From the New Deal to the Great Society

School & Society

Remember• Mann: schools could solve social problems• Advocates of voc ed—schools key to solutions• Now, question schools’ capacity– New Deal directly addressed problems– Great Society focused on schools

Before Great Depression1870s-1920s

• Class conflict & economic crises– declining wages– Increasing unemployment

• Attempts to regulate corporations and banks

The Great Depression

• Stock market crash 1929• Massive unemployment• Homelessness• Hunger• Bank failures

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Election

The New Deal

• Relief• Recovery• Reform

What Programs Did

• Jobs• Cash• Food• Housing

“…Government hired about 60 per cent of the unemployed in public works and conservation projects planted a billion trees, saved the whooping crane, modernized rural America, and built such diverse projects as the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh, the Montana state capitol, much of the Chicago lakefront, New York’s Lincoln Tunnel and Triborough Bridge complex, the Tennessee Valley Authority and the aircraft carriers Enterprise and Yorktown. It also built or renovated 2,500 hospitals, 45,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 7,800 bridges, 700,000 miles of roads, and a thousand airfields. And it employed 50,000 teachers, rebuilt the country’s entire rural school system, and hired 3,000 writers, musicians, sculptors and painters, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.” Marshall Auerbach, cited in James K. Galbraith, No Return to Normal, The Washington Monthly, (March 9th 2009)

George Washington Middle School

Built Modern Middle Class

• Social Security• Home Mortgages• Employment• Unions (Wagner Act)• GI Bill

Whites Only

• Blacks excluded from many programs• Southern Senators• E.g., of 3200 VA loans in MS, two went to

Blacks• Growing gap between Blacks & whites(New Deal helped many Blacks, but not as much

as it did whites.)

Role of Women

• Women in high government positions– Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labor– Mary McLeod Bethune, Director of the Division of

Negro Affairs of the National Youth Administration

The Great Society

• End poverty• Secure Racial Equality

Lyndon Johnson’s Election

Great Society v. New Deal

• Far less intervention in labor market• Focus on Education– Elementary and Secondary Education Act

Why the Shift in Policy

• Declining power of Unions• Employer-provided benefits• Brown v. Board of Education