In 1939, a federal Women's Bureau survey revealed that only one in fifteen union members was female. But the same observers also noted the truism that women workers, once organized, often became tenacious and militant unionists. Unionists saw women as temporary members of the work force (as indeed most were before 1940, when the average worker was a young single woman). They mistakenly assumed that such workers would not be dedicated union members. Some saw women as unwelcome competitors for "men's jobs" and worked to keep women out of better paid union jobs rather than recruiting them to join the union. Even the United Office and Professional Workers Association (UOPWA), a progressive union that focused its efforts on clerical workers, shared some of these demeaning views of women. A regular column in the UOPWA's publication, the Ledger, featured "Susie Steno," a condescending caricature of a clerical worker as a frivolous and naive young woman, albeit one who becomes a good unionist.

Part of the New Deal's Works Progress Administration (WPA), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) was one indication of the breadth of that program. Perhaps best known for its trenchant political satire and innovative presentations, the FTP actually represented a much broader range of activity. But the FTP's mandate proved fragile. When the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established in May 1938, one of its first targets was the FTP, which it labeled a subversive organization. When FTP director Hallie Flanagan testified before HUAC in December 1938, she fought back against these attacks. But the FTP still fell victim to the Congressional cuts.

A survey of America's transition from a rural, agrarian, and artisan society to one of the world's leading industrial powers. Treats the emergence of industrial capitalism: the rise of the factory system; new forms of power, transport, and communication; the advent of the large industrial corporation; the social relations of production; and the hallmarks of science-based industry. Views technology as part of the larger culture and reveals innovation as a process consisting of a range of possibilities that are chosen or rejected according to the social criteria of the time.

Tensions among industrial workers of different ethnic backgrounds often proved a barrier to unionization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was, for example, a key factor in the defeat of the 1919 steel strike. In the 1930s, however, that began to change, particularly under the auspices of the CIO. In this 1974 interview done by historian Peter Gotlieb in 1974, Polish-American steelworker Joe Rudiak recalled how ethnic hostility declined in the "CIO days," particularly among the "young folks." This decrease in suspicion between people of different nationalities fostered unionization in the 1930s.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, stunned virtually everyone in the U.S. military. American intelligence, with the benefit of intercepted Japanese messages, had known for some time that Japan was planning an assault, but military leaders had no idea precisely when and where. Hawaii, they assumed, was so far away from Japan that the Japanese navy could never mount an effective attack. Japan's carrier-launched bombers found Pearl Harbor totally unprepared. A radio broadcast from station KTU in Honolulu the day of the attack captured the events as they unfolded over several hours. From the roof of a Honolulu office building, the radio reporter described significant damage. Apparently, he was calling New York City on the phone, while the New York station broadcast his call to the nation at large.

In the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people during World War II, the U.S. government viewed its popular performers--singers, dancers, and actors--as a crucial weapon. Even before Pearl Harbor, Treasury Department officials began making plans to raise money to finance the war by selling bonds to the public, which would be repaid with interest after the war was over. During the war, private citizens and organizations bought $190 billion worth of war bonds at the low interest rate of 1.8 percent. Hollywood stars became central to war bond drives. The glamorous actress Dorothy Lamour alone was credited with selling $350 million in war bonds. A September 1942 "bond blitz" enlisted more than three hundred actors who worked eighteen-hour days and sold more than $800 million in bonds. As the war dragged on, the Hollywood bond salespeople continued to motivate purchases even when allied victory seemed secure. This 1945 recording by Bing Crosby exhorted people to participate in the seventh war loan.

The sudden revival of the United Mine Workers of America in 1933 was a remarkable story. In late 1932 the UMWA was practically defunct, yet by the fall of 1933 it was in the strongest position in its history. Perhaps the best historical narrative of the revival of UMWA was penned in lyrical form by an African-American former coal miner called "Uncle George" Jones. Jones had started working as a miner in 1889 at age seventeen but in 1914 blindness forced him out of the Alabama mines. Long known for his singing in church choirs, down in the mines, and on the picket line. Jones' "This Is What the Union Done" not only expressed the miners' sense of the role that Roosevelt and Lewis played in the union revival; it also beautifully captures a sense of the transformation when miners "got the union back again!"

Strikes affect an entire community, and in the end they need that community's support to succeed. This is especially true in the case of a sit-down strike like the legendary sit-down strike at Flint, Michigan, in 1936, when the strikers occupied the GM plants. The strikers, isolated at first inside the Fisher Body Plant Number One, needed food; they also needed information and advance warning on what management might be up to. The Women's Emergency Brigade, formed during the Flint strike, proved indispensable to the union effort more than once. Genora Johnson Dollinger helped found the Women's Emergency Brigade and became one of the strike's key leaders. In this interview, conducted by historian Sherna Gluck in 1976, Genora Johnson Dollinger described first how the strike affected her family.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. This 1938 article in the Chinese Vanguard reported on the CHLA's anti-Japanese work and efforts to mobilize support for China.

Japan invaded China in 1931. The ruling Kuomintang Party (KMT) in China, led by Chiang Kai-shek, initially adopted a nonresistance policy toward the Japanese. Many overseas Chinese, including members of New York City's Chinese Hand Laundry Alliance (CHLA), opposed the KMT's passive position and organized "Save China" campaigns to raise money for a strong China. The CHLA sent letters and telegrams to American politicians urging them to adopt policies to support China against Japan. But the CHLA's main strategy was to appeal directly to the American public by approaching their customers, residents of New York City. The CHLA's flyers, which were enclosed in clean laundry packages, detailed Japanese aggression and called on Americans to urge their government to sanction Japan and support China. This 1938 editorial in the Chinese Vanguard praised their organizational energy.

From smoking to skin care, advertisers rushed to identify their products with the war effort once the United States entered World War II. Using the war to pitch products was not the only way American businesses benefited from their association with the conflict. Although the government managed and regulated the wartime economy, it often did so to the benefit of large companies. The top 100 companies turned out 30 percent of the nation's manufactured goods in 1940; by war's end, those same companies held 70 percent of all civilian and military contracts. Business executives sat in many of the key posts of war production agencies, serving as dollar-a-year-men" while remaining on their company payrolls

Spirituals and work songs, rooted in both the slavery era and the West African societies from which most African-American slaves were originally taken, provided cultural sustenance to African Americans in the midst of intense racial oppression. Folklorists first began collecting traditional southern music in the late-19th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, John Lomax (and other members of his family) recorded southern musicians (African-American, white, and Mexican-American) for the Library of Congress. "Trouble So Hard," sung by Dock Reed, Henry Reed, and Vera Hall in Livingston, Alabama, in 1937, was reminiscent in style of the slavery era, when the congregation sang without hymnbooks or musical accompaniment. The style of singing--the lead singer's call and the congregation's increasingly loud and forceful response--had its roots in African religious practice.

Life in the armed services had a long-lasting impact on America's homosexual population. Far from home, many gay men and lesbian women felt less social pressure to conform to heterosexual social norms, and the need for manpower made the military somewhat more tolerant of homosexual men and women in its ranks (although it still purged many gay and lesbian soldiers). Many who first expressed their sexual orientation during the war later became pioneers in the gay and lesbian rights movement. This towel advertisement was one of a series published during 1943-44 that framed its sales-pitch in homoerotic imagery inspired by purported testimony from G.I.s overseas. The ads, which are sexually ambiguous, suggest how the same-sex environment in the military afforded young men, both gay and straight, with opportunities for sexual self-discovery.

In late 1932, the United Mine Workers of America was an organization struggling to survive. Yet by the fall of 1933, with the signing of an agreement with coal operators, it was strong. The miners' union had finally won a contract that guaranteed it recognition and stability in the hitherto nonunion southern Appalachian coalfields. Section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act set off the spark of unionization in coal and other industries and many coal miners felt that they owed a debt of gratitude to the man who had become president of the United States in March--Franklin D. Roosevelt. For coal miners, one way of expressing that gratitude was in song. "Union Dues," collected in the 1940s by folklorist George Korson, used the blues, a musical idiom that had become popular in southern black communities in the 1920s, to explain what President Roosevelt had given coal miners.

Using resources from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency and the American Battle Monuments Commission, students will learn about the recovery and identification pro- cess of missing service members’ remains. The students will demonstrate their understanding of the recovery process by researching the location of a missing service member and developing a pre-mission report for that area.

Vagrancy was one of the most troubling signs of the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, as now, those who had food and shelter were confronted by the sight and appeals of those who did not. Shabby men sought food or work on the doorsteps of private homes while men, women, and children stood in the breadlines of municipal relief agencies. Vagrants gathered in "hobo jungles" on the outskirts of town as beggars on the streets appealed to more prosperous passersby. Middle-class observers viewed vagrants with suspicion, empathy, concern, fear, and sometimes even a twinge of envy. For some stolidly holding on to traditional values of work and success, the "bum" was suspect, potentially a con artist. In a very different response, novelist John Dos Passos made the vagrant a symbol of the derailed promise of the American dream in this vignette "Vag," which ended his monumental U.S.A. trilogy.

The Wagner Bill was the most radical and far-reaching piece of legislation passed in Roosevelt's second "hundred days." Following on the heels of intense industrial unrest, large-scale strikes, and social turmoil, the act guaranteed workers the right to organize unions, and to strike, boycott and picket their employers. It also outlawed "unfair" labor practices by employers, including blacklisting union activists or intimidating workers who sought to join an independent union, and ensured workers the right to collective bargaining. This leaflet distributed by the United Automobile Workers captures the impact of the Wagner Act on union organizing, as it provided a spur for industrial unionism.

The relationship between African Americans and Franklin D. Roosevelt presents something of a paradox. On the one hand, Roosevelt never endorsed anti-lynching legislation; he accepted segregation and disenfranchisement; and he condoned discrimination against blacks in federally funded relief programs. On the other hand, Roosevelt won the hearts and the votes of African Americans in unprecedented numbers. African Americans who supported left-wing parties, however, were more likely to be critical. Langston Hughes, a playwright, poet, and novelist, became a socialist in the 1930s. Although he did not join the Communist Party, he spent a year in the Soviet Union and published his works in magazines sympathetic to liberal, socialist, and Communist causes. In Hughes's "Ballad of Roosevelt," which appeared in the New Republic in 1934, the poet criticized the unfulfilled promises that FDR had made to the poor. Hughes's style in this poem showed his distinctive merging of traditional verse with black artistic forms like blues and jazz.

The War Labor Board (WLB) and its predecessor, the National Defense Mediation Board, had a profound impact on relations between employers and unions during World War II. The WLB--made up of representatives from government, labor, and management--provided protection for unions from hostile bosses, increased the wages of the lowest-paid workers, helped set industry-wide wage patterns, and established methods of resolving shop floor disputes. Although the WLB operated in routinized and bureaucratic ways, its decisions could also carry powerful ideological messages. That became clear in the following document, which insisted upon the policy of equal pay for equal work--a seemingly self-evident principle that was not standard practice in American industry. This board decision mandated equal pay for African-American workers.

Although many historians have emphasized the conservative dimensions of this language of Americanism--the ways that it reinforced rather than challenged the status quo--historian Gary Gerstle shows that it was considerably more complex and contradictory. He argues that it was "flexible enough to express both the social democratic and ethnic communalist visions that inspired political activism among the nation's workers during the Great Depression. As in other communities, this working-class Americanism infused the organizing campaign of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC) in Homestead, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1936. Four thousand steelworkers endorsed a declaration of their "inalienable rights to organize into a great industrial union, banded together with all our fellow steel workers." It was surely not an accident that they worded that declaration in conscious imitation of the Declaration of Independence.