The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was one of a constellation of federal agencies that made up President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal program to help Americans recover from the Great Depression. Established in 1933 in an effort to spur industrial recovery, the NRA sought to use government power to restrain competition and end the downward cycle of wage cuts and price reductions, without abolishing the free market. The administration asked businesses, labor, and consumers to help write new codes for hour limits, minimum wages, and production standards. To encourage voluntary adoption of these new codes, participating businesses were allowed to display a blue eagle logo, and consumers were urged to spend money only where the symbol was displayed. This photograph captures three unlikely spots for the display of the otherwise ubiquitous NRA eagle.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, which became known as the Indian New Deal, dramatically changed the federal government's Indian policy. Although John Collier, the commissioner of Indian affairs who was responsible for the new policy, may have viewed Indians with great sympathy, not all Native Americans viewed his programs in equally positive terms. Antonio Luhan, the husband of the wealthy writer Mabel Dodge Luhan and a Taos Pueblo Indian, was a friend and supporter of John Collier. In this letter to Collier, which he dictated to his wife, he reported on his efforts to persuade other Indians that Collier was their friend and that the reorganization act would bring positive change.

The Pacific theater was the most inhospitable environment in all of World War II, with all-out assaults that were unparalleled in their barbarity. The ferocity of the battles and the atrocities committed by both sides were further encouraged by the pervasive anti-Asian racism expressed by Americans toward the Japanese enemy. Fighting the war in the Pacific left indelible impressions on the men who served there. Because employees at the Library of Congress thought marines might have time to do ethnographic recordings of the music and culture of the native peoples they encountered in the South Pacific, several marine units were given metal disc recording machines to carry with them. Though they never managed to use the recorders for their intended purpose, several marines did have the presence of mind to record what happened during major battles at sea and on the islands. In one such recording, made on the island of Guam in 1944, an unidentified marine described his foxhole.

John Collier's appointment as Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 marked a radical reversal--in intention if not always in effect--in U.S. government policies toward American Indians that dated back to the 1887 Dawes Act. An idealistic social worker, Collier first encountered Indian culture when he visited Taos, New Mexico, in 1920, and found among the Pueblos there what he called a "Red Atlantis"--a model of living that integrated the needs of the individual with the group and that maintained traditional values. As Commissioner, Collier proposed a sweeping set of reforms to reverse the previous half century of federal policy. Although he could not win congressional backing for his most radical proposals, the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 dramatically changed policy by allowing tribal self-government and consolidating individual land allotments back into tribal hands. His 1938 report as Commissioner of Indian Affairs combined a frank indictment of the broken promises of the past with an insistence that the Indian Service, since 1933, had made a "concerted effort" to rectify those past mistakes.

The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), launched by the federal government in 1933, provided temporary work to three million young men, who lived in semi-military camps, constructed recreation facilities, and carried out conservation projects. This photograph of a young CCC worker epitomizes the agency's emphasis on the morally and physically curative powers of vigorous outdoor life. Building strong bodies is a major CCC objective

The New Deal tried to end the Depression by spending government money to employ the jobless. One of its most ambitious efforts, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), put 8.5 million people to work between 1935 and 1943, mostly on projects that required manual labor, but also on projects for artists, writers, actors, and musicians. At its peak, the Federal Writers Project employed about 6,500 men and women, some of whom later became famous. In the late 1930s the project's writers began a series of "life histories," recording the experiences of diverse Americans from Florida to Alaska. Sometimes they recorded people's words verbatim; other times they rewrote them into narratives. In this example, Berta Ballard Manning recalled meeting the famous outlaw "Billy the Kid" as a child in New Mexico. He was unassuming and gentle, with good manners, but she also remembered him as a bandit and killer who kept their county in turmoil

While the exact origin of the loose-fitting "zoot suit," worn by Mexican-American and African-American youths in the 1940s, is obscure, its most important roots were among Mexican-American youths, or pachucos. In the context of World War II, this defiant gesture of group identity put the Mexican-American zoot suiters into direct conflict with another youth group--white servicemen stationed on the West Coast. Wartime rationing regulations effectively banned zoot suits because they ostensibly wasted fabric, so a combination of patriotism and racism impelled white soldiers to denounce Mexican-American wearers of the zoot suit as slackers and hoodlums. In June 1943, apparently provoked by stories that Mexican Americans had beaten up a group of Anglo sailors, servicemen on leave began to attack Mexican-American neighborhoods in Los Angeles. These anti-Mexican riots often featured the ritualistic stripping of the zoot suiters. Despite the brutality of these incidents, most press coverage was sympathetic to the servicemen. One exception was this description by Al Waxman, editor of the Eastside Journal, an East Los Angeles community newspaper.

Father Charles Coughlin attracted an enormous audience for his radio sermons in the 1930s. Although he initially supported President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal, his speeches turned increasingly strident, conspiratorial, and anti-Semitic over the course of the decade. After 1936, his talks combined harsh attacks on Roosevelt as the tool of international Jewish bankers with praise for the fascist leaders Mussolini and Hitler. The now bitter and delusional tone of his sermons alienated his larger audience and made many of his fellow Catholics nervous. John Ryan, a Catholic priest himself, had long been active as a social reformer and university educator, and became a vocal critic of Coughlin. Ryan published the following missive in the Catholic journal Commonweal in October, 1936.

In April 1940 Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins convened a conference in Missouri concerning the silicosis crisis that had emerged in the late 1930s. The differing perspectives on the disease and workers' health are apparent in these excerpts from the Tristate Silicosis Conference. Evan Just, representing industry, claimed that silicosis is a social, not an industrial, problem. Ex-miner Tony McTeer disputed Just's analysis, arguing that he, himself, contracted silicosis even though he had worked only in mines that employed the improved "wet drilling" method. The legendary public health advocate Dr. Alice Hamilton, representing the Public Health Service, spoke on the medical aspects of industrial hygiene and showed that, despite industry's claims, little had improved over the past twenty-five years.

Those who built the atomic bomb at the secret Los Alamos, New Mexico, facility understood very well the potential for destruction and death they had created, though individual reactions of the scientists varied widely. Some argued that America needed to develop nuclear weapons before the Germans did. Others argued that a war against fascism demanded the most lethal measures. Still others, as they witnessed the blast on July 16, 1945, were appalled at what they had unleashed. In this excerpt from a 1980 interview, Bernard Feld recalled his work as a graduate student at Los Alamos. While he had few reservations about the bomb's development and its first use at Hiroshima, he had profound reservations about using the second bomb against Nagasaki.

Unions that continued to press beyond the general labor settlements established in the auto and steel industries after World War II found themselves facing an additional and powerful adversary--the federal government. In the spring of 1946, both coal miners and railroad workers staged nationwide strikes. President Harry Truman decided that the unions had gone too far, and after the railroad workers rejected a settlement, he seized control of the railroads. Despite the government takeover, the workers continued with their strike plans. As a result, on May 24, 1946, Truman issued an ultimatum declaring that the government would operate the railroads and use the army as strikebreakers. When the deadline passed, Truman went before Congress to seek the power to deny seniority rights to strikers and to draft strikers into the armed forces. Just as Truman reached the climax of his speech, he received a note saying that the strike was "settled on the terms proposed by the President." After the congressional cheers died down, Truman proceeded with his prepared text.

This collection uses primary sources to explore women's work on the home front during World War II. Digital Public Library of America Primary Source Sets are designed to help students develop their critical thinking skills and draw diverse material from libraries, archives, and museums across the United States. Each set includes an overview, ten to fifteen primary sources, links to related resources, and a teaching guide. These sets were created and reviewed by the teachers on the DPLA's Education Advisory Committee.

The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 stand out not just for the number of people killed--as many, or more, died in "firebombings" in Germany during the war--but for the strange, alien quality of the atom bomb's effects. The atomic bomb's immense destructive capacity staggered observers, and its effects have haunted the world's imagination ever since. By the time the United States had a usable atomic bomb, the war in Europe was over, but thousands of American soldiers remained in the Pacific fighting the Japanese. Although some historians argue that the war could have been ended without the dropping of the bomb, in the summer of 1945 President Harry Truman made the fateful decision to proceed. In this dramatic radio address, Truman told the nation that a bomb had been dropped on the city of Hiroshima on August 6. Truman inaccurately described Hiroshima as a "military base." It was the base of the Second General Headquarters of the Imperial Army, but civilians outnumbered army personnel by about six to one.

"The theater must grow up," declared Hallie Flanagan, director of the New Deal-era Federal Theatre Project (FTP), which provided employment for actors, directors, and technicians during the Depression. By the 1930s, theater was rapidly losing its audiences to movies, and Flanagan sought to win audiences back by revitalizing drama with the excitement and conflict of contemporary life and politics. Her energy and sense of urgency came through in this talk on theater as social action, entitled "First Federal Summer Theatre: A Report." She borrowed the rhetoric of the militant labor movement as she summarized the work of a 1937 summer project that gathered FTP workers from around the country.

Frustrated by the elimination of the NRA and other programs, like the Agricultural Adjustment Act ( United States v. Butler, 1936) through the courts, and overconfident after his big win in the 1936 elections, Roosevelt proposed a novel but not entirely unprecedented solution in 1937. He would add one new judge to the federal judicial system for every active judge over the age of seventy. The result would create fifty new judgeships, including up to six new Supreme Court justices. Having established these new positions, the president could then appoint new judges friendly to his administration and tip the balance in his favor. Roosevelt posed the measure as a plan to streamline the Court system and ease its caseload, as he explained in this fireside chat on March 9, 1937. Roosevelt argued that the Court expansion bill would merely restore the balance of power intended by the Constitution's framers, a balance that had been lost to a reactionary, backward-looking, shortsighted group of old men.

In 1943, Anglo servicemen attacked Mexican American, Filipino American, and African American adolescents in Los Angeles. This violence was known as the "Zoot Suit Riots," named for the allegedly un-patriotic fashion then popular among the city's youth. In this lesson, students examine four historical sources to answer the question: What caused the Zoot Suit Riots?

Labor activism during the 1930s had an impact on U.S. popular culture, especially film--both on screen and behind the camera. The Screen Actors Guild was formed in 1933 and In 1941 trade union organizing reached the workplace where some of the nation's favorite fantasies were produced. After Walt Disney fired union organizers on his art staff, his studio cartoonists went on strike. This cartoon from a newspaper report indicates how Disney strikers brought new skills to labor organizing. "There are mighty few labor disputes," the caption states, "in which just about every striker can make his own picket signs. Consequently, the signs are bright and lively . . . attracting the passerby and winning friends for the Screen Cartoon Guild."