Faced with stiff business opposition, a conservative political climate, hostile courts, and declining membership, leaders of the American Federeration of Labor (AFL) grew increasingly cautious during the 1920s. Labor radicals viewed AFL leaders as overpaid, self-interested functionaries uninterested in organizing unorganized workers into unions. A cartoon by William Gropper published in the Communist Yiddish newspaper Freiheit (and reprinted in English in the New Masses ) caricatures delegates to a 1926 AFL convention in Atlantic City. Well

" In analyzing fiscal issues, conventional public finance approaches focus mainly on taxation and public spending. Policymakers and practitioners rarely explore solutions by examining the fundamental problem: the failure of interested parties to act collectively to internalize the positive externalities generated by public goods. Public finance is merely one of many possible institutional arrangements for assigning the rights and responsibilities to public goods consumption. This system is currently under stress because of the financial crisis. The first part of the class will focus on collective action and its connection with local public finance. The second part will explore alternative institutional arrangements for mediating collective action problems associated with the provision of local public goods. The objective of the seminar is to broaden the discussion of local public finance by incorporating collective action problems into the discourse. This inclusion aims at exploring alternative institutional arrangements for financing local public services in the face of severe economic downturn. Applications of emerging ideas to the provision of public health, education, and natural resource conservation will be discussed."

In the decades following the Confederacy's 1865 defeat and the abolition of racial slavery, white southern landowners, entrepreneurs, and newspaper editors heralded the coming of a "New South" economic order. Freed from the plantation system, the South would enter the modern age, building factories to turn its cotton into cloth, its tobacco crop into finished cigars and cigarettes, and its growing coal and iron ore output into steel. But not all southerners benefited from a prosperous and industrialized New South. Mill workers, small farmers, and tenants and sharecroppers bore the brunt of the sacrifices required to build a new southern economy. These extracts from letters by tenants and farm laborers to the North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1887 and 1889 described the depressed crop prices, usurious interest rates charged by landowners for seed and equipment, and the absence of decent schooling for children faced by southern agricultural workers.

Inspired by Mary Shelley's novel about a man-made monster who turned upon its creator, this cartoon depicted the railroad trampling the rights of the American people. Agriculture

The Bonus March was one of several grassroots movements of the unemployed during the Great Depression that galvanized thousands of men and women and helped focus attention on the role of the federal government in alleviating economic hardship. Twenty thousand World War I veterans marched to Washington to demand the immediate release of promised cash bonuses and set up camp until their demands were met. With President Herbert Hoover's authorization, federal troops, armed with tanks and cavalry, attacked the homeless veterans and burned their encampment. When images like this photograph, which shows the Bonus Marchers' shantytown burning down in sight of the Capitol on the afternoon of July 28, 1932, reached the public, Hoover's image was permanently tarnished.

Known best by his knack for moneymaking, turn-of-the-century steel magnate Andrew Carnegie nonetheless found a moment to pen a one-sided poetic tribute to the "eighth wonder" of the world--steel manufacturing in his Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, plant. This brief poem reflected how he (and other contemporaries) viewed the monumental process of steelmaking. The poem was notable for its use of passive voice and the absence of workers--miners, railroad men, or blast furnace crews--from the process by which "one pound of solid steel" came to be.

Wealthy planters from the Caribbean island of Barbados settled in Carolina in the late seventeenth century and turned Carolina's farms into large plantations that concentrated on growing rice. This transformation was enabled by the many enslaved Africans in the colonies who had grown rice as free men and women in West Africa; scholars have traced the origins of Carolina and Georgia's rice culture back to those African rice fields. In this letter, Johann Martin Bolzius described rice cultivation's highly skilled but backbreaking labor, and the colonies' task system of work. Each slave was assigned a particular duty and, after completing the day's tasks, might have some time to him or herself. Bolzius had left Halle, Germany, in 1733 on route to the new colony of Georgia where he lived upriver from Savannah. He wrote this letter in the form of a questionnaire, providing a vivid description of agriculture and life in the new colony.

The single most important product in the early twentieth-century culture of consumption was the automobile, and the number of cars produced more than tripled during the 1920s. Like many other products, however, marketing cars to consumers effectively became as important as manufacturing them efficiently. This 1927 advertisement for Paige-Jewett cars suggests how manufacturers and advertising firms used colors and new styles to differentiate their products from those of competitors. Buying became confused with self-expression as consumers were urged to purchase products as a way to display individual taste and distinction.

Economic and social power became concentrated in late seventeenth-century Virginia, leaving laborers and servants with restricted economic independence. Governor William Berkeley feared rebellion: "six parts of Seven at least are Poore, Indebted, Discontented and Armed." Planter Nathaniel Bacon focused inland colonists' anger at local Indians, who they felt were holding back settlement, and at a distant government unwilling to aid them. In the summer and fall of 1676, Bacon and his supporters rose up and plundered the elite's estates and slaughtered nearby Indians. Bacon's Declaration challenged the economic and political privileges of the governor's circle of favorites, while announcing the principle of the consent of the people. Bacon's death and the arrival of a British fleet quelled this rebellion, but Virginia's planters long remembered the spectacle of white and black acting together to challenge authority.

On May 9, 1934, International Labor Association (ILA) leaders called a strike of all dockworkers on the West Coast who were joined a few days later by seamen and teamsters, effectively stopping all shipping from San Diego to Seattle. San Francisco would become the scene of the strike's most dramatic and widely known incidents, aptly described in one headline as "War in San Francisco!" On Bloody Thursday, July 5, 1934, two strikers were killed by the San Francisco police. A mass funeral march of tens of thousands of strikers and sympathizers four days later and the general strike that followed effectively shut down both San Francisco and Oakland (across the bay). Mike Quin, a self-described "rank-and-file journalist," offered a sympathetic picture of the striking workers actions in The Big Strike, a collection of his published articles. Here, Quin described the events leading up to Bloody Thursday, and what happened in its aftermath.

In 1897, Scribner's published a series of articles on "The Conduct of Great Business." This article by Philip Hubert on a New England textile mill conveyed some of the sense of wonder that Americans felt at the enormous new factories suddenly emerging in what had been primarily an agricultural nation. Although other contemporaries--both agrarian radicals and trade unionists--viewed the new industrial behemoths with skepticism or even horror, middle-class observers like Hubert celebrated the achievements of the capitalists who organized and managed these vast and complex enterprises. Hubert had little interest in or sympathy for the thousands of workers who toiled in the textile mill that he visited, echoing the view that the "character of the machinery" was more important than "the character of the hands." But his account, including a vivid description of the mill at quitting time, captured the sheer size and dehumanizing impact on workers of the new industrial enterprises.

In his essay "Wealth," published in the North American Review in 1889, industrialist Andrew Carnegie argued that individual capitalists were duty bound to play a broader cultural and social role and thus improve the world. Carnegie's essay later became famous under the title "The Gospel of Wealth," and in 1908, at age seventy-three, Andrew Carnegie recorded a portion of it under that title. (Click here to read the full text of the article.)

Before the Civil War, some enslaved African Americans labored in Southern textile mills, especially in the spinning and weaving rooms. But with the jump in the price of slaves in the 1850s, manufacturers decided that poor white farmers provided a cheaper labor force. After the Civil War, the textile mill workforce remained entirely white for a number of reasons: landlords wanted African Americans to work in cotton fields; white leaders promoted industrialization as the salvation of poor whites; and the dominant racial ideology forbade the mixing of white women and black men in the workplace. Although planters and manufacturers had the most to gain from a segregated work force, white workers--as this 1898 protest from the women of Atlanta's Fulton Mills indicated--accepted the idea that factory work was the privilege of "loyal white citizens." There were few opportunities for white women to earn cash wages in this period, and family farms yielded little cash. The only jobs open to black women--domestic service--paid even less.

William A. Rogers depicts Capital and Labor as evenly matched with Commerce a beleaguered referee on a 1901 cover of Harper's Weekly. Variations on this theme frequently appeared in the Progressive Era's mainstream press. Commerce alternated with other allegorical figures like the nation" or the "public

Small-group study of advanced subjects under staff supervision. For graduate students wishing to pursue further study in advanced areas of urban studies and city and regional planning not covered in regular subjects of instruction. 11.941 and 11.955 are taught P/D/F.

During the Great Depression, New Deal programs provided work for a range of unemployed Americans, including creative artists. Visual artists working for the Federal Art Project created murals for the walls of federal and state buildings and established community art centers in remote areas. The murals often depicted ordinary Americans, at work or in struggle, rendered in heroic, larger than life style. Few of the post office murals commissioned by the Treasury Department Section of Fine Art displayed the humor of Orr C. Fisher's paean to corn. But the Iowa-born Fisher's work suggests the kind of regional boosterism and pride of place that characterized many murals painted by local artists.

The New Deal launched a series of federal employment programs, including the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which not only provided jobs but also initiated many important studies of the depression's human toll. One such study, published by the WPA Division of Research in 1939, included transcripts of interviews by WPA workers with Dubuque, Iowa, families. The DiMarcos interview revealed that the disabled faced a double challenge during the depression: finding employment while competing for scarce jobs with the able-bodied. The DiMarcos, a deaf couple with a small child, recall in their own words (because they were deaf they had to write responses to the WPA interviewer's questions), the struggles they endured during six years of unemployment.

New home construction declined dramatically during the Great Depression as rents rose, reaching an all-time high in 1940. A persistent housing shortage continuing into the early 1950s forced families to separate and apartment dwellers to "double-up." The housing reform movement, largely ineffectual in the 1920s and 1930s, gathered strength in the postwar period. Labor and veteran groups pressured Congress and the White House to enact a comprehensive housing policy with money for public housing and continued wartime rent control. President Harry S. Truman, echoing reformers, wrote to Congress, "A decent standard of housing for all is one of the irreducible obligations of modern civilization." Despite opposition from real estate interests, the Housing Act of 1949 passed. Although the Act called for the construction of 810,000 units of public housing over six years--and two additional housing acts in 1961 and 1965 promised substantial increases--by the mid-1960s, more people lived in substandard housing than in 1949. In addition, many blamed public housing itself for destroying neighborhoods and fostering social problems. In the following 1947 testimony before a joint Congressional committee, including Frank L. Sundstrom, Representative of New Jersey, created by anti-housing reform legislators to stall action, New Jersey spokespersons for tenants quoted the proposed Taft-Ellender-Wagner legislation and described housing conditions, while a number of tenants related their own difficult living situations.

Before the Great Depression of the 1930's the Beuschers--he was a sixty-two-year-old railroad worker; she was the mother of their eleven children--had been fairly prosperous: they owned their home and had several life-insurance policies serving as savings. But by the time the Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewed them in 1937, their lives had dramatically changed: the father had lost his railroad job and the mother was taking in sewing. This interview summary, published by the WPA, showed how they struggled to make ends meet during The Great Depression.

During the Great Depression, the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Act attempted to raise disastrously low commodity prices by authorizing the federal government to pay farmers to raise fewer crops. These crop reduction subsidies enabled landlords to dispossess so many African-American tenants and share-croppers that the bill was often referred to sardonically as the Negro Removal Act." Despite such unintended consequences and other exclusions from New Deal programs