03/20/11

NRA: Negroes Ruined Again

L. Rogers, Chicago Defender, 1934

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal created many controversies where some were optimistic about the new programs and others were left in doubt. One particular cartoon artist L. Rogers expressed his stance of the latter by publishing a series of political cartoon that direct towards anti-New Deal sentiments. As a prominent writer for a black Chicago newspaper he published the cartoon above, in 1934, conveying his discern of the first New Deal establishment, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was created to abolish corrupt business practices and to induce rights for workers by setting standards of minimum wage and maximum hours.

The cartoon above displays a joyful family where the father is telling his wife news about his company becoming a member of the NRA, and his presumptions about better wages and better hours. On the second half of the cartoon it shows that the father later learns that the company has cut his job and his fellow workers by exclusively hiring whites only. The factory discriminated blacks because they did not want to promote more black rights. The cartoon shows that white racists were using the New Deal as a way of furthering discrimination against the blacks. Lynching and wage discrimination were still very much prevalent in the 1930s, and eventually the NRA was even referred to as “Negroes Ruined Again.” L. Rogers created this cartoon to illustrate Roosevelt’s fail recognition of the blacks and his sentiments that the New Deal was only created to aid the whites.

03/19/11

How the South Interprets the New Deal

This political cartoon was published in a black Chicago newspaper, the Chicago Defender, on January 27, 1934, during the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. L. Rogers, created this cartoon. He expresses his belief that white racists used programs under the New Deal, like the NRA, to further discriminate against low wage black labor. Throughout the 1930s, discrimination and racist beliefs about blacks continued to thrive and practices such as lynching and wage discrimination were prevalent. Blacks even referred to the NRA as “Negroes Ruined Again”. Rogers created this cartoon because he wanted to spread the word to fellow blacks, who were readers of the Chicago Defender, that the New Deal programs under Roosevelt were actually aimed at only helping white folk. Rogers believes that Roosevelt failed to recognize that blacks were just as affected by the Great Depression as whites and that racism in the US resulted in black laborers suffering even more than white laborers.

03/15/11

FDR and the New Deal

From the cartoon, we can see a man was surrounded by a bunch of dancing kids. The man in the middle was President Franklin D. Roosevelt; on the backs of the kids’ shirts were printed WPA, PWA AND AAA, which stand for Works Progress Administration, Public Works Administration (which constructed roads, dams, and public buildings), and Agricultural Adjustment Act (which provided funding to farmers to curtail their production). These were all the programs set up under FDR’s New Deal. There were some other kids facing us, which from the artist’s points should represent the other programs adopted by FDR, such as Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which served to insure deposits in banks, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which provided for navigation, flood control, electricity generation and economic development in the Tennessee River Valley and the National Industrial Recovery Act (NRA), which provided for codes of fair competition to regulate industry, and for the first time in American history guaranteed the rights of labor to bargain collectively, etc. These programs were responses to the Great Depression, and focused on what historians call the “3 Rs”: relief, recovery, and reform. That is, relief for the unemployed and poor; recovery of the economy to normal levels; and reform of the financial system to prevent a repeat depression.