Deal Era Research Articles

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

Darkness on the Edge: Revisionary Black Radicalism in the Depression Era

Digital Twin for Urban Planning in the Green Deal Era: A State of the Art and Future Perspectives

This paper provides a state of the art of contemporary Digital Twins (DTs) projects for urban planning at an international level. The contribution investigates the evolution of the DT concept and contextualises this tool within the scientific-cultural debate, highlighting the interconnection between global policies and local needs/wishes. Specifically, six case studies of DTs are compared, illustrating their application, content, technological infrastructure, and priority results. The projects presented provide an overview of the existing DT typologies, focusing on the evaluative/prefigurative use and the limits/potential of the tool in light of the socio-health, climate, and environmental crises. Reflections on DT reveal, on the one hand, its potential role in supporting decision-making and participatory processes and, on the other, the potential utopian trend of data-driven planning encouraged by public–private investments in the smart city/twin city sector. In conclusion, the study underlines the innovative role of DT as a cutting-edge scientific format in the disciplinary framework but highlights that the practical use of the tool is still in an experimental research-action phase. From this theoretical-critical review, it is possible to hypothesise new research paths to implement the realism and application potential of DTs for urban planning and urban governance.

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Poor Man's Fortune: White Working-Class Conservatism in American Metal Mining, 1850–1950

Quilts, Social Engineering, and Black Power in the Tennessee Valley

Drawing on a group of quilts created by African American women who lived in the construction villages associated with the Tennessee Valley Authority during the New Deal era, this essay asserts that these quiltmakers created modernist quilts as "home beautification," as a potential source of empowerment to the Black tva staff and their families, and as a signal to white tva administrators that Black workers had much to offer the community and nation, deserving better treatment than the federal program was providing. These women attempted to disrupt the customs and traditions of the rural South by crafting quilts with equally radical aesthetics and messages, in contrast to the typical quilts of this era, which reflect the colonial revival and popular consumer culture. By giving these quilts to white tva higher-ups, African Americans associated with the tva claimed their power and potential in the face of a segregated system funded by the federal government.

Using Dendroecology to Strengthen the Historic Integrity of Cumberland Homesteads Tower in Crossville, Tennessee

The Cumberland Homesteads Historic District, located on the Cumberland Plateau in East Tennessee, is home to one of the first and largest Homesteads projects attempted during the New Deal era. Although the settlement did not succeed in its original objective, the history of the Cumberland Homesteads has become a valued foundation of the local community, which in turn strives to protect the legacy of the Cumberland Homesteads Tower. To preserve the integrity of the structure as well as the historical integrity of the landscape, the Cumberland Homesteads Tower Association sought to date and potentially remove trees that were not present during the period of significance (prior to 1938). The majority of the trees in close proximity to the Tower were identified as Eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carrière) and 15 trees total were sampled. Additionally, three post oak (Quercus stellata Wangenh.) trees located in a historic ‘triangle’ across the highway from the Tower and targeted for removal were sampled. Samples were successfully dated, and ca. half of the hemlock were confirmed to have been planted after the construction of the Homesteads Tower. Additionally, post oaks analyzed near the Tower were dated back to the early 1800s, which motivated their protection in the midst of a road project threatening their survival.

Cultivating Citizens: The Regionalist Work of Art in the New Deal Era

Cultivating Citizens: The Regionalist Work of Art in the New Deal Era

Enduring Exclusion

Economic justice has long been a part of the civil rights agenda, and minimum labor standards statutes play a crucial role in eradicating the exploitation and subordination of historically marginalized workers. While statutes establishing labor standards are characterized as “universal,” their effect has been anything but universal. Racial and ethnic minorities, women, and those at the intersection experience disproportionate violations of labor standards laws concerning minimum wage, overtime, and occupational safety and health. Through legislative maneuvering dating back to the New Deal era, Congress carved out many female workers and workers of color from core protections of minimum labor standards legislation. Due to the vigorous advocacy of civil rights groups, amendments to these statutes expanded coverage, making these statutes more inclusive of marginalized workers. Nevertheless, the exclusionary legacy of these New Deal era-laws lingers today. Black, Latinx, and female workers are more likely to be retaliated against for asserting rights or reporting employer misconduct pursuant to these statutes. Tracing the racial and gendered origins of exemptions to labor standards statutes from the early twentieth century to the present, this Article argues that, despite expanded coverage, female workers and workers of color remain largely excluded from “universal” workplace protections. Although antiworker forces previously sought to thwart creation of legal rights for marginalized workers, contemporary antiworker campaigns seek to gut marginalized workers’ protections through actual and threatened retaliation. Examination of the traditional rationales for employer retaliation reveals that the retaliation disparity is incongruent with these conventional motivations. This Article argues that securing compliance with both minimum labor standards and antiretaliation reform should be integral parts of the civil rights agenda.

The role of scientists in EU forest-related policy in the Green Deal era

Forests are under pressure to provide biomass for different uses, but also to mitigate climate change and house biodiversity. In the EU, there is an intense debate around which functions to prioritize, and the role of scientists is increasingly critical in the quest for policy coherence.

Propaganda in the Guise of News

Abstract In the late 1940s, conservative radio commentator Fulton Lewis Jr. was embroiled in controversy after publicly criticizing consumer cooperatives for taking advantage of a federal tax loophole. Coinciding with the Federal Communications Commission’s reconsideration of its Mayflower doctrine—a ban on broadcast editorials—the dispute served as fodder for New Deal–era progressive media reformers. This article unpacks Lewis’s mostly forgotten role as an unwitting catalyst of progressive media regulations through reconsidering the FCC’s 1948 Mayflower hearings, which resulted in the fairness doctrine (1949–87). This doctrine mandated that broadcasters present controversial issues of public concern in an ideologically balanced manner. Lewis’s news-breaking thus became framed as a problem in need of federal regulatory solution by reformers who sought to sublimate radio into an idealized liberal public sphere. These reforms, however, framed political disagreement as an epistemological crisis and, in doing so, unintentionally bolstered a conservative critical disposition toward the mainstream press, exemplified in the “liberal media” trope.

Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs (review)

Reviewed by: Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America by Avigail Sachs Elliott Sturtevant (bio) Avigail Sachs Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018 240 pages, 44 black-and-white illustrations ISBN: 9780813941271, $39.50 HB As Avigail Sachs notes on the book's first page, Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics, and Science in Postwar America tries to answer a question posed by her doctoral advisor, Jean-Pierre Protzen: "What did happen to the scientific approach" (ix)? In what follows, Sachs skillfully retraces how a series of "scientific" theories and exchanges with adjacent disciplines radically transformed architectural education in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. "The answer," she writes, "is that 'science' was caught up (unsurprisingly) in both national and professional politics" (ix). For some, the story may be familiar, perhaps even intimately so, and may remind them of time spent in participatory design meetings, reading about environmental psychology, or feuding over curricular reform. For others, particularly those whose educational trajectories did not cross the schools discussed—mainly Harvard, Berkeley, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale—Environmental Design offers a compelling view of architectural education as it swung closer to the natural and social sciences in the immediate postwar era and then, starting in the 1970s, began to swing back. The book is organized in five chapters that move chronologically through five decades of the mid-twentieth century, each documenting different valences of "architecture as environmental design" (3). This is primarily done through a detailed analysis of the shifting structure and pedagogical priorities of American schools of architecture and relies on research in institutional archives. Sachs begins the long arc of this disciplinary "pendulum swing" in the 1930s. In chapter 1, "A Social Art," environmental design first gains traction as a progressive response to the challenges and opportunities posed by the Depression and subsequent New Deal era. Working for federal agencies, architects were confronted with a new set of "clients"—namely, the public—and forced to share the limelight with other experts, including planners, landscape architects, and economists. These new conditions were perhaps most clearly felt following the passage of the Housing Act of 1937, which Catherine Bauer, one of the chapter's main protagonists, helped write. The federally mandated provision of housing for the masses, in turn, exemplified one of the main tensions of architecture as environmental design, or its "dual allegiance," as Sachs writes, "to political and public action, on the one hand, and to scientific inquiry and knowledge, on the other" (9). The use of the term environment was meant to convey this broader purview by encompassing all aspects of the human world within disciplinary bounds, and by recasting architecture as a means of mediating the relationship between humans and their surroundings, rather than a fine art. To this was added the idea of research, following in the American pragmatist tradition of John Dewey, that represented a commitment to scientific knowledge and inductive reasoning over top-down, universalist solutions. To reframe architecture as environmental design was hence both a revaluation of professional responsibilities and recalibration of disciplinary horizons. After the war, proponents of the environmental approach, now faced with fewer public commissions, retrained their sights on architectural education. For instance, at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, William W. Wurster, Bauer's partner, encountered Dean Joseph Hudnut's effort to replace the school's professional emphasis with "a collaborative, environmentalist one" (23). Sachs recounts similar transformations at the School of Architecture at MIT, after Wurster was offered [End Page 130] its deanship; at the School of Fine Arts at Penn, after one of Hudnut's hires, G. Holmes Perkins, was appointed dean; and at Berkeley, where, after much debate, the Department of City and Regional Planning and College of Architecture were combined to create the College of Environmental Design in 1959. At MIT, and later Berkeley, Wurster used the term "research" to distinguish architecture as environmental design from its beaux arts predecessors. This was meant to elevate designers' status in the public eye, but also to create distance between architectural education and the competitive, commercial reality of architectural practice. In this sense, and counter to...

Kate Dossett. Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal

Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal focuses on the Negro Units of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–39). Dossett argues that Black performance communities consisting of Black theatre artists and the Black public sphere helped shaped the performance and reception of theatre manuscripts in the New Deal era.

Review: Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change

Review: <i>Iconic Planned Communities and the Challenge of Change</i>

Mapping and making gangland: A legacy of redlining and enjoining gang neighbourhoods in Los Angeles

We provide an example of how race- and place-based legacies of disinvestment initiated by New Deal Era redlining regimes under the auspices of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) were followed by decades of anti-gang over-policing tactics at the scale of the neighbourhood. We show how HOLC-mediated and mapped redlining has sustained community disinvestment and stigmatisation wrought by unjust and racist social policy seen to this day in contemporary geographies of gang abatement in the form of mapped gang injunction ‘safety zones’. As we illustrate with the use of two case studies from Los Angeles – in South-Central LA and LA’s San Fernando Valley – it is overwhelmingly redlined neighbourhoods that have remained marginalised, becoming civilly enjoined ‘gang’ neighbourhoods faced with oppressive anti-gang policing tactics over the past few decades.

The “Social Science” of Segregation: Between the “Charitable” Surveys of the Progressive Era and the “Appraisal” Surveys of the New Deal Era

Between the “charitable” surveys of the Progressive Era and the “appraisal” surveys of the New Deal Era, the field of “Social Science” emerged. Although the philanthropic surveys of the Progressive Era influenced housing reform for working-class Persons of Color in urban neighborhoods, while the federal surveys of the New Deal Era influenced real estate disinvestment in those same neighborhoods, each had the effect of furthering segregation. This article considers the commonalities among the discourses, methods, and results of these two seemingly disparate ends of the survey spectrum to illuminate their respective contributions to one another and to segregation.

Walking on a Redline: Did Discriminatory U.S. Housing Policies Affect Greenspace Development?

Walking on a Redline: Did Discriminatory U.S. Housing Policies Affect Greenspace Development?

Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part 1

The efforts of liberal thinkers to incorporate mutualistic social principles into Americans’ understanding of liberalism extended through the century, but the strongest and most holistic conceptions of the social sphere took hold during the New Deal era and World War II. Contrary to recent accounts that locate the weakening of that social liberal project in the 1970s and attribute it to underlying economic changes, this article builds on two generations of historiography to argue that the decline began during the long 1950s when totalitarianism changed the political context of social thought. The theory of mass society that developed to explain the rise of totalitarianism replaced the citizens of liberal democratic theory with the anxious, rootless masses of modern society and forecast the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. Americans cast totalitarianism as the antithesis of America, its Other in the narrative of American identity, a threat both without and within. In that context, mutualistic conceptions of the social sphere were put on the defensive and individual liberty was valorized. Liberal intellectuals, trusting in American capitalism and in the weak social state, focused on the threat of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism and mass irrationality. Their commitment to social democracy weakened and their chief concern shifted to the no-longer-autonomous individuals of modern society.

Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews

Reviewed by: Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region by Scott L. Matthews Carol Quirke Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region. By Scott L. Matthews. Documentary Arts and Culture. (Chapel Hill: Published by University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, 2018. Pp. xvi, 312. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4645-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4644-2.) Travel writers, poets, ethnographers and other social scientists, musicologists, folklorists, journalists, and photographers made “the American South . . . the most documented place on earth” (p. 2). Scott L. Matthews surveys this oeuvre; his history’s title conveys that he is equally interested in what the [End Page 145] region’s rich vein of documentary studies communicates about its practitioners. For Matthews, documentarians’ will to chart “appealing primitivism and appalling pathology” often overshadowed much else—hence the book explores documentarians’ motives and mythologizing (p. 239). If James Agee claimed the camera testified to “the cruel radiance of what is” (James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [Boston, 1941], p. 9), Matthews argues that documentarians’ witnessing often resulted in patronizing attempts at reform or twisted caricature that still adhere to the South. They conspired to preserve a “premodern” regionalism before “modernity wiped it away,” yet Matthews evidences how documentary subjects often rejected such representations (p. 2). The author’s well-researched case studies span the twentieth century. Beginning with social scientist Howard W. Odum’s development of the University of North Carolina’s Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, Matthews moves to New Deal–era Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of a Georgia county through Jack Delano’s eyes. For the postwar period, Capturing the South: Imagining America’s Most Documented Region explores musicologist/musician John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers, who tracked down and then promoted the “high lonesome sound” of Appalachian singers (p. 113). Matthews then investigates Danny Lyon’s evocative photos of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and finishes with a deep dive into Hale County, Alabama, where Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is set. Matthews’s probing of a range of documentary materials is a strength, allowing him to identify common patterns of representation. He also delineates documentary projects’ overlapping audiences. For example, Odum’s staff introduced photographer Dorothea Lange to several southern communities. Photographers, academics, policy makers, and the general public then engaged with this imagery, a generation later embraced by folk lovers, art enthusiasts, and political activists. Another strength is Matthews’s mining of poor southerners’ reactions to their documentation. One Kentucky musician shot and killed an interviewer. Most subjects found less brutal forms of resistance. Matthews makes an important scholarly intervention in demonstrating how elites, such as Zora Neale Hurston or W. E. B. Du Bois, and common sharecroppers or churchgoers registered distaste or actively sabotaged documentarians’ efforts to pin down southern folkways. For half a century, critics and scholars have argued photographers exert an adverse power over their subjects. Matthews’s analysis provides evidence where others offer theory alone; but as each chapter shows documentarians forcing themselves upon resisting subjects, the argument becomes formulaic. Greater suppleness in limning the relations between subject and maker would persuade more. Similarly, Capturing the South flattens differences in the wide variety of practitioners who made the South their subject. Certainly, documentarians in the center (urban North) sought to preserve an “authentic” culture in the periphery (rural South). And yet what drew such diverse people as snobbish, WASPy Walker Evans; genteel, racist Odum, a southerner; or Jewish Brooklynite and antiracist Lyon to documenting the South? Lyon was held in high esteem by his subjects and his activist sponsor, SNCC. Ultimately, SNCC [End Page 146] advanced Black photographers, paralleling the movement’s radicalization to Black Power. This does not appear proof of Lyon’s “well-meaning white liberal[ism]” (pp. 187–88). A final concern is that Matthews’s southern documentarians are largely men. His discussion of Lyon’s SNCC work focuses on leaders such as Bob Moses and John Lewis. But one of Lyon’s most famous photographs portrays teenage women in the Leesburg, Georgia...

Epic Errors: The Supreme Court Ignores the History of Collective Actions and Decades of Struggle to Establish "Living Wage" Standards

If an employer can take away the right of “acting together” from its employees and force them to proceed only “individually” to enforce rights related to their wages and other terms and conditions of employment, the employer has interfered with or restrained the “collective power of individuals” that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 are all New Deal era statutes – all of which are still in force today – which provide for the right of employees to proceed collectively or in concert. These statutes were the culmination of decades of struggle in workplaces and communities, state and federal legislatures, and state and federal courtrooms. Each rests on detailed Congressional findings that individual employees do not “commonly” enjoy “actual liberty of contract” or “full freedom of association” and have an “inequality in bargaining power” vis a vis the employer, and that “collective” actions to resolve disputes over the terms and conditions of employment are in the interest of employees and the public. And while it is rarely noticed today, from 1923 to 1925, the Supreme Court issued three unanimous decisions on the unconstitutionality of “compulsory arbitration,” holding that compulsory arbitration implicates the due process and liberty of contract protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, except in temporary emergencies. See, e.g., Charles Wolff Packing Co. v. Court of Indus. Rel., 267 U.S. 552, 565-66 (1925). In Epic Systems Corp. v. Lewis, 138 S.Ct. 1612, 1624-25 (2018), a 5-4 majority opinion, written by the then-new Justice Neil Gorsuch, upheld compulsory arbitration agreements with “class action waivers” in three companion cases, even though the waivers clearly constituted unbargained-for restraints on the collective enforcement action provided in Section 16(b) of the Fair Labor Standards Act. All of the cases involved the right to receive overtime pay, which applies even when employees earn more than the minimum wage. In upholding the class/collective action waivers, the majority opinion in Epic displayed a near total ignorance of class and representative actions in “the old, nearly forgotten world before 1966, Elizabeth K. Spahn, “Resurrecting the Spurious Class,” 71 Geo. L.J. 119, 120 (1982). It also displayed a woeful ignorance of the history of the use of “liberty of contract” theories to block the enforcement of wage and hour standards, and Congress’ rejection of those theories in the legislative findings and declarations of policies of the New Deal legislation.

Hispanic Racialization, Citizenship, and the Colorado Border Blockade of 1936

Abstract In April of 1936, Governor Edwin “Big Ed” Johnson of Colorado declared martial law in a one-mile strip along the state’s southern border with New Mexico, claiming that an invasion of “aliens and indigents” threatened the well-being of Colorado and its citizens. In addition to literally placing a militarized boundary between the more Anglo state of Colorado and the heavily Hispanic state of New Mexico, Johnson’s blockade also heightened contestations over the social boundary between who belonged and who fell outside of citizenship and belonging. Those crossing the New Mexico-Colorado border for work included Mexican immigrants as well as New Mexican Hispanics who were long-time US citizens, most of whom were racialized as undesirable foreigners by many Anglo residents. Interestingly, during the blockade, many native-born Hispanics in New Mexico and Colorado also characterized Mexican immigrants in a negative light, while simultaneously and vigorously asserting their belonging as Spanish American citizens of the United States. The scholarly literature on the racialization of Hispanics has generally approached Mexican-origin people as a unitary group, explored their racial identity in contrast to Anglos, and, less often, taken into account tensions over racialization as they played out between different Hispanic groups. In response, this article details how Johnson’s blockade contributed to the racialization—by both Anglos and Hispanics—of Mexican immigrants and Hispanics in the Southwest during the New Deal Era. This case study also offers a rare example of a state’s attempt to usurp the federal government’s plenary power over immigration during the twentieth century, a time when the federal government’s control over immigration was relatively unquestioned.

디지털 뉴딜시대 공공데이터를 활용한 에듀테크에 관한 연구

코로나 19로 인한 사회적 거리두기는 비대면화와 디지털 전환을 가속화 시키며 전 산업 분야에 영향을 미치고 있다. 이러한 거대한 사회적 전환점에서 교육 분야는 홈스쿨링 수요가 급증하였고 ICT기술을 활용하여 교 육의 효과를 높이는 에듀테크의 관심이 커지고 있다. 또한 최근 정부가 발표한 디지털 뉴딜 정책 따라 디지털 대 전환이 예고되고 그 변화의 물결로 누구나 양질의 공공데이터를 활용할 수 있는 환경이 조성되고 있다. 본 논문은 날로 커지는 온라인 콘텐츠 시장에서 공공데이터를 활용한 교육용 어플리케이션 플랫폼 제안을 통해 교육 기회의 불균형을 해소하고 새로운 디지털콘텐츠의 가능성을 모색하고자 하였다. 데이터 댐 구축에 따른 풍부한 공공데이 터 개방과 디지털 기술은 앞으로 누구나 쉽고 편리하게 교육 콘텐츠 서비스를 제공하고 이용할 수 있는 마중물이 될 것으로 기대된다.