The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal

States' rights

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To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Sign In or Create an Account. Close mobile search navigation Article navigation. For permissions, please e-mail: You do not currently have access to this article. You could not be signed in. Millions of people struggled to survive every day, and as the nation's economy weakened, many lost their jobs, their savings, and their homes.

Efforts by the previous president, Herbert Hoover —; served —33 , had failed to improve economic conditions. In the election of , the nation elected Roosevelt with hopes that he would bring great changes. Within the first hundred days of being in office, Roosevelt sent Congress a flurry of legislation aimed at solving the nation's problems. The legislative plan was known as the New Deal. Roosevelt's New Deal was initially effective. In , however, the economy experienced another recession, and Roosevelt was moved to introduce more legislation. This is sometimes called his Second New Deal.

The most influential pieces of legislation from both waves of the New Deal were aimed at providing relief, recovery, and reform to the United States. Relief measures included programs designed by the president to assist farmers and unemployed workers who faced impossible financial challenges. They included the following legislation:. Provided grants to states in which relief agencies had run out of money. Agricultural Adjustment Act May Established programs, including the Agricultural Adjustment Administration , to stabilize and raise prices for farm products.

It provided subsidies to farmers who were told to reduce crop production by leaving part of their land idle. Money to pay the farmers was raised by a tax on companies that purchased farm products to further process into food and clothing. The Supreme Court ruled that this aspect was unconstitutional in The majority of judges ruled that it was illegal to levy a tax on one group in order to pay another. Congress therefore passed further legislation that restored some of the act's provisions to encourage soil conservation, balanced prices, and food reserves. It allowed the government to pay benefits to farmers who planted soil-building crops rather than staple crops.

Employed millions of young men to work in camps at federal lands.

Established a work relief program that employed millions of people. Men built and renovated bridges, public buildings, and roads. Women were generally employed in child-care or handicrafts, such as sewing. Art, theater, and writers projects employed artists for preserving the cultural uniqueness of the United States. Roosevelt designed recovery measures to normalize economic activity and to restore faith in the banking system.

Emergency Banking Act Required banks to pass a Treasury Department inspection before reopening. In response to the nation's banking crisis, Roosevelt had declared a mandatory bank holiday until this first piece of New Deal legislation could be passed. It was successful in restoring confidence in the banking system.

National Industrial Recovery Act Established the Public Works Administration PWA , which paid private firms to construct major public works, including airports, dams, bridges, warships, schools, and hospitals. An ambitious project that built a series of dams at the Tennessee River. The dams served to revitalize a broad region of the Southeast by generating electricity and controlling flooding in the valley.

Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration Provided loans to help farmers relocate to better land. Reform measures were designed by the president to protect consumers by regulating businesses and providing assistance to the elderly and unemployed.

The Great Depression and World War II, 1929-1945

Truth in Securities Act Required corporations to provide the public with accurate and complete information concerning corporate securities, or shares of stock in corporations. Enabled the government to regulate irresponsible speculation by banks. It called for every business to abide by a temporary code that provided a minimum wage , a maximum workweek, and no child labor.

Those who chose to follow the code displayed the symbol of the Blue Eagle in their windows. It also gave workers the right to form unions, but had no mechanism for enforcement of the right. Supreme Court eventually nullified NRA legislation, and the program, which was failing anyway, was abolished. Established the SEC as a stock market watchdog. Established the National Labor Relations Board. It gave workers federal protection for organizing unions and required employers to recognize unions. Established several social welfare programs to assist the elderly, unemployed, and handicapped citizens.

It established a pension for those over sixty-five, funded through an employment tax. It also provided unemployment compensation and governmental support for the handicapped and for single mothers with dependent children. Fair Labor Standards Act Established the minimum wage and maximum work week and abolished child labor.

President Roosevelt's New Deal allowed the federal government to assume new responsibility for the welfare of the people. In some cases, the Supreme Court decided New Deal programs were unlawful. Other programs were meant to provide just temporary relief in the midst of the Great Depression.

The New Deal helped alleviate problems caused by the Great Depression. The depression did not end, however, until the American economy recovered by providing equipment and supplies for World War II. Though many parts of New Deal legislation did not last beyond the war, several New Deal programs, including the Social Security Act and the National Labor Relations Board , survived into the twenty-first century. The United States in the s, argued William E. Leuchtenburg, "had almost no institutional structure to which Europeans would accord the term 'the State.

No doubt he saw a soldier or a sailor now and then, but the government had nothing to do with the general public. Roosevelt confronted the worst economic depression in American history with this feeble state apparatus. A generation before, Grover Cleveland had responded to a similar crisis. As in , the president had been faced in with armies of the unemployed, desperate farmers, and frightened financiers. Cleveland had resolutely maintained a policy of sound money and strict economy, and he steadfastly resisted demands for government assistance.

His courage won Cleveland the praise of conservatives everywhere, but it split his Democratic Party, brought it electoral disaster, and condemned the Democrats to national minority status until the s. Roosevelt ignored this model. Instead, he drew on the Progressive traditions of the need for government to confront the problems of modern industrial society and to protect the disadvantaged—what Daniel Rodgers has called a "new social politics.

Herbert Hoover had drawn on many of the same traditions and had mobilized government agencies to check the deflationary spiral after , just as he had as secretary of commerce in to combat recession. But Hoover's activism was to promote voluntary cooperation. Roosevelt's was not so constrained: He cheerfully, albeit unsystematically, sought federal government remedies and, if necessary, federal government coercion to tackle the Depression. As a result, American citizens who had had so little experience with the federal government now saw it deeply interwoven in their daily lives.

Between and the New Deal that Roosevelt had promised the American people when he accepted the Democratic nomination in profoundly altered the relationship between individuals and their government and shaped the political economy of the United States for the next fifty years. American farmers were told what they could and could not plant by federal officials. They received checks for not planting crops, or even for destroying what they had already planted. Many had access to electricity for the first time. Farm owners, like homeowners across the nation, renegotiated their mortgages with federal agencies.

Tenants could borrow to buy their own farms. Millions of workers were employed by the government on public works and work relief projects. They voted in federal elections for union representation. Their minimum wage was determined by the government. They were eligible for unemployment compensation and received old-age pensions. Most Americans paid income taxes to the federal government for the first time in the s and s. Businessmen could no longer fight unions with every weapon at their disposal and could no longer simply ignore them. They were told what they had to pay their workers, and, for a short time, how much they could produce.

Their banking and securities operations were strictly monitored. At the same time, they had unprecedented access to cheap credit from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation RFC and had their bank deposits underwritten. Virtually every community in the United States bore the physical imprint of the New Deal: This transformation of the role of the federal government and the notions of the legitimate function of government was eventually accepted by the federal courts. The exact timing of the "Constitutional Revolution" of the s, and the motivation of the judges who appeared to switch sides, remains open to dispute, but the constitutional consequences were clear.

The restrictions on what the federal government could regulate under the commerce clause were largely removed. In the U. Supreme Court ruled that an Ohio chicken farmer growing twenty-three acres of wheat, all of which would be fed to his chickens and consumed in his backyard, so affected interstate commerce that the secretary of agriculture could impose marketing penalties on him. Before the Court had savaged economic and social legislation, notably the great industrial and farm recovery acts of Since it has never overturned legislation involving economic regulation and between and it reversed thirty-two of its earlier decisions in the economic and social arena.

The American people made the same decision as the judges. The majority of Americans welcomed this assumption of active responsibility by the federal government for the welfare of ordinary Americans and responded by electing Roosevelt as president four times. American voters made the Democratic Party the national majority party for a generation and supported presidents—Harry Truman, John F.

Kennedy , and Lyndon Johnson—who campaigned in the shadow of Roosevelt and sought to complete the unfinished business of the New Deal. Until the s most Americans believed that the federal government could be relied on to do the right thing. They were mainly liberal activists for whom the Depression and World War II were their formative political experiences. Because of Roosevelt's sense of history and the creation of the presidential library in Hyde Park , New York , historians could accomplish archive-based work on the Roosevelt presidency far more quickly than on any previous president.

By , 85 percent of Roosevelt's papers had been cleared and could be studied—some five years before the Library of Congress was able to release some of its Lincoln papers and seventeen years before serious archival assessments of the Hoover presidency started. It was inevitable that these historians should put Roosevelt at center stage: The need to establish a coherent narrative of the vast array of legislation and the agencies that proliferated dictated their emphasis on the president and the dynamics of policy formulation.

Their tone was largely celebratory. They were not uncritical: They regretted the lack of greater planning and coherence in the New Deal, felt that Roosevelt was sometimes too clever by half and sacrificed long-term strategic goals for short-term political gains, and noted that many who needed help most were excluded from the benefits of the New Deal. Nevertheless the overall portrait of Roosevelt and the New Deal was heroic. At a time of unprecedented prosperity after , the New Deal legacy of economic management through fiscal activism seemed successful.

At a time when ideology and mass movements—fascism, communism, McCarthyism—seemed so dangerous, these historians could see great value in the apparently pragmatic, non-ideological New Deal that "brokered" the demands of the competing interests groups who mediated between the government and the people. Radical historians Zinn, Bernstein, Conkin, Kolko of the s lamented what the liberals had celebrated. The one-third of a nation that Roosevelt had identified in as ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed remained poor. Neither racism nor the power of capitalism had been checked.

To these historians the New Deal, like other reform movements in twentieth century, had merely served to sustain the hegemony of corporate capitalism. To the radical historians of the s, the New Deal failure was particularly tragic because, echoing the radicals of the s, they believed that there had never been a better time for a radical overhaul of the American economic and political system.

American workers and farmers were more disillusioned than ever before or since with traditional business leadership. For once corporate leaders could not solve their problems through overseas economic expansion, since foreign markets had collapsed. They feared that the alternative domestic remedies for depression in a mature economy, therefore, would involve the radical redistribution of wealth and power if America's persistent overproduction were to be solved.

To forestall that radical change, New Left historians argued, corporate leaders were not the targets of New Deal reform; rather they were the driving force behind the New Deal. These corporate leaders sought to patch up, not tear down, the old economic system to ensure that power remained largely in traditional hands.

Shrewd business leaders supported industrial stabilization, labor legislation, and social security legislation because they could afford increased labor costs that would drive under their smaller competitors. To defuse the angry discontent of workers, farmers, and the poor, they supported the most minimal welfare measures possible. Limited concessions would avert the threat of disorder and undercut the appeal of radicals.

This interpretation continued to resonate in graduate schools in the United States, even though it did not yield a major overview of the New Deal. In the s historians of American business like Colin Gordon resurrected a more sophisticated version of the analysis. If New Left historians lamented the limited nature of New Deal change and viewed it as a decisive "missed opportunity" for radical change, critics on the right lamented that the New Deal had initiated entirely too much change and that the s had marked the "Big Bang" of the federal government. Critics from Herbert Hoover to economic historians such as Robert Higgs in the s and s argued that Roosevelt artificially created a crisis in , then used the analogy of wartime powers and foisted economic regimentation and government control on the American people.

The New Deal was a decisive wrong turn in American history that set the nation firmly on the road to collectivism and the creation of a Leviathan—the modern, insatiable, bureaucratic state. As a result, conservative critics and historians argued, the commitment of both ordinary Americans and their leaders to individualism, free markets, and limited government suffered a blow from which the nation has never recovered. In fact, few New Deal programs were implemented by an army of federal officials faithfully carrying out orders from Washington.

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Programs were often administered by state administrators, by local officials more sensitive to local mores than to Washington diktat, or by people, such as farmers and businessmen themselves, whom the programs were intended to regulate. State and local case studies of the New Deal and particular agencies have shown that change that looked impressive in Washington did not necessarily have the same impact at the local level.

Studies that focus on social groups rather than on their leaders and politicians, "the inarticulate many" rather than "the articulate few," show grassroots radicalism and the agency of ordinary Americans, but they also show the persistence of conservative traditions of deference and individualism amid extraordinary economic distress. Studies that focus on policymaking rarely show the enlightened capitalists as the driving force behind New Deal reforms. Historians who have attempted overviews that take advantage of these studies McElvaine, Badger, Biles have tended to emphasize the limitations of the changes wrought by the New Deal.

In that sense they resemble the New Left historians. But, unlike those historians, they tend to stress not the conservative intent of policy-makers or the malign influence of corporate capitalists, but the external constraints imposed by the political and economic environment: What judgments on the New Deal can be made against this background? The overriding imperative in was to produce economic recovery quickly—to reopen the banks and to check the downward deflationary spiral of wages and prices.

The microeconomic intervention in agriculture and industry aimed to restore purchasing power to farmers by controlling production under the Agricultural Adjustment Administration AAA and to eliminate destructive competition in industry by setting a floor under wages and prices through National Recovery Administration NRA codes. Various schemes of "quick fixes" by currency manipulation, to which Roosevelt was always attracted, had little effect.

The NRA codes may have checked the deflationary spiral, but they did not generate additional purchasing power that would create extra jobs. Microeconomic policies were largely abandoned after the end of the NRA in Unemployment figures never fell below 10 percent until well into It would take the demands of preparedness and the defense industries during the war to generate the purchasing power to create new jobs and full employment. In agriculture, the mix of credit, production control programs, parity payments, and price support loans under the and Farm Acts rescued rural America.

Federal assistance enabled farm owners to stay on the land in the s when there were no alternative economic prospects off the land. But those on the land who were always poor—tenants and sharecroppers in the South , migratory farm workers in Florida and California, small farmers in the Appalachians—did not receive proportionate assistance from the AAA or the cash-strapped Resettlement Administration RA and its successor, the Farm Security Administration FSA. Farm programs, which were largely to remain in place for the next fifty years, eliminated much of the risk of unpredictable weather and markets for American farmers but they did not in themselves bring prosperity.

It was World War II that solved the farm problem: It produced the urban demand that absorbed surplus farm production and the non-farm jobs that absorbed the surplus rural population. Nevertheless, there were important New Deal economic legacies. The reforms in banking and securities eliminated most of the excesses that had produced financial instability in the s. The stabilization of the financial system lasted until deregulation in the s. The New Deal was also a "laboratory of economic learning.

They were emergency measures and he hoped to balance the budget in fiscal The defense buildup and the need to escape the to recession once more made deficit spending an imperative. By now a version of Keynesian economics had influential backers in the administration. Previously they had believed that the mature American economy did not have the capacity to expand dramatically: Unemployment would always be with them. Now they believed that the necessary injection of purchasing power through government spending could create the demand to put all Americans back to work.

The war showed that government spending could indeed create full employment. The New Deal left a legacy of macroeconomic tools that would produce nearly full employment until the late s. The mixed record on the economy was not what brought the New Deal overwhelming electoral endorsement. What more than anything bound lower-income voters to the Democratic Party, including for the first time African-American voters in the northern cities, were the welfare programs of the New Deal.

Before the United States was a welfare "outlier" in the Western industrial world: Private charity and county poor-law provision all too often constituted the sum total of assistance to the unemployed. There was no social insurance—no unemployment compensation in operation at the state or federal level, no old-age insurance, no health insurance. The Social Security Act of provided unemployment compensation, old-age insurance, and matching funds for categorical assistance to the needy aged, the blind, and dependent children.

The New Deal, as James Patterson concluded, "responded with a level of public aid scarcely imaginable in The welfare state the New Deal launched was, however, in many ways a ramshackle affair. New Dealers disliked welfare and wanted to replace the dole with jobs and social insurance. But work relief programs never provided jobs for more than 40 percent of the unemployed and welfare did not wither away: Indeed, aid to dependent children would in time be unrecognizable as a program that was aimed at the children of worthy widows.

Relief programs, whether under federal direction from to or under state control thereafter, were always handicapped by occasionally incompetent, sometimes corrupt, often niggardly state and county administrators. Social insurance was funded by the contributions of the workers themselves and not by general tax revenues. The immediate impact of payroll taxes was deflationary and regressive. There were wide variations in state generosity and eligibility requirements, and Social Security failed to cover many of the most needy in the United States—agricultural laborers and domestic servants, who were disproportionately African American.

The emerging welfare state offered nothing for health care and very little for low-income housing—staples of the welfare state in western European countries.

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The New Deal may not have achieved a dramatic redistribution of wealth, but there was a radical edge and a class base to politics in the s. American workers flocked to unions in the s: Even more important, the great majority of unskilled and semiskilled, often immigrant, workers in the mass production, basic manufacturing industries were organized. Before organized labor had been hemmed into sick industries and into craft unions of skilled workers. By the great primary industries of autos, steel, rubber, and electrical goods, which were dominated by hostile open shop national corporations, had been organized in industrial unions under the Congress of Industrial Organizations CIO.

These new unions were overtly and aggressively political in contrast to the traditional nonpartisan stance of the American Federation of Labor AFL. By labor funds made the largest contribution to the Democratic Party's campaign chest, union members were a crucial element of a class-based New Deal electoral coalition, and in many northern cities union organizing drives and Democratic election campaigns were virtually inter-changeable.

Labor leaders could demand representation at the highest levels of government policymaking.

These labor gains owed much to a newfound militancy on the part of American workers, a militancy that was developed and channeled by union organizers, many of whom were Communists and Socialists. Before vulnerable immigrant workers, no matter how much they resented their job insecurity or the arbitrary power of foremen on the shop floor, had been no match for the unfettered power of employers determined to smash unions. But the Depression solidified class solidarity and subordinated ethnic divisions. Any loyalty to employers from the benefits of welfare capitalism disappeared when those benefits were eliminated as employers cut costs.

Explosions of militancy in and were in part stimulated by the rising expectations encouraged by the NRA. But rank-and-file militancy was not enough to secure long-term organization. What workers needed was the protection afforded by the Wagner Act of , which outlawed many of the traditional anti-union practices of the employers, and by the political power exercised by labor within the Democratic Party, which meant sympathetic federal, state, and local governments. Governors and sheriffs no longer inevitably protected strikebreakers or used troops or the courts to defeat labor.

The sit-down strikes were allowed to succeed. Even defeats during the to recession did not mean the complete destruction of unions, as in the past. Employers bitterly resisted and seldom realistically bargained, even after union recognition. But faced with the determined stance of government and the need to maintain production and profits during the war, they did come to terms with unions.

They continued to seek to protect managerial prerogatives after the war, but also came to see benefits in stable and predictable industrial relations with "responsible" unions. The New Deal also made important investments in the nation's infrastructure. Public works projects built the roads, government buildings, and airports that revenue-starved localities could not. Long before federal aid to education, New Deal programs built school and university facilities, paid teachers' salaries and, through the National Youth Administration NYA , put thousands through school.

The New Deal may not have built many units of public housing, but its credit to homeowners not only saved homes for owners who would otherwise have lost them but paved the way for long-term mortgages that revived the private construction industry in the late s and, in due course, gave the United States the highest percentage of home ownership in the world. Multipurpose dams like those in the Tennessee Valley brought water resource development and cheap power that not only transformed agriculture in the West and the South but also stimulated industrialization. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation made credit available to regional entrepreneurs in the Sunbelt who would spearhead economic development in the late s and s.

The New Deal had major achievements: But these achievements have to be set against confusions in policy, the restoration of the power of big business in World War II, the failure to tackle rural poverty with as much vigor as farm recovery, the failure to challenge segregation and disfranchisement of African Americans in the South, and the inadequacies of the welfare revolution.

The limitations of the New Deal were perfectly clear to younger New Dealers. Roosevelt inspired a remarkably talented and largely incorruptible cohort of young academics, economists, lawyers, and social workers into government service, including the first generation of influential women at the federal government level. They were self-critical and willing to learn. It was their own investigations that first uncovered the extent of rural relief needs. Critics of the impact of New Deal policy on southern tenancy were brought into the government. Advocates of social security were conscious of taking first steps: They would extend coverage and bring in health insurance later.

Rural planners intended to tackle the problem of urban under-consumption and to shift farmers out of high-cost production. Advocates of the Tennessee Valley Authority TVA wanted to see it replicated in all the major river valleys of the country. Radical southerners saw that prosperity in the South needed political and economic democracy in the region, which meant, at the least, the end of black disfranchisement. Their faith in federal solutions made sense, given the narrow-minded, venal, and amateurish politics of so many state governments.

But a remarkably lean federal bureaucracy and a recurrent faith in participatory democracy in the form of, for example, farmer committees, crop control elections, National Labor Relations Board elections, and Native-American self-government accompanied their faith in federal solutions. That the New Dealers failed to overcome the limitations they themselves identified was sometimes the result of missed opportunities, of excessive deference to southern congressional leaders, of a lack of interest in domestic politics during World War II, of too great a willingness to compromise, and of a lack of valor against vested interests like the American Medical Association or white southerners.

But the limitations were also the result of the economic emergency of and the lack of preexisting "state capacity. The lack of central government expertise and resources precluded top-down central planning or purely federal solutions. The political realignment that the New Deal created was inevitably a partial realignment.

Σύνοψη του βιβλίου "The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal"

The Democratic Party might be a class-based party of lower-income voters linked with middle-class consumers behind policies that accepted the necessity of increasing mass purchasing power. But the power of southern county-seat elites and their control of congressional leaders were still intact. Some scholars now argue that a Third New Deal from onwards attempted to achieve the full-scale political realignment, the strengthening of state capacity and executive power, and the policy prescriptions that would have enabled the New Deal reform aspirations to be more completely met through executive reorganization, the court-packing plan of , and the attempt to purge the Democratic Party of conservatives in the primaries of The president would have had more control over the executive through the budget bureau, a planning board, and control of the regulatory agencies.

A reformed Supreme Court would have ensured that rulemaking authority could be delegated to this new streamlined executive. The purge attempted to nationalize party politics and overcome localism and inertia. In the North, issue-oriented politics espoused by young New Dealers had replaced the patronage-oriented politics of the older generation of Democrats. Roosevelt hoped to facilitate the same change in the politics of the South.

The policy complement to this administrative thrust was the National Resource Planning Board's report of , Security, Work, and Relief, which called for guaranteed minimums for all American citizens, health care, and low-cost housing. Full employment, the elimination of the weaknesses of Social Security, and a structural assault on rural and urban poverty would ensure that the first steps of the New Deal were not last steps. But a full-scale political realignment, the creation of a liberal nation-wide Democratic Party, and the triumph of a social democratic agenda was ultimately checked by a powerful anti-statist coalition that had developed right from the start of the New Deal.

Conservative businessmen had backed the Association Against the Prohibition Amendment AAPA because of prohibition's unacceptable degree of federal control and interference in individual rights. A billion-dollar industry had been destroyed and assets confiscated without compensation. They hoped to link up with southern states-rights advocates of rigid governmental economy, such as Harry Byrd of Virginia. They viewed the New Deal's exercise of power in the same light as prohibition—a massive infringement of property rights and freedom of contract.

They soon sought like-minded businessmen to join them in the Liberty League in outright rejection of the New Deal. But, on the whole, businessmen were on the defensive in the s: Those who worked with the New Deal largely did so to try and restrain New Deal reforms. They regrouped in the late s to redress the political balance that had produced the Wagner Act of They tapped into long-term middle-class hostility to strikes and trade unions and managed to drive a wedge between working-class and middle-class Americans.

However, disagreements continued to split the Democrats, leading to defeat at the polls. In the presidential elections Maine once again rejected the New Deal by a margin of 57 to 43 percent, joining only one other state — Vermont — in endorsing Alfred Landon. Roosevelt, enjoying one of the greatest landslide victories in American history, quipped, "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.

The New Deal

Barrows defeated incumbent Brann in the gubernatorial election, the Democrats lost their last chance to ride the nationwide Democratic wave to victory in Maine. The New Deal programs presented an opportunity for rebuilding the party by appointing WPA supervisors and foremen throughout the state, but instead of exploiting this, Democrats plunged into a downward spiral that lasted until the election of Edmund S.

Dexter Cooper, a young engineer, devoted much of his energy and personal finances to a plan to harness the tides in Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays to generate electricity. Herbert Whitney, captured in words and photographs the richness of Maine's arts scene during the Great Depression. In Maine, like many other states, a message of patriotism and cautions about immigrants and non-Protestants drew many thousands of members into the newly re-formed Ku Klux Klan in the early s.

While many Mainers were averse to accepting federal relief money during the Great Depression of the s, young men eagerly joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin Roosevelt's most popular programs. Two shipyards in South Portland, built quickly in to construct cargo ships for the British and Americans, produced nearly ships in two and a half years.

Many of those vessels bore the names of notable Mainers. Photographers from the Eastern Illustrating and Publishing Co. This is a breadcrumb navigation to take you back to previous pages. Page 4 of 5 Print Version. Portland City Hall Rum Room, ca. Tidal Power Dexter Cooper, a young engineer, devoted much of his energy and personal finances to a plan to harness the tides in Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays to generate electricity.

The Nativist Klan In Maine, like many other states, a message of patriotism and cautions about immigrants and non-Protestants drew many thousands of members into the newly re-formed Ku Klux Klan in the early s. Putting Men to Work, Saving Trees While many Mainers were averse to accepting federal relief money during the Great Depression of the s, young men eagerly joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, one of President Franklin Roosevelt's most popular programs.

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