In 1933, after four years of increasing economic devastation, America had a serious housing shortage. Millions of people were out of work, millions more had their homes and businesses foreclosed, and thousands of banks were shutting down every year — but the incoming Roosevelt administration was developing a plan to give Americans a home. Well, some Americans at least. The next year, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) was born, offering affordable and quality housing to Americans in need, but, said author Richard Rothstein to NPR, “primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families.” 

The segregating of American cities is, in very large measure, the result of systematic prejudices built into the New Deal. The FHA incorporated numerous features to discriminate against Black Americans. “Incompatible racial groups should not be permitted to live in the same communities” said the FHA’s Underwriting Manual, guaranteeing Black people could never qualify for home loans or even be considered for certain neighborhoods. Furthermore, the manual actually recommended separating Black and white communities by highways. 

Because it is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies love color-coding, the FHA inscribed its bigotry into their neighborhood maps, designating neighborhoods unqualified for mortgages with the color red. Black neighborhoods were surrounded by red lines, indicating places too dangerous to qualify for a loan, which they weren’t. But decades of organized neglect turned it true, and today some of America’s worst urban neighborhoods are direct descendants of racist redlining. 

American farmers were exceptionally vulnerable during the Great Depression. Banks closed as markets collapsed, farmers couldn’t get loans, prices fell as customers shriveled under their own bankruptcies so farmers earned less, and there were the black blizzards of the Dust Bowl wreaking havoc on thousands of square miles of farmland. 

His first year in office, FDR passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act to raise prices so farmers could earn more from their crops and authorized emergency benefit payments for states to allocate to citizens and employees in need. The programs, however, were so rife with racist corruption that, as the Center for American Progress explains, “The number of black farmers in the South decreased 8 percent from 1930 to 1935, while the number of white farmers increased by 11 percent.”

One of the grandest projects of the New Deal was the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA was created, according to their website, “to address the Valley’s most important issues in energy, environmental stewardship and economic development.” They went about this with cash payments, reforestation, flood control, and dams. They flooded some 730,000 acres, evicting tens of thousands of people from their homes and farms. The government was accused “of almost criminal neglect of the Negro in the plans of the Tennessee Valley Administration,” said a 1934 issue of the Journal of Negro Life at the Virginia Commonwealth University’s Social Welfare History Project.

The kids born and who grew up during the depression ended up being called the Silent Generation, in part because there actually weren’t that many of them. Birth rates plummeted during the Great Depression, according to the Population Reference Bureau, hitting a record low in 1936, which wouldn’t be surpassed for another 40 years. 

This wouldn’t be too surprising to the analysts at the Brookings Institution who, declaring that “RECESSIONS MEAN FEWER CHILDREN,” predicted that the 2020 COVID Recession would also see fewer babies born. A successful prediction it seems as NPR reported that the “U.S. Birthrate Fell By 4% In 2020, Hitting Another Record Low.” While it is generally true that people have fewer children in economic downturns, this may not tell the whole story however. The preceding decade of the 1920s saw unprecedented political and economic gains for women, and the Great Depression, notes researchers at the University of Montreal, “attracted young married women 20 to 34 years old in 1930 …in the labor market.” 

“The children of the Great Depression learned of necessity to be resourceful,” says the Minnesota Historical Society, “wearing hand-me-down clothing, going without luxuries of any kind and, at times, going without meals.” The Silent Generation became marked as frugal, reluctant to discard what could be repaired, clipping every coupon, and getting inventive with leftover food. 

There’s nothing like an economic catastrophe to bring out the nationalists and straight-up racists in a country. Americans, like many places around the world, were very anti-immigrant during the depression, and many politicians went out of their way to send immigrants — as well as actual Americans — away. 

President Herbert Hoover’s “attorney general who had presidential ambitions, instituted a program of deportations,” said Francisco Balderrama, author of “Decade Of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation In The 1930s,” to NPR. Americans needed jobs, after all, and anyone who seemed a threat to those jobs was rounded up or encouraged to leave the country. States passed laws cutting relief to immigrants and descendants of recent immigrants, and the federal government passed laws restricting immigration up to 90%, according to The Atlantic. The private sector was involved to, as multiple industry giants basically “said to their Mexican workers, you would be better off in Mexico with your own people.”

“We’re talking over 1 million Mexican nationals and American citizens of Mexican descent from throughout the United States,” says Balderrama, and, in fact, the majority of the deportees were actually American citizens. Local state agencies were given free reign by, and coordinated with, the federal government to send them to a country that they weren’t citizens of, that many couldn’t speak the language of, and that was going through its own depression so in no way had the means to help them once they arrived. 

Although it isn’t generally thought of it as such, the GI Bill was part of FDR’s New Deal legislation. In fact, it would turn out to be one of the most effective. It was intended to help the millions of soldiers sailors, and marines returning from wartime deployment reintegrate into society with housing benefits, unemployment wages, job training, and college tuition. However, while “more than 2 million veterans flocked to college campuses throughout the country,” returning Black servicemembers were not accorded the same respect and opportunities, according to The Conversation, “because white southern politicians designed the distribution of benefits under the GI Bill to uphold their segregationist beliefs.”

As if racist southern politicians changing the rules wasn’t enough, many racist college administrators — North and South — were reticent to accept Black applicants as well. So at a time when “ex-service members made up nearly half of the nation’s college students,” the vast majority of Black veterans were denied the chance to join their ranks. While the nation’s historically Black colleges and universities were chronically underfunded and couldn’t accommodate the huge influx of new students at first, they all “welcomed black veterans and their federal dollars, which led to the growth of a new black middle class in the immediate postwar years.”