AMH 2020 FIU American Experience with The New Deal Essay

Instructions: Write a 3-4 page essay responding to the prompt below. Your essay should be double spaced, and in Times New Roman, size 12 font.

New Deal programs provided relief to millions of Americans suffering from the Great Depression. Inspired by Roosevelt’s more inclusive message of relief during deep economic crisis, African Americans supported him en masse leading to a shift in their vote from the “Party of Lincoln” to the New Deal Coalition during the 1936 election. Using your textbook and at least five of the primary sources below (six sources total) discuss African Americans’ experience with New Deal programs and their efforts to eliminate racial violence and discrimination through the 1930s and 40s. Ultimately, was the New Deal a good Deal for African Americans?

• Anonymous, “Black Labor and the Codes” (1933) (Links to an external site.)
• “Waitin’ on Roosevelt”: Langston Hughes’s “Ballad of Roosevelt” (1934) (Links to an external site.)
• E. E. Lewis, “Black Cotton Farmers and the AAA” (1935) (Links to an external site.)
• “Please Help Us Mr. President”: Black Americans Write to FDR (1935-1936) (Links to an external site.)
• “The Right to Housing Is a Civil Right Due Without Discrimination”: Racial Bias in Public and Private Housing (1947) (Links to an external site.)
• “Democracy Can’t Live in These Houses”: Senator Paul Douglas Advocates a Federal Housing Program to Clear Slum Areas (1949) (Links to an external site.)
• “The Rights of All Must Be Secured or the Rights of None Will Be Secure”: Arguments for Federal Civil Rights Legislation (1949-1950) (Links to an external site.)
• “Gonna Miss President Roosevelt”: The Blues for FDR (1945) (Links to an external site.)

Additional guidelines:

• Be sure to structure your essay with an introduction, body and conclusion.
• The introductory paragraph should include the following three parts:
  • Context or background (2-3 sentences). You should provide context to the material you will be discussing. You should “set the scene” by providing the what, the where, the when, or the who of the material. There should be no argument here, just general historical data to set up your historical question and thesis statement.
  • Historical problem (1-2 sentences). This should be the essay prompt reintroduced as the historical problem you will be addressing in the paper. Try to find a flow between the background information you provide and the statement of the historical problem. Why should we care about the historical facts you just discussed in the preceding background/context section of the introduction? What is their significance?
  • Thesis statement (1-2 sentences). The thesis statement should have 2 parts. The first states your position or answer to the historical problem above, and the second provides a blueprint for the paper (or approximately three elements that will support your position in the body of the paper). ***Note: Each element in the blueprint should directly correlate to a topic sentence or main idea in a corresponding body paragraph.
• Body paragraphs should have topic sentences describing the main idea of the corresponding paragraph. They should echo one of your thesis elements.
• Sources should provide your evidence. Body paragraphs should use primary and secondary sources to support your argument. You may ONLY use the primary and secondary sources provided on CANVAS or specified in the prompt(s) above. Absolutely no outside internet sources should be used for this assignment. The specific number of sources required for each essay question is provided in the prompt(s) above.
• Citations: Cite any quotations, paraphrased content, or original ideas from other sources using the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). Citations in CMS formatting should be written as footnotes. ***Note: Sources and citations are two different things. Sources are the repositories of your information (the book, article, or historical document). Citations are references to the sources, usually with specific page numbers or locations within the source. The paper should use the minimum number of sources stated above, but it can and should have many more footnote citations. The minimum number of footnotes will equal the number of sources required, but an excellent paper will have many more specific footnote citations. ***Note: You do not need a bibliography. The first time you mention a source in a footnote citation, you should provide the full reference of the source. You should use “Ibid” (plus the page number, if applicable) for any series of footnotes that reference the same source. See the Purdue Online Writing Lab (Links to an external site.) for specific examples.
• Grammar and Style. Use a concise, professional and academic style of writing, free of grammatical errors and colloquialisms.
• Quotations: Limit quotations to 1 sentence per page or one longer quotation of 3 to 4 sentences for the whole essay.

For more on this precise essay structure, refer to the handouts I posted on the “Student Resources” module on CANVAS.

Rubric

Essay Rubric_Solis