Jumping in the New Deal's Deep End

ANNETTE TELLS TALES One small town decides maybe political identity and ideology isn't as important as making a decent place to live

Carbon Hill’s New Deal

In September, 1937, Carbon Hill, Alabama, entered a beauty contest. Civic leaders had nominated their hardscrabble town in a coal mining district in hilly northern Alabama for a State “City of Progress” award. In their letter, leaders boasted of how their city had been transformed in the last few years. They weren’t exaggerating, either.

Six years earlier, most roads in Carbon Hill were unpaved dirt, with no sidewalks or gutters. This mattered more than you might think by 1930, and not just because more Americans now owned cars.

Most people in Carbon Hill were poor, and relied on outdoor earth privies. But this wasn't the problem. Middle-class flushing toilets were the problem.

In the 1920s, middle-class citizens across America, including in Carbon Hill, began to embrace the luxuries of modern life. That included installing indoor flushing toilets. However, the city had no sewers to collect the waste, or sewage plants to process it, so these new fancy loos drained into ditches on the sides of the hilly dirt streets, where the sewage stagnated. The contest nomination letter explained that this “caused a very offensive odor.”

I’ll bet it did. I’ll also bet the problem was biggest in the middle-class part of town, which is why it became a funding priority. But everyone in the mostly poverty-stricken population of this mining town also had to deal with the rampant poop flow. They suffered diarrhea, dysentery, and even typhoid (this last disease was only contained by vaccinations). They were also tormented by mosquitoes that bred in the stagnant waters, spreading malaria through a sick and poorly-fed community, and reducing resistance to other diseases.

And then the Great Depression hit. By 1931, city bigwigs wrote, Carbon Hill was “on absolute economic bottom.”

Local coal mines had shut down, they wrote, destroying 75% of the city’s economy. Both of the town’s banks closed, taking middle-class savings with them, because, before the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the United States government did not insure bank deposits. The value of Carbon Hill houses and land had crashed, and so had the city’s tax income. Notice the letter-writers’ revealing middle-class concern for property.

And as for Carbon Hill's working-class people? They were in dire straits. The rapid growth of the US economy in preceding decades, thanks to their hard work, had turned into a dramatic crash that wasn't their fault at all. And they had been paid far too little to be able to save for a rainy day: They had no savings to lose.

Before Present Franklin Roosevelt, there was no national unemployment insurance.

Out of a total population of 2,519, four hundred of Carbon Hill’s people were now on local relief, meaning inadequate aid to the unemployed from evaporating city funds. Local government in 1931 employed unemployed people in city public works projects, filling in potholes or who knows what, but, the letter implied, this make-work hadn’t been enough to support unemployed men and their families.

Hanging in the air of Carbon Hill in 1931, along with the mosquitoes, was this question: How long could this town and its people go on without federal (national) government help? This was a question repeated in small towns and large cities across America in the early 1930s. Suddenly, small government and self-reliance seemed less and less attractive.

This story threatened to end in revolution in America. But it didn't. And curiously, Carbon Hill, like much of America, not only survived the Great Depression and World War II, but emerged new and improved, ready to become part of modern 1950s America. Why this should matter to anyone else, and especially today, is the bottom line of today’s story. I guarantee you’ll be surprised.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt became the most popular President in US history. His New Deal transformed the cities of the United States, from Washington DC to the smallest towns like Carbon Hill. Sure, the New Deal’s massive public works programs didn’t end the Great Depression—World War II did that. But most Americans in the 1930s were more than happy that the federal government provided work building infrastructure, and were delighted by the products of that work in their own communities: A nation mired in fear and misery was deeply relieved to see light at the end of the tunnel.

Today, most Americans “remember” the New Deal only as that thing that Franklin Roosevelt did a long time ago. At best, they think of Social Security, Roosevelt’s signature accomplishment, which is still with us, despite decades of its opponents chipping away at it, because it’s so darned popular. (Brit readers? 1945 Labour Government, NHS, same thing.)

At worst, most Americans who hear “New Deal” shudder to recall being forced at school to memorize a bunch of “alphabet agencies”, acronyms of New Deal programs, that meant little or nothing to them (CCC, WPA, PWA, etc.) Otherwise, they consider the New Deal, like FDR, dead and gone. In fact, that pretty much sums up America’s relationship with history: Back then. The olden days. Done.

This is not how historians think. So let me show why all this matters, by doing what historians do best, telling stories.

A New Deal for Annette’s Students

It’s not a surprise to me that the relevance of the New Deal is lost on the American public. Here’s why.

Like every professor in the history department at Georgia Southern University (and, indeed, most universities in the States), I taught the introductory United States survey class, required of every student.

UK readers: The dubious idea behind US history surveys is that students must learn about “everything”, the broad sweep of US history, before they can learn anything. Hands up if you have a British history “A” level, but know bugger all about large parts of British history? Yup! Me too! And strangely, I’ve been fine, because whenever I’m inclined to learn more, I watch a documentary or (gasp!) read a book. That’s what my 70s/80s British history education through “A” level prepared me to do: Be curious and enthusiastic to learn, go find out, and have the reading skills to be able to learn more, and quickly. Oh, and FYI, college over here typically means university.

Maybe it takes a Brit expat of a certain age to say this, but American history curriculum, in my experience, observation, and reading, has utterly sucked for over a century (with the glaring exception of history taught in jawdroppingly expensive uber-elite schools, where the wealthiest Americans hoard good education for their kids).

Historians go along with this because they comfort themselves with the dubious idea that a student drilled on the broad outlines of what everyone thinks of as an “official” story of the US in a history survey class is now primed for future study. Sadly, the survey course pretty much ensures that most people won’t do any such thing. It bores them silly with names and dates. Who can blame Americans for being sour about history after taking US surveys again and again, in elementary, middle, and high school? And once again, for luck, in college?

True, a passionate high school teacher (even Coach Grunt with his Civil War fixation) or a capable college professor will persuade at least some survey students that history isn't just one damn thing after another. Humor helps. So does showing connections over time. But it's still pretty superficial.

But about twenty years ago, a few years into teaching the college US history survey, I finally got fed up of this BS curriculum, and the massive rubbish textbook that came with it. I dumped the textbook, and designed a new survey course spanning US history that focused on six specific events and phenomena that I found especially intriguing. I did this without asking permission (it’s always easier to get forgiveness, and I was tenured, which was helpful even in its weak Georgia version).

I picked topics I knew I could teach with enthusiasm, and could teach in context, so as to throw light on change in American history, and on what history is. In short, the class was a hit for me and the students, and I never looked back. I’ll write sometime in more detail about my experiment. But for now, I want to share with you one of the subjects I taught in that class: The impact of the New Deal on Carbon Hill, Alabama.

Why Carbon Hill? I found a tiny collection of photos and documents from 1930s Carbon Hill, selected for educational use, on a massive history teaching site. The New Deal Network was funded by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. This was hardly an unbiased archive, but then again, there's no such thing as an unbiased archive. My students and I used these sources on Carbon Hill to glimpse the overall impact of the New Deal. Since Alabama was right next door to us, I figured my Georgia students might find Carbon Hill relatable. They did.

So, as I was thinking recently about the Living New Deal, a center in Berkeley that seeks to document the lasting benefits of New Deal programs (all the way to today!) I went in search of the Carbon Hill stuff online, so I could write about it for you. It had vanished. So had the entire site. Thousands and thousands of New Deal documents and teaching materials, gone. Fortunately, Hoosen, my long-suffering husband and an engineer, knew exactly how to find it all. He did, in this internet archive. Phew. So here we go.

A Black and White New Deal Story

By 1937, using New Deal funds, Carbon Hill had transformed itself into a place people might actually want to live. Where once raw sewage ran down the unpaved hilly streets, the town now boasted proper roads, sidewalks, a sewer system and a wastewater treatment plant. Mosquito control now drastically reduced illness. People spoke of a new optimism in town.

The city also now had a new high school. Before, kids of all ages, eight hundred of them, had been crammed together in a small building on a tiny lot downtown. Now, a new school on ten acres provided plenty of room for teenagers to spread out. The city added agriculture classes (for boys) and home economics classes (for girls), and constructed buildings to accommodate both. This was, they said, in response to growing demand in recent years for vocational courses.

Annette’s Aside: Before we get too excited for 1930s Carbon Hill, know this: US high schools in the 19th century had been aimed at rich and middle-class people. They taught mostly academic subjects, like history, and to a high standard aimed at people who might actually develop an enjoyable and useful life of the mind. As more and more working-class students were enrolled around the turn of the century, though, public pressure grew for more vocational training classes.

This was because, and this breaks my heart, working-class people were not encouraged to see education as something for them, as a means to social advancement, much less as an end in itself. And city leaders were happy to funnel working-class kids (not their own) into training, rather than education for a fulfilling life. That’s another story for another day, but, strangely, this is where we are again.

Why does anyone need to learn to think when we have AI to do that for us? Needless to say, the usual semi-literate numpties and grifters who run capital E Education are just as excited about AI as they were about e-books, IPads, Chromebooks, etc, and look how well that has worked out for us, eh? I rest my case.

There was more to Carbon Hill’s renaissance. By 1937, Carbon Hill, a city that had “never had a recreational center, no place close in where children could swim, play ball and other games” now flaunted a large public swimming pool with changing rooms and loos. Leaders were also planning a skating rink, a bowling alley, and a field for baseball, football, and other sports.

The high school, the pool, and probably the field, were for whites only. Carbon Hill’s black community in the 1930s was likely only about 5% of the total population. Since we're talking about Alabama, this probably surprises you. But Carbon Hill was in an overwhelmingly white area where slavery had never taken hold. However, Carbon Hill was still part of Alabama, and still ruled by racist laws and customs.

Yet, although the white city leaders’ letter doesn’t mention this, the New Deal did not bypass Carbon Hill's black citizens. Federal government New Deal funds also allowed the Black community to repair and rebuild its churches. This might surprise you, the federal government paying for churches. But black churches were never just churches. They were centers of community and education, places where people could meet in community and exercise autonomy, away from the everyday humiliations of segregation and racist disdain. Black children and adults were educated in churches. The civil rights movement was born and nurtured in churches. A black church was always much more than a church.

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Recently, I visited a former African Methodist Episcopal church in Arkansas that also served as a school for black kids excluded by the state’s public education system under segregation. Today, it is not only a museum, but a center of progress for the whole community of the town of Pocahontas:

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Like everyone else, Carbon Hill's black citizens in the 1930s welcomed the New Deal’s public health improvements, and sidewalks. But don't just take it from me. Here’s testimony from Rev. C. H. McCall, pastor of the Carbon Hill African Methodist Episcopal Church, on the impact of the New Deal on the black community. Church repairs were a great help, he said, and so was the general improvement of the town: He was happy to note that church attendance had risen, thanks to poop-free streets.

But Rev. McCall emphasized not the sparkling swimming pool (for whites only). He was focused on much more fundamental issues that federal programs were addressing: With coal mines and other businesses shut down, the New Deal saved lives by employing people on public works projects. Most black breadwinners in Carbon Hill in the Thirties were like most white breadwinners in Carbon Hill: They were coal miners, thrown out of work at the start of the Depression when the booming economy collapsed. The owners of mines and factories laid off their workers to preserve their own profits. So if you were starting wondering why the government was employing people directly, there's your answer.

White privilege in a desperately poor place like Carbon Hill meant being a higher grade of desperately poor. White coal miners weren’t failures because they hadn’t taken advantage of their white privilege, in the current way of thinking (hoo boy, this old-school Brit is gobsmacked). They were poor people who came from generation after generation of hardworking poor people. Have I said “poor” and “hardworking" enough to get my point across ? The coal that powered America's industrial revolution didn't mine itself.

Education in Carbon Hill—whether in 1931 or 1937—was much better funded for white kids than for black kids. Yet these schools, dedicated to producing compliant workers, moved almost nobody out of poverty. Classes in farming and cooking, even in a nice shiny new high school, would help working-class kids get by and know their place, not realize their potential.

Crippling unemployment was just the last straw. Want to know why? Meet a Carbon Hill coalminer’s wife. Here’s a quick snapshot of Mrs. Nelson Greene, her baby, and her story.

Pulling Themselves Up By Their Bootstraps?

In their 1937 application to the City of Progress contest, Carbon Hill's leaders claimed all the credit for their city's improvement.

But this was rubbish, and their own words show it. In total, they said (and they may have exaggerated, ahem) Carbon Hill paid 58 cents to (not out of) every dollar contributed by the federal government to local New Deal projects. That means, and even my math can cope with this calculation, that the federal government provided most of the money. The city leaders must have realized they sounded lame, because they asked for extra credit for their work in applying for and handling the federal grants the city received. Ooh, pushing pens and adding up money is hard labor!

All this meant, the city bigwigs argued, that Carbon Hill was “picking itself up by its bootstraps”.

[UK I’m pretty sure that’s just an American saying: It means people relying entirely on their own resources to improve their lives]

This is, to be blunt, an utter pile of horse crap. Let's be clear: The New Deal made possible all these projects and more. Carbon Hill's leaders were using Other People’s Money for these projects. The lion’s share of the funds came from taxpayers around the nation, via the federal government.

The “boot straps” work of the city fathers of Carbon Hill meant sitting in cozy rooms, filling out application forms for federal funds, and then deciding how to splash the cash. And before anyone says, “Ooh, but Carbon Hill taxpayers were just getting back all the money they had paid in federal taxes”, give me a break. The federal government had always been tiny before World War One, and it only expanded greatly under FDR. Carbon Hill’s citizens were almost all poor, and that means nobody paid much, when they paid anything, in taxes to Washington DC.

What alternatives did city leaders have to taking federal money and hiring local workers? To consider a modern libertarian perspective (sorry, libertarians, but you do walk into these things!), Carbon Hill leaders could, I suppose, have let all these surplus people die from malaria, typhoid, and starvation, and then, when the economy improved, replaced them with imported workers from elsewhere. In fairness, I’m making that up. Nobody proposed that in the Thirties! Or did they? I’m thinking Social Darwinism, which has had a bit of a rebound in recent years: Basically, it’s not Charles Darwin’s idea, but it borrows and misuses his phrase “survival of the fittest” to suggest letting “useless” people die when their work is no longer needed.

I'm also thinking of the very good possibility that the United States came close to revolution in 1932, and the elite definitely wanted to avoid that. FDR was elected to stave off revolution. Roosevelt was not a Communist, as he was often accused of being, or even a democratic socialist: He was the savior of American capitalism.

Fascinating though it is to speculate what could have happened in 1932, it's not what happened. FDR was elected, the New Deal happened, and it was wildly popular. In Carbon Hill in 1931, whatever their motives, local leaders wanted their townspeople, their community, to survive. The New Deal made that survival possible.

Those liberal readers who aren’t disposed to give a damn about Red State Americans as they imagine them, and who aren’t moved by the plight of Mrs. Greene (above), might remind themselves of this: Unemployed coal miners in Carbon Hill and throughout the South were black as well as white. Black and white miners had much misery in common. What divided them and prevented them from organizing together—to the benefit of mine-owners — was racism. Racism had been cultivated in American law for the benefit of those in power, since mid-17th century Virginia. Don’t tell me colonial American history ain’t relevant, or I shall wallop you with my musket! (Using a colonial musket as a club is far more effective than attempting to load and fire it, trust me.)

Want to know more about cooperation and conflict among black and white miners? Here’s a recent scholarly article by historian Dr. Joe William Trotter that looks at both. The bit you can see is a summary of his argument.

Coal miners did horrendous and essential work. While black miners were paid diddly-squat, white miners were paid diddly. All miners and their families struggled to get by. Yet, by the time the Depression laid them off, miners had already paid for the fantastic economic growth of the US in hard graft. Since WWI, America had emerged as the world’s leading industrial nation, taking over from Britain.

The leaders of Carbon Hill tried to take credit for New Deal projects. But the locals who could best claim credit for the money that paid for the New Deal were the unemployed miners, who actually did the work of building New Deal projects, like the swimming pool, the white high school, and the black churches, and who were paid by the federal government. With guidance from federal officials, they built these things to last. This is where the story gets more interesting still.

Making Sense of Carbon Hill’s New Deal

Prepare to be pissed off at me, American readers, because I’m a historian, and I’m coming for all of you (and again, thank you to my paying readers for supporting me, regardless. You are amazing. Mwah.)

Brits? Get out the popcorn. Your turn to be offended will come another day. Everyone else? Pick a team, or take a seat, and thank you for being here.

So let’s start with the Democrats. There’s a tendency among middle-class Democrats to blame what a Californian friend once called “toothless hillbillies” in the South for the Democratic Party’s problems. He was branding entire areas of the nation ignorant twits. After wincing at that remark, as a Brit with working-class roots, let me tackle that hillbilly thing. I mean, technically, it’s wrong anyway. Most white Southerners don’t live in the hills. They never did. In the mid-19th century, those who lived in the hills were in places like Walker County, where Carbon Hill would be founded a few decades later.

Unlike other white Southerners, hill people did not live in places dependent on slavery. Slavery didn't make much headway in hilly places, which couldn't support staple crops like cotton. Poor whites here were still racist (who wasn’t among white Americans then? Few.) But they grasped that their interests were not those of slaveowners. That's why-- surprise!— the people of northern hill country Alabama supported the Union—the North— in the Civil War.

I learned about this long ago on a visit to Alabama, when I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Don Dodd, a history professor. Dodd introduced himself proudly to me (as to everyone else) as “a hillbilly from northern Alabama”. He had an accent so thick as to be unintelligible, and a pick-up truck that was a prized possession. He was also a former Army colonel, and a capable historian.

We could have been colleagues, Don Dodd and me. Both unfortunately and fortunately, we were not, because (Oh, thank you, God) I didn’t get the job. That job interview is why I was in Alabama, a year before I landed myself in Georgia. It's a story for another post, probably entitled “The Worst Job Interview That Saved My Life”. But meeting Don Dodd on my very first trip to Alabama and the Deep South told me something unexpected about the South. By the way, I just Googled Don Dodd. Having retired to his beloved northern Alabama, Dr. Dodd died in 2021, in the very same hospital that serves Carbon Hill.

Living in Georgia for 24 years, I came to understand instinctively what academic historians of the 20th century South have revealed in recent decades: During the Great Depression, political ideas popular among white Southerners, ideas of personal independence, of community self-reliance, came crashing down. Ordinary white Southerners had long embraced this idea of independence, even though they were being denied good wages, because racism had successfully divided people since the middle of the 17th century. They had been taught to think that, however badly off they were, they were superior to black people. And no, that thinking wasn’t inevitable, as historians of early America can tell you.

For Carbon Hill's leaders to argue in 1937 that they were responsible for the city's uplift was obviously nonsense. Their letter shows how Southern elites were determined to keep up the story that Southern states and communities were basically independent of federal government help, and that this was as it should be. However, the vast, overwhelming majority of white Southerners—including people on farms and in small towns— were no longer buying this. They voted for Franklin Roosevelt, a liberal New Yorker who favored a large, activist federal government, again and again.

It’s not hard to imagine black citizens of Carbon Hill watching the struggles of white neighbors in 1937, in the middle of massive disruption, of economic upheaval, of labor unrest, of all kinds of assumptions crashing down, and while a new Carbon Hill was rising in New Deal projects, and saying to themselves, “Hang on, how come our kids don’t get to go to a nice, shiny school? How come we don’t get to enjoy that sparkling new pool?” This is how things begin to change, in Carbon Hill, and everywhere. Change begets change.

Here’s Carbon Hill’s pool in 1937:

The new swimming pool in Carbon Hill, AL, in 1937, built with WPA funds. Image: National Archives Record Group 69-N

You can meet more of the citizens of Carbon Hill here. The photos and quotes were collected by the federal government. If you question their bias, you should. That bias was discussed, too, by the federal officials in 1937 who took the photos, who knew they had to put a positive spin on the New Deal, while also showing that not everyone was on board. Their interviews still reveal more than they were meant to: Not everyone interviewed who benefited from the New Deal projects in Carbon Hill was enthusiastic about how the money was spent, and we’re not just talking about middle-class conservatives. We're also talking coalminers who were more interested in feeding their families than in new swimming pools and churches. Which is not to say that they didn’t value what the New Deal did. And then they died. And their stories were forgotten. Except by historians.

Two Towns, Two Pools

When I wrote the first version of this post, in 2023, I decided to see how Carbon Hill’s New Deal pool was doing. I found that by 2022, during COVID, the pool had closed, not least because it needed major updates after nearly a century of service.

I wondered if the pool’s neglect began with integration in the 70s, with whites refusing to swim alongside black people? That is certainly what happened to the pool in Statesboro, Georgia, where I lived for many years.

The Statesboro public pool eventually closed in the early 2000s. And then the county government, with an economy driven by a booming Georgia Southern University, replaced the pool with something I had never heard of before: A government-owned waterpark. Yes, in the anti-government rural South. It’s called Splash in the Boro.

Despite its name, Splash in the Boro was built on the far outskirts of town, unlike the old pool, which was right in the middle of Statesboro. Most of us (including me and little Hoosen, Jr.) needed a car to get to the new pool, because even for the energetic, sidewalks in town were few and far between. The pool was also (what a coincidence!) far from poor areas, where many black people lived. The cost per day of visiting Splash in the Boro was well beyond the means of large numbers of poor citizens. Was all this by design? I couldn’t possibly comment. Regardless, Splash in the Boro, built by and supposedly for locals, was soon inundated with people from throughout south Georgia. Ticket prices rose.

The high prices didn’t keep out black people, not if they were middle class. They kept out poor people, most but not all of whom in Statesboro, unlike Carbon Hill, were black.

What happened to the pool in Carbon Hill?

Carbon Hill’s population today is in decline, like other small towns in Alabama, and in most of America beyond metro and tourist areas. According to the 2020 census, only 1,354 people lived in Carbon Hill, and that number was dropping fast. The average household income in Carbon Hill in 2020 was $26,333. Coal mining is gone, for better and for worse, and most jobs seem to be in services and local government, not private business as you might expect in a conservative small town (you would be wrong, however)

Today, Carbon Hill’s New Deal pool is closed, because it has problems that the city can’t or won't fix. I don’t know all the details or background. Maybe the pool’s sorry state was a long-term product of racist backlash against integration, leading to neglect, as was the case with Statesboro's first pool. But I really don’t know or think that. Carbon Hill’s black population has long been much smaller than Statesboro’s. Even lacking detailed study of Carbon Hill by journalists and other academics today, future historians will know with greater certainty about the state of Carbon Hill society in the early 2020s, because they'll have access to all the documents left behind. For now, unable to afford the time or cost of a trip to Carbon Hill, the best I can say is that the pool is very much in demand, but is now very old, has never been properly maintained, and has big, big problems.

Carbon Hill’s still-popular pool was supposed to be repaired and re-opened Memorial Day weekend, 2022. That didn’t happen. In early July, local councilwoman Cindy Killingsworth tried to get some kind of official historical status to save the pool. That doesn’t seem to have happened, either.

That’s where things stood when I first wrote this post, in 2023. Now, in 2026, I have an update: Carbon Hill, horrified that 98% of high school graduates leave town, most never to return, realized it needed reasons for its young people to stay, and that quality of life includes free, accessible government-funded parks and, yes, a pool. Finding a grant to build a whole new pool on a new site turned out to be easier than finding funds to repair the 1930s pool. As of 2025, that was the plan: The city got a grant for nearly $400,000, to be matched by the city, to build a new pool, and a whole park around it.

And where did this new grant come from in 2025? The federal US government. The governor of the state of Alabama announced the grant, implying she had something to do with it. But the city had written the grant application, and the money came from Washington, DC and thus from taxpayers around America.

However, as of early 2026, the pool project had fallen apart, and the city council was squabbling over how to use the federal grant, or lose it. I paid $3 for a day pass to The Daily Mountain Eagle, the local newspaper, to find this out.

But now we’ve strayed into news reporting, and prognosticating. You know I'm a fan of the New Deal, that much is clear. What you make of all this is up to you. Some of us might think “good riddance” to shrinking towns like Carbon Hill. Others, like me, may hope for the revival of small towns like Carbon Hill in the era of remote work: I had a look around Carbon Hill on Google Street View, and wondered, with my customary ill-founded optimism, what a coffee shop, new people with new ideas, road repairs, employment in infrastructure, and even funding for a new pool, could do for this town.

The New Deal brought new ideas, like activist government, into Southern consciousness, and new people, too. Lead among them was a rich Yankee who chose to spend time in rural Georgia long before he was elected president. Despite his many flubs, the great majority of Southerners loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and voted for him and his New Deal (even when their politicians and other elites balked at the expansion of the federal government). Most white Southerners remained staunch Democrats for decades. Most Americans loved what the New Deal had accomplished. In the end, thirty plus years later, the Republican party realized that the only way for it to win elections was to separate the white South from the New Deal coalition. And the most effective way to do that, GOP leaders realized, was by weaponizing racism, while presenting it as something else entirely. Please stay, Republicans, even though this makes you uncomfortable, because that's what history does. I will show at NBH that this development is well documented, and that the story begins, not in the South, but in faraway California.

See, this is why I detoured into talking about US history survey courses, and why it’s a problem that they are so boring, and so sketchy. They hide the fascinating truth that history is interesting, relevant, jarring, and a discussion that depends on seeking out different perspectives, not just following dogma.

You know what? I could teach hungover freshmen an entire sixteen-week course centered on the history of Carbon Hill. We would read about the big picture of the New Deal, in the state, the region, the nation. Explore local and national opposition to New Deal programs. End with local boys marching off to war in 1942. We could even have a field trip, meet locals, record their stories, and ponder how the town has changed. And we would all take away far, far more than students ever take from survey courses.

I taught my students about Carbon Hill, and the New Deal, over two weeks in a sixteen-week class that was supposed to cover from Columbus to Clinton. I did my best, in that short time, to get them off to a start. It still wasn’t enough. That’s because, far from being a short and shallow history of irrelevant stuff, of things to memorize but not understand, the story of the US is long and deep. It’s a raging river that still carries us along with it. But the superficiality of US history classes leaves Americans without a raft to cling to, leaves them to opt for jumped conclusions, groupthink, and basing beliefs, no matter what they are, on trivia and on following gurus (most of them not trained historians), and floating in a vacuum that propaganda of all kinds is happy to fill. You’re not wrong in what you’re realizing: I am not just aiming this at one “side”, but at everyone. Risky being a gadfly? That’s a public historian’s life.

Before we go: I love the idea of documenting the New Deal's tangible projects, the ones we can see, touch, and use today. If you have time, think about volunteering a little for the treasure hunt that is the Living New Deal. Use the map to find out about the New Deal where you live, and report your findings. And tell your friends.

This is an updated post which first appeared at Non-Boring History in 2023. NBH appears on Saturdays and Tuesdays, with Saturday posts (serving all new and fresh material) reserved for paying subscribers. Why? Annette simply can’t afford to research and write NBH without your help. If you can manage an annual or monthly subscription, please join us! Details: