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“Deserting The Broad And Easy Way”: Southern Methodist Women, The Social Gospel, And The New Deal State, 1909-1939, Chelsea Hodge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Over the course of three decades, white southern Methodist women took on issues of labor and poverty through their national women’s organization, the Woman’s Missionary Council (WMC). Between 1909 and 1939, the WMC focused their work on five groups of people they viewed as in need of their help: women, children, black southerners, immigrants, and rural people. Motivated by the Social Gospel and an intense belief that their faith led them to effect real change in the American South, the WMC intervened in people’s lives, pursuing reform that could at times be maternalistic and condescending but at other times radical …

The New Deal Public Works Programs And Mexican-Americans In Mcallen, Texas, 1933-36, Irene Ledesma

Theses and Dissertations - UTB/UTPA

In an area like the Rio Grande Valley of Texas with a majority population of unskilled Mexican-Americans who generally worked for another group in trouble, the farmer, there was bound to be a high rate of unemployment during the Great Depression of the 1930's. Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration responded to unemployment with the several New Deal public works acts in 1933. The question then arises: what effect would such acts have on a majority group in an area where the minority population had political power?

Extensive use of county and city newspapers, a number of interviews, a short survey, and …