2

The Popular Front and Social Equality

For the abolitionists, slavery was the greatest evil; for the socialists, capitalism was the enemy. Not surprisingly, the potential for social democracy reached its high point during the Depression of the 1930s. Like the Civil War, the Depression was a crisis during which the nation’s core values were deeply shaken and ultimately rethought. Like the Civil War, the Depression led to the construction of a new social order, centered this time on the ideal of social equality. Rejecting an interpretation of the Depression in terms of recovery alone, the left played a crucial role in this transformation. Out of the death throes of classical or laissez-faire liberalism came a new, socially oriented liberalism, heir to both classical liberalism and the left.

America’s second great crisis, analogous to that of the Civil War, did not begin in 1929. Rather, the Great Depression was the last and most intense in a series of depressions that had begun in the 1850s. Recognized as systemic in the 1890s, when such terms as “overproduction” and “glut” entered the language, these depressions were not taken as economic problems per se, but rather as larger illnesses in the body of society. The 1929 Depression was the turning point in a secular crisis, then, just as the Civil War had been. In both cases, Americans sought a new direction; in both cases, too, the left framed the meaning of the new direction. If the first American left helped insure that the abolition of slavery would be imprinted with the ideal of racial equality, the second stamped the ideal of social equality on the modern administrative state.

Previously American liberalism had been associated with a market society and a limited state. Deeply rooted in English Whig suspicions of the monarchy, the liberal tradition held that a large state was dangerous because it could be seized by factions, notably the rich, who would use it for their own ends. From this point of view a limited state grounded in small private property holdings – Jeffersonian individualism – served to protect individuals from “tyranny.” A limited state need not, moreover, be weak. Throughout its history, the American state actively solicited immigration, providing many of the immigrants with land, schools, and roads. The early American state was also a military prodigy, engaging in Indian wars, raids against maroon colonies (escaped slaves) and pirates, and border conflicts with England, France, Russia, Spain, and Mexico. What was important from the liberal perspective was that the state not involve itself directly in the production and exchange of goods.

At the turn of the century, however, the rise of the large corporation posed a major challenge to the liberal idea of the state. This was partly because the sheer power of the corporations threatened democratic control and partly because the corporations eroded small private holdings. The result was a widely felt demand for a new type of state that would actively shape economic life in the interest of the overall welfare. Progenitors of the “general welfare state,” as it was called, included the Populists, who pioneered the idea of an interventionist state; the Hamiltonian “New Nationalists” of the Theodore Roosevelt era, who championed a powerful, regulatory state; and the Jeffersonian supporters of Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom”, who were antimonopoly and anti-Wall Street. But it was the socialists who gave the emergent welfare state the moral and ethical meaning of social equality. In doing so, they transformed American liberalism and laid down a promise for future realization.

Just as slavery would have been ended without the abolitionists, so the modern administrative state would have been created without the socialists. Such a state was necessary to unify the masses of immigrants, ethnic groups, regions, states, and localities that constitute this vastly heterogeneous, and internally divided continent, heir to the decentralized, self-governing, British imperial system. Such a state was also needed to organize elites, rationalize new forms of knowledge and technology, and provide the planning and research needed to accompany corporate growth. Certainly, such a state would have created centralized, flexible forms of credit, assisted private enterprise in the management of capital, created an infrastructure for investment in the underdeveloped parts of the country (the South and the West), supported trade unions, facilitated corporatist or associationalist cooperation between the state, labor, and capital, and instituted Keynesian spending, all of which the New Deal, which finally created the modern state, did, or tried to do. Above all, such a state was needed to pursue foreign wars. But without the left none of these activities would have been associated with the ideal of social equality. What the socialists and Communists added to all this was not so much the idea of public ownership as the transformation of American democracy via the mobilization of the lower classes. Elaborating the ideal of social equality, both for current and future use, they provided an egalitarian meaning to the otherwise conflicting and particularistic tangle of laws and regulations generated by the modern American state.

I will make this argument in four parts. In the first, I examine the Progressive era (1890–1920), the period of American history during which the problem of the modern American state was first probed. The Progressives proposed a modern state, but their conception was largely an abstract one, based on an idealized model of the middle-class, taxpaying citizen, equating the state with objectivity and rationality, and excluding or marginalizing the bulk of the immigrants and of African-Americans. Debsian socialism, which aimed to mobilize the mass of working people, especially through industrial unions, gave a democratic content to the Progressive idea of the state. If the Debsians grasped the democratic potential of the modern state, World War One demonstrated the latter’s close relation to violence, a relation that we discussed in relation to slavery and that we will discuss again in connection to the war in Vietnam. Here we show that the Progressive claim that the state in itself could embody objective criteria and rationality ran aground in the Red Scare, laying the ground for the “disillusion” of the 1920s.

The equation of the modern state with an abstract conception of rationality continued in the early or “planning” phase of the New Deal, the subject of the second part of the chapter. Planning rested on a huge body of reform and leftist thought, including the Soviet example of the five-year plan and Thorstein Veblen’s critique of the “pecuniary interest.” Planners welcomed the scientific, technological and managerial revolution that accompanied the corporation but sought an “extramarket” way of thinking to realize its possibilities, which they mostly found in John Dewey’s experimental logic. The planned economy was an inspiring ideal. Walter Lippmann told students at the University of California at Berkeley in 1933 that the “ideal of a consciously controlled society” gives us at last “a transcendent purpose.” “The purpose to make an ordered life on this planet can, if you embrace it, and let it embrace you, carry you through the years triumphantly.” Even so, the second American left emerged as a critique of planning, insisting that only an organized working class, including but not restricted to industrial unions, would have the heft to bend market forces to meet popular needs.

The third part of the chapter describes the process of democratic mobilization, the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the “Popular Front,” associated with the “second,” postplanning, New Deal. The organization of industrial unions fulfilled a long-standing ambition of the second American left, and was accompanied by massive efforts at working-class education, recreation, radio stations, fraternal benefit lodges, cooperative insurance, summer camps, credit services, cooperative housing, day care, public theater, and arts.1 Overall, these programs are better described as cooperative than statist. They created for the first time a genuine counterweight to business, rooted as they were in the family wage, the ethnic community, and a strong protective government. No less important, the 1930s gave birth to a new social class, organic intellectuals, a class that was temperamentally antibusiness until the defeat of the New Left in the early 1970s. These intellectuals were not so much ideologues or literary revolutionaries as “writers from the working class, the lower class, the immigrant class, the non-literate class, from Western farms and mills – those whose struggle was to survive.” Richard Pells writes:

Many writers and artists hoped to persuade their fellow citizens that the American people could never be adequately fed or clothed or housed or employed so long as they continued to rely on a capitalist economy, that the United States must break with the liberal tradition both politically and philosophically, that an individualistic and competitive value system had become not only obsolete but inherently destructive to the nation’s social and psychic stability, and that the country desperately needed a new literature, a new theatre and a new cinema to bring all these changes about. These ideas led to an intensification of the intellectuals’ desire to overcome his historic isolation from public affairs, to make his essays and novels and plays and films more meaningful in the lives of ordinary people, to devise a realistic program and strategy for democratic socialism, [and] to create a new spirit of community and cooperation throughout the land.2

Finally, in the fourth and last section, I describe the growth of the left after 1937 when the New Deal came under attack. The left’s core insight was that the perpetuation of the New Deal reforms depended on the organization of a working class, not as an interest group or as a lobby, but as the intellectual and moral center around which a politics of inclusion and equality could coalesce. The goal of organizing was not revolution but a democratic society that recognized its capitalist (class-divided) character. At the same time, new forces of democratic mobilization among blacks and women, released by the New Deal, but also critical of it, presaged the New Left.

As we saw, nineteenth-century non-slaveholding American society was republican, meaning that almost the whole of life was organized at a local, self-governing level, in which individuals participated more or less as equals, and in which property ownership was a universal expectation. The corporate revolution, which laid the basis for the first railroads, factories, and steamships, destroyed this way of life. Family-owned businesses gave way first to pools, trusts, “gentlemen’s agreements,” and holding companies and then to corporations, culminating in the first great merger movement (1897–1904). The corporate form encouraged oligopolistic control (a few firms dominating an industry), which made it possible to dictate prices rather than allowing the market to determine them. It also vested authority in a new class of managers, planners, engineers, and technicians who were able to secure and organize raw materials, the labor process, and sales, with some measure of control and predictability, even becoming free from dependence on banks for financing.

The extension of control was not simply economic. Previously, the market republic had rested on the Lockean garden of “cheap land,” or “the frontier.” Now, barbed wire, fences, railroad tracks, telegraph poles, stopwatches, and slag heaps of mine debris crisscrossed and punctuated the “great American desert” of the West and Southwest. Not only were the commons destroyed and the bison ground underfoot, but the last Native American tribes, the Pawnee, Apache, Hopi, Zuni, Cherokee, Blackfoot, Crow, Arapaho, Sioux, Osage, Kiowa, Omaha, and Comanche, were driven into reservations. As the West became subject to corporate rationalization, the South sank deeper into underdevelopment, boasting of its “cheap labor,” supplying food, textiles and primary products to the Eastern and mid-Western industrial cities, “at once squalid and vibrant,” in the words of Christopher Lasch.3

Four great social movements responded to the corporate revolution, laying the groundwork for the second American left: the Populists, the labor movement, the Progressives, and the socialists. Each combined defensive aspects, which aimed to restore the Jeffersonian utopia of small producers, with a more far-seeing vision, aimed to address the needs of a modern economy. Let us consider them in turn.

Originating as the Alliance or Cooperative Movement in the more isolated, frontier regions of Texas during the great agricultural depression of the 1880s, Populist cooperatives soon spread into the cotton states as well as into Kentucky and Missouri. Membership quickly grew to as many as 3 million, including the Colored Farmers’ Alliance and Cooperative Union which, boasting over 1 million members, was the largest black organization in America until the Garvey movement of the 1920s. An outgrowth of republican ideals, the cooperative idea was to bring together small farmers to buy seed, bags and other necessities and sell their products on a large scale, thus gaining leverage vis-à-vis the railroads and other corporations. The difficulty, however, was that farmers had no credit. As a result, the movement advanced what was called the “sub-treasury plan,” according to which the government would establish warehouses and elevators in which farmers could store nonperishable crops, such as cotton, wheat, corn, tobacco, and sugar, and hold them until the price was right. With their “sub-treasury plan,” the Populists effectively invented the modern idea of government intervention into the economy.

Populism’s cooperative dimension reflected the communal background of rural America, most of which had until recently been common land, open for hunting, fishing and pasturage, and populated by tiny villages with an ethic of mutual aid. Many Populists accepted the idea that God, as John Locke wrote, “has given the Earth to the Children of Men in common,” and that private property was on loan from God.4 That is why the railroads, with their barbed wire, fencing rights, telephone poles and stock market tickers, were so offensive to them. They responded by insisting that intrinsically public goods – railroads, telephone and telegraph, public lands, and the money supply – be put under democratic, popular control. Toward that end, they mobilized the South and the West against the Northeast, and fostered the cooperation of farmers with laborers, and of blacks with whites.

The second great upheaval came from America’s skilled workers and artisans, who largely controlled the nineteenth-century industrial process, and from the growing number of unskilled workers as well. The Knights of Labor, founded in 1869, epitomizes this current. The largest labor organization of its time, the Knights was a sprawling, community-based movement centered on local assemblies, which sought to unite “all producers,” excluding only bartenders, whiskey makers, lawyers, doctors, and bankers. Like the Populists, the Knights espoused Jeffersonian ideals, including the ideal of the local community. Far more inclusive than the later American Federation of Labor, they ran candidates for office, and managed to win offices in many local governments. Beyond the Knights, the decades following the Civil War saw what was arguably the most militant labor movement in the history of the world. Between the great Railroad Strike of 1877, “one of the bitterest explosions of class warfare in American history,” through the Homestead and Pullman strike of the 1890s, millions of Americans struck, often led by skilled workers or artisans.⁵ As immigration occurred, the corporations counterattacked, playing off ethnic groups against one another, mechanizing and creating a network of industrial spies – there were more Pinkerton men than soldiers in late nineteenth-century America – in their effort to destroy craft or skilled worker unions.

Both the Populists and the labor movement were decimated during the Depression of the 1890s, the first systemic crisis of the new corporate order. Precipitated by a railroad bubble, yet global in scope, the Depression gave rise to a series of unprecedented phenomena: the hobo, armies of unemployed marching across the land, demands for government assistance to veterans of the Civil War, and brutal suppression of strikes, especially the Pullman strike of 1894, aimed at eliminating unionism from the land. At the time, Arthur Hadley, a professor of economics at Yale University, described the Depression as a cyclical, business cycle depression telescoped within “a secular decomposition of competitive capitalism,” a depression that could no longer be explained by neoclassical (i.e., market-based) economics alone.6

The Depression set the stage for the election of 1896, the turning point from the older, agrarian-based republic to the newer, corporate-organized industrial order. William McKinley’s Republican Party, supported by most of the large capitalist interests, presented itself as the workingman’s party by virtue of its program of high tariffs, supposed to raise wages, and its symbolic recognition of the new immigrant (Italian, Slavic, Jewish) through political spoils and appointments.⁷ The Republicans, who triumphed, were also the party of US imperialism. By contrast, William Jennings Bryan’s Democrats represented the pre-immigration agrarian republic, symbolized by the call for “free silver” – that is, freedom from the banker-imposed gold standard – which appealed to the Populists, as well as by opposition to judicial injunctions against strikes, which appealed to the older – “Yankee,” Irish or German – skilled workers.

The inability to win strikes during the 1890s also destroyed labor’s esprit de corps, which had been symbolized by the term “Knights.” In place of the Knights, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) arose. Founded in 1886, the AFL accepted the depoliticizing and rationalizing implications of the new order. “Collective bargaining,” a concept largely invented by the AFL, abandoned a republican language for a corporate one. Repudiating the concept of “one big union,” the AFL charged heavy dues, so that an adequate fund could support members during a strike, and disciplined the unruly workforce, limiting and controlling work stoppages. The first union movement in American history to survive a depression, the AFL excluded the largest number of workers, namely the unskilled immigrants, deploying such weapons as the union label, the boycott and the closed (i.e., single-union) shop. San Francisco, to cite one example, became a closed-shop town in good part because of the labor movement’s anti-Chinese mobilizations. As the abolitionists intuited, racial equality was the key to progress, and racism was the tool of reaction. As the aspirations of labor narrowed in the 1890s, black leaders like Booker T. Washington repudiated the abolitionist legacy of racial equality, writing, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Corporate-organized agriculture originated in Southern disfranchisement, which affected poor whites as well as blacks, and in Jim Crow, the so-called nadir of African-American history.

The destruction of the nineteenth-century republican order, reflected in the collapse of Populism and the Knights, paved the way for the Progressive movement. A complex amalgam, the mainstream of Progressivism aimed to bypass both capital and labor, and found a new politics on the purported neutrality and moral decency of the middle class. In principle, most Progressives accepted the corporate order, opposing only corrupt variants of the corporations, which the muckrakers called “trusts.” Most Progressives, however, did not accept the political influence of the black, immigrant and working classes that the corporations brought in their wake. They insisted, rather, that the elites of these classes (the “talented tenth”) adopt middle-class, Protestant norms of respectability, domesticity and sexual propriety. Opposing the immigrant-dominated “bosses” and “machines,” Progressives advocated independent voting rather than party loyalty, and restriction of the urban franchise to taxpayers. They passed four constitutional amendments: the income tax, direct election of US Senators (formerly elected by state legislatures), Prohibition (repealed in 1933), and women’s suffrage, which they expected to strengthen the middle-class vote. Inventing the ethics of objectivity, professionalism and expertise, Progressives sought to destroy the parochial loyalties and traditionalism of nineteenth-century society, rise above political parties, and create a neutral state, above all in regard to the conflict between capital and labor.

Deeply shaped by America’s Calvinist heritage, most Progressives shared the classical American preoccupation with individual responsibility, which they assumed was lacking in “dependent” immigrants, from supposedly nondemocratic, largely peasant societies. This made Progressives not only antisocialist but culturally conservative. Thus the Progressives not only attacked “trusts” but also sought to abolish the liquor trade and prostitution, thereby turning the immigrants and ethnics against them. As Richard Hofstadter later argued, what appeared to be forward-looking programs sometimes incorporated rearguard campaigns to restore America to its rural, republican infancy, when it had been “a homogeneous Yankee civilization.” This gave many Progressives their moralistic and depoliticizing character. “The misgovernment of the American people,” wrote muckraker Lincoln Steffens, “is misgovernment by the American people.”

But Progressivism also contained a left wing. The so-called “advanced” Progressives were very close to socialists. Centered around Hull House in Chicago, Survey magazine in New York, and within the German, Jewish, Finnish, Cuban and other immigrant communities, the advanced Progressives challenged the middle-class biases of mainstream Progressivism. Advanced Progressivism culminated in the Bull Moose Party, which supported Theodore Roosevelt in the 1912 election. The key thinker behind the party was Herbert Croly, a founder of the New Republic, who advocated “a strong national government capable of regulating giant corporations in the public interest, the use of taxation to redistribute wealth, the elevation of labor unions to parity with government and industry, and a general faith in leadership and expertise as the guiding instruments of reform.”8 Taken by many as a step toward “statism,” Roosevelt’s New Nationalism provoked a strong counterresponse in Woodrow Wilson’s “New Freedom,” another current of Progressivism. Reflecting the continued pertinence of the republican ideal, Wilson wanted the state to curb the power of “artificially” concentrated “trusts” or “monopolies” and restore the “natural” workings of society, including small-scale competitive commerce, understood in Jeffersonian terms as part of the substructure of a democratic society. Bull Moose Progressives regarded this as a backward step.

The fourth great precursor of the New Deal lay in socialism, which in the US dated to the 1840s. One current of American socialism harked back to the republican ideal of a “cooperative commonwealth,” as exemplified by Henry Demarest Lloyd’s Wealth against Commonwealth (1894), which argued that the monopoly form was inconsistent with republicanism, and which was aimed at Standard Oil. Another current, the Socialist Party of America, founded in 1901, was one of the great democratic pre-Bolshevik Marxist parties in the world.

Like the Progressives, the Socialist Party emerged against the background of the merger movement that swept corporate America between 1897 and 1904. Because the corporations were still engaged in competitive struggle with one another, they bitterly fought any improvement in the workers’ conditions. This made it possible to organize a mass socialist party with deep roots in American culture. According to James Weinstein,

the party’s potential lay in its strategy of making socialism vs. capitalism a central question in all of its public activity. By making millions of people aware of capitalism as a class system run by capitalists in their own interests, and by convincing these millions that socialism was necessary for the development of their full human potential … the old Socialist Party established the basis for a genuinely revolutionary movement.9

Besides electoral activity, the party worked to organize industry-wide (as opposed to craft) unions, for example on the railroads, in mines, textiles, and breweries. The largest of the Socialist newspapers, The Appeal to Reason of Girard, Kansas, had a weekly circulation of 761,747, roughly comparable, adjusting for population size, to the circulation of Newsweek in its heyday. In 1912 the Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, running against Roosevelt and Wilson, polled 6 percent of the vote, while Socialists held 1,200 offices in 340 cities, including 79 mayoralities. A few years later there were two Socialist Congressmen in Washington DC, Victor Berger from Wisconsin and Meyer London from New York. In 1920, Debs won 3.4 percent of the vote, running from an Atlanta penitentiary, where he had been jailed for antiwar activity.¹⁰

Sometimes in tandem, sometimes in conflict with the Socialists, the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World endorsed the goal of “one big union,” its largest successes occurring in the mining camps, the lumber and steel industries, and the textile factories, especially among young immigrant women. The IWW – the “Wobblies” – stood for a self-governing producers’ society with a minimal state. The movement encouraged the radicalization of an emerging intellectual class associated with the “new paganism” of Greenwich Village. Literary intellectuals such as John Reed and Louise Bryant sensed an “affinity between their own ideal of the emancipated individual, unburdened by the cultural baggage of the past, and the hoboes and migratory workers glorified by the IWW.”11 Espousing an ideal of “self-expression and defiant irresponsibility,” this “lyrical left” intermingled sexual radicalism, bohemian freedom, and antibusiness radicalism.

The famous Lawrence and Paterson, Massachusetts strikes of 1912–13 proved a high point. In the Paterson strike Greenwich Village bohemianism commingled with Debsian socialism, immigrant self-affirmation, and Wobbly syndicalism. The strike’s mass cultural pageants were taken to mark a new epoch in American creative life because they seemed to offer radical artists and writers a chance to break out of the neglect suffered by earlier writers such as Herman Melville and Mark Twain. In the same year, women suffragists marched with trade unionists in support of the Armory Show, which brought modernism to the United States. The march was a precursor of the Popular Front desire not only to bring all social classes together, but also to integrate modern art and a feminist sensibility into a broader left movement.¹²

War and empire led to the demise of the Progressive era of reform. Instead of the growth of reason, as Progressives supposed, the Great War (World War One) “offered proof of the mobilizing capacities of nationalism” and “the tremendous power of the modern state.”¹³ The limits of the liberal tradition, when confronted with war and “boundless acquisition,” became clear, as they would again in the 1960s. Herbert Croly, exemplar of “advanced” or Bull Moose Progressivism, supported the war, writing in the New Republic that it offered Progressives what social justice could not: “the tonic of a serious moral crusade.” War, Croly predicted, would provide the means “to imbue the people with a spirit of common purpose sufficiently powerful to win their submission” to the ends of regulation and state-building. America’s entry would prove the apotheosis of Progressive reform. John Dewey agreed, arguing that the US would finally come of age, discovering “a national mind, a will as to what to be.”¹⁴ “All the slow agonizing waiting for the American community to integrate itself spontaneously into a cooperative commonwealth was ended.”¹⁵ Most intellectuals were equally enthusiastic. The “good fight,” one later boasted, refuted “the ancient libelous assumption that [intellectuals] constituted an absent-minded third sex.”16 One, however, Randolph Bourne, sarcastically termed America’s entry “a war free from any taint of self-seeking,” becoming a New Left hero for his critique of Dewey’s “pragmatism.”

In one respect, though, Croly was right. The war did in fact provide the first occasion for large-scale planning, the key to the first New Deal. With America’s entry into the war, the War Industries Board suspended the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, providing a “lubricating consensus” concerning production goals, labor relations, prices, safety regulations and the like.¹⁷ Based on the model of the rationalized, state-managed German economy, the War Industries Board took a giant step toward corporatism: entire industries, even entire economic sectors, were organized and disciplined through the mediation of the government. Later, Franklin Roosevelt nostalgically recalled “the great cooperation of 1917 and 1918,” when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, citing it as an inspiration for the New Deal.¹⁸ The war began what historian David Kennedy has called “the modern practice of massive informal collusion between government and organized private enterprise.”

The war also destroyed the Socialist Party. Two Communist parties formed, precipitating pointless debates over immediate insurrection and initiating the destructive conflicts between Bolshevik-imitating Communists and non-Communist leftists that limited the successes of the second American left. Nonetheless, with the Russian Revolution came the first American use of the term “left” in its political sense (though not yet a book title) as in the 1919 “Manifesto and Program of the Left Wing Section Socialist Party Local Greater New York.” Most Progressives had believed that their own class, the middle class, was a “universal class,” embodying the values of society as a whole; they saw other classes, “monopolists” and workers, as “special interests.” In contrast, the Bolsheviks viewed the poor, the oppressed, and the proletarianized as the true representatives of universal values. As China, India, Africa, and the Middle East moved to the center of Lenin and Trotsky’s world picture, Bolshevism brought home the limits of the American liberal (i.e., Progressive) tradition. The workers, as well as the racial and colonial subaltern classes, were the overwhelming majority of society. Their common labor and widespread suffering gave their claims great moral power.

Meanwhile, the war produced vigilantism, censorship of the mails, espionage acts, the “Committee on Public Information,” i.e., anti-German propaganda in the schools and movie theaters, the spread of racial violence, and the Red Scare, which led to the deportation of thousands of leftists, anarchists, and even simple critics of the government. In Zeev Sternhell’s words,

[the] war demonstrated the … facility with which all strata of society could be mobilized in the service of collectivity. [It] showed the importance of unity of command, of authority, of leadership, of moral mobilization, of the education of the masses, and of propaganda as an instrument of power. It showed, above all, the ease with which democratic liberties could be suspended.19

In the 1920s, disillusioned postwar writers like Ernest Hemingway (later a representative of the Popular Front) and William Faulkner (later a staunch opponent of the New Deal) struggled to create a new, modernist language to capture the background of violence against which American history was unfolding. At the same time, the Great Depression was brewing. Something of the coming mood can be grasped from the1932 words of the then thirty-two year old president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, to the Young Democratic Club:

After attacking us as the younger generation for ten years after the war they caused they are … preparing to pass on to us, a world wrecked by that colossal blunder and their inability to cope with its consequences. Their stupidity, selfishness and rapacity in the postwar period have matched the criminal lightheartedness with which they sent us into battle.²⁰

This was the atmosphere from which emerged the collaboration between liberals and leftists that came to be called the Popular Front.

Americans were accustomed to the business cycle. From hard experience, they knew what to expect: when the price of labor and raw materials and money fell far enough, recovery would begin. Only in 1929 that is not what happened. Instead of hitting bottom, the economy kept falling. Credit dried up; bankruptcies mushroomed; farms were repossessed; unemployment struck a quarter or more of the workforce. Sales of automobiles, the most important American industry, dropped from nearly 4.5 million in 1929 to slightly over 1 million in 1932. To this day there is no scholarly agreement as to the causes, or indeed the nature, of the Great Depression. One thing is clear, however. The Depression was a collective action problem: the labor, materials, factories, and money were all present; only the means of bringing them into relation with one another was absent.

The 1932 election of Franklin Roosevelt reflected the desire for collective action. A landowning aristocrat, Roosevelt was a Patroon, a member of the great Dutch Hudson Valley landowning elite. In line with this heritage, Roosevelt regarded “America as a great estate to be nurtured and cherished,” and not as a business.21 Campaigning in September 1932, he explained that the Presidency is “more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” The office, he continued, called for

someone whose interests are not special but general, someone who can understand and treat the country as a whole. For as much as anything it needs to be reaffirmed at this juncture that the United States is one organic entity, that no interest, no class, no section, is either separate or supreme above the interests of all.²²

Few Presidents understood as Roosevelt did the importance of morale, a Popular Front idea, psychoanalytic in origin, and centered on group or mass psychology. An early episode, his appearance at the 1924 Democratic Convention, a few years after he was stricken with polio, conveys his grasp of the idea. Called from the stage to nominate Al Smith, sweating desperately, he struggled forward. “But when he finally stood at the podium, unable even to wave for fear of falling, head thrown back and shoulders high, in the exaggerated posture that would now become his trademark, the delegates rose to their feet and cheered for three minutes.” Something in Roosevelt’s struggle to overcome his disability resonated with the American people’s struggle to overcome the wound that capitalism had inflicted on them, and to build a new social order and identity, based on social and economic equality.

Roosevelt understood, as did most intellectuals of the time, that the nation was at a historic turning point. In his 1932 Commonwealth Club address he asserted that while the goal of economic growth had been universally accepted in the nineteenth century, when it seemed that “no price was to high to pay for the advantages which we could draw from a finished industrial system,” this was no longer the case.

Our industrial plant is built … our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land. More than half of our people do not live on the farms or on lands and cannot derive a living by cultivating their own property. There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start … Clearly this calls for a reappraisal of values.23

Thus, Roosevelt recognized that the republican ideal was no longer sufficient, that small private property was no longer an adequate basis for citizenship and participation, and that economic expansion under the leadership of the corporations was no alternative.

Although Roosevelt had run as a Progressive, criticizing Herbert Hoover for excessive government spending and promising to balance the budget, his election left the country agitated and excited. Within a few months, politics began “to recover meaning; the battle of programs and ideas began to recover significance.” Leftist journals such as the Nation, the New Republic and Common Sense welcomed the new President with common recommendations: control of production, recognition of trade unions, redistribution of income. Such proposals lay behind Roosevelt’s bold First New Deal (1933–5). Included here were the Glass– Steagall Act, which sought to separate banking from speculation, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act and National Industrial Recovery Act, which were based on the model of a corporatist, state-centered economic system, and brought together business, labor, and government to set prices, establish national standards, limit production (in agriculture especially) and, in a word, to plan.

Planning, “the panacea of the age,” as the economist Lionel Robbins called it, connoted much more than it does today. Its guiding insight was that markets were incapable of coordinating a complex, modern economy in a way that took account of social and even economic needs. The outcome of innumerable, automatic reflexes, markets lacked the element of consciousness or discursive intelligence (i.e., extrabiological feedback) that characterizes politics in the classic sense of the term. The project of planning was aimed at introducing the higher level of conscious awareness or reflection that markets lacked.

Planning rested on the pragmatic revolution of the Progressive era. At the heart of that revolution lay a reinterpretation of Darwin, which argued that learning was at the center of the evolutionary process. John Dewey’s 1896 article “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology” was a keystone for this idea. In it Dewey argued that human behavior could not be described as a series of separate reflexes, but rather was a flow of coordinated actions. Even if these actions had a certain automaticity, when conflict occurred consciousness intervened and learning took place. Thorstein Veblen, Simon Patten, Rexford Tugwell and others translated Dewey’s theory of psychology into a new economics.

The question was, who would do the planning, and by what criteria? This question had been central both for “advanced” or Bull Moose Progressives, such as Walter Lippmann (in his 1914 Drift and Mastery), and for the socialists. It was also at the center of the Lippmann–Dewey debate in the 1920s, in which Lippmann had insisted on the priority of technically trained elites, while Dewey argued for dialogue at local and community levels, along lines similar to those envisioned later by the New Left. With Roosevelt’s election the question became pressing.

There were at least three possible answers. Planning could be determined by business interests, by state experts, or by a democratic political process that included popular forces. In the event, large corporations mostly wrote the New Deal codes; and even when this was not the case, planning was technocratic and top-down. But the left struggled for the third possibility. Thus planning exemplified the ambiguous nature of American reform. Like the abolition of slavery, the New Deal hovered between “disguising exploitation” and recognizing “elements of equality in people of subordinate status.” The second American left sought to resolve the ambiguity of planning in favor of equality by advocating the idea of the working class as the agent of planning.

The idea of the working class as the agent behind planning entered New Deal reform thought through John Chamberlain’s 1932 Farewell to Reform. According to Chamberlain, planning required not just a democratic citizenry, but also a self-interested social class that could plausibly identify its interests with the interests of society as a whole. Advocates of planning, Chamberlain believed, were deluded to imagine that they could limit the sway of vested interests without such a class. Economists like Veblen, he charged, seemed to believe that “a hierarchy of technical experts [could] oust the high priests of the price and profit system.” Such economists lacked a realistic sense of the American power structure. Along similar lines, Chamberlain criticized Dewey for exalting the role of education without recognizing the underlying institutions of domination. “Hoping for the salvation of democracy through primary and secondary education,” he wrote, Dewey failed to see that “regeneration of the body politic as a whole must come from … outside the public school,” in other words from an organized working class.24

The emphasis on working-class agency marked a new stage in the history of the American left. Whereas the abolitionists had relied on the actions of intensely committed morally motivated individuals and small groups, the socialists relied on mass mobilization. And whereas the abolitionists intuited the nation’s proclivity to violence and expansion, the socialists had a theory of capitalism, classes and the state, however rudimentary. Moreover, the emphasis on agency and mobilization also distinguished leftists from liberals. Liberals sought planning; leftists sought democratic planning. As early as 1934 the New Republic, the Nation, and Common Sense began to criticize the top-down biases of the New Deal, which they connected to its excessive caution. Intellectuals decried the President’s “unwillingness to move to the left – to use the crisis as an opportunity for taxing corporate profits, nationalizing the banks, assuming control over transportation and public utilities, and reallocating the country’s wealth more equitably.”²⁵ Harold Laski, the British leftist, wrote Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1934, “America can’t live half slave and half free … control capitalism [i.e., planning] is a contradiction in terms … Either you have to go backward to a kind of industrial feudalism,” in other words, planning by the big corporations, “or forward to a much greater increase in socialised economic life … Roosevelt is standing proof of Lenin’s insistence that you cannot make greater reforms unless you have a theory and an end you want to reach.”²⁶

The attempt to grapple with the dilemmas of planning led the left to socialism. As early as 1931 the critic Edmund Wilson proposed in the New Republic to use the demand for planning to “take Communism away from the Communists.” The core point of reference, he explained, should be “social control.” “We have always talked about the desirability of a planned society,” Wilson wrote, “The phrase ‘social control’ has been our blessed Mesopotamian word. But if this means anything, does it not mean socialism? And should we not make this perfectly plain?”27 Wilson’s conception of socialism was rooted in the thought of Dewey, but it also anticipated the Marxism of the Popular Front.

In the event, all currents of reform and leftist thought centered on the President, who had become the target of an enormous upsurge of populist sentiment, both urban and rural, sentiment that must be distinguished from leftism proper. For example, Father Charles Coughlin’s weekly radio program with an audience of 30–40 million, many of them recently arrived Catholic immigrants, rested on the populist critique of the money power. While Coughlin also drew on the rich history of Catholic social justice encyclicals, he appealed to America as a Christian nation. A critic of the First New Deal, he criticized Roosevelt for leaving banking in private hands and nationalizing industry (referring to the National Recovery Administration, NRA), when he should have nationalized the banks and left industry alone.

In addition, agrarian insurgencies with roots in the post-Civil War greenback, farmer-labor and agrarian movements provided more populist pressure. One historian has called Milo Reno’s Farmers’ Holiday Association, which was centered in the corn belt and urged farmers to withhold their products, “the most aggressive agrarian upheaval of the twentieth century.”²⁸ Finally, Huey Long revived the South’s radical legacy. Long’s hometown, Winn, Louisiana, had been a center of antislavery, Populism and Debsian socialism. Appealing “not to the resentments of a petty-bourgeoisie … but to the egalitarianism of the poor,” Long built a movement of 2,700 clubs with 7,500,000 members, most of them unemployed workers and discontented farmers, on a program of radically redistributive taxation.²⁹ Critically, the movement was not racist. As Long explained, “My father and my mother favored the Union. Why not? They didn’t have slaves. They didn’t even have decent land. The rich folks had all the good land and all the slaves – why, their women didn’t even comb their own hair.”30

But it was the labor movement, with its roots in the earlier attempts to organize industry-wide unions, that most directly pressured Roosevelt from the left. Treated as a stepchild by the Progressives, labor had begun to feel at home with the New Deal. The famous clause 7A of the National Recovery Act, which called for union organization to facilitate planning, had given an enormous boost to those seeking to organize industry-wide as opposed to craft unions. Under the slogan “The President wants you to join a union” auto, steel, oil, rubber, and typography unions enjoyed huge membership surges, as did the United Mine Workers (UMW), the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). While there was support among labor leaders for a third party, there was even more support for party realignment. Many felt that it was time for labor to abandon its role as a lobby group, and instead become the center of a new progressive coalition, based not only on labor’s role in the workplace but also on its importance to “the national political community and in the infrastructure of the state.”³¹ With so much stirring, John Dewey’s League for Independent Political Action, the New Republic and the Nation began discussing possible third parties aimed at the 1936 election.

Threatened with the disintegration of his centrist coalition of 1932, Roosevelt could have moved to the right, scapegoating banks, Jews, and radicals. Instead, while carefully proclaiming himself the opponent of “Communism, Huey Longism, Coughlinism,” he moved to the left. His January 1935 annual message to Congress spotlighted the lower classes, discussing the slums, and calling for respect for the laboring man, although not yet for the trade unions. Looking toward the 1936 election, Roosevelt realized “that he would win the greatest response by exploiting the class antagonisms of the Great Depression.”³² Having begun his Presidency with the idea of uniting all classes, he now complained that businessmen had no sense of moral indignation about the sins of other businessmen. As the election drew closer, Roosevelt concluded “that nothing would help him more than to have newspapers, bankers and business aligned against him, for their attacks would only win him more votes.” He directed the Democratic National Council to direct its fire not against the Republicans, but against symbols of wealth such as the American Liberty League. By the time of the election, his language had become dramatically antibusiness: “money changers,” “economic royalists,” “privilege,” “malefactors of great wealth.” Speaking of the rich, he boasted: they are “unanimous in their hatred of me and I welcome their hatred.”

Roosevelt’s advisors also encouraged him to move to a more anticapitalist or at least antibanker position. “The time has come to assert the leadership that the country is demanding,” they told him. It’s the “Eleventh hour,” Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis added.33 A month after receiving this advice in 1935 Roosevelt appeared before Congress calling for passage of the Wagner Act, which put the force of the federal government behind unions; the Public Utility Holding Company Act, which subjected the electric industry to regulation, especially by the states; and Social Security, which included not only old age insurance, but unemployment insurance and welfare. In addition, Roosevelt called for “very high taxes” on large incomes, an estate tax since “the transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes … is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people,” a graduated corporate income tax, and taxes on holding companies, all of which, taken together, he called a “wealth” tax. “Our revenue laws have operated in many ways to the unfair advantage of the few, and they have done little to prevent an unjust concentration of wealth and economic power,” he explained. The result had been “a deepening sense of unfairness.”³⁴

The election of 1936 richly rewarded the Democrats. During the 1936 World Series, those watching the baseball game in the expensive boxes had all worn sunflowers, the Republican Party symbol, while the bleachers broke out in wild applause when fans saw the President. Roosevelt got 42 percent of the upper income vote but 76 percent of the lower income vote and 80 percent of the labor vote. A furniture worker from Paris, Texas, wrote: “Now that we have a land Slide and done just what was best for our country … I will say … you are the one & only President that ever helped a Working Class of People.”³⁵ The transformation of the American Progressive tradition into the party of militant liberalism – a term now signifying social democracy that Roosevelt took over from British Fabians and socialists – was no electoral trick. Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes noted, “I’ve been hoping ever since 1912 that we’d have political parties divided on real issues…. I’d like to see all the progressives together and all the conservatives together.”36

The 1936 Presidential election presaged a new conception of the state. Americans, opined a writer in the journal Christian Century after the election, had been “so busy defending a traditional … concept of freedom from governmental control” that they had forgotten that it was their government, and that they could use it to protect their freedom.³⁷ Underlying the new conception, though not yet fully articulated, was the ideal of social equality. This ideal did not take the form of an abstract demand for leveling. Rather it took the form of a recognition that the society had changed to such an extent that the lone individual, as Roosevelt explained in a 1934 Fireside chat, was “quite helpless.” Only collective security, or what Roosevelt called the “intervention of that organized control we call government,” and not the market, could provide a realistic basis for the independence and self-sufficiency that small private property had once provided.³⁸ This insight, central to the populist, labor, progressive and socialist critiques of the corporate revolution, was also consistent with the egalitarian thrust of abolitionism. Hence the election inspired a large number of letters comparing Roosevelt’s task to Lincoln’s. “Truly,” one began, “there is such a thing as economic slavery.” The President, another insisted, should “free us from the slavery that we are in.”

Around 1935 the second American left morphed into what was known as the “Popular Front.” During this period the idea that American society was best understood in terms of the conflict between capitalists and workers, and that eventually America and other nations would evolve toward some form of democratic socialism became widespread. The significance of this idea was that it inflected the structural transformation then underway with the meaning of social equality. This can be seen in the changed meaning of liberalism. Originally, liberals assumed that the state endangered freedom. Now liberalism conveyed the idea that the state needed to protect workers, farmers, and the poor from the ravages of market capitalism.

The Communists, who invented the phrase “Popular Front,” were significant in the ensuing period, but not because of their numbers. Even at its high point, during World War Two, the party had at most 80,000 members. Rather, the Communists gained popularity because they downplayed the idea of revolution in order to support the New Deal. Thus, Steve Nelson recalled how Communist organizers of the Chicago Unemployed Councils “spent the first few weeks agitating against capitalism” until they realized that working-class people were “more concerned with their daily struggles,” after which they adopted what Nelson called a “grievance approach,” meaning they talked about the grievances, and not about capitalism.39 In addition, after the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, the “Popular Front” meant an alliance of representatives from all social classes against fascism. Spain, France, Chile and China were among the nations with Popular Fronts. The attempt to build broad-based coalitions against fascism in Europe and militarism in Asia signified that the nation, rather than the working class, had become the vehicle of change. Communists, party leader Earl Browder explained, would never “raise the issue of socialism in such a form and manner as to endanger or weaken [national] unity.”⁴⁰

The Popular Front reflected the coming of age of American intellectuals as a social class. Earlier intellectuals had been “men of letters” who supported themselves by writing, preaching or lecturing. In contrast, the intellectuals of the thirties were “organic intellectuals,” meaning that they worked in the new mass consumption industries, such as advertising or film, or else for the expanding New Deal state. They identified with the working class, often seeing themselves as intellectual workers allied with manual workers against capital. The Popular Front largely consolidated the idea of the intellectual as a critic of power. In 1966 Lionel Trilling wrote, “the importance of the radical movement of the thirties cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual class as we now know it in its great size and influence.”⁴¹ In fact it is impossible to understand twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural history without giving full weight to the painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, theater, film and music, as well as the historical writing and social theory of the Popular Front period, even though most contemporary historians still fail to do so.

Roosevelt’s “turn to the left” in 1935 had opened up a new possibility, to which the idea of the Popular Front spoke. This was a new kind of state, which in Europe would have been called a social democratic state, in which business, the churches, the working class, professionals and the poor would actively participate. The creation of such a state could not rest on change in the political realm alone; in addition, the structure of capitalist society would have to be changed. The wave of New Deal reforms that began to be passed in 1935 suggested such a possibility, by protecting the rights of unions to organize, and by guaranteeing collective security for unemployment and old age. Powerful though these reforms were, their meaning was ambiguous. Just as the abolition of slavery could either provide a new means “of disguising exploitation” or could lead to the recognition of “elements of equality in people of subordinate status,” so the New Deal reforms could infuse a corporate-dominated order with market dynamism, or could signal a wider democracy.42 The key to shaping the meaning of a reform was not so much the reform’s content as the mobilized presence of the working class in interpreting the reform’s meaning and guiding its influence. And that depended on the energies and imagination of the left.

America needed a social democratic state, according to the leftist thought of the time, because it was more a system of estates or orders than a system of classes. What divided the society was not ownership of property or income level, but “insecurity of employment with its consequent disturbance in the rhythms of life,” as Robert and Helen Lynd’s 1929 Middletown insisted.⁴³ “That word [job] came into my vocabulary,” social worker Mary MacDowell had written earlier, “and has since become almost a sacred word … It is the word first learned by the immigrant, the children lisp it, and the aged cling to it to the end. A ‘steady job’ or ‘please get me a job’ is ever at the front of their minds and at the tips of their tongues.”⁴⁴ In addition, American society was organized through race and ethnicity as much as through social class. In the Jim Crow South, state-supported lynching enforced the racial code. But the rest of the country also distinguished, albeit informally, old-line “Americans,” for example, English, Scotch-Irish, and perhaps Irish and German, from recently arrived immigrants, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews.⁴⁵ Native-born “Yankees” tended not to recognize the latter groups as Americans, even after they became citizens. As to blacks, throughout the country they were referred to as “boy,” “George,” or “Jack.”

The Popular Front, in essence, was an effort to turn this system of ranks and orders into a modern, democratic society in which the working class qua working class had a distinct voice. In classical Marxist terms, the Popular Front aimed not to bring about socialism, but simply to complete America’s bourgeois revolution (which is why Trotskyists and many other leftists attacked it as essentially conservative). There were two main fronts in this struggle. In the South, the US had a racial state, in that its laws, institutions and ideologies were racially organized. The modern civil rights movement in the South began in Popular Front labor struggles, bookstores, and struggles for basic rights, like the right to demonstrate in public spaces, or to read anti-imperialist literature. The theory of antifascism, which Communists and other Marxists developed to explain the rise of Nazism, encouraged antiracism, as when the African-American Pittsburgh Courier asked, “What are Jim Crow laws but fascist laws?” or when Roosevelt in 1938 called the South feudal, adding, “There is little difference between the feudal system and the fascist system. If you believe in one you lean to the other.”46

At the same time, a bourgeois revolution meant organizing the 23.5 million Southern and Eastern Europeans who had immigrated between the 1880s and 1920s, as well as the several million Southern blacks who had migrated to the North. Both groups worked in the great multiplant manufacturing operations aimed at national and international markets. Building industrial unions was central to the Popular Front, in which unions were conceived of as forms of social and political organization, and not simply as means of negotiating wages and hours.

CIO unions, in this sense, were qualitatively different from the skilled trade unions that had dominated American labor since the founding of the AFL in 1886. The earlier craft unions were largely composed of skilled “Yankee” workers; the industrial unions included a higher proportion of immigrants, and the children of immigrants.⁴⁷ The earlier movement was overtly racist; the industrial unions chanted “black and white, unite and fight.” The earlier movement tried to convince the middle class of its “respectability”; the industrial union movement was based on the idea that the working class had its own values, superior to those of the middle class. The earlier movement had little connection to intellectuals; industrial unions not only organized “white collar” and other forms of educated labor, but also forged a “cultural front.” The earlier movement restricted itself to negotiating and administering contracts; the industrial unions worked closely with the left wing of the New Deal both in government and in the Democratic Party.

The slogan of the new union movement, along with the new labor radio stations, rent strikes, eviction protests, writers’ and artists’ clubs, unemployed councils, and CIO political action committees that accompanied it, was solidarity. Solidarity, writes Liz Cohen, “was the age-old cry of the labor movements, but it had a very particular significance to the … 1930s.” The difference lay in the emphasis on the workers’ agency. “If any theme prevailed it was the recognition that the workers themselves must change to prevent the kinds of divisions that had doomed similar efforts to organize them in the past.”48 In the Akron, Ohio tire factories, skilled machinists and electricians attended CIO meetings, which were filled with unskilled and semiskilled second-generation immigrants. The skilled workers, Ruth Kenney writes, refused to believe “that their interests were different from the common ordinary rubber worker.”⁴⁹ “The CIO’s effort to create a culture of unity that brought workers of different sexes, races, nationalities, and locales together was so basic to its organizing philosophy that it permeated all CIO union activities … on and off the shop floor.” Union drives included speakers of different languages, representatives of the different ethnic groups, and meetings that brought together different ethnicities.⁵⁰ Perhaps the most powerful expressions of solidarity came from the labor movement’s songs, chants, hootenannies, and marches, which supplied a vernacular language and sense of collective rhythm that lasted into the 1960s, when they infused the civil rights and antiwar movements.

Racial equality was crucial to the industrial union movement, which in that sense was building on the abolitionist precedent. Among the Chicago Packinghouse workers, the killing floors of the slaughterhouse where the blacks predominated spawned the most militant unionism. According to one white union member, “I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay … I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world getting’ everybody who works in the yard together and breakin’ up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.” For another: “overcoming prejudice didn’t mean anyone got invited to somebody’s house for Christmas dinner … but so far as on the job and in the union … we were making a religion of racial unity.” A black butcher summarized,

the white butchers hated the Negroes because they figured they would scab on them when trouble came and then get a good-paying, skilled job besides … with the CIO in, all that’s like a bad dream gone. Oh, we still have a hard row, but this time the white men are with us and we’re with them.51

Black/white unity broke down during World War Two, when the availability of jobs and the consequent size of the black migration threatened white advantages, but even the limited cooperation achieved during the thirties was an important advance.

Industrial union organizers aimed at transforming the conditions not only of workers, but also of their families and communities. The early immigrants had mostly been migrant workers, living in boarding houses and working the longest possible hours to send money to their families, or to return to Europe and buy land. When US Steel put up dwellings for immigrants in Gary, Indiana in 1909 the immigrants converted them into boarding houses to save money. Later, as families formed, “children viewed their immigrant fathers as … individuals who believed in ‘work, work, work, and work.’ … They always feared the loss of their jobs since they had nothing to fall back on.” Union drives transformed communities. The rate of home-buying rose, the crime rate declined; unionization became an alternative to repatriation. Workers explained: “I have got my family here, my woman, and I have five children; and I have that family and I would like to know how a man is going to make a living for himself and his wife and five children on $4.75 a day,” and “Why did we strike? We did not have enough money that we could have a standard American living.”⁵² After union drives, neighborhood park benches were renamed “eight-hour benches,” because for the first time men had time to spend with their families.

Because of its focus on family and community, the Communist Party made a special effort to recruit women, and the number of women went from 10 percent of the party membership in 1930 to 50 percent in 1943.⁵³ But because the party wanted to recruit middle-class women, it often appealed to traditional notions of womanhood, which contradicted women’s rights. This ambiguity affected union organizing. The CIO supported female unionization unequivocally, including equal pay for equal work, but it did not challenge the sex-typed distinction between men’s work and women’s work. By 1940 800,000 women had been organized, a 300 percent increase over 1930. In the auto industry, women’s average hourly wages rose from 54 cents in 1936 to 65 cents in 1938 as a result of unionization.54 But by World War Two, women were questioning sex-typed employment distinction, preparing the way for the feminism of the 1960s–1970s.

The culmination of the industrial union drive came with the largely spontaneous but highly disciplined sit-down strikes of 1937, in which nearly 500,000 workers, supported by their communities, occupied factories, packinghouses, foundries, assembly plants, and commercial enterprises. The strikes derived much of their moral power from being nonviolent. The industrialists dreaded damage to their machinery above all else, but the workers damaged nothing. When sit-down strikers took an item from the stock in retail stores like Woolworth, they left the money for it on the register.⁵⁵ Equally significant, the federal government refused to use force against the strikers, as previous governments had, and as the government soon would again, in 1941. The La Follette Civil Liberties Committee even called national attention to the use of spies, strikebreakers and private police. Congress enacted a law prohibiting transport of strikebreakers across state lines. In the years that immediately followed, all of the great mass production industries – auto, steel, rubber, oil, chemicals, coal, garment and needle trades, West Coast shipping and newspapers – were unionized, marking “a fundamental, almost revolutionary change in the power relationships of American society.”⁵⁶

No change of such magnitude occurs without a constitutional crisis, as we saw in considering the abolition of slavery. For the second left, the crisis occurred with the defeat of Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan. The Supreme Court historically had used the power of judicial review to block reform on grounds of “substantive due process” and “freedom of contract,” legal principles that tended to define property rights as untouchable. By 1935 the Court had overturned every aspect of the New Deal, and Roosevelt’s plan to reform the Court was widely supported throughout the government. Because the Supreme Court changed course in 1937 and upheld Social Security and the Wagner Act, many have argued that Roosevelt lost the battle but won the war. In fact, the defeat of the plan, according to historian William Leuchtenberg, “helped blunt the most important drive for social reform in American history.” Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was more direct. For him, “the whole New Deal went up in smoke” with the Court Fight.57

After 1937 the New Deal lost much of its steam but the Popular Front did not. The most consequential discovery of the second American left may have been the idea of democratic mobilization or mass organizing itself. Organizing meant party organizing, whether through the Democratic Party or third parties; it meant organizing powerful blocs like African-Americans, women, Jews, and Native Americans; it meant community organizing, an American innovation that rested on the small group experiences of the first American left; it meant labor and civil rights organizing in the Jim Crow South. Each of these forms of organizing produced its own manuals, schools, training camps, institutes, conferences and bodies of theory, whose influence persisted into the sixties. The goal of organizing was not revolution, except in the imagination of a few militants, but rather a democratic society that recognized its divided character and addressed it through a permanently charged and responsible state.

Popular Front militancy changed the nature of American protest, especially among blacks and immigrants. Most earlier protest was restricted by the ideal of “uplift,” an ideology of self-help articulated mainly in racial, ethnic and “middle class specific, rather than in broader, egalitarian social terms.” Uplift meant identification with “temperance, thrift, chastity, social purity, patriarchal authority, and the accumulation of wealth.”⁵⁸ Focusing aspirations on the private depoliticized space of the family, and on the idealization of women, uplift was hegemonic among the teachers, preachers, dentists, undertakers and other “community leaders” of the black world, as well as among the storekeepers, priests, and local politicians of the ethnic communities. The Popular Front repudiated the uplift approach, paving the way for the sixties. In Thomas Bell’s 1941 autobiographical novel Out of This Furnace, a Slovak steelworker in Braddock, Pennsylvania, reacts to the union organizers: “they didn’t talk and act the way the steel towns expected men who were Scotch and Irish and Polish and Italian and Slovak and German and Jew to talk and act.” They were “obviously convinced that they were individually as good as any man alive, from the Mill Superintendents up or down.” Unlike other immigrants, “they talked – without stumbling over words, uttering them as though they meant something real right there in Braddock – about liberty and justice and freedom of speech.”59

Instead of deference toward authority, the Popular Front encouraged the sense that citizens had social and economic rights and that these rights were inalienable, just like civil and political rights. Consider the following letter from a recent immigrant, probably Bosnian, Mrs Olga Ferk, written in 1935 to President Roosevelt complaining that she had been mistreated at her relief station, was only $19 behind in her government-subsidized mortgage payments, not three months as accused, and that her son’s Civilian Conservation Corps check was always late in arriving. “How long is this rotten condition going to last,” Mrs Ferk demanded of the President. “I am at the end of the rope. The rich get richer and the poor can go to H--- that is what it looks like to me … Let’s have some results.” Mrs Ferk’s assumption that the national government owed her family relief, a mortgage, and a decent job was unprecedented. A truant officer working in the Black Belt observed an analogous shift. Earlier, being on relief was stigmatized and many blacks demurred out of pride. Now, however, “this attitude had undergone a radical change. These people now demand relief and become indignant when a worker presumes to question their eligibility.” Demanding that the Federal government bail out his local relief agency, Thomas Jablonski explained, “We are citizens of the United States, have been paying taxes … and are in dire need.”⁶⁰

The challenge to the code of deference was especially important to African-American protest. In 1931 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) forbade any expression of protest against the Scottsboro decision, a railroading of nine Southern black youths who allegedly raped two white women, except for the wearing of an anti-lynching button. This brought the NAACP leadership into conflict with younger militants like Ralph Bunche who believed the old-line organizations were “hopelessly bourgeois in their thinking and living. They pursued goals that evoked admiration from the Negro elite but left the masses of Negroes and their problem of daily bread untouched.”61 Later, in Detroit, Henry Ford worked with the older black community leadership, especially the churches, to provide jobs for black workers. As a result, Ford’s River Rouge complex had the largest concentration of black workers in the country, but when the CIO tried to organize Ford, black community leaders opposed the effort. Nevertheless, unionization proceeded, transforming shop floor relations, rolling back the power of the foremen and breaking the company spy system. As a result, the union moved to the center of leadership of the civil rights struggle in the black community. The CIO organization at Ford also moved the national NAACP in a more radical direction. In 1941 its then-leader, Walter White, joined the United Auto Workers’ call to support a strike at River Rouge, reversing the NAACP’s previous position.⁶²

Leftists spoke to the structural crisis in American capitalism through popular, democratic mobilization, and aimed to strengthen and solidify the New Deal’s commitment to social security and the organization of labor. They spoke to America’s identity crisis by building a new conception of the American nation, one that put industrial workers, immigrants, farmers, and sharecroppers at its center. While the exaltation of the “yeoman” goes back to Jefferson and Jackson, the Popular Front conception was different in that it foregrounded collective labor rather than small, widely dispersed property. Equally important, artists and writers were central to forging the imagined community of the nation. The Popular Front included a new relation between the artist and the society, one that rejected elitism and esoteric specialization.

The Popular Front artist did not conform to earlier romantic and modernist ideals of rebellious subjectivity. Rather, much of the art of the period has to be seen as a compact with the community. Artists painted murals in small-town post offices; orchestras performed in medium-sized industrial communities; theaters – including black, experimental and children’s – dramatized social problems for a newly created public.⁶³ Popular Front artists adorned the largest public works expansion in American history: “playgrounds and sports fields, public swimming pools and beaches, nature reserves and parks with picnic and camping areas, observation platforms, and outdoor landscapes.”⁶⁴ They publicized the government’s achievements, as at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), which was designed to allow for regular public visits to powerhouses and dams. Since the government paid writers and artists as a job-creating measure, the number or writers and artists expanded exponentially. The earlier idea of the artistic “genius” came into question.

Popular Front efforts to reimagine American identity were based on a valorization of the “common man.” Journalistic exposés, historical writing and preservation, the “proletarian” novel, social realist painting, film, and documentary flourished. Social realism produced a great age of photography and reform-minded exposés of chain gangs and poverty among sharecroppers, while also documenting African-American life. This body of work, writes Alfred Kazin, “testified to an extraordinary national self-scrutiny.”65 The “common man” theme also found expression in filmic art, as Charlie Chaplin metamorphosed from the solitary tramp of The Gold Rush (1925) to the immigrant of City Lights (1931) to the assembly line worker of Modern Times (1936) to the Jewish barber in The Great Dictator (1940). The Marx Brothers used the immigrant’s faulty command of English as a tool against authority: “Go, and never darken my towels again,” or “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” or (defying a lawyer in contract negotiations) “there is no sanity clause.”⁶⁶

The social realism of the thirties was based on a reading of class that grasped its subjective dimension. Growing up in poverty, Popular Front writers like Michael Gold, Henry Roth and Tillie Olsen “refracted the concerns of the Depression by writing about their parent’s difficult lives.”⁶⁷ Gold wrote: “I was born in a tenement … The sky above the airshafts was all my sky, and the voices of the tenement neighbors in the airshaft were the voices of all my world” or “you should have seen at twilight, after the day’s work, one of our pick-and-shovel wops [sic] watering his can of beloved flowers.”⁶⁸ The interpenetration of class and ethnicity paved the way for the literature of the fifties. Jewish writers, writes Morris Dickstein, were among the first to realize “how much of their identity and affective life they might have to surrender to the bland uniformity of the melting pot.”⁶⁹ Lionel Trilling wrote, “The discovery … of the Jewish situation had the effect of making society at last available to my imagination … Suddenly it began to be possible – better than that it began to be necessary – to think with categories that were charged with energy and that had the effect of assuring the actuality of the object thought about. One couldn’t, for example, think for very long about Jews without perceiving that one was using the category of social class.”70

Along with Jewish intellectuals, African-American intellectuals were a mainstay of what Michael Denning has called “the cultural front.” Black artists and writers like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Paul Robeson, and W. E. B. Du Bois began their involvement with the Communist Party because of the party’s role in organizing working-class blacks. Almost immediately, however, the appeal of Communism shifted from the critique of capitalism to the project of national cultural revival.⁷¹ “Of all the developments in the Soviet Union,” Richard Wright later recalled,

the way scores of backward peoples had been led to unity on a national scale was what had enthralled me. I had read with awe how the Communists had sent phonetic experts into the vast regions of Russia … I had made the first total emotional commitment of my life when I read how the phonetic experts had given these tongueless people, a language, newspapers, institutions. I had read how these forgotten folk had been encouraged to keep their old cultures, to see in their ancient customs meanings and satisfactions as deep as those contained in supposedly superior ways of living.⁷²

Complementing the changing vision of American identity, Marxism was revolutionized to take account of race. The two greatest Marxist works of the 1930s, W. E. B. Du Bois’s 1936 Black Reconstruction and C. L. R. James’s 1938 Black Jacobins, both argued that racial equality was the precondition for socialist revolution not, as earlier socialists and Communists had claimed, the consequence. As early as 1906 Du Bois had argued that the imposition of the color line on a world scale “transferred the reign of commercial privilege and extraordinary profit from the exploitation of the European working class to the exploitation of backward races under the political domination of Europe.” The wars unfolding in the thirties in Spain, Ethiopia, Manchuria and China bore this out. In 1948, James wrote, “The independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights, and is not led necessarily either by the organized labor movement or the Marxist party.”73 Civil rights, James was saying, was the really revolutionary path toward democratization. This was more or less the same line that Marx and Engels had taken in writing about the Civil War almost a hundred years earlier. Ultimately, democracy would lead to socialism, not the other way around.

The Communists’ grappling with race, like that of the abolitionists, was deeply personal. The Communists invented the term “white chauvinism.” Like the abolitionists, they “made special efforts to recruit blacks to their organizations and to promote them to leadership positions.” Who sat where at union meetings, who spoke and in what order, who socialized with whom: these were all subject to self-scrutinizing vigilance. More than any group of that era, the Communists “encouraged interracial dating, sex and marriage, believing that full extirpation of racial prejudice would only be achieved when love and sex freely crossed the color line.”⁷⁴ Swing music, a blend of African-American and European influences, was explicitly identified with the Popular Front. Benny Goodman began interracial recording in 1933, later integrating his quintet by hiring Lionel Hampton. White musicians like Artie Shaw and Charlie Barnet toured with black artists like Billie Holiday and Lena Horne. Pete Seeger worried that by concentrating on folk music he was not doing justice to jazz.

Overall, the second American left anticipated today’s multicultural understanding of American identity. In l849 Herman Melville wrote: “Settled by the people of all nations … We are not a nation, so much as a world.”⁷⁵ Until the Popular Front period, however, this boast was belied by WASP domination. “The Progressive mind,” wrote Richard Hofstadter, had been “a Protestant mind.” By contrast, the 1936 election signaled “a social revolution completing the overthrow of the Protestant Republic.”⁷⁶ The Popular Front, Steve Fraser summarized, “seemed to embody everything … that offended the pieties of Middle America: its gaudy cosmopolitanism, its ‘Jewishness,’ its flirtations with radicalism, its bureaucratic collectivism, its elevation of the new immigrant, its statism, its intellectual arrogance, and its racial egalitarianism.”⁷⁷ Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958) expressed the Popular Front’s openness to diversity. A collection of photos taken across the whole continent, it included prayer meetings, deserted mining towns, waitresses, crowds, billboards, flags, parades, barber shops, subway cars, highways, buses, out-of-work cowboys, street toughs, abandoned cars, and African-Americans in multiple settings. Published by Grove Press, with an accompanying text by Jack Kerouac, it also became a founding document of the New Left.

The anti-Communist arguments of the 1950s relegated the Popular Front artist to the role of propagandist. In fact, the Popular Front was a key moment in the evolution of the American artist, and in his or her understanding of subjectivity. Consider, in this regard, the career of Edmund Wilson. In 1932 Wilson finished writing Axel’s Castle, his history of modern poetry, which ends with the cul-de-sac to which avant-garde formalism and symbolism – that is, asocial interiority or subjectivity – had led. As he sent the book to his publisher, he began To the Finland Station, his powerful account of the origins of socialism. Wilson was a typical Popular Front intellectual in other respects. Having “grown up in the Big Business era,” he wrote, he found the atmosphere of the thirties “not depressing but stimulating. One couldn’t help being exhilarated by the sudden unexpected collapse of that stupid, gigantic fraud.”78 “Rather than foreclosing on the intellectual heritage of Bohemia, Greenwich Village, and Paris,” then, the Popular Front drew on the antibusiness critique of the previous decade, as well as its pioneering explorations of subjectivity and culture.⁷⁹

The conception of subjectivity at the heart of the Popular Front can be seen in James Agee and Walker Evans’s 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one of the era’s greatest achievements. Agee, who called himself “a Communist by sympathy and conviction,” insisted that his subjects, “rather than being average or representative types, were each unique: ‘a creature which has never in all time existed before and which shall never in all time exist again.’ ” Thus, his book

did not dramatize its subjects in their social role and show them as “sharecroppers” per se: disputing with their landlord, paying exorbitant prices at the plantation store, nor even (very much) working. Instead it recorded their [concrete, individual] lives: their meals, their traveling to work, their Saturday in town, their worrying about their kin, their posing for pictures, their going to bed and getting up.

According to the historian William Stott, Evans was very careful to protect his subjects’ sense of agency, their control over the camera and the photographer, in fact, “he records people when they are most themselves, most in command, as they impose their will on their environment.”80 What we do not learn about, however, is the inner lives of the sharecroppers, their conflicts, their thwarted desires, the duality of their existence, all that psychoanalysis was to bring into prominence in the next decade.

Instead, the Popular Front conception of subjectivity valorized commitment.⁸¹ The decision of the truly free individual for whom a political choice is ultimately an act of salvation – an idea that echoes abolitionism – not only led to Stalinism, but also anticipated postwar existentialism. In André Malraux’s Man’s Fate, a 1934 novel describing the failed Communist uprising against Chiang Kai-shek, Katov, a Japanese Communist, offers his suicide pill to two frightened young militants, about to be burnt alive in a locomotive engine. Malraux’s point of view, according to Alfred Kazin, was that of the committed intellectual “who serves the Revolution not in the illusion that man is perfectible, but in order to give value to his knowledge of death.”⁸² After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, when antifascism became the driving force for the second American left, the ideal became prominent on the left. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade, several thousand volunteers who joined the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, along with 30,000 other volunteers from throughout the world, exemplified it.

As with the convergence of abolitionism and Republicanism in the nineteenth century, the convergence of leftism and liberalism in the twentieth had an international dimension. After the Depression of 1929 every nation in Europe, including the Soviet Union, moved to the right. By contrast, the United States moved to the left, ultimately inspiring the Popular Fronts in France, Spain, and elsewhere. With the rise of Nazism and of Japanese militarism, Roosevelt, with the help of the left, began to nudge an isolationist country toward war. By 1940–1, the highpoint of Nazi power and the eve of Pearl Harbor, every nation in the world waited for the US entry, which all knew would determine the outcome. While the war involved the US in an alliance with the Soviet Union, which inevitably strengthened Stalin’s dictatorship, the alternative would have been far worse. Far from being something new in the world, Nazism, and Japanese expansionism, were based on the older principles of racial and ethnic domination against which, as we saw, the first American left emerged. After the war, US occupations helped democratize Germany and Japan, radically until the Cold War interrupted the process. Thus Marx and Engels’s prediction, that the abolition of slavery would launch the US on a democratic path with global consequences, was realized.

To be sure, the Communists’ defense of every twist and turn coming out of Stalin’s Russia, and their denials of the crimes that were obvious to all, disfigured the second American left. Many leftists, such as John Dewey or Sidney Hook, were passionately anti-Communist, and the Front, broadly conceived, included a vast number of independent Marxists, as well as émigré leftists. What distinguished the second American left, finally, was not that the Communists dominated it, which they did not, but that they were not excluded. Profoundly anti-Communist figures like the labor leader Sidney Hillman understood that exclusion would mean the self-destruction of the left and consistently fought to include Communists in the very parties, conventions, demonstrations, schools, radio stations, and other left activities that Communists sometimes tried to turn to their own purposes. A generation later the New Left’s refusal to join liberals in their anti-Communism was decisive for, and definitive of, the third American left. After years of anti-Communist militancy, the pacifist A. J. Muste came to “the deep and much searched conclusion of his soul that he personally would no longer eschew participation in radical activities which contained Communists.” “It was an historic moment,” wrote Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night, “the New Left was to a degree born of Muste’s decision.”83

Taken in the context of the New Deal state, the Popular Front’s reimagining of American identity amounted to a second refounding. Nevertheless, like the first effort, the second was inadequate. For one thing, in spite of the efforts of some leftists, the First New Deal had been complicit with Jim Crow. The Agricultural Adjustment Administration had acquiesced in the eviction of sharecroppers and tenants and the cheating of poorer farmers, often black, as wealthier white farmers administered the program. TVA’s model town, Norris, was not just segregated; it was all white. The NRA’s wage codes excluded those who worked in agriculture or in domestic service, which meant it excluded three-quarters of all blacks. Blacks referred to NRA as “Negroes Ruined Again” or “Negro Rights Abused.” As the black political scientist Ralph Bunche, the first person of color to win the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote, “The New Deal only serves to crystallize those abuses … [blacks] have long suffered under laissez-faire capitalism.”84

Nevertheless, the overall sense of empowerment created during the thirties meant that such oppressions and exclusions could be challenged, and that new paths could be forged in spite of the New Deal’s complicity with racial discrimination. Du Bois resigned from the NAACP in 1934, proposing instead black cooperatives based on socialist principles. What was required, he argued, was for blacks to cease patronizing white capitalist enterprises and turn their purchasing power to manufacturing and agricultural businesses owned by Negroes. Far from viewing this as “black capitalism,” Du Bois argued that the goal was not for individual blacks to become capitalists, but for the black community to become socialist. “There exists today a chance for the Negroes to organize a cooperative State within their own group,” he wrote in 1935. The starting point, however, was to organize within the New Deal: “credit unions, home mortgages, farmers’ credit and even industrial capital are available … Rail if you will against the race segregation here involved and condoned, but take advantage of it by planting secure centers of Negro cooperative effort and particularly of economic power.” Proper use of government resources, he continued, would make it possible for “Negro farmers [to] feed Negro artisans, and Negro technicians [to] build Negro home industries, and Negro thinkers [to] plan this integration of cooperation, while Negro artists dramatize and beautify the struggle.”⁸⁵

A. Philip Randolph, the socialist head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, also challenged the New Deal since, as he wrote, it “gave business interests the support of the state,” and left Southerners “in the saddle in the Nation’s capital.” Blacks, he insisted, should not “place their problems for solution down at the feet of their white sympathetic allies, which has been and is the common fashion of the old school of Negro leadership.” Instead, he concluded in 1937,

the task of realizing full citizenship for the Negro people is largely in the hands of the Negro people themselves … True liberation can be acquired and maintained only when the Negro people possess power, and power is the product and flower of organization – organization of the masses, the masses in the mills and mines, on the farms, in the factories.

In 1941 Randolph defied Roosevelt by organizing a March on Washington to protest discrimination in the defense industry. Randolph refused to call “upon our white friends to march with us. There are some things Negroes must do alone.” An all-black movement, he added, “helps break down the slavery psychology and inferiority complex in Negroes which comes … with Negroes relying on white people for direction and support.”86

For an example of how the Popular Front liberated black radicalism, consider the life of Anna Arnold Hedgeman. Born in Iowa in 1899, the daughter of a preacher, educator and temperance advocate, Anna Arnold was the first black student at Hamline University in Minnesota, but racial prejudice forced her to find a job teaching at an all-black school in Mississippi, where she developed a “deep hate” for Southern whites. In 1924 she began working for the Springfield, Ohio, Young Women’s Christian Association, a magnet for “young, idealistic, church-going women” interested in reform. As a “race woman,” Arnold felt she had two responsibilities: to “embody the very virtues that whites believed were inherently lacking in black culture,” and to inculcate those virtues into the downtrodden. With the Great Depression, Arnold moved to the Harlem YWCA, where she was moved by the words of Garvey: “No more fear, no more cringing, no more sycophantic begging and pleading.” By 1933, when she married, the nationalists had recast their politics under the influence of the Communist Party, the black-led trade unions, and “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” boycotts. In 1934 she went to work distributing welfare in a black neighborhood in which 55.6 percent of the families received relief. Rejecting the Communists’ atheism, but agreeing with their political analysis, she became a militant in the Communist-led National Negro Congress, agitating for black women’s economic opportunity and opening communication with other anticolonial struggles such as those of Mohandas Gandhi in India, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, and Haile Selassie in Ethiopia. Disturbed by Hedgeman’s regular appearance on picket lines, the Y expelled her, but she ended her career as the only woman on the steering council of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.87

The growth of black radicalism rebounded back on the New Deal. After the election of 1936 Roosevelt courted the black vote through patronage, relief, the creation of a “black cabinet” around the President, and the recognition in commissions, studies and speeches of racial inequality as a national problem. Eleanor Roosevelt worked against lynching and the poll tax, while Harold Ickes stipulated that all government contracts in the Public Works Administration hire blacks in proportion to their percentage in the population, and that public housing reserve space both for blacks and for joint black–white occupancy.⁸⁸ As we saw, a few years later when the Daughters of the Revolution refused to rent out their hall for a concert by the black soprano Marian Anderson, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned her membership and Ickes arranged for the concert to take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Meanwhile, the exploits of Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and Joe Louis, heavyweight champion from 1937 to 1949, began to “create a national consciousness of the black athlete as an American hero.”⁸⁹ In 1939 Roosevelt created the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department. By the end of World War Two, civil rights issues had gained national salience. Ten states had created Fair Employment Practice Commissions, several cities had laws against job bias, and in the South black labor was on the verge of an organizing breakthrough.⁹⁰ The eruption of McCarthyism after the war not only destroyed the Communists, and turned the labor unions into bastions of reaction, it also destroyed the civil rights breakthroughs of the Popular Front period. It took fifteen years to get back to the consciousness of race that the country had achieved by 1945.

The women’s question was also transformed in the later phases of the Popular Front. New Deal women reformers such as Molly Dewson, head of the women’s division of the Democratic Party, tended to conform to an earlier uplift model that preached the need to humanize industry or to bring a moral tone to politics. By contrast, the generation of feminists that emerged during and immediately after World War Two broke with the ideal of sentimental womanhood. They criticized the National Industrial Recovery Act, which had sanctioned lower wage rates for women than for men in the same occupations; they criticized social security, which excluded domestic and agricultural jobs, thereby excluding many women; they criticized the Civilian Conservation Camps, which were originally set up for men alone and paid women at half the wage rate when women’s camps were added. They criticized the CIO’s emphasis on mass production organizing which left many centers of women’s work, notably clerical work, unorganized. And they protested the fact that although there were many successful strikes among women workers in the 1930s, women were sent home from the sit-down strikes in order to avoid accusations of sexual promiscuity. As Popular Front institutions politicized the home and the neighborhood, women organized women’s councils, neighborhood committees, meat boycotts, rent strikes, and eviction protests.

The true ascendancy of Popular Front feminism occurred during and immediately after the war. The 1940s witnessed the growth of the League of Women Shoppers, the Women’s Trade Union League, and the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom. The Jefferson School of Social Science, established in New York City “as an expression of [the] view that Marxism was a legitimate doctrine neglected by the conventional schools,” was an early center for courses and research on women.91 The Congress of American Women, with 250,000 members, was the most important Popular Front organization of progressive women. Founded immediately after World War Two, in part as a reaction to the Nazi emphasis on Kinder, Küche, and Kirche, its leaders were among the founding figures of second wave feminism.⁹² Under the influence of the Congress, Communists and other progressive feminists gradually abandoned the position that only working-class women were oppressed and “embraced the idea that women’s oppression affected all women, regardless of their class or color.”⁹³ Women in the Congress invented many of the concerns and even the vocabulary later employed by New Left feminism, such as the relation of women’s oppression to class, the oppressive division of labor within the household, the “special problems of the Negro woman,” and the “triple burden” faced by black women, that is, race, class and gender. As in the case of civil rights, the Congress was red-baited out of existence in 1950.

Betty Friedan was a product of the Popular Front. She came from a highly politicized Popular Front family and attended Smith College where one of her favorite courses was Economics 319 taught by Dorothy Wolff Douglas, a lesbian and socialist activist, who taught her utopian socialism, labor history and socialist thought, and whose research debunked the idea that women worked for “pin money.” Friedan spent the summer after her junior year at Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a Popular Front organization, founded in 1932 as a training ground for American radicals, communitarians and nonviolent activists. During the war, she studied psychology with Erik Erikson at Berkeley at a time when Erikson was seeking to “unreify” (Friedan’s word) Freudian categories, that is, situate them socially. In the early 1950s she became a labor journalist for the United Electrical Workers, the most communist of all the CIO unions. Women workers, she wrote in her 1952 pamphlet UE Fights for Women Workers, “refuse any longer to be paid or treated as some inferior species by their bosses, or by any male workers who have swallowed the bosses’ thinking.”94 After her marriage she lived in Parkway Village in Queens, a typical Popular Front suburb, which boasted a coop nursery, organized reading groups, regular political activity, and sophisticated political discussions. From these experiences she derived her core insight, namely that the most devastating problem women faced was isolation within the home. Nevertheless, her 1963 The Feminine Mystique, organized around this insight, did not mention the Popular Front, understandably given the nearly two decades of McCarthyism that had intervened.

Let us conclude. Like slavery, industrial capitalism challenged America’s egalitarian republican ideals. While this challenge was apparent in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, precipitating the Populist, Labor, Progressive and Socialist movements, it mushroomed into a full-scale crisis in the Great Depression. The crisis had a structural dimension in that the capitalist system could not go on without fundamental reforms. But it also had an identity dimension, meaning that the reforms had to be inflected with an egalitarian meaning if the country’s core identity was to survive and prosper. A second American left appeared in response to the crisis. Just as the abolitionists interpreted the dismantling of slavery through the lens of racial equality, so the leftists of the thirties refracted the New Deal state through the prism of social equality. What the left added to the modern administrative planning state was the insistence on mass democratic mobilization, which reflected the principle of workingclass agency. In thus inflecting the structural resolution of the crisis with the ideal of social equality, the left spoke to the crisis – the turning point – provoked by the Depression. Like their predecessors during the Civil War, they undertook a refounding, a deepening of the meaning of American nationhood to include social equality. During World War Two, as the nation turned into a mass consumption society, the idea of economic growth tended to supplant the idea of social equality. This did not mean, however, that the achievements of the second American left were obliterated. Subsequent generations were able to uphold social equality, even as they upheld racial equality, against powerful forces that sought to undermine it.