4 4 The New Deal and Popular Movements
During the Great Depression many vibrant social movements arose, contributing to a profound critique of American society and exerting pressure for change in government and corporate spheres. Indeed, the 1930s was not only a decade of Great Depression but also of great dissent. The interest here is not only in the character and range of these popular movements, but in how the New Deal both responded and influenced them, and in the closely related issue of their impact on the New Deal and public policy.
This is a difficult task for several reasons, an obvious one being that policies are multi-determined. Among the influences on federal government policies, in addition to popular movements, were: the views of the “slightly left of center” New Deal president himself;1 FDR’s advisors such as the Brain Trust and members of his administration; elected representatives from the South intent on preserving white supremacy and the region’s low-wage economy; members of Congress who proposed Progressive policies during and prior to the New Deal; liberal business leaders; conservative business leaders; local and state government officials; public opinion; and combinations of these. Some of these actors, of course, were influenced by popular movements. In addition to social protest, the prolonged and largely unrelieved deprivation wrought by the Depression gave rise to disorderly group behavior such as the widespread looting of food and a consequent need to restore political, economic, and social order.2
Direct evidence of policymakers’ response to particular organizations or protests is sought. However, because political élites may not admit they are responding to pressure, particularly from disorderly or radical lower-income groups, making these connections risks committing a post hoc fallacy. Another problem is the frequent failure of general historians of the New Deal to downplay or even denigrate radical-led organizations; on the other hand, writers on the left may tend to exaggerate the size and impact of such movements.
This chapter attempts to identify the effect on New Deal policies of movements by and on behalf of unemployed workers; jobless workers who sought relief qua veterans; employed workers; black workers; the elderly; tenant farmers; and middle- and lower-income persons seeking a more equitable distribution of income and wealth, sometimes referred to as “levelers.”
Poor people typically lack resources for organized protest—other than their numbers and the urgency of their need. This weakness can be overcome by using the resources of radical organizations.3 Following the stock market crash of 1929, some unemployed men and women initiated action on their own behalf, but many who sought relief, perhaps most, were aided by radical organizations that offered leaders, money, and strategies. “Throughout America in the early 1930s unemployed workers, sometimes under the leadership of radical activists,… sometimes on their own initiative, formed a variety of local jobless associations aimed at meeting the staggering individual and societal problems of Depression unemployment.”4 Communists were the first to aid the unemployed and the most active in the early years following the stock market crash of 1929.5 In time, other radical groups provided these resources: the Workers’ Committees organized by members of the Socialist Party and other groups of socialists and the Unemployed Leagues led by the left-wing labor minister, labor educator, and activist A. J. Muste.6 However, most members of unemployed organizations were not politically affiliated, much less radical.7 According to Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, this was “the largest organization of the unemployed this country has ever known.”8
Only a few months after the stock market crash, demonstrations by the unemployed took place in almost every important American industrial and commercial center, some involving serious and violent clashes with the authorities.9 Although the Communist press probably exaggerated when it claimed that “millions” demonstrated on March 6, 1930, large numbers did take part, many of them at the instigation of the local Unemployed Councils (UC).10 According to Irving Bernstein, “Bleeding heads converted unemployment from a little-noticed to a page-one problem in every important city in the United States. No one could any longer afford to ignore it.”11 Although violence raised people’s consciousness of the problem, it could also be a deterrent to participation. Among the “formidable barriers” faced by the movement were “persistent and often violent repression by government.…”12 On the other hand, sociologist Steve Valocchi maintains, repression was not “the dominant response,” and the successes of the movement are due not only to its attributes but to a government that could have repressed it but did not.13 Yet, there is ample evidence of violence at the local level, particularly if protesters were identified with Communists, and, in some cases, there was a combination of both brutality and concession by local officials.14
The goals of the radical organizers went way beyond relief and even reform, for they viewed the organizations as “transmission belts” to Communist Party membership and commitment to revolutionary goals.15 Yet, in order to build a movement, it was necessary to address the immediate, urgent needs of the unemployed for relief and protection against evictions and foreclosures. The array of strategies included direct resistance to eviction, sit-ins at relief centers, resolution of grievances, and local, state, and national hunger marches.16 Communists in Chicago led, organized, or participated in 2,080 mass demonstrations in the first five years of the Depression.17 In New York, in less than six months in 1931, a Workers Committee formed by Socialists and independent organizers “sprouted into a citywide movement of over 10,000 unemployed; within a year it flowered into sixty locals and 25,000 members.”18
Direct relief of suffering was the chief activity of the organizations that arose throughout the country, but from the start, federal unemployment insurance and federal appropriations for relief were goals for which movement organizations lobbied at city and state levels.19 The unemployed movement contributed to a revival of interest in unemployment insurance.20 Significant, particularly in view of virulent racism in the 1930s, was the priority that Communist-led groups gave to interracial councils. Indeed, in some Southern cities, the Unemployed Councils were the first interracial organizations in the area.21
Roy Rosenzweig, who has studied the organizations led by Communists, Socialists, and Musteites, writes that “Easily two million jobless workers engaged in some form of activism at some time in the thirties, and their participation affected not only their own outlook, but also how society looked at and treated them.”22 Still, Rosenzweig holds that, despite the heroism and imagination of radical leaders, it was “neither a revolutionary force nor even a truly mass movement.” He estimates that the active membership never included even one percent of the unemployed at the height of the Depression.23 Writing specifically of Chicago, Lizabeth Cohen recognizes that actual rank-and-file members of the Communist and Socialist unemployed movements were relatively few, but that when an action such as a hunger march took place, many more joined in. “Even those who stood on the sidelines, because they were employed or wary of joining a ‘radical’ cause, were influenced by the strategies and demands of the more militant.”24 In considering membership in unemployed organizations, one should bear in mind the inherent barriers to organizing the unemployed: their tendency toward blaming themselves rather than the economy for their condition, loss of self-confidence, the deterrent effect of militant strategies or of being labeled “Red” or subversive, and the potential for violence already mentioned.25 In any case, social protest of this sort is probably never a majority phenomenon, and it is hard to say how large the numbers of activists, how frequent the actions, and how skilled the strategists need to be in order to have a “truly mass movement” and one with a significant influence on public policy.
Before the New Deal, the major gains of the unemployed movement were raising public consciousness of the extent and devastation of unemployment, stopping evictions, increasing relief levels, and adding rent allowances to relief benefits. In the cities he visited, wrote one author of a magazine article, the amount of relief was proportionate to the strength of the Unemployed Councils.26 The movement had some success in reversing cutbacks. For example, a hunger march of 50,000 in Chicago in October 1932 forced the rescinding of an announced 50 percent reduction in relief.27 According to the editors of Fortune: “… the sharp rise in relief expenditures … is due more than you might think to Communist agitation. By mass demonstrations, stubborn, insistent and vociferous protests, the Unemployed Councils … have indeed improved the lot of the jobless.”28
Since municipalities lacked sufficient resources to meet the mounting needs that the unemployed movements were forcing them to address, city governments exerted pressure on higher levels of governments for funds. In fact, the National Conference of Mayors was established in 1932 with the express purpose of lobbying for federal relief, and immediately after its founding, a delegation of big-city mayors was dispatched to Washington to lobby federal officials.29 Thus the mayors became “lobbyists for the poor.”30
Beginning in 1931 with New York under then-governor Franklin Roosevelt, the states responded to the need and the inability of local governments to meet it by opening up their own limited coffers. It is not clear how much FDR was influenced by the unemployed movement to initiate the state’s Temporary Emergency Relief Administration (TERA), although New York City was a hotbed of unemployed protest, and Roosevelt later claimed that as governor he had resisted pressure to call out the National Guard.31 Directed by future federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins, TERA was a state-level version of the subsequent New Deal Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA).32 By 1933, the majority of states had followed New York’s lead,33 but their resources, too, were limited.
Judging by the revolutionary aims of its radical organizers, New Deal historian Irving Bernstein considers the unemployed movement a failure: “Its principal achievement was to raise relief standards in some communities and to hasten the coming of federal relief.”34 That, however, seems like quite an accomplishment from the perspective of the unemployed and public policy.35 One historian of labor in the twentieth century holds that when Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, his decision to provide direct relief was influenced by the insurgency of the organized unemployed.36 Other writers have noted that experience with the organizations of the unemployed prepared some participants for other movement activity, particularly in the labor struggles of the New Deal era.37 “Many organizers in the CIO,” according to Cohen, “would come directly out of the unemployed movement.”38
To Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, one of FDR’s closest advisors, the case for federal relief was compelling, and the reasons included indirect consequences of the unemployment movement:
It is hard today to reconstruct the atmosphere of 1933 and to evoke the terror caused by unrelieved poverty and prolonged unemployment. The funds of many states and localities were exhausted. The legal debt limit of many states had been reached, and they could borrow no more, even for so urgent a matter as relief. The situation was grim in city, county, and state. Public welfare officers had reached the end of their rope.… The Federal Government and its taxing power were all one could think of.39
Further, Perkins recalled: “Hunger marchers were on parade. Food riots were becoming more common. Crime, born of the need for food, clothing, and other necessities of life, was on the upsurge.”40 Thus the magnitude of need, depleted local and state resources, partly the result of relief expansion achieved by agitation of the unemployment movement, and disorder played a part in the unprecedented assumption of relief by the federal government.
Most writers emphasize a decline in movement activity in response to New Deal relief, but Albert Prago presents a different picture of the early years: the inadequacy of early New Deal reforms prompted “mounting protests involving large numbers of people and with the organizations of the unemployed mushrooming.” During the period from 1933 to 1935, there were militant daily struggles at relief bureaus that were met with police brutality.41 According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), “time and again strikes and demonstrations on F.E.R.A. [Federal Emergency Relief Administration] projects have resulted in the adjustment of unfair wage-scales and stopping discrimination.”42 When the brief but large Civil Works Administration was terminated after four months, there was a considerable outcry from numerous sources, a march led by Socialist leader Norman Thomas, 60,000 protest letters, strikes and demonstrations by CWA workers, but to no avail. Roosevelt, under pressure from Southern Democrats and Budget Director Lewis Douglas, and worried about the cost of the CWA, did not bow to pro-CWA forces.43
Despite continuing to agitate, the Communists, according to Prago, “simply did not have the resources in manpower and finance, to provide the necessary leadership for the many millions scattered in so vast an area.”44 Moreover, the movement lost some of its ablest members who were among the first to get work when unemployment abated, while others became labor organizers with the resurgence of the labor movement.45 Yet, by early 1935, the UCs claimed to have chartered 859 units in forty-two states, with 300,000 carrying membership cards, plus scores of affiliated organizations that issued their own cards.46 Both an indication of continued protest and New Deal respect, if not encouragement, is what the WPA’s labor relations director had to say early in 1936: “They are irreconcilable … because they never stop asking.… They crowd through the doors of every relief station and of every WPA office. They surround social workers in the street. They exhibit the American spirit of determination.…”47
The fight for unemployment insurance, one of the early demands of the unemployed movement, was an important focus of the left in this early period. In a personal communication to Piven and Cloward, who saw lobbying as a departure from the movement’s earlier militancy, Herbert Benjamin, leader of the UCs, maintained that theirs was not the usual approach to lobbying, that they engaged in “mass lobbying … angry delegations besieging reactionary members of Congress in their offices. We marched and picketed and were arrested.”48
Early in 1934, Representative Ernest Lundeen (Farm Labor–Wisconsin) introduced the first version of what was known popularly as the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill—a federal bill, financed by general revenues, available to all the unemployed regardless of need, and administered under a democratic plan with local representation by recipients. The Interprofessional Association for Social Insurance, founded at the time that Lundeen introduced his bill in 1934, had twenty-one chapters within a year, one in every major city in the Northeast but also in the Midwest and far West. In January 1935, a national conference in Washington convened to support Lundeen’s Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill; it was composed of 2,506 elected delegates from trade unions, including 742 AFL locals, scores of unemployment organizations, African-American organizations and social work groups.49 Inserted in the record of House of Representatives hearings on the Lundeen bill was a list of original sponsors that included 3,000 local unions, over sixty city councils, county and municipal bodies, and hundreds of clubs and fraternal organizations.50 In testimony before the House Committee on Labor, Herbert Benjamin of the Unemployed Councils said his office had published over a million copies of the bill and sold them at two dollars a thousand to organizations that distributed them free to individuals, and over 650,000 postcards in favor of the bill were sold for $1.50 per thousand for mass distribution.51 The bill was supported by the House Committee on Labor, but through maneuvers of the administration, never went to the House floor.52 According to Seymour, it had not the remotest chance of passing. Dona and Charles Hamilton write that conservative Republicans helped to get it out of the Labor Committee and added amendments, hoping this would render social security legislation unacceptable to the majority of Congress.53
University of Chicago economist Paul Douglas, later a Democratic Senator from Illinois, wrote that the Communists were initially the “main driving force” behind the Lundeen bill but that many non-Communists came to support it because it was “the most thorough-going and adequate proposal … for taking care of the unemployed.” Douglas further observed that although the AFL officially opposed it, support came from many city federations and a much larger number of local unions and “by a surprisingly large number of social workers.”54
Unemployment insurance, as adopted by the Social Security Act, however, fell far short of the demands of the left. It was Douglas’s position that the radical proposal of the left had “enabled the administration forces to say to the indifferent and conservatives that unless they accepted the moderate program put forth by the administration, they might later be forced to accept the radical and far-reaching provisions of the Lundeen bill.” In short, Douglas pointed out, it was the traditional strategy of the center using the left “as a club against the right.”55
In the early New Deal years, unemployed workers, in a remarkable show of solidarity with their employed brothers and sisters, lent support in some of the decade’s critical strikes. For example, the Musteite Unemployed Leagues played a central role in the Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, where they organized workers, not to get relief and jobs for themselves, but to engage in mass picketing to help striking workers.56 Largely under Socialist control, the Milwaukee Workers’ Committee on Unemployment sent 13,000 unemployed workers into the picket lines just as the 1934 Milwaukee Streetcar Strike was on the verge of collapse.57 In the Minneapolis General Drivers’ strike of 1934, there was “extraordinary activity in the unemployed field involving jobless union members, direct relief clients and WPA workers.”58
What leading historians have to say of the movement after the advent of the New Deal is more characteristic of the Workers Alliance of America (WAA) that united the formerly rivalrous unemployed workers organizations in 1936. According to Rosenzweig, “The New Deal did not wipe out the problems of the unemployed, but the small gains and the more optimistic tone of Roosevelt’s administration … probably helped to pacify some jobless and made them less likely recruits for the Leagues [the Unemployed Leagues led by A. J. Muste].”59 Piven and Cloward hold that “more liberal relief machinery … diverted local groups from disruptive tactics and absorbed local leaders into bureaucratic roles.”60 Each year, according to one study that reported fewer sit-ins, strikes, and picket lines, there was “a gradual evolution from the position of a purely conflict group to an organized and responsible relationship with the authorities.”61 There is another explanation as well. Recognizing Roosevelt’s popularity and that jobless workers put their trust in FDR more than in the radical left, WAA leaders, according to Rosenzweig, felt the need to develop a sympathetic relationship with FDR and the New Deal and to gently prod it toward incremental improvements. The Popular Front mentality no doubt contributed to Communists’ rapprochement with other radical groups as well as with the New Deal. The result was a “symbiotic relationship” between the WAA and the New Deal, including not only WPA administrators but Roosevelt himself.62 According to WAA’s chairman David Lasser and its executive secretary Herbert Benjamin, Roosevelt liked having an organization pushing from the left for support of his programs to counter the inevitable pressure from the right.63 Indicative of the friendly relationship between the WAA and WPA administrators, Harry Hopkins and Aubrey Williams, was the recognition of the WAA as the bargaining representative of WPA workers. The right to strike, however, was contested.64
Local protest, if diminished, nonetheless continued after the merger that created the WAA. For example, five thousand hunger marchers entered the New Jersey legislature in protest over cutbacks in August 1936, and a similar action took place in the Pennsylvania state capitol. Later that year, short “folded arms strikes” for a “living wage” were conducted by the WAA in WPA projects throughout the country.65 Despite the “symbiotic relationship” with New Dealers, the WAA greeted the announced cutbacks and firing of 475,000 WPA workers late in 1936 with a wave of protest actions, sit-downs, sit-ins, stoppages, picketing, demonstrations, mass meetings, delegations to city officials, resolutions, and telegrams to Congress, the president, and Harry Hopkins. To oppose the cutbacks, the U.S. Conference of Mayors called a special meeting in Washington and sent telegrams to the president. The mass layoffs were called off. Once again, the support of local officials was important to the unemployed movement.66 Although Karsh and Garman write that the WAA moved increasingly away from organizing the unemployed and “job actions” and toward lobbying for legislation to protect the unemployed, they note that as late as 1939 it mounted a nationwide strike of WPA workers protesting cutbacks and layoffs on relief projects.67
In 1938, the WAA was attacked by the Dies Committee (House Committee for Investigation of Un-American Activities) for being under Communist domination. FDR thought that if there were a chance to save the WAA, “liberals should make the fight and not simply withdraw,” and wrote as much to Aubrey Williams, deputy WPA director. On the letter was a handwritten comment by Eleanor Roosevelt: “FDR wld [sic] like to see Dave Lasser change name & purge communists who put Russia first.”68 This would seem to indicate that Roosevelt did find the WAA a useful WPA ally. Williams, it should be noted, had spoken admiringly of Lasser and the WAA, and for this and other examples of outspokenness he paid dearly—in Roosevelt’s unwillingness, despite exemplary service, to appoint him to succeed Hopkins as WPA director.69
The thousands of veterans who descended on Washington, D.C., in the late spring of 1932 demanded a different form of relief from the organizations that represented all unemployed workers, but they were in similar states of joblessness and destitution. They sought a special form of relief for veterans, an advance on bonuses (Adjusted Compensation Certificates) that were not due until 1945; their future bonus was the only asset most of them had.70 Compared to ongoing relief for millions of unemployed workers, including veterans, theirs was a small order. Two-thirds were entitled to about $1,000, according to an estimate of the Veterans Administration.71 The veterans did not call for relief for all the unemployed and were, in fact, criticized for the narrowness of their focus.72 Yet this “Bonus Army” (Bonus Expeditionary Force or B.E.F) and its violent rout by the U.S. Army did much to dramatize the plight of the jobless, and contributed to the election of Franklin Roosevelt or the size of his triumph and perhaps to the New Deal’s federal relief policies. Whereas most other protests by poor people depended on outside resources, the B.E.F. was largely a spontaneous phenomenon. Communists, trying to take credit for originating what was a “ready-made revolutionary engine,” staged a march to the Capitol.73 They were, however, reviled by most of their fellow veterans.74
The march to Washington was sparked by a bill introduced by Representative Wright Patman (D-Texas) providing for immediate payment at full maturity value of bonuses otherwise not due until 1945. The first contingent set out from Oregon:
Early in May 1932, some World War veterans in Portland, Oregon, contemplated the fact that the one nest egg they had left was the government’s promise of payments on … the bonus for their wartime services.… If the money was really theirs, why should they not have it when they needed it? Tired of watching their children grow pale on a diet of stale doughnuts and black coffee, tired of community neglect, tired of official gabble, tired, above all of waiting, the men in Portland decided to bring their plight home to the country by marching on Washington. They chose as leader an unemployed cannery superintendent and former World War sergeant named Walter Waters … who had not worked for eighteen months. Under his command, the group set out, riding the rods and living on handouts along the way. Its principles were “no panhandling, no drinking, no radicalism.” …75
A confrontation with the Illinois National Guard over their trying to board a Baltimore and Ohio freight train in Illinois—“the Battle of the B & O”—became a front-page story,76 evidently encouraging other veterans to follow the Oregon vanguard to the nation’s capital.
Bernstein refers to the gathering of an estimated 22,000 veterans and family members in Washington to lobby and demonstrate on behalf of the Patman bill as “a remarkable display of jobless transiency.”77 It was to be “the most explosive demonstration that Washington had ever experienced.”78 On May 19, the first contingent of 300 from Oregon arrived; “a flood tide of servicemen followed.”79 Theirs was no one-day march. According to Waters: “We are going to stay until the veterans’ bill is passed.”80 Theirs was a “new kind of lobbying” combining public demonstrations with an energetic and persistent presence in the halls and galleries of the Capitol.81 The House of Representatives passed the Patman bill by a large margin, but it was defeated overwhelmingly in the Senate. Herbert Hoover was against special treatment for veterans, as were FDR, then running against him for the presidency, and liberals like Republican Fiorello LaGuardia of New York, who held that ex-servicemen had been treated generously by Congress and that it should consider the plight of millions of other equally needy unemployed men and women.82
There remain questions regarding Hoover’s assent to police action resulting in the killing of two veterans and the subsequent violent eviction by tear gas and bayonets of unemployed veterans by the United States Army under General Douglas MacArthur. MacArthur and Secretary of War Patrick Hurley justified the brutal attack on the nation’s impoverished veterans as putting down a Communist conspiracy. President Hoover, for his part, expressed relief that the “Red plot” had been checked.83
Although agreeing with Hoover regarding early payment of the bonus, FDR disagreed sharply with his handling of the protest (but refrained from commenting publicly about his opponent’s behavior). At the time, FDR told Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell his views concerning the use of force that were already noted. “Suppression,” he held, was “not good enough.”84 Instead, he said he would have given them jobs developing the Shenandoah National Park and would have hoped to stimulate states and municipalities to offer similar types of jobs in public works.85 Roosevelt believed that his election had been made much more likely by the eviction of the veterans.86 “It is probable,” writes Irving Bernstein, that “no act of Hoover’s proved so unpopular as his decision to drive out the BEF.”87
Early in the New Deal, a second bonus march, largely in response to cuts in veterans’ disability payments resulting from FDR’s Economy Act of 1933, descended on Washington. Roosevelt clearly controlled their protest, but he did follow his dictum that suppression was not good enough. He issued a regulation barring loitering in public parks or grounds and located the veterans in a camp at some distance from the city. He drove out to the camp, waving his hat at them, and asked Mrs. Roosevelt and his close aide Louis Howe to visit the camp and be sure to bring coffee. In one of her early acts as First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, apologizing that she could bring them no news about their bonuses, waded through the mud to speak with the veterans and brought sandwiches in addition to coffee as well as uplifting talk about her gratitude for those who had served their country.88 Thereafter the veterans met regularly with presidential assistant Howe.89 FDR rid Washington of the veterans by offering them free transportation home or jobs in the Emergency Conservation Works, a forerunner of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Encouraged by FDR, most of the marchers took the jobs, and others were transported home.90 The veterans did get their bonuses but did not have the New Deal President to thank for them. A New Deal Congress voted for it in 1936, overriding FDR’s veto. It has been suggested that the fear of another army of unemployed veterans was one of the motives for the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (G.I. Bill) that provided cash allowances, tuition for higher educations and other benefits that removed World War II veterans from the ranks of the jobless.91
The Depression decade began with union membership at a low ebb. In 1930, union density was 12 percent, membership having fallen by about 1.7 million since the end of World War I.92 (This is about the proportion of the work force that belonged to unions in 2007 when the Great Recession began.)
Government did much to wake up the nation’s labor movement. The Norris-La Guardia Act of May 1932, the initiative of two progressive Republicans, outlawed “yellow-dog” contracts or pledges that employees would not join a union and restricted the use of federal court injunctions against strikes, picketing, and boycotts.93 The next important step was a New Deal measure, Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act of 1933. The Act gave something to both business and labor in order to encourage cooperation that would facilitate recovery. Section 7a gave labor collective bargaining rights. William Green, President of the American Federation of Labor, called Section 7(a) “a Magna Charta for labor.”94 John L. Lewis, President of the United Mine Workers (UMW), Sidney Hillman of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) recognized the significance of Section 7(a) and responded by launching vigorous organizing drives and other militant actions. “The resurgence of union activity … was mobilized by the industrial unions with the strongest fighting traditions, the miners and the garment workers.”95 Lewis compared Section 7(a) to the Emancipation Proclamation and committed the UMW’s entire treasury to the drive.96 According to Bernstein, this New Deal measure was “the spark that rekindled the spirit of unionism within American labor.”97 A UMW official described the fantastic response of the miners: They “moved into the union en masse.… They organized themselves for all practical purposes.”98
Resistance to Section 7(a) by capital was enormous. Where employers responded to 7(a) by establishing company unions, the law was actually a setback for resurgent unionism.99 Senator Robert Wagner (D-New York) who headed the National Labor Board established by Roosevelt to oversee the implementation of 7(a) became discouraged with the Board’s insufficient authority. Convinced that enforceable rules were necessary for the guarantee of collective bargaining rights, he proposed the National Labor Relations Act, which would not only grant the right to collective bargaining, but establish administrative machinery with quasi-judicial powers to implement it. The Board would be a permanent independent agency to conduct elections that would determine appropriate bargaining units and outlaw “unfair labor practices” such as company unions, discharging workers for union activities, or refusing to bargain with workers.100 FDR and Labor Secretary Perkins were initially cool to the NLRA, and Perkins wrote that it was not part of FDR’s program, that “all the credit goes to Senator Wagner.”101 As Bernstein points out, “Roosevelt had more confidence in the power of the state to promote the welfare of wage earners than he had in their capacity to do so themselves by means of trade unions,” and this point of view was either shared with Perkins or reflects her influence.102 It should be noted that despite the fact that over the decade labor became a part of the New Deal coalition, the right of workers to organize and bargain collectively was not included in FDR’s 1944 proposal for an Economic Bill of Rights.103
Why did Roosevelt suddenly throw the weight of his influence behind the NLRA? Leuchtenburg writes that the reasons were “not wholly clear.”104 The background of resistance to unionization on the part of capital and the bitter, intensive, numerous, and violent labor strikes during 1934 and 1935 may have influenced his decision to support the NLRA, whose proponents argued it would reduce such conflicts and facilitate recovery.105 The bill had already passed the Senate by a huge majority of 63–12 and had been reported out of the House Committee. Roosevelt did make the decision before the Supreme Court ruled the NRA unconstitutional, thus ending Section 7(a), although he may have anticipated the decision from the Court’s ruling against the Railroad Retirement Act a little earlier.106
Along with other Progressive labor leaders, Lewis urged the AFL to expand the labor movement by organizing on an industrial union rather than on a crafts basis. The AFL, evidently preferring to have control of a small organization rather than to lose it in one double or triple the size, refused.107 Another reason was longstanding disdain for the less skilled workers by the craft unionists and related snobbery and nativism.108 Lewis and other Progressive labor leaders like Sidney Hillman and Philip Murray left the AFL and formed the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which sought to organize the unorganized in the mass production industries.109 This was enormously important for the nation’s semi-skilled and unskilled industrial workers and, because the CIO organized interracial unions, for black workers as well. It was the CIO, pushed ahead by militant rank and file members, that led the drives that won collective bargaining rights in the nation’s leading mass-production industries. In the Minneapolis Teamster strike, local unionists had proceeded in opposition to their national union, and in the general strike in San Francisco, conservative national leaders were overruled by the militant members of the longshoremen’s union.110
Employers resisted the Wagner Act on the grounds that they expected it to be declared unconstitutional, and militant labor groups for their part took the law into their own hands with a spate of sit-down strikes shortly after FDR’s second-term victory. When courageous rank and file workers at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, sat down without Lewis’s authorization, he nonetheless supported them to the hilt.111 In the critical showdown at Flint, Roosevelt and Perkins refused to condemn the sit-down. Instead, they supported the efforts of Michigan’s governor, Frank Murphy, to achieve a peaceful settlement and to delay the enforcement of a court order to end the strike.112 The result was a momentous victory for the labor movement: recognition of the United Auto Workers as the company’s bargaining unit by General Motors (GM), then the largest corporation in the world. It was “the most important single strike confrontation of the century.…”113 Following on its heels was another great accomplishment, union recognition by the United States Steel Corporation. Roosevelt subsequently explained why he acted as he did: “Little do people realize how I had to take abuse and criticism for inaction at the time of the Flint strike. I believed and I was right, that the country, including labor would learn the lesson of their own volition without having it forced upon them by marching troops.”114
In a press conference with newspaper publishers soon after the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act was upheld by the Supreme Court, Roosevelt was asked why he had not spoken out against what one of the publishers described as “an epidemic of sit-downs.” The President acknowledged that the sit-downs were illegal but held that both sides had made mistakes. He predicted that “we are going to get a workable system but we won’t get it by antagonism and threats and demands.” The labor people, he observed, were beginning to realize that sit-downs were wrong, that they were “damn unpopular” and that “labor cannot get very far if it makes itself unpopular with the bulk of the population of the country.” It would take time to realize this, “perhaps two years, but that is short time in the life of a nation.…”115
Roosevelt’s restraint in aid of the labor movement could be seen as reciprocating labor’s substantial support for his candidacy in 1936. However, soon after, FDR failed even to condemn the violence in the Memorial Day massacre at Republic Steel that resulted in the fatal shooting of ten marchers and the wounding of twenty-eight more.116 Roosevelt took a neutral stance in relation to the drive to organize the Republic plant, making the oft-quoted remark at a press conference that “The majority of the people are saying just one thing, a plague on both your houses.” That was usually reported as if this were his own opinion.117 He had rejected Perkins’s advice to intervene.118 According to Lewis’s biographers, Dubofsky and Van Tine, Roosevelt, having been warned by advisors that he had little to gain, “acted as he did for good political reasons.”119 This one could infer from his remark concerning public attitudes toward the strike. It was, however, interpreted by Lewis as a betrayal of the heavy UMW support for his presidential campaign: “It ill behooves one who has supped at labor’s table … to curse with equal fervor and fine impartiality both labor and its adversaries when they become locked in deadly embrace.”120 The CIO failed to unionize “Little Steel” (a term that refers to steel companies other than the United States Steel Corporation), thanks partly to FDR’s hands-off policy. The “Roosevelt Recession,” moreover, contributed to labor’s loss of steam that began with the failure at Republic. In the ensuing years, the Democratic Party would fail to reciprocate labor’s consistent support.
The relationship of the New Deal to the labor movement in the late 1930s is a complicated one. It involves the rivalry between the AFL and the CIO, a business counterattack, and a Red-baiting campaign to discredit the labor movement and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The AFL attacked the NLRB for being both pro-CIO and Communist-led, and it Red-baited the CIO as well. These charges were readily received and promulgated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (Dies Committee). The AFL joined the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) in this attack against the rival union and the NLRB. FDR acted by enlarging the NLRB governing board, thereby diluting both the alleged “Red” influence and CIO bias, replacing one of the board members most linked to Communism, appointing a chairman with an unvarnished record for both judiciousness and competence, and at the same time intervening to prevent passage of legislation directed against the NLRB and the Wagner Act.121
Concurrently, the courts weighed in on the side of employers. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Wagner Act in 1937, but the courts otherwise limited labor rights, notably making the sit-down illegal. James Green concludes, “the courts allowed unions to engage in collective bargaining over a limited range of issues, but prohibited them from using the kind of militant, direct action that had built the CIO.”122
The state thus gave and then took away. The limiting of labor’s power continued with the Administration’s exacting a no-strike pledge during World War II and then, when the war emergency was no longer a justification for reining in the unions, Congress went even further with the Taft-Hartley Act by enacting it and then sustaining it over President Harry Truman’s veto. Regardless of the pull-back, the New Deal had given more support to organized labor than any previous administration. Labor, it should be noted, tripled its membership between 1933 and 1941.123
Neither long-established civil rights organizations nor the radical interracial groups that arose during the 1930s were able to muster significant pressure to advance civil rights for African Americans. The Unemployed Councils had not only crossed the color line in their protest but had supported such measures as non-discrimination in rehiring and legislation like the Lundeen bill, which, in contrast to the insurance programs of the Social Security Act, would have included all workers. Testifying in favor of the Lundeen bill, the National Urban League’s (NUL) acting executive secretary pointed out that it would cover farmers, domestic and personal service workers—occupations employing two-thirds of Negro workers.124 Because Negroes’ experiences with state-administered programs had been unsatisfactory, the NUL favored another attribute of Lundeen: federal administration of benefits for the unemployed. Hamilton and Hamilton suggest that the NUL’s advocacy of legislation associated with the Communist Party is an indication of how much the League valued the Lundeen Bill.125 The NAACP and the NUL tried to add anti-discrimination measures to the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, but were unsuccessful.126
Progress in civil rights would have to await militant action by blacks as well as proper timing. Wartime production provided that opening. Many of the unemployed were being absorbed in defense industries, but discrimination robbed blacks of the benefits of this upswing. “As Negroes saw wages skyrocket in plants holding large defense contracts and as they saw no change in the rigid anti-Negro policy in industry, they developed a program of drastic action.”127 Previous to the decision to employ militant tactics, black leaders had met with Roosevelt to protest discrimination in defense employment and in the military, and they had felt he was with them, only to be disillusioned when a short time later he supported segregation in the military: “the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”128 Putting an end to discrimination in the military had been a principal goal of their delegation.
A.Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, had been part of the delegation to the Oval Office. He decided that such delegations were not going to get them anywhere, and that it was time to take to the streets.129 Consequently, Randolph formed the National March on Washington Committee and threatened to march on the capitol to protest this discrimination. The idea caught fire, and Randolph was able to predict 100,000 marchers. Despite appeals to desist from allies like Eleanor Roosevelt and Mayor LaGuardia, Randolph did not back down.130 A march of this magnitude in the capital would have been disruptive of the defense build-up and national unity in a time of impending war, so Roosevelt made concessions. The result of bargaining between FDR and black leaders was Executive Order 8802, the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), which held that there should be no discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origins in the employment of workers in defense industries. The March on Washington bargainers had asked for much more: including ending discrimination in the civilian sector of the federal government, rooting out discrimination and segregation in the armed forces, and denying discriminatory unions the benefits of the Wagner Act. “A much reduced compromise” is how Bernstein describes Executive Order 8802.131 It should be noted that an executive order does not require the assent of Congress. Clearly, the FEPC did not abolish discrimination in defense-related employment, but blacks made gains in defense industries as a result, particularly in factories organized by CIO affiliates.132 This, of course, was not the end of the story. The FEPC had little support from the Roosevelt Administration, but it was still the general consensus of the civil rights organizations that “the experiences of black workers during the war would have been quite different without it.”133
The successful use of black power in 1941 reverberated in a number of ways, such as black pressure in CIO unions for a change in racist hiring practices, and it served to encourage subsequent protest.134 Randolph went on to play a leading role in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Indeed, he initiated and planned another march on Washington that did take place: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Tenant farmers, severely disadvantaged to begin with, were made more so by New Deal agricultural policies. (Tenant farmers is a general term for landless Southern farmers, the most numerous and worst off of whom were sharecroppers.)135 In order to curtail production, the federal government paid farmers for crop reduction. Since payments were based on equity in crop production, landlords got a disproportionate share of the money. Furthermore, landlords often pocketed sharecroppers’ payments, and when they complained, landlords changed their status to wage-hands in order to disqualify them.136 Robert Leighninger points out that landlords took the money, evicted tenants, and in some cases used it to buy farm machinery, further reducing the need for tenants.137 “The New Deal was not to blame for the social system it inherited, but New Deal policies made matters worse.”138
With the encouragement and support of outside resources, particularly Socialist Party leader Norman Thomas and a small group of Arkansas socialists, the beleaguered white and black tenant farmers banded together in 1934 to form the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. (STFU).139 Here, as with the organization of the unemployed, outside resources were necessary for a poor people’s movement.140 Immediately the STFU encountered fierce opposition from planters and their allies, including violence and jailing of protesters and prohibiting members to speak. Planters used their political and economic power against the STFU, padlocking church doors and packing schoolhouses with bales of hay to deter union rallies, and flogging sympathetic croppers.141 In a national radio broadcast, Thomas, who, on one occasion, was prevented from speaking and escorted to the Arkansas border, described the situation as a “reign of terror” directed against the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas.142 The heart of the protest was in Arkansas, the home state of Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson who, like local landlords, smeared the union as Communist, socialist, the work of outside agitators. Roosevelt, speaking in Arkansas, did not mention the union or condemn violence directed against one of the STFU strikes.143
Thomas waged a relentless campaign to inform the public of these “Forgotten Men of the New Deal,” taking his message to the highest government officials, including the president, and gaining support from religious groups and civil rights organizations as well as the AFL, which unanimously adopted a resolution condemning “the inhuman levels to which the workers employed in the cotton plantations had been reduced” and calling for a federal investigation of the condition of the workers.144 Groups that could not be accused of radicalism corroborated the reports of Thomas and others, and a number of articles about the hardships of the sharecroppers appeared in national magazines and Northern newspapers.145 The STFU’s most effective weapons were said to be agitation and publicity, not strikes or collective bargaining, although it did mount some successful strikes.146
Early in 1935, when liberals within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) attempted to provide legal protection to the tenants, the AAA administrator demanded their dismissal from the agency. Roosevelt was said to be sorry and to have the highest regard for the liberals who were purged, but he made no attempt to save them.147 The President was moved by the plight of the sharecroppers but nonetheless did not move on their behalf; as the organ of the STFU put it, “Too often he has talked like a cropper and acted like a planter.”148 Protection of the tenant farmers ran up against the formidable opposition of Southern congressional leaders. When Senator Wagner was urged to include agricultural workers in the NLRA, he replied that they were excluded only because he thought it would be better to pass the bill for the benefit of industrial workers than not to pass it at all.149
As the 1936 election drew closer, government officials made some concessions, probably in response to the condemnation of the treatment of the tenant farmers by mainstream groups. At the Democratic Convention, the STFU leader, H. L. Mitchell, won Majority Leader Robinson’s consent to include platform planks protecting the sharecroppers’ civil liberties and their right to organize.150 During the campaign of 1936, Roosevelt responded by urging Senator Bankhead (D-Alabama) and Representative Marvin Jones (D-Texas) to formulate plans for a federal program to reduce farm tenancy. Soon after his re-election, Roosevelt appointed the President’s Committee on Farm Tenancy; its efforts laid the groundwork for the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act of 1937 and for establishment of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The STFU considered it a recognition of its power that Roosevelt appointed one of its members to the Committee.151
The report recommended the establishment of a Farm Security Administration in the Department of Agriculture to carry out a program of “land for tenants,” that is, federal loans for the purchase of land. The STFU member of the Committee, W. L. Blackstone, dissented from the majority proposal.152 What the administration recommended to Congress was “cautious and conservative,” according to an historian of the movement; even so, Roosevelt’s proposals were further scaled down by Congress.153 There were approximately 2.9 million tenant farmers in the United States in 1935, and by the end of 1941, the Farm Security Administration had given loans to only 20,748 tenants for the purchase of farms—less than one percent. According to the FSA, it received about twenty applications for every loan it made.154 Like so many other problems, some relief of the dreadful suffering of tenant farmers and their families had to await the stimulus of World War II. A popular movement of very poor people, aided by a determined and eloquent advocate and the mainstream support he aroused, had achieved only token concessions from the New Deal.
The elderly formed one of the most significant social movements of the decade of dissent. It was widespread, mainstream, and American, and hence not vulnerable to attacks as radical or “Red.” According to a plan of California doctor Francis E. Townsend, persons sixty years and older would be eligible for a pension of $200 a month, providing they were unemployed and spent it all during the month they received it. The plan would aid a group hit very hard by the Depression, and, through its spending requisite, expand consumption and aid recovery. It did not matter to the millions of elderly persons who joined Townsend that the numbers did not work out. Nine percent of the U.S. population at the time, the elderly would be getting benefits equal to 60 percent of national income.155 The plan would transfer to the aged money otherwise spent by the general population, and the two percent “transfer tax” that was intended to finance the benefits would only raise a sum sufficient for benefits of $60 rather than $200 a month.156 Nonetheless, the plan was attractive to its beneficiaries, and the means of selling it, devised by Townsend’s partner, real estate promoter Robert Clements, were entrepreneurial and innovative for a social movement. The establishment of “Townsend clubs,” especially in the West, provided companionship and recreation to elderly members who joined, paid dues, and participated in advocacy, principally, in the early days, a massive petition campaign. Dr. Townsend probably exaggerated the size of the movement and the number of petitions in support of the plan, but his critics conceded there were at least ten million signatures.157 Interestingly, the Townsend movement eclipsed the more conventional organizations that had studied and advocated benefits for the elderly for a number of years.158
“Before his inauguration,” recalled Frances Perkins, “Roosevelt had agreed that we should explore at once methods for setting up unemployment and old age insurance in the United States.”159 As New York governor, FDR had publicly endorsed and promulgated unemployment insurance but stated a distinct preference for old-age insurance over non-contributory pensions for the elderly in a system of contributions beginning at an early age.160
Prior to the Administration’s plan for social security, the Dill-Connery bill to establish a federal-state program of old age benefits passed the House and would have passed the Senate were it not that FDR withheld his support. The bill called for federal matching grants of one-third of states’ expenditures for relief to the elderly. Thomas Eliot, who drafted the Social Security Act, explained the administration’s delay: that recovery measures had priority at the time, not long-term reform.161 Paul Douglas believes that the failure to act “helped … to create the Townsend movement which arose in the summer of 1934.”162 What about this suggestion—that the Townsend movement might not have arisen had the Dill-Connery bill been enacted? On one hand, Townsend and his adherents were by no means pleased or satisfied with the Social Security Act and might have reacted similarly to the Dill-Connery Act, which promised no more than the Old Age Assistance program in the Social Security Act. Nonetheless, Townsend and his lieutenants might have had a hard time mobilizing millions of elderly people if Congress had already taken action on their behalf.
According to Frances Perkins, who headed the Administration’s Committee on Economic Security (CES) that was planning the security legislation, the pressure of the Townsendites and other radicals was tremendous:
One hardly realizes nowadays how strong was the sentiment in favor of the Townsend Plan and other exotic schemes for giving the aged a weekly income. In some districts the Townsend Plan was the chief political issue, and men supporting it were elected to Congress. The pressure from its advocates was intense. The President began telling people he was in favor of adding old-age insurance clauses to the bill and putting it through as one program.163
Roosevelt also told CES members, “Congress can’t stand the pressure of the Townsend Plan unless we have a real old-age insurance system, nor can I face the country without having devised … a solid plan which will give some assurance to old people of systematic assistance upon retirement.”164 According to a historian of the movement, FDR “over-assessed Townsend claims of popular support,” but, in any case, he “countered the political threat inherent in the mushrooming pension movement by utilizing this public clamor for old-age pensions to justify the enactment of a moderate social security program of his own.”165 In the opinion of CES director Witte, FDR’s strategy of keeping the entire social security program together was critical because of the various programs, only old-age assistance would have gone through.166
It is important to point out the differences between what Townsendites advocated and the provisions for the elderly in the Social Security Act. Townsendites wanted an equal or flat benefit payable to all the elderly without a means test—a universal demogrant. Even the combination of benefits for the elderly in the Social Security Act, Old Age Insurance and Old Age Assistance, was much less comprehensive and generous.
The Lundeen and Townsendite movements, the one advocating more progressive unemployment insurance than the New Dealers, and the other more expansive benefits to the elderly, did not attempt to combine forces in 1935. Together they might have been formidable, but they were far apart politically, and while the Lundeen plan was carefully thought out, the first Townsend plan was considered “crackpot.” Later Dr. Townsend did join forces with other dissidents, though not with leftists, in a failed third-party attempt in 1936.
What did the Townsendites get on the first round? Perhaps left to its own devices the administration would have omitted pensions for the elderly, including only Old Age Insurance, which Roosevelt preferred to pensions.167 The insurance program would have afforded no current benefits to the elderly. That the SSA version of benefits, Old Age Assistance, was somewhat more generous than Dill-Connery could be credited to Townsend pressure. Instead of matching one-third of state benefits, the federal government would match up to 50 percent of the first thirty dollars.168 It should be noted that many states were not willing to grant enough funds to take advantage of the full benefit.169
The second act in advocacy for the elderly did not result in a universal demogrant for older people or a generous pension, but it did achieve considerable improvement of Old Age Insurance and a small change in Old Age Assistance. The Townsendites continued to fight for better, more adequate benefits for the elderly. After some setbacks to Dr. Townsend and the organization, the movement emerged stronger and was joined by other pension-promoting groups. As one historian of the movement put it, prior to the elections to the Seventy-sixth Congress in 1938, pension advocates were aided by a number of conditions: deficiencies in coverage and benefits of the Social Security Act, dissatisfaction with the SSA’s payroll taxes on the part of businessmen, and the recession of 1937–1938, which left more people in need and the states less able to pay their shares of Old Age Assistance (OAA).170 One of the movement’s strategies was to endorse congressional candidates who agreed to support their plans for the elderly. Ninety Republicans with some commitment to the demands of the elderly were elected in 1938. Harry Hopkins laid Republican victories in that election to the pension issue: “Democratic Congressmen were pitched out and … Republican Congressmen went in because they promised bigger and better old-age pensions.” The pension movement could be credited with the prominence of the pension issue and the electoral advantage of candidates who supported “bigger and better pensions.”171
How did the Roosevelt Administration respond to this successful move by a popular movement? As Holtzman put it, “To conciliate the national demand for increased old-age security, to head off the demands by radical pension lobbyists, and to cut the ground from under the Republicans, the Democratic leadership undertook to liberalize its Social Security Act.”172 Their proposals were based on a Senate Advisory Committee considerably and adroitly influenced by the Social Security Commissioner, Arthur Altmeyer, with Roosevelt’s encouragement.173 These efforts were in motion by the fall of 1937, well before the Republican gains in the election of 1938. In putting forth the administration’s proposals for liberalization, Roosevelt urged Congress to reject “untried and demonstrably unsound panaceas,”174 a not very subtle jibe at the Townsendites. Not all the administration’s proposals held sway, but Old Age Insurance was changed from a narrowly conceived annuity for retired workers to a family program: benefits for workers’ dependent spouses and the workers’ widows and dependent children. Moreover, payments to lower-wage workers were increased, and the date at which payments began was moved up so that newly retired claimants were receiving what amounted to a “pension-like” benefit to which they had contributed very little. The amendments fell short of the administration’s proposals, primarily the refusal of Congress to extend coverage to farm and domestic workers. The pension advocates did not get what they wanted, but older people and their families got more. The New Deal once again used the radical demands of a popular movement to gain approval of its preferred, moderate reforms.
While the unemployed and labor movements advocated for particular population groups, other social movements, sometimes referred to as levelers, campaigned for a more egalitarian distribution of income or wealth.175 The leaders of the two most prominent of these latter movements, Senator Huey Long (D-Louisiana) and Father Charles E. Coughlin, were initially for Roosevelt and the New Deal. “Roosevelt or Ruin” and “The New Deal Is Christ’s Deal” were Coughlin’s slogans. Long favored Roosevelt’s nomination in 1932 and helped keep the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic convention in his camp.176
By 1934, however, both Long and Coughlin were disappointed in the New Deal: Coughlin because it was too close to the banks and did not do enough to spur inflation, Long because its policies did not go to what he considered the heart of the matter, the grossly unequal distribution of wealth. Both men, like Roosevelt, were excellent orators and used the radio to attract followers. Coughlin had the largest regular radio audience in the world.177 A Catholic priest, born outside the United States (Ontario), he was not a potential rival for the presidency, but Long was. Among the dissenters, “Long was the shrewdest operator and the most thoroughly professional politician. He had brains, money, ambition, extravagant oratorical skill, a gift for political theater.… He was the radical most likely to succeed.”178 In the Senate, Long was not alone in his dissent. Despite his outrageous behavior, he was “liked and even admired” by senators who were increasingly alienated from both major parties. A Southerner, Long voted often with such Midwestern or Western Progressives as William Borah, Lynn Frazier, Robert La Follette, Jr., George Norris, Gerald Nye, and Burton Wheeler.179
Early in the second year of the New Deal, Long invited his radio audience to join his Share Our Wealth Society (SOW), a nationwide system of local clubs. Share Our Wealth was a plan whereby the rich would be taxed highly in order to provide an income guarantee for everyone. The guarantee of two to three thousand dollars annually was enticing, particularly in view of the fact that half the nation’s families earned less than $1,250, the amount considered necessary for a minimal standard of living.180 The numbers, however, did not add up. The taxes on the rich would not yield enough for the guarantee, and Long acknowledged it, saying “when they figure that out, I’ll have something new for them.”181 Nonetheless, as historian Alan Brinkley points out, Long, in focusing on the distribution of wealth, was addressing “an issue of genuine importance” and a major cause of the Depression.182
Both Long and Coughlin founded organizations. Early in 1935, Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, the skilled, tireless organizer of the Share Our Wealth clubs, claimed he was enlisting 20,000 recruits a day and that the organization had passed the five-million mark in membership. “No one could either verify or dispute his claim, but few could disagree with his statement that ‘The popular appeal of our movement can’t be discounted.…’”183 Coughlin also established an organization, the National Union for Social Justice, which stood for monetary reform, nationalization of key industries and protection of the rights of labor.184 “Social justice” was to substitute for capitalism in a political order “strikingly similar to that of Italian corporatism.”185
Brinkley writes that in the spring of 1935, when Congress was debating the Social Security Act, the Share Our Wealth clubs and Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice appeared to be “vibrant growing movements with almost limitless political potential.” Yet Brinkley concludes that “they were far from the kind of coherent, centralized organizations that could easily be transformed into an effective third party.”186 Nor were their predominantly middle and lower-middle class constituents—people with something to lose—the stuff of revolutions. In fact, both movements included people unwilling to desert the New Deal, and the more Coughlin, for example, criticized Roosevelt, the more support he lost.187 Whether they could be designated “movements” is also questionable, for “there was nothing for members of either organization to do, if they obeyed their leaders, besides write letters to the President and listen to the radio.”188 Interestingly, Brinkley identifies a problematic effect of the movements’ organizing strategies. While the radio gave Long and Coughlin immediate access to millions of people, earlier populists who lacked such mass media were obliged to engage in vigorous grass-roots organizing. This, in turn, gave their followers “a strong sense of connection with dissident politics” and a more active engagement with the organizations than the relatively passive act of listening to the radio.189 (The heavy dependence on the Internet as the medium for organizing protest today would seem to pose an even greater challenge to the creation of a vital social movement.)
Even if a third party or powerful social movement was not likely to emerge from the actions of these dissidents, Long was a serious political threat. He boasted of a “Share the Wealth” ticket in 1936. His strategy was to be a spoiler in 1936 by throwing the election to a Republican, and by 1940, the nation’s plight would be so desperate that voters would be ready for him.190 Wary of Long, even when he had helped him to secure the nomination, Roosevelt told Brain Truster Rexford Tugwell that Huey Long was “the second most dangerous man in this country.”191 In response to Long’s strident criticism, Roosevelt blocked federal patronage to the Long machine in Louisiana and ordered an Internal Revenue Service investigation of Long and his political associates.192 Roosevelt vacillated more with Coughlin, who was initially less strident than Long, but he nonetheless cut off relations with the radio priest by mid-1934, and was also responsible for investigating his finances and checking his citizenship, as well as trying to get the Roman Catholic Church to silence him.193 Both Long and Coughlin were flawed as leaders, the former by his dictatorial rule in Lousiana and the latter by pro-fascism and anti-Semitism later in his career.
A “scientific” poll taken by Democratic Party leaders in the spring of 1935 found that Long, particularly if he enjoyed the support of Coughlin and other dissenters, could hold the balance of power in the 1936 presidential election, perhaps throwing victory to the Republicans.194 In response to this threat, Roosevelt tried co-optation—in addition to the deprivation and opposition already invoked against Long. In the summer of 1935, partly to “steal Huey’s thunder,” FDR proposed a tax on undistributed profits, stepped-up inheritance taxes, and increased levies on the very wealthy.195 It is not clear how much Roosevelt wanted this Wealth Tax Act to be enacted in that particular session of Congress.196 In any case, Congress eliminated the inheritance tax and reduced the graduated corporation income tax to “no more than symbolic importance.” Actually, it would not have changed the distribution of wealth significantly nor done much to raise revenues.197 Long initially said “Amen,” but several days later inserted into the Congressional Record a letter challenging Roosevelt to support his whole Share Our Wealth Plan.198 To what extent this did steal Long’s thunder is an unanswerable question because of Long’s assassination a few months later, but in the time between the proposal of the Wealth Tax Act and his death, Long’s personal and organizational strength was growing.199 It is not clear how much further Roosevelt would have gone to steal Long’s thunder, but had Long lived, he might have forced Roosevelt to move further to the left and do more to redistribute income than the gestural Wealth Tax Act. The encounter with Long shows that where a challenger posed a threat, not only to his policies, but to his presidency, it would take more than simply ignoring the dissent, depriving him of privileges that were at the disposal of the president, or attacking him.
Without Long, the opposition to the New Deal was greatly weakened. Roosevelt had predicted that “when it comes to show-down these fellows [the various dissident groups] cannot all lie in the same bed.”200 The Union Party, which mounted a third-party challenge to Roosevelt in 1936, was a complete misnomer for very incompatible, rivalrous bedfellows: principally Father Coughlin, Dr. Francis Townsend, and Long’s successor, the Rev. Howard L. K. Smith. “Since all three men were prima donnas, a compromise candidate was needed.”201 With that standard bearer—Representative William Lemke of North Dakota—the Union Party went down to resounding defeat, taking less than two percent of the popular vote away from Roosevelt and the New Deal.202
New Deal responses to popular movements varied from movement to movement and from time to time. Take the relationship between the New Deal and organized labor, a movement with which it was thought to be allied. The New Deal encouraged unionization through its National Recovery Administration. When Section 7(a) of the NRA proved unenforceable in the face of capital’s resistance, labor rights were strengthened very considerably by the National Labor Relations Act, the work of Senator Robert Wagner that Roosevelt supported tardily (and perhaps reluctantly as well). Capital continued to defy the law, and rank and file labor resorted to sit-downs that clearly infringed on property rights. Nonetheless, Roosevelt refused to condemn the Flint sit-down strikes, consistently opposed the use of force to suppress popular protest, and supported Governor Frank Murphy in his successful avoidance of violence. The New Deal stance at Flint was pro-labor as well as reciprocation for Progressive labor leaders’ vigorous support and participation in Roosevelt’s 1936 campaign for reelection. However, only a few months later, during labor’s drive to unionize Little Steel, FDR condemned labor and capital equally, evidently thinking that that was the view of the public. The New Deal needed working-class votes, but organized labor still represented a minority of the working-class, many of whom may well have condemned militant union tactics. State support, a critical contributor to the gains labor made, was abating by the end of the decade, particularly in the Supreme Court and Congress, and the Executive branch was either unwilling or unable to do much to protect labor’s gains.
New Deal enactments were more moderate than popular movement demands for unemployment insurance and benefits for the elderly. Title III of the Social Security Act established a federal-state program for unemployment compensation that was consistent in its general framework with the preferences of such New Dealers as Roosevelt and Perkins: although Perkins was deeply disappointed in the restrictions on coverage imposed by Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and Congress. Given his druthers and without the Townsend pressure, Roosevelt would have avoided pensions for the elderly, but Title I, Grants to States for Old-Age Assistance, fell far short of Townsend demands. Old Age Insurance, initially a very limited program for retired workers, underwent structural change as a result of the 1939 amendments. The amendments were close to administration proposals and made possible by congressional representatives of both parties whose pledges to support the pension movement could be fulfilled by voting for the more moderate administration proposals. The overall pattern with respect to social welfare is that the social movements served the purpose of moderate New Deal reform.
Did the movements ever succeed in moving the New Deal farther than it wanted to go? Its support of the National Labor Relations Act was partly a response to labor militancy but at the same time was initially opposed by the Communist Party. Whereas the NLRA did guarantee an important right to labor, albeit one that was weakened even before the end of the 1930s, this was not the case with Roosevelt’s response to a political rival, one who could have threatened the very existence of the New Deal. Redistribution of wealth was not a New Deal policy. Roosevelt’s proposed Wealth Tax Act was co-optative, an attempt to “steal Huey’s thunder.” FDR did not seem to care whether Congress passed the Wealth Tax Act, nor did he rail against it for weakening his proposals. Nonetheless, the opinion of an unidentified Democratic senator suggests that Huey Long in particular, and movements in general, had pushed the New Deal further left: “We are obliged to propose and accept many things in the New Deal that otherwise we would not because we must prevent a union of discontent around him; the President is the only hope of liberals and conservatives: if his program is restricted, the answer may be Huey Long.”203 On the other hand, historian Robert McElvaine points out that in most of the 1934 elections in which plausible candidates to the left of Roosevelt appeared, they won. From these results he infers:
This was a firm indication of the direction in which many Americans, particularly those on whom Roosevelt’s political future depended, wanted to move. The votes for these candidates were not anti-Roosevelt votes—at least not yet. But the possibilities that such voters would turn against the President if he did not produce more constructive change was a real one.204
Despite the blatant oppression of Southern tenant farmers, the Roosevelt administration initially turned a deaf ear to reports of their suffering and of the “reign of terror” that greeted the movement that arose to fight for sharecroppers’ rights. Roosevelt was apparently sympathetic but trapped by the Southerners on whom the New Deal depended for enactment of its programs. Some support for the tenant farmers was expressed during the 1936 election campaign. However, the results were limited, bordering on token support for this very oppressed group.
The New Deal did occasionally bow to the pressure of the Workers Alliance of America, a more moderate successor to the unemployed movement and friendlier to the Roosevelt administration than its predecessor. Whereas the Roosevelt Administration withstood protest against the decision to shut down the CWA in 1934, it did accede to WAA protest over announced, severe cutbacks of the WPA in 1937. This was perhaps because it valued the program and needed WAA support to balance anti-WPA forces. The New Deal also gave into threatened black protest over discrimination in the defense industry that would perhaps have been disruptive of preparations for war and that could be achieved through an order without the assent of Southern legislators.
Crisis can be a fertile ground for social movements, and the economic collapse of 1929 and its aftermath, coupled with a paucity of public policies to cope with it, contributed to widespread protest by a number of deeply distressed populations. A welfare state that has often been considered “reluctant” or a laggard by international standards may nonetheless be one reason for the relative lack of popular protest in the early stages of the Great Recession. The outside resources, particularly parties of the left, that were important ingredients in protest movements of the poor during the 1930s were conspicuous in their absence during the nation’s second great economic crisis and another reason for limited social protest.
The popular movements of the 1930s were relatively large and characterized by great commitment, courage, and skill. They were diverse in class, race, political persuasion, and demands, and they peaked at different times during the decade. Given this diversity, they were seldom allied in their protest, and this may be one reason why their contributions to permanent reform were relatively modest. Perhaps, it is an axiom of social protest that a great deal of effort often yields only a modicum of social change. Still, one might have expected more far-reaching change from economic crisis and the burst of social action to which it gave rise. Part of the answer lies in the New Deal itself and in the political skill and persuasion of Franklin Roosevelt, as well as his administration’s dependence on a Congress led by Southern legislators. The moderate policies with which the “slightly-left-of-center” Roosevelt was most comfortable were aided by the movements, and, along with co-optation and some token benefits, were sufficient to restore social order and bring the New Deal victories at the polls.
1. This is how Roosevelt described himself to New York Times columnist Anne O’Hare McCormack. Marion Turner Sheehan, ed., “A Little Left of Center,” November 25, 1934, in The World at Home: Selections from the Writings of Anne O’Hare McCormick (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1956), 248–258.
2. Irving Bernstein refers to organized looting of food as a “national phenomenon.” The “most remarkable illustration of illegal self-help” was anthracite bootlegging, described by Bernstein: “an entire industry in northeastern Pennsylvania that nonetheless had the approval of authorities and public opinion.” Bernstein, The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker 1920–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 422–423.
3. See, e.g. Steve Valocchi, “The Unemployed Workers Movement of the 1930s: A Reexamination of the Piven and Cloward Thesis,” Social Problems, 37, no. 2 (May 1990): 191–205; and Steve Valocchi, “External Resources and the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s: Six Propositions from Social Movement Theory,” Sociological Forum, 8, no. 3 (1993): 451–470.
4. Roy Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time’: The Socialist Party and the Unemployed, 1929–1936,” Labor History, 20, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 486. In addition to these dominant organizations, “innumerable local associations sprang up, built ordinarily around an individual, and either independent of or breaking away from existing organizations.” Helen Seymour, When Clients Organize (Chicago: American Public Welfare Association, 1937), 6.
5. Roy Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed: The Early Years of the Great Depression, 1929–1933,” Radical America, 10, no. 4 (1974): 40. According to Albert Prago, “Of all the radical groups, the Communists were the most active, reacted earliest to the problems of the jobless, and had the greatest influence.” “The Organization of the Unemployed and the Role of Radicals, 1929–1935” (Ph.D. diss., Union Graduate School, Yellow Springs, OH, 1976), 11.
6. For the Socialists’ Unemployed Leagues, see Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time,’” 485–509; for the Musteites, see Rosenzweig, “Radicals and the Jobless: The Musteites and the Unemployed Leagues, 1932–1936,” Labor History, 16 (1975): 52–77. There was inter-organizational competition among the movement groups in the early stages that, in Valocchi’s view, contributed to the numbers and types of insurgency because each group tried to outdo the other. Valocchi, “Unemployed Workers Movement,” 193, draws on the work of Prago, 189–211.
7. Seymour, 3.
8. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 41.
9. Daniel J. Leab, “‘United We Eat’: The Creation and Organization of the Unemployed Councils,” Labor History, 8 (1967): 306.
10. Ibid. According to an account of movements of the unemployed by one who took part in the struggles of the 1930s, there were 100,000 or more in New York and Detroit, 50,000 in Boston and Chicago, 30,000 in Philadelphia, 25,000 in Cleveland, and 20,000 in Youngstown and Pittsburgh; and “at least 125,000 demonstrated in a total of two dozen other cities across the country.” That would add up to around half a million. Frank Folsom, Impatient Armies of the Poor: The Story of Collective Action of the Unemployed 1808–1942 (Niwat, CO: University Press of Colorado, 1991), 55.
11. Bernstein, 427. These demonstrations may have raised consciousness of the problem but the Hoover administration continued to underplay and resist relief throughout its tenure. Similarly, Leab (p. 318) writes that the demonstrations “had broken through the generally optimistic tone of a press which had talked of little but quick recovery and happy days.”
12. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed,” 56.
13. Valocchi, “Unemployed Workers Movement,” 196. Valocchi points out that the unemployed movement used the political resources of local élites who found it in their interest to support the movement’s demand for national relief. This is discussed below.
14. See, e.g., American Civil Liberties Union, What Rights for the Unemployed? A Summary of the Attacks on the Rights of the Unemployed to Organize, Demonstrate, and Petition (New York: Author, February 1935), 6, accessed July 18, 2013, available at http://debs.indstate.edu/a505w5_1935.pdf. The ACLU reports this example of violent response and concession: In a demonstration of the Unemployed Councils at New York’s City Hall, the leaders were arrested and treated with brutality, but the next day the New York City Board of Estimate appropriated one million dollars for relief (p. 6).
15. Leab, 361. Similarly, “the day-to-day economic action of the Councils was looked upon in the party as meaty bait to attract the workers and as an effective demonstration that they could hope to get nothing from “a capitalistic government which was in the throes of decay.” Bernard Karsh and Phillips L. Garman, “The Impact of the Political Left,” in Labor and the New Deal, Milton Derber and Edwin Young, eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), 90.
16. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed”; see also Leab.
17. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed,” 40.
18. Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time,’” 491.
19. Also part of a platform adopted in March 1930 by the Unemployed Councils were: no discrimination in rehiring because of race, religion, or sex; exemption from taxes and mortgage payments for the jobless; and a fair distribution of all available employment. Leab, 309, citing the Communist Daily Worker, March 7, 1930. Valocchi, “Unemployed Workers Movement” (p. 196) calls attention to lobbying, not simply direct action.
20. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed,” 52; see also Prago, Chapter VI.
21. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed,” 41–43; see also Prago, 110–111.
22. Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in our Time,’” 486.
23. Rosenzweig, “Organizing the Unemployed,” 38.
24. Lizabeth Cohen, Workers Make a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 263.
25. See Rosenzweig, “Radicals and the Jobless,” 64, for inherent barriers. Seymour (p. 3), writes that “By 1932, repeated disorder, violence, police arrests, and unfriendly publicity contributed to bring the Councils into disrepute.” Other reasons such as fear of being branded a “reliefer,” “conservatism and inertia” of the rank and file, and distrust of Communists are given by E. Wright Bakke, Citizens Without Work: A Study of the Effects of Unemployment upon the Workers’ Social Relations and Practices (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1940), 71–84. Communists, particularly, were adept at helping unemployed workers to overcome the tendency toward self-blame or to achieve a “transformation from personal troubles to public grievances” (Valocchi, “External Resources,” 456-457).
26. C. R. Walker in The Forum, September, 1932, cited by Prago, 145–146.
27. American Civil Liberties Union, 6.
28. Fortune, September 1934, 69, 159, cited by Prago, 188. Fortune, a business magazine founded in 1929 by Henry Luce, was known for having a social conscience during the Depression. It’s interesting, given the Party’s eyes on larger goals, that responsiveness to immediate needs is noted.
29. Melvin G. Holli, American Mayor: The Best & the Worst Big City Leaders (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
30. Piven and Cloward, 91. See also, Valocchi “The Unemployed Workers Movement” (p. 196) who mentions as well governors, social workers, and labor leaders. See also Josephine Chapin Brown, Public Relief, 1929–1939 (New York: Henry Holt, 1940), 106–141 who emphasizes the compelling testimony of social workers and labor leaders at Congressional hearings on relief measures.
31. See below for Roosevelt’s approach to protest expressed at the time when the Hoover Administration used armed force against the encampment of unemployed veterans in Washington.
32. For a description of TERA, see Emma Octavia Lundberg, “The New York State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration,” Social Service Review, 6, no. 4 (1932): 545–566.
33. Brown, 96.
34. Bernstein, 434.
35. While acknowledging the Communists’ role in stopping evictions, improving conditions in relief centers, and promoting unemployment insurance, Schlesinger also comments that “they won credit for much that could more soberly be ascribed to conditions than to agitation.” Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 295, 219. However, need alone is seldom a sufficient reason for governments to meet it.
36. James R. Green, The World of the Worker: Labor in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 138.
37. Karsh and Garman, 197; see also Leab. Folsom studied the unemployed movement during the entire decade. Referring to the Workers Alliance that succeeded the earlier movements, he writes: “the alliance and its predecessors had created a body of thousands of workers who had learned a great deal about how to organize and get results”(p. 431).
38. Cohen, 265.
39. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: Harper and Row, 1946/1964), 182.
40. Ibid., 183.
41. Prago, 180.
42. American Civil Liberties Union, 6.
43. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 277; William E. Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal (New York: Harper, 1963), 122.
44. Prago, 188.
45. See, e.g., Seymour, 9.
46. Prago, 188. The source of the claim was Herbert Benjamin, the leader of the UCs who could be quite critical of the movement. See his “The Unemployment Movement in the U.S.A. from March 6, 1950, through the Second ‘New Deal’ Year,” The Communist, 14 (June 1935): 528–547.
47. Nels Anderson, “Pressure Groups,” Survey Graphic (March 1936): 168–170, 189.
48. Herbert Benjamin, in Piven and Cloward, 87.
49. Prago, 242–245.
50. Ibid., 248–249.
51. Ibid., 249–250.
52. Paul H. Douglas, Social Security in the United States: An Analysis and Appraisal of the Federal Social Security Act (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939), 81–82.
53. Seymour, 9; Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton, The Dual Agenda: Race and Social Welfare Policies of Civil Rights Organizations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 31.
54. Douglas, 76–77.
55. Ibid., 82.
56. Rosenzweig, “The Radicals and the Jobless,” 68; Irving Bernstein, The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), 217–227.
57. Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time,’” 499. The unemployed union in Camden, New Jersey, assisted in organizing workers at Campbell’s Soup and RCA.
58. Seymour, 6.
59. Rosenzweig, “The Radicals and the Jobless,” 63.
60. Piven and Cloward, 76. See their full discussion, 76–91. Similarly, Cohen (p. 265) writes that, by the mid-1930s, the unemployed movement “became more centralized and bureaucratized under the aegis of a national coalition.” For a different position regarding the decline of insurgency that includes the effect of federal relief but not bureaucratization, see Valocchi, esp. 197.
61. Irene Oppenheimer, “The Organizations of the Unemployed, 1930–1940,” (unpublished MA thesis, Columbia University, 1940), 36, cited by Rosenzweig, “’Socialism in Our Time,’” 502.
62. Rosenzweig, “‘Socialism in Our Time,’” 505.
63. Ibid., 507–508. Evidently Mrs. Roosevelt, who became a friend of Lasser, was an honorary member of the WAA. For the relationship of WAA leaders to New Dealers, including FDR, see also Prago, 257.
64. “While federal rulings did not touch upon the legality of WPA strikes, relief organizers interpreted the right to organize as implying the right to strike. State and local administrators frequently ruled differently.” Seymour, 8.
65. Karsh and Garman, 94. For actions in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, see Folsom, 419–421.
66. Folsom, 423, based on information in a WAA pamphlet, “How to Win Work at a Living Wage or a Decent Standard of Relief with the Workers Alliance of America,” 1937.
67. Karsh and Garman, 94.
68. Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin: The Story of Their Relationship Based on Eleanor Roosevelt’s Private Papers (New York: W.W. Norton, 1971), 602. Lash cites Eleanor Roosevelt’s marginal note on Aubrey Williams’ letter to her, November 11, 1939.
69. John A. Salmond, A Southern Rebel: The Life and Times of Aubrey Willis Williams, 1890–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 102–103, 168–169. Roosevelt told him he was “a political liability.”
70. Bernstein, Lean Years, 437.
71. Lucy G. Barber, Marching on Washington: The Forging of an American Political Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 75.
72. The Socialist Party and its leader, Norman Thomas, supported the Bonus Army but criticized the veterans for not broadening their demands to include general relief for all of the unemployed and the needy. According to Donald J. Lisio, theirs was a “non-radical, essentially middle class outlook.” Donald J. Lisio, The President and Protest: Hoover, Conspiracy, and the Bonus Riot (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 84. At one point Commander Waters did try to say that the B.E.F. was “the vanguard of a general rising of the unemployed.” Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old. Order, 259, but there was no evidence of a program beyond the bonus.
73. Bernstein, Lean Years, 446.
74. Schlesinger points out that “B.E.F. leaders were tireless in denouncing Communist activity, destroying their leaflets and throwing their leaders out of the camps. Crisis of the Old Order, 260. See also Lisio, Chapter 5, 87–108; see also, Barber, 90.
75. Schlesinger, Crisis of the Old Order, 257.
76. Ibid.
77. Bernstein, Lean Years, 437. A crude census of cantonments in July put the size of the army at 23,000. The Washington Superintendent of Police put the size at peak at 22,000. Bernstein, Lean Years, 441, citing papers of the police superintendent, Pelham D. Glassford, and other sources. See, e.g., Bernstein, Lean Years, 441–443; Lisio, 51–53 and passim.
78. Lisio, 50.
79. Bernstein, Lean Years, 441.
80. Ibid.
81. Barber, 88.
82. Lisio, 109. Roosevelt tried to persuade the New York contingent to return home from Washington, offering them free transportation and jobs, but they refused, saying they would stay in Washington until they got their bonuses. Lisio, 84.
83. Lisio, 219 and passim.
84. Rexford Tugwell, Brains Trust (New York: Viking, 1968), 358.
85. Lisio, 283.
86. Tugwell, 358. Lisio (p. 285) refers to a conversation between Roosevelt and his advisor Professor Felix Frankfurter, who was visiting him in Hyde Park at the time of the rout in which Roosevelt said that this incident and Hoover’s behavior would elect him.
87. Bernstein, Lean Years, 454. A lengthy account of the aftermath of the rout shows that initially public opinion favored the President for ridding the nation of subversives, but in time, owing to the Attorney General’s report that many of the veterans were criminals and a refutation by Superintendent of Police Glassford, the tide turned against Hoover a bare two months before the presidential election. See Lisio, 226–257.
88. Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2, 1933–1938 (New York: Viking, 1999), 46.
89. While Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit was largely symbolic, FDR’s Veterans Administration director, Frank T. Hines, is said to have done much to ensure that the demonstration remained peaceful by housing the marchers away from the capital and attending to their needs. Lisio, 292.
90. Lisio, 293.
91. Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, The Bonus Army: An American Epic (New York: Walker and Company, 2005), 266–277.
92. Green, 133. Milton Derber reports that union membership was 3.4 million in 1929, having declined 1.7 million from its post–World War I peak or by about one-third. “Growth and Expansion,” in Derber and Young, 3.
93. “Thanks to the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 … capital could no longer look to the federal courts for help.” David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 289.
94. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 34.
95. Green, 140.
96. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 34, 41.
97. Ibid., 37.
98. Ibid., 41.
99. Green, 141.
100. Leuchtenburg, 151.
101. Perkins, 239.
102. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 3; Murray Edelman makes a similar point about FDR and the influence of Perkins in “New Deal Sensitivity to Labor Interests,” in Derber and Young, 180. See also Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 402, regarding FDR’s somewhat paternalistic attitude of having government do things for working people rather than gaining them through union power.
103. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress, January 11, 1944, accessed April 22, 2013, available at http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/archives/address_text.html. See Chapter 11 in this book for a discussion of the Economic Bill of Rights.
104. Leuchtenburg, 151.
105. See, e.g., J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Athenaeum, 1968), 192. See McIntyre, Chapter 5 in this book, on the bill as both pro-worker and anti-Communist. In 1934, nearly 1.5 million workers took part in some 1,800 strikes. See Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941, 2nd ed. (New York: Times Books, 1993), 225.
106. On May 6, 1935, the Railroad Retirement Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in Railroad Retirement Board v. Alton Railroad Co., 295 U.S. 330.
107. Melvyn Dubofsky and Warren Van Tine, John L. Lewis: A Biography (New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977), 232, citing C. P. Howard to Sidney Hillman, February 3, 1936, Sidney Hillman Papers, CIO Folder, 1935–1936.
108. Dan Tobin of the Teamsters, one of the AFL officials most opposed to industrial unionism, referred to the heavy industry workers as “the rubbish,” and another remarked, “My wife can always tell from the smell of my clothes what breed of foreigners I’ve been hanging out with.” Schlesinger, Coming of the New Deal, 411, citing Edward Levinson, Labor on the March (New York: Harper, 1938), chapters 3, 4.
109. For fuller discussion of the rupture, see Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 352–431.
110. McElvaine, 226.
111. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 257.
112. Sidney Fine, Sit-down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969). See also, Bernstein, Turbulent Years, esp. 523–551.
113. Green, 155.
114. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 550. This was in a letter to his advisor and speech writer Samuel Rosenman following his reelection in 1940.
115. Press Conference, April 15, 1937. See Complete Presidential Press Conferences of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Introduction by Jonathan Daniels (New York: Da Capo Press, 1972), vol. 9, 304–307.
116. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 485–490.
117. Dubofsky and Van Tine, 314.
118. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 494.
119. Dubofsky and Van Tine, 315.
120. Leuchtenburg,. 243.
121. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, 663–671.
122. Green, 166.
123. Green, 173. The increase was from 2.8 million to 8.4 million.
124. Hamilton and Hamilton, 31, citing the statement of T. Arnold Hill, February 8, 1935, House Committee on Labor, Unemployment, Old Age, and Social Insurance, 74th Congress, 1st sess., 326.328. Hamilton and Hamilton point out that the NUL testimony put the proportion of Negro workers excluded at two-thirds, whereas the NAACP estimate was one-half.
125. Ibid.
126. Ibid., 27.
127. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans, 5th ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 426.
128. Kennedy, 765–766, cites Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973), 241–241, for examples of discrimination; and Ulysses Lee, United States Army in World War II Special Studies: The Employment of Negro Troops (Washington: Department of the Army, 1963), 76, for the War Department policy.
129. Kennedy, 766, citing Anderson, 247–253.
130. Franklin, 426–427.
131. Irving Bernstein, A Caring Society: The New Deal, the Worker, and the Great Depression (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 296.
132. Bernstein, ibid., 294–296; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto, 3rd ed. (New York: Hill and Wang), 268.
133. Hamilton and Hamilton, 54; Green, 180.
134. Green, 130.
135. In the system that emerged after Reconstruction, landowners assigned landless farmers small tracts of land and provided them with food, shelter, clothing, necessary seeds, and farm equipment. When the crop was harvested, part of the proceeds went to tenants after deduction of the cost of items furnished by the landlord. Sharecroppers got a smaller part of the proceeds than share tenants whose portion depended on what they could pay for themselves, and cash tenants paid a fixed rent and kept all the proceeds of the harvest.
136. Jerold S. Auerbach, “Southern Tenant Farmers: Socialist Critics of the New Deal,” Labor History, 7, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 4–5.
137. Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 151.
138. Leuchtenburg, 137.
139. Auerbach (p. 17) writes that although the STFU claimed to be interracial and both races were welcome, the overwhelming number of unions were either black or white or with one white or one black member only. Surveys of STFU membership are the basis of his conclusion.
140. According to the chief STFU organizer, Harry L. Mitchell, whose salary was paid by the Socialist Party, they could not have continued without outside support. Auerbach, 9–10.
141. Ibid., 9–12.
142. M. S. Venkaratamani, “Norman Thomas, Arkansas Sharecroppers, and the Roosevelt Agricultural Policies, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 137, no. 2 (September 1960): 236.
143. Auerbach, 15.
144. Venkaratamani, 238.
145. Ibid., 239.
146. Auerbach, 17.
147. Venkaratamani, 229, 231. The account regarding Roosevelt is taken from Schlesinger’s review of a number of sources, including the AAA papers and interviews. See Coming of the New Deal, 597.
148. Schlesinger, ibid., 379, quotes The Sharecropper’s Voice.
149. Venkaratamani, 237, citing a letter from Wagner to Norman Thomas, April 2, 1935.
150. Auerbach, 16.
151. Ibid.
152. Venkaratamani, 244. Blackstone expressed disagreement with the philosophy of small homesteads for tenants.
153. Ibid.
154. Ibid., 245.
155. Leuchtenburg, 104, citing several critics of the plan.
156. Abraham Holtzman, The Townsend Movement: A Political Study (New York: Bookman, 1963), 108–109.
157. Leuchtenburg, 106. Amenta writes that the doctor claimed there were 2,000 clubs promoting the plan in December 1934, and a little later, 300,000 members. Examination of the Townsend Plan’s financial records show that the figures for both are about half what Townsend claimed. Edwin Amenta, When Movements Matter: The Townsend Plan and the Rise of Social Security (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 58–59.
158. See Roy Lubove, The Struggle for Social Security, 1900–1935 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). A similar overshadowing of more conventional organizations occurred in the 1950s and 1960s when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee temporarily displaced long-established civil rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League. This is not to compare the reasonable demands of the civil rights leaders of the 1960s with the unrealistic ones of the Townsendites.
159. Perkins, 278.
160. Roosevelt, The Annual Message to the Legislature, January 7, 1931. In The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1928–1932 (New York: Random House, 1938), 103.
161. Thomas H. Eliot, “The Legal Background of Social Security, delivered at a general staff meeting at Social Security Administration Headquarters, Baltimore, Maryland, February 3, 1961, accessed May 6, 2013, available at http://www.ssa.gov/history/eliot2.html.
162. Douglas, 12.
163. Perkins, 278–279.
164. Ibid., 294.
165. In January 1935, the Townsend national publicity director wrote to movement co-founder Robert Clements that newspapers were sold on the movement’s strength. “Our big job is to get that strength before our strength is actually measured.” Letter from Frank Peterson to Robert E. Clements, January 20, 1935, cited by Holtzman, p. 89, who gave this as evidence of Roosevelt’s over-assessment.
166. Witte, 78–79. Witte added that it was smart of Thomas Eliot, who drafted the bill, to make Old Age Assistance “Title I.”
167. Amenta, 87–88. See also Holtzman, 94–100.
168. Amenta, 91–92.
169. The average OAA benefit was under $20 throughout the 1930s. Eveline M. Burns, The American Social Security System (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 313.
170. Holtzman, 115.
171. Holtzman, 104, cites Hopkins’s address at Grinnell College quoted by Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 20.
172. Holtzman, ibid.
173. Arthur J. Altmeyer, The Formative Years of Social Security (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press), 89–90 and passim; Amenta, 169–171.
174. House Ways and Means Committee, Hearings Relative to the Social Security Act Amendments of 1939, Vol. 1, 1–2, cited by Amenta, 171.
175. The emphasis here is on national movements. A fuller treatment of popular movements would include End Poverty in California (EPIC). Based on Upton Sinclair’s plan to give the unemployed the opportunity to produce for their own use on lands purchased or leased by the state, EPIC won its author the Democratic nomination for governor in 1934. Also worthy of discussion is the Midwestern Farmers’ Holiday Association, organized by Milo Reno in 1932 to deal with the problem of over-production in agriculture.
176. Leuchtenburg, 7.
177. Ibid., 100. It was estimated at thirty to forty-five million by the end of 1932.
178. Kennedy, 234.
179. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1982), 77–78.
180. William Ivy Hair, The Kingfisher and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 270.
181. Ibid., 272. Hair cites an interview with one of Long’s associates, H.C. (“Happy”) Sevier in the Interview Collection in T. Harry Williams’ Papers, Hill Memorial Library, Lousiana State University, Baton Rouge,
182. Brinkley, 74. Hair (p. 272) makes a similar point: that “hunger and rags in the midst of plenty was real enough” and “inadequate distribution of income a prime cause of the Depression.” James MacGregor Burns also points out that Long was describing “a fundamental dilemma of American democracy.” MacGregor Burns, The Crosswinds of Freedom (New York: Knopf, 1989), 60.
183. Brinkley, 173.
184. Kennedy, 233.
185. Leuchtenburg, 102. The reference is to the fascistic corporatism of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
186. Brinkley, 179.
187. Brinkley, 201–203, 246, 248; Kennedy, 243.
188. Brinkley, 193. See also McElvaine, 240.
189. Brinkley, 193.
190. Ibid., 174–175.
191. Tugwell, 433. In answer to Tugwell’s question, FDR said the most dangerous was General Douglas MacArthur.
192. Kennedy, 237.
193. Brinkley, 126–128. See also, Leuchtenburg, 100–102.
194. Ibid., 207–209. See also Kennedy, 240–241.
195. Roosevelt admitted to Brain Truster Raymond Moley that he was indeed trying to steal Long’s thunder. Moley, After Seven Years (New York: Harper, 1939), 312, cited by Kennedy, 276.
196. Leuchtenburg, 153–155.
197. Ibid., 154; Brinkley, 207–209.
198. Hair, 307.
199. Brinkley, 80.
200. Kennedy, 243, citing Elliott Roosevelt, FDR: His Personal Letters (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1970), 452–453.
201. MacGregor Burns, 84.
202. Lemke, a Progressive Republican, was, like Coughlin and Long, originally pro-New Deal but became embittered by the Roosevelt Administration’s intervention to defeat the Frazier-Lemke Act, which called for government refinancing of all farm mortgages and major inflation of the money supply. See Brinkley, 154.
203. Arthur Krock, “In Washington Ways Are Sought to Counteract Huey Long’s Program,” New York Times, January 10, 1935, 18.
204. McElvaine, 236–237.