Unemployed Movements, 1930s

UNEMPLOYED MOVEMENTS, 1930s. “When you looked out on the scene of misery and desperation during the depression,” A. J. Muste later recalled of the 1930s, “you saw that it was the radicals, the left-wingers, the people who had adopted some form of Marxian philosophy, who were doing something about the situation, who were banding people together for action, who were putting up a fight.” Muste’s recollections are borne out by the history of the unemployed movements of the Great Depression era; while many people talked about the problems of the jobless, it was radicals—particularly Communists, Socialists, and Musteites—who actually mobilized the out-of-work for social and political action.

The Communists were the first in the field. Even before the Wall Street crash, American Communists aggressively sought out the jobless on breadlines, outside factory gates, in relief offices, and in working-class neighborhoods. The coming of mass unemployment in 1930 accelerated their efforts and dramatically increased their ability to mobilize discontent into highly visible protests. On 6 March 1930, which the Communists dubbed International Unemployment Day, hundreds of thousands of jobless workers marched through the streets of the nation’s major cities. The size of the demonstrations surprised even radicals and awakened many Americans to the existence of mass unemployment and large-scale unrest.

In the summer of 1930, the Communist Party (CP) brought this burgeoning unemployment movement together into a national organization, the Unemployed Councils of the United States of America. Despite the existence of a national office, the Unemployed Councils remained a largely local and decentralized movement rooted in particular local communities. The strength of these councils rested, in fact, on their ability to resolve specific grievances of concern to the jobless in those communities: to force concessions from local relief authorities or to block police from carrying out evictions. Struggles against evictions, for example, mounted as the Depression deepened in 1931 and 1932. When Chicago blacks received eviction notices, “it was not unusual,” according to sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, “for a mother to shout to the children, ‘Run quick and find the Reds!’ “

The local, ad hoc: character of the Unemployed Councils was both a strength and a weakness. Jobless workers might mobilize around specific grievances or demonstrations but then drift away when the issue was resolved, or they returned to work. CP members often dominated the formal membership of the councils and official Party policy sometimes conflicted with the localism and the “bread and butter” focus of the councils. Many jobless workers did not see the reason why councils should participate in demonstrations against the “imperialist war danger” or hold up placards calling for “Defense of the Chinese Soviets” or denouncing the Socialists and Musteites as “social fascists.” Ultimately, the CP agreed. In late 1930, it shifted the Unemployed Councils toward more direct work among the unemployed and away from revolutionary sloganeering. Locally, councils would represent the jobless in their dealings with relief authorities; nationally, they would work for federal relief and unemployment insurance.

The primary national activities centered around petition drives for unemployment insurance and two national “hunger marches” in December of 1931 and 1932. Herbert Benjamin, an energetic Communist organizer, became the national leader in 1931 and remained with the unemployed movement for most of the decade. Despite Benjamin’s able leadership, the councils remained a largely local movement, particularly before 1933.

While Communist organizers confronted the Depression with aggressive organizing of the jobless, Socialists initially responded with inertia. At the beginning of the 1930s, Socialist activity on behalf of the unemployed emphasized traditional Socialist propagandizing and disdained direct organization of the out of work. Only with the entrance into the Socialist Party (SP) of a newer generation of young (and often college-educated and native-born) members did the Socialists begin to abandon their passive approach to the unemployed question.

Many of these young, activist Socialists also belonged to the League for Industrial Democracy (LID), an SP offshoot. Under LID leadership, the Chicago Workers Committee on Unemployment organized twenty-five thousand jobless in sixty locals by mid-1932. Inspired by this successful model, Baltimore LID members built the People’s Unemployment League, which was surprisingly successful at interracial organizing given its border state location.

The LID’s success as well as the growing power of younger activists within the SP, the fear of Communist domination of the unemployed, and the deteriorating economic situation finally persuaded the SP’s national executive committee to endorse direct organization of the jobless in February 1932. Although the SP’s national office provided some guidance to party branches interested in organizing the jobless, the success or failure of most efforts (as was true among the Unemployed Councils) rested largely on local initiative. In 1935, however, Socialist activists, under the leadership of David Lasser, launched a national organization of the unemployed—the Workers’ Alliance of America.

The LID and Socialist unemployed groups used many of the same techniques as the Communist unemployed councils: acting as grievance representatives at relief stations, fighting evictions, and holding demonstrations and parades to urge higher relief appropriations. In general, however, Socialists tended to use confrontations and disruptions less than Communists. They often tried to intercede with relief authorities to get money for a family threatened with eviction rather than trying to block it bodily. This moderation gave the Socialist groups a certain respectability that the Communists lacked. “We were not a pariah organization,” one leader of the Baltimore People’s Unemployment League recalled.

The third major radical movement of the unemployed, which was led by the followers of A. J. Muste, differed in organizing methods and constituency from the Communist and Socialist groups. The Musteites were mostly graduates of Brookwood Labor College, where Muste presided in the 1920s, and adherents of the Conference on Progressive Labor Action, which aspired to be an independent working-class movement competitive with both the American Federation of Labor and the traditional left-wing political parties. Carl Braninn, a Musteite and a Seattle labor editor, was one of the founders of the Seattle Unemployed Citizens League (UCL). The UCL began as a “self-help” cooperative, whose members obtained food and fuel through barter and exchange of labor. This “Republic of the Penniless” was typical of the more than 330 self-help groups (with more than 300,000 members) that sprung up among the unemployed, particularly during the worst years of the Depression. It was more unusual in the overtly political turn that it took after self-help proved to be only a very partial solution to the problems of the jobless. It took control of the city’s relief apparatus, successfully backed candidates for mayor and county commissioner, blocked evictions, and illegally restored terminated electric and gas services.

The success of the UCL inspired imitation among Musteites in other parts of the country. They began building groups around self-help and then pushing them toward political militancy. With remarkable success, they mobilized the unemployed in the small industrial and mining towns of Ohio, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the textile mills of North Carolina. The acceptance that the Musteites won outside the primary centers of American radicalism was due, in part, to what they called their “American approach”—their identification of the Unemployed Leagues (as their groups came to be known) with patriotic symbols and slogans. It was equally due to their explicit focus on the immediate and concrete needs of the jobless and their willingness to work with self-help organizations, which other radicals disdained as “collective picking in garbage cans.”

But this willingness to embrace self-help and patriotism did not always lead the Unemployed Leagues to an outcome desired by the Musteites. Some groups remained focused solely on their crop picking, and, in the disdainful words of onetime Musteite Louis Budenz, “Potatoes became the opium of the people.” At other times, the Musteites’ patriotism and seeming conservatism was taken more seriously than they had perhaps intended. At the first national convention of the Leagues in Columbus, Ohio, on 4 July 1933, the Musteites faced a revolt from a “Stars and Stripes” faction, which was unhappy over the mingling of black and white delegates as well as the failure to open the convention with a prayer and the singing of the National Anthem.

The 1933 national convention represented the high point of the Unemployed Leagues, which gradually declined over the next few years because of the changing political climate (particularly the emergence of the New Deal) and the shifting of the interests and energies of the Musteites away from the organizing of the unemployed as they created first the American Workers Party and then (in alliance with the Trotskyists) the Workers Party (WP). These shifts also embroiled the Musteites in a crippling factionalism and sectarianism that alienated many rank-and-file members of the Unemployed Leagues. Nevertheless, the leagues remained an active force in agitating for the needs and rights of the jobless in particular localities. Probably their most notable success came in the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike, where the Lucas County Unemployed Leagues helped win the strike through mass picketing.

The beginning of the New Deal in 1933 and particularly the inauguration of the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in 1935 transformed the climate in which the radical unemployed movements operated. Many jobless workers began to see the federal government (personified by the charismatic figure of Franklin Roosevelt) as their friend and benefactor. But the federal government also became the focus of jobless protests since it was now the primary source of relief funds and jobs. At the same time that New Deal liberalism and reformism eroded some of the constituency for the unemployed movement, changes within the Left finally made it possible for the three different unemployed groups to unite in a single organization. The rise of fascism in Europe and the emergence of the Popular Front had made Communists much more willing—indeed eager—to unite with the non-Communist Left. At the same time, Trotskyists within the leadership of the WP, which now subsumed the Musteite movement, sought entrance into the SP in line with worldwide Trotskyist policy. Consequently, in April 1936 the Unemployed Leagues and the Unemployed Councils merged with the Workers’ Alliance, which was retained as the name of the new national group.

After 1936, the Workers’ Alliance focused much of its attention on Washington, where it became a relatively effective lobbying organization for national relief and unemployment insurance measures. Politically, it operated as a kind of left wing of New Deal liberalism and it developed a close relationship with New Deal relief officials. On the local level, the Workers’ Alliance served largely as a bargaining agent for relief recipients and WPA workers. Large demonstrations and eviction protests occasionally flared up, but more often the alliance quietly carried out its trade union-like functions. The alliance faded with the coming of the war and the end of mass unemployment.

The legacy of the unemployed movement lies partially in the ways that it concretely improved the lot of the jobless: resolving individual relief grievances, winning high levels of local relief, establishing more equitable and less degrading relief practices, stopping evictions, fighting WPA cuts, limiting the exploitation of WPA workers. More generally, it helped to refute the still prevalent notion that the jobless were “responsible” for their problems and to establish governmental responsibility for relief and unemployment insurance. Perhaps most important, the unemployed movement raised the political and social consciousness of the thousands of workers who passed through its ranks and learned the power of organization as a political and economic weapon. Veterans of the unemployed movement went on to play crucial roles in other political and social struggles, particularly the campaign for industrial unionism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Although the unemployed movement of the Depression era never attracted more than a minority of the jobless to its banners, it was the most powerful such movement in U.S. history. It serves, moreover, as a significant example of a locally based, grass-roots movement under radical leadership that worked creatively and militantly to meet the concrete, immediate needs of the unemployed.

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