What the New Deal can teach us about winning a Green New Deal: Part III—the First New Deal

In Part I and Part II of this series on lessons to be learned from the New Deal I argued that despite the severity of the Great Depression, sustained organizing was required to transform the national political environment and force the federal government to accept direct responsibility for financing relief and job creation programs. In this post, I begin an examination of the evolution and aims of New Deal programs in order to highlight the complex and conflictual nature of a state-directed reform process.

The New Deal is often talked about as if it were a set of interconnected programs that were introduced at one moment in time to reinvigorate national economic activity and ameliorate the hardships faced by working people.  Advocates for a Green New Deal, which calls for a new state-led “national, social, industrial, and economic mobilization” to confront our multiple interlocking problems, tend to reinforce this view of the New Deal.  It is easy to understand why: state action is desperately needed, and pointing to a time in history when it appears that the state rose to the occasion, developing and implementing the programs necessary to solve a crisis, makes it easier for people to envision and support another major effort.

Unfortunately, this view misrepresents the experience of the New Deal.  And, to the extent it influences our approach to shaping and winning a Green New Deal, it weakens our ability to successfully organize and promote the kind of state action we want.

The New Deal actually encompasses two different periods; the First New Deal was begun in 1933, the Second New Deal in 1935.  In both periods, the programs designed to respond to working class concerns fell far short of popular demands.  In fact, it was continued mass organizing, spearheaded by an increasingly unified unemployed movement and an invigorated trade union movement, that pushed the Roosevelt administration to initiate its Second New Deal, which included new and significantly more progressive initiatives.

Unfortunately, as those social movements lost energy and vision in the years that followed, pressure on the state for further change largely abated, leaving the final reforms won compromised and vulnerable to future attack.   The lesson from this history for those advocating for a Green New Deal is clear: winning a Green New Deal requires, in addition to carefully constructed policy demands, an approach to movement building that prepares people for a long struggle to overcome expected state efforts to resist the needed transformative changes.

The First New Deal

Roosevelt’s initial policies were largely consistent with those of the previous Hoover administration.  Like Hoover, he sought to stabilize the banking system and balance the budget.  On his first day in office Roosevelt declared a national bank “holiday,” dismissing Congressional sentiment for bank nationalization.  He then rushed through a new law, the Emergency Banking Act, which gave the Comptroller of the Currency, the Secretary of the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve new powers to ensure that reopened banks would remain financially secure.

On his sixth day in office, he requested that Congress cut $500 million from the $3.6 billion federal budget, eliminate government agencies, reduce the salaries of civilian and military federal workers, and slash veterans’ benefits by 50 percent.  Congressional resistance led to spending cuts of “only” $243 million.

Roosevelt remained committed, against the advice of many of his most trusted advisers, to balanced budget policies for most of the decade.  While his administration did boost government spending to nearly double the levels of the Hoover administration, it also collected sufficient taxes to keep deficits low.  It wasn’t until 1938 that Roosevelt proposed a Keynesian-style deficit spending plan.

At the same time, facing escalating demands for action from the unemployed as well as many elected city leaders, Roosevelt also knew that the status quo was politically untenable.  And, in an effort to halt the deepening depression and growing militancy of working people, he pursued a dizzying array of initiatives, most within his first 100 days in office.  The great majority were aimed at stabilizing or reforming markets, which Roosevelt believed was the best way to restore business confidence, investment, and growth.  This emphasis is clear from the following list of some of his most important initiatives.

• The Agricultural Adjustment Act (May 1933). The act sought to boost the prices of agricultural goods. The government bought livestock and paid subsidies to farmers in exchange for reduced planting. It also created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to manage the payment of subsidies.
• The Securities Act of 1933 (May 1933). The act sought to restore confidence in the stock market by requiring that securities issuers disclose all information necessary for investors to be able to make informed investment decisions.
• The Home Owners’ Loan Act of 1933 (June 1933). The act sought to stabilize the finance industry and housing industry by providing mortgage assistance to homeowners. It created the Home Owners Loan Corporation which was authorized to issue bonds and loans to help homeowners in financial difficulties pay their mortgages, back taxes, and insurance.
• The Banking Act of 1933 (June 1933). The act separated commercial and investment banking and created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to insure bank deposits, curb bank runs, and reduce bank failures.
• Farm Credit Act (June 1933). The act established the Farm Credit System as a group of cooperative lending institutions to provide low cost loans to farmers.
• National Industrial Recovery Act (June 1933). Title I of the act suspended anti-trust laws and required companies to write industrywide codes of fair competition that included wage and price fixing, the establishment of production quotas, and restrictions on market entry.  It also gave workers the right to organize unions, although without legal protection.  Title I also created the National Recovery Administration to encourage business compliance.  The Supreme Court ruled the suspension of anti-trust laws unconstitutional in 1935.  Title II, which established the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works or Public Works Administration, is discussed below.

Roosevelt also pursued several initiatives in response to working class demands for jobs and a humane system of relief.  These include:

• The Emergency Conservation Work Act (March 1933). The act created the Civilian Conservation Corps which employed jobless young men to work in the nation’s forests and parks, planting trees, reducing erosion, and fighting fires.
• The Federal Emergency Relief Act of 1933 (May 1933). The act created the Federal Emergency Relief Administration to provide work and cash relief for the unemployed.
• The Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works or Public Works Administration (June 1933). Established under Title II of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Public Works Administration was a federally funded public works program that financed private construction of major public projects such as dams, bridges, hospitals, and schools.
• The Civil Works Administration (November 1933).  Established by executive order, the Civil Works Administration was a short-lived jobs program that employed jobless workers at mostly manual-labor construction jobs.

This is without doubt an impressive record of accomplishments, and it doesn’t include other noteworthy actions, such as the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the ending of prohibition, and the removal of the US from the gold standard.  Yet, when looked at from the point of view of working people, this First New Deal was sadly lacking.

Roosevelt’s pursuit of market reform rather than deficit spending meant a slow recovery from the depths of the recession.  In fact, John Maynard Keynes wrote Roosevelt a public letter in December 1933, pointing out that the Roosevelt administration appeared more concerned with reform than recovery or, to be charitable, was confusing the former with the latter.  Primary attention, he argued, should be on recovery, and that required greater government spending financed by loans to increase national purchasing power.

Roosevelt also refused to address one of the unemployed movement’s major policy demands: the establishment of a federal unemployment insurance fund financed by taxes on the wealthy.  Finally, as we see next, even the New Deal’s early job creation and relief initiatives were deliberately designed in ways that limited their ability to meaningfully address their targeted social concerns.

First New Deal employment and relief programs

The Roosevelt administration’s first direct response to the country’s massive unemployment was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC).  Its enrollees, as Roosevelt explained, were to be “used in complex work, not interfering with normal employment and confining itself to forestry, the prevention of soil erosion, flood control, and similar projects.”  The project was important for establishing a new level of federal responsibility, as employer of last resort, for boosting employment.  Over its nine-year lifespan, its participants built thousands of miles of hiking trails, planted millions of trees, and fought hundreds of forest fires.

However, the program was far from meeting the needs of the tens of million jobless and their dependents.  Participation in the program was limited to unmarried male citizens, 18 to 25 years of age, whose families were on local relief, and who were able to pass a physical exam.  By law, maximum enrollment in the program was limited to 300,000.

Moreover, although the CCC provided its participants with shelter, clothing, and food, the wages it paid, $30 a month ($25 of which had to be sent home to their families), were low.  And, while white and black were supposed to be housed together in the CCC camps where participants lived under Army supervision, many of the camps were segregated, with whites given preference for the best jobs.

Two months later, the Roosevelt administration launched the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), the first program of direct federal financing of relief.  Under the Hoover administration, the federal government had restricted its support of state relief efforts to the offer of loans.  Because of the precariousness of their own financial situation, many states were unable to take on new debt, and were thus left with no choice but to curtail their relief efforts.

FERA, in contrast, offered grants as well as loans, providing approximately $3 billion in grants over its 2 ½ year lifespan. The grants allowed state and local governments to employ people who were on relief rolls to work on a variety of public projects in agriculture, the arts, construction and education.  FERA grants supported the employment of over 20 million people, or about 16 percent of the total population of the United States.

However, the program suffered from a number of shortcomings.  FERA provided funds to the states on a matching basis, with states required to contribute three dollars for every federal dollar.  This restriction meant that a number of states, struggling with budget shortfalls, either refused to apply for FERA grants or kept their requests small.

Also problematic was the program’s requirement that participants be on state relief rolls.  This meant that only one person in a family was eligible for FERA work.  And the amount of pay or relief was determined by a social worker’s evaluation of the extent of the family’s financial need.  Many states had extremely low standards of necessity, resulting in either low wages or inadequate relief payments which could sometimes be limited to coupons exchangeable only for food items on an approved list.

Finally, FERA was not directly involved in the administration and oversight of the projects it funded. This meant that compensation for work and working conditions differed across states.  It also meant that in many states, white males were given preferential treatment.

A month later, the Public Works Administration (PWA) was created as part of the National Industrial Recovery Act.  The PWA was a federal public works program that financed private construction of major long-term public projects such as dams, bridges, hospitals, and schools.  Administrators at PWA headquarters planned the projects and then gave funds to appropriate federal agencies to enable them to help state and local governments finance the work. The PWA played no role in hiring or production; private construction companies carried out the work, hiring workers on the open market.

The program lasted for six years, spent $6 billion, and helped finance a number of important infrastructure projects.  It also gave federal administrators valuable public policy planning experience, which was put to good use during World War II.  However, as was the case with FERA, PWA projects required matching contributions from state and local governments, and given their financial constraints, the program never spent as much money as was budgeted.

These programs paint a picture of a serious but limited effort on the part of the Roosevelt administration to help workers weather the crisis.  In particular, the requirement that states match federal contributions to receive FERA and PWA funds greatly limited their reach.  And, the participant restrictions attached to both the CCC and FERA meant that program benefits were far from adequate.  Moreover, because all of these were new programs, it often took time for administrators to get funds flowing, projects developed, participants chosen, and benefits distributed.  Thus, despite a flurry of activity, millions of workers and their families remained in desperate conditions with winter approaching.

Pressed to do more, the Roosevelt administration launched its final First New Deal jobs program in November 1933, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), under the umbrella of FERA.  It was designed to be a short-term program, and it lasted only 6 months, with most employment creation ending after 4 months.  The jobs created were primarily low-skilled construction jobs, improving or constructing roads, schools, parks, airports, and bridges. The CWA gave jobs to some 4 million people.

This was a dramatically different program from those discussed above.  Most importantly, employment was not limited to those on relief, greatly enlarging the number of unemployed who could participate.  At the end of Hoover’s term in office, only one unemployed person out of four was on a relief roll.  It also meant that participants would not be subject to the relief system’s humiliating means tests or have their wages tied to their family’s “estimated budgetary deficit.”  Also significant was the fact that although many of the jobs were inherited from current relief projects, CWA administrators made a real effort to employ their workers in new projects designed to be of value to the community.

For all of these reasons, jobless workers flocked to the program, seeking an opportunity to do, in the words of the time, “real work for a real wage.”   As Harry Hopkins, the program’s chief administrator, summed up in a talk shortly after the program’s termination:

When we started Civil Works we said we were going to put four million men to work.  How many do you suppose applied for those four million jobs? About ten million. Now I don’t say there were ten million people out of work, but ten million people walked up to a window and stood in line, many of them all night, asking for a job that paid them somewhere between seven and eighteen dollars a week.

In point of fact, there were some fifteen million people unemployed.  And as the demand for CWA jobs became clear, Roosevelt moved to end the program.   As Jeff Singleton describes:

In early January Hopkins told Roosevelt that CWA would run out of funds sooner than expected.  According to one account, Roosevelt “blew up” and demanded that Hopkins begin phasing out the program immediately.  On January 18 Hopkins ordered weekly wages cut (through a reduction in hours worked) and hinted that the program would be terminated at the beginning of March.  The cutback, coming at a time when the program had just reached its promised quota, generated a storm of protest and a movement in Congress to continue CWA through the spring of 1934.  These pressures helped the New Deal secure a new emergency relief appropriation of $950 million, but the CWA was phased out in March and April.

Lessons

The First New Deal did represent an important change in the economic role of the federal government.  In particular, the Roosevelt administration broke new ground in acknowledging federal responsibility for job creation and relief.  Yet, the record of the First New Deal also makes clear that the Roosevelt administration was reluctant to embrace the transformative role that many now attribute to it.

As Keynes pointed out, Roosevelt’s primary concern in the first years of his administration was achieving market stability through market reform, not a larger financial stake in the economy to speed recovery.  In fact, in some cases, his initiatives gave private corporations even greater control over market activity.

The Roosevelt administration response to worker demands for jobs and a more humane system of welfare was also far from transformative.  Determined to place limits on federal spending, its major initiatives required substantial participation from struggling state governments.  They also did little to challenge the punitive and inadequate relief systems operated by state governments.  The one exception was the CWA, which mandated wage-paying federally directed employment.  And that was the one program, despite its popularity, that was quickly terminated.

Of course, there was a Second New Deal, which included a number of important and more progressive initiatives, including the Works Progress Administration, the Social Security Act, and the National Labor Relations Act.  However, as I will discuss in the next post in this series, this Second New Deal was largely undertaken in response to the growing strength of the unemployed movement and workplace labor militancy.   And as we shall see, even these initiatives fell short of what many working people demanded.

One lesson to be learned from this history for those advocating a Green New Deal is that major policy transformations do not come ready made, or emerge fully developed.  Even during a period of exceptional crisis, the Roosevelt administration was hesitant to pursue truly radical experiments.  And the evolution of its policy owed far more to political pressure than the maturation of its administrative capacities or a new found determination to experiment.

If we hope to win a Green New Deal we will have to build a movement that is not only powerful enough to push the federal government to take on new responsibilities with new capacities, but also has the political maturity required to appreciate the contested nature of state policy and the vision necessary to sustain its forward march.

What the New Deal can teach us about winning a Green New Deal: Part II—Movement Building

In Part I in this series on lessons to be learned from the New Deal, I described the enormous economic and social costs of the first years of the Great Depression and the reluctance of business and government leaders to pursue policies likely to threaten the status quo.  I did so to demonstrate that we should not assume that simply establishing the seriousness of our current multifaceted crisis, especially one that has yet to directly threaten capitalist profitability, will be enough to win elite consideration of a transformative Green New Deal.

I also argued that it was the growth of an increasingly militant political movement openly challenging the legitimacy of the police, courts, and other state institutions that finally transformed the national political environment and pushed Roosevelt to change course and introduce his early New Deal employment and relief programs.  In this post, I examine the driving force of this movement, the movement of unemployed.

The growth and effectiveness of the unemployed movement owes much to the organizing and strategic choices of the US Communist Party (CP).  While there is much to criticize about CP policies and activities, especially its sectarianism and aggressive antagonism towards other groups, there is also much we can learn about successful organizing from its work with the unemployed in the early years of the depression.

The party faced the challenge of building a mass movement powerful enough to force a change in government policy. Although its initial victory was limited, the policy breakthrough associated with the programs of the First New Deal led to new expectations and demands, culminating in Roosevelt’s adoption of far more extensive employment and relief policies as part of his Second New Deal, only two years later.

We face a similar challenge today; we need to build a mass movement capable of forcing the government to begin adopting policies that help advance a Green New Deal.  Therefore, it is well worth our time to study how party activists built a national organization of the unemployed that helped the unemployed see that their hard times were the result of structural rather than personal failure; encouraged local, collective, and direct action in defense of immediate shared basic needs; and connected local actions to a broader national campaign for government action.

The CP and the unemployed movement

The CP made its decision to organize the unemployed even before the start of the Great Depression.  In August 1929, two months before the stock market crash, the CP established the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) as an alternative to the AFL and called on that body to assist in the creation of a nation-wide organization of Unemployed Councils (UCs).

The CP was following the lead of the Communist International which had, in 1928, declared the start of the so-called Third Period, which was said to mark the beginning of capitalism’s terminal stage, and called on all communist parties to end their joint work with other organizations and prepare for the coming revolutionary struggle.  This stance meant that as unemployment exploded, those without work had the benefit of an existing organization to give them a voice and instrument of action.  Unfortunately, it also led to destructive attacks on other political tendencies and efforts to build organizations of the unemployed, thereby weakening the overall effort.

The CP’s first big effort directed towards the unemployed was the March 6, 1930 demonstrations against unemployment and for relief that drew some 500,000 people in twenty-five cities and was organized under the banner of “International Day for Struggle against Worldwide Unemployment.”  The New York City demonstration, the largest, was met by police repression, with many demonstrators beaten and arrested.  But another New York City protest by the unemployed in October produced a victory, with the city agreeing to boost relief spending by $1 million.  These actions created visibility for the CP’s fledgling national network of UCs and helped to build its membership.

The Unemployed Councils of the USA held its founding convention in early July.  The following month it issued a statement calling on Congress to adopt its “Workers Unemployment Insurance Bill.” The bill called for “payment of $35 per week for each unemployed worker plus an additional $5 per week per dependent and the creation of a ‘National Unemployment Insurance Fund’ to be generated through a tax on all property valued in excess of $25,000 and incomes of more than $5,000.” A new Workers’ Commission, to be elected by working people, was to control the distribution of funds.

To this point, the Unemployed Councils of the USA was dominated by the CP, and its general program and demands largely echoed those of the CP, often including foreign policy declarations expressing support for the Soviet Union.  However, in November, finally acknowledging that this dominance was limiting recruitment, the party agreed to give its organizers more independence and freedom to focus on the issues of most direct concern to the unemployed.  In the months that followed, “a wave of rent strikes, eviction fights, and hunger marches involving an estimated 250,000 workers in seventy-five cities and six states swept the country. The Unemployed Councils had become a force to be reckoned with.”

The party’s focus on building a confrontational movement operating both locally and nationally led it to reject a variety of other efforts embraced by some unemployed.  As Franklin Folsom describes:

Early in 1931, some leaders of Unemployed Councils had recommended setting up food kitchens, and Communists helped organize food collections. These were humane acts of assistance to people who needed something to eat immediately. In a few months, however, both the Communists and the Unemployed Councils abandoned the idea, saying it had nothing to do with solving the basic problems of the unemployed.  Similarly, Communist and council policy on the subject of looting varied depending on time and place.  In the early days of mass unemployment some Communists encouraged the direct appropriation of food.  Later the practice was frowned on because it solved no long-term problem and could provoke very costly counteraction.

Many unemployed also turned to self-help activities to survive.  The so-called “productive enterprise” movement, in which unemployed workers sought to create their own enterprises to produce either for the market or barter, spread rapidly.  According to one study, by the end of 1932 this movement was active in thirty-seven states, with the largest group in California.  The CP and UCs opposed this effort from the start, calling it a self-starvation movement.

The organization and activity of the UCs

Most UCs were neighborhood centered, since the unemployed generally spent most of their time in the neighborhoods where they lived. The basic unit of the UC was the block committee, which comprised all unemployed local residents and their family members.  Each block committee elected delegates to a neighborhood unemployed council, and these councils, in turn, elected delegates to county or city unemployed councils.

The block committee office served as a social center, where the unemployed could gather and build relationships.  Through conversation and even more importantly action they were also able to develop a new radical understanding of the cause of their unemployment as well as appreciation for collective power.  As Steve Nelson, a leader of the Chicago UC movement, explained, it was important for the unemployed to “see that unemployment was not the result of their own or someone else’s mistake, that it was a worldwide phenomenon and a natural product of the system.” Thus, “unemployed agitation was as much education as direct action.”

With time on their hands, the unemployed were generally eager to act in defense of their neighbors, especially around housing and relief.  Here is Christine Ellis, a UC organizer, talking about what happened at one UC meeting in a black neighborhood on the west side of Chicago:

We spoke simply, explained the platform, the demands and activities of the unemployed council. And then we said, “Are there any questions?”…. Finally an elderly Black man stood up and said, “What you folks figure on doing about that colored family that was thrown out of their house today?… They’re still out there with their furniture on the sidewalk.” So the man with me said, “Very simple. We’ll adjourn the meeting, go over there, and put the furniture back in the house. After that, anyone wishing to join the unemployed council and build an organization to fight evictions, return to this hall and we’ll talk about it some more.” That’s what we did…everybody else pitched in, began to haul in every last bit of furniture, fix up the beds…and when that was all done, went back to the hall. The hall was jammed!

Carl Winder, another UC activist, describes the response of the councils in New York to attempted evictions for nonpayment of rent:

Squads of neighbors were organized to bar the way to the dispossessing offices.  Whole neighborhoods were frequently mobilized to take part in this mutual assistance.  Where superior police force prevailed, it became common practice for the Unemployed Councils to lead volunteer squads in carrying the displaced furniture and belongings back into the home after the police had departed.  Council organizers became adept in fashioning meter-jumps to restore disconnected electric service and gas.

Hosea Hudson, a UC activist in Alabama, tells how landlords in Birmingham would sometimes allow tenants to stay even without paying rent “because if they put a family out, the unemployed workers would wreck the house and take it away for fuel by night…. This was kind of a free-for-all, a share-the-wealth situation.”

No Work, No Rent! was the common chant at UC anti-eviction actions.  And because UCs were part of a national organization, successful strategies in one area were quickly shared with UCs in another, spurring new actions.  According to one account, UCs had practically stopped evictions in Detroit by March 1931.  It was estimated that in 1932, 77,000 New York City families were moved back into their homes by UCs.  At the same time, these were costly actions. The police would often arrest many of those involved as well as use force to end resistance, leading to serious injuries and in some cases deaths.

UCs also mobilized to help people who were turned down for relief assistance.  Normally, UC organizers would gather a large crowd outside the relief agency and send in an elected committee to demand a meeting to reverse the decision.  Here is Hosea Hudson again, explaining the approach of the Birmingham UC:

If someone get out of food and been down to the welfare two or three times and still ain’t got no grocery order…. We’d go to the house of the person that’s involved, the victim, let her tell her story. Then we’d ask all the people, “What do you all think could be done about it?” We wouldn’t just jump up and say what to do. We let the neighbors talk about it for a while, and then it would be some of us in the crowd, we going to say, “If the lady wants to go back down to the welfare, if she wants, I suggest we have a little committee to go with her and find out what the condition is.”

In New York, UC members would often organize sit-ins at the relief office and refuse to leave until the center reversed a negative decision.  Intimidated by the aggressive protests, local relief officials throughout the country increasingly gave ground and approved relief requests.

This kind of activism directly challenged business and elite claims that prosperity was just around the corner.  It also revealed a growing radical spark, as more and more people openly challenged the legitimacy of the police, the court system, and state institutions.

With demands for relief escalating, cash-strapped relief agencies began pressing city governments for additional funds.  But city budgets were also shrinking.    As Danny Lucia reports in his study of unemployed organizing, this was an explosive situation.  In 1932, with Chicago’s unemployment rate at 40 percent, “Mayor Anton Cermak told Congress to send $150 million today or federal troops in the future.”

Thus, the militancy of the unemployed movement was now pushing mayors and even some business leaders to also press for federal action.  This development served to amplify the UCs own state and national campaigns demanding direct job creation and a program of federal relief.  These campaigns, by design, also helped generate publicity and support for local UC actions.

For example, in January 1931, a gathering of the Unemployed Councils of America and the TUUL decided to launch a national petition drive aimed at forcing Congress to pass a Federal Unemployment Insurance bill.  The UCs then began door-to-door canvassing for signatures.  Approximately a month later a delegation of 140 people was sent to Washington DC to deliver the petition to Congress on National Unemployment Insurance Day.  Demonstrations in support of the petition, organized by UCs, were held in most major cities on the same day.

Not long after, the CP set up a new organization, the Unemployed Committee for the National Hunger March, to coordinate a national hunger march on Washington DC to demand federal unemployment insurance and “the granting of emergency winter relief for the unemployed in the form of a lump-sum payment of $150 per unemployed worker, with an additional $50 for each dependent” as well as “a 7-hour workday, establishment of a union wage pay scale for unemployed workers, payment of a soldiers’ bonus to veterans of World War I, and an end to discrimination against black American and foreign-born workers.”  Local conferences selected 1,670 delegates, who converged on Washington from four separate columns in December 1931.  Their trip across the country was supported by local UCs.

Not surprisingly, the delegates were denied entrance to the Capital to present their demands.  They stayed two days and then started back, holding mass meetings across the country on their return trip to talk about their demands and the need for mass action to win them.

Another National Hunger March took place the following year.  This time 3,000 delegates came to Washington DC to again present their demands for winter relief and unemployment insurance.  These marches not only helped to strengthen the movement of the unemployed, they also greatly increased the pressure on elected officials to take some action to restore popular confidence in the government.

Underpinning the strategic orientation of the work of the UCs was the CP’s determination to build solidarity between the labor movement and the unemployed and anti-racist unity.  The first is highlighted by struggles in Detroit, where most unemployment was the result of auto factory layoffs.  There, the UCs and the Young Communist League led several marches to auto plants to protest the inadequate benefits given to laid-off workers.  Organizers would also read statements aimed at the workers still employed in the plants, pledging that the unemployed would not scab if workers struck for improved conditions.

As for anti-racism work, the CP “made sure that all of its agitation in the unemployed councils included protests against racial discrimination by relief agencies, landlords, and local and federal government.  On a more individual level, the Communists’ emphasis on multiracial organizing created situations in which whites and Blacks worked together for a common purpose and created personal bonds.”

Other organizing efforts

The CP was not the only left organization working to build a movement of the unemployed.  Both the Socialist Party and the Conference of Progressive Labor Action (CPLA), led by A.J. Muste, also created unemployed organizations that mobilized hundreds of thousands of jobless workers in local and national protests.  The Socialist Party created affiliated committees in a number of cities, the largest in Chicago and New York.  These committees were, like the UCs, generally oriented towards direct action in response to local conditions but they also engaged in electoral efforts.

The CPLA organized a number of Unemployed Citizen Leagues (UCLs) following the model of the Seattle Unemployed Citizens League. Established in the summer of 1931, the Seattle UCL quickly grew to a membership of 80,000 by 1933.  The UCLs initially focused on self-help through barter and labor exchange.  For example, members of the Seattle league:

persuaded farmers to let them harvest the fruit and potatoes for which there was no market, and they borrowed trucks to transport this produce.  Women exchanged sewing for food.  Barbers cut hair for canned berries.  This practice of barter spread and was highly organized. . . . Some men collected firewood from cutover forested areas; in all, they cut, split, and hauled 11,000 cords.  The products of these labors were shared by UCL members.  Some members repaired houses or worked in shoe repair shops, while others did gardening.  There were also child welfare and legal aid projects in which lawyers contributed their services.

The UCLs were also active in local elections, supporting candidates and legislation in favor of extended relief aid and unemployment insurance.  However, after a few years, most abandoned their focus on self-help, finding that “the needs of the jobless greatly exceeded the ability of a mutual aid program to meet them,” and turned instead to more direct-action protests similar to those of the UCs.  Although the CPLA failed to develop a national presence, their leagues were important in the Midwest, especially Ohio.

The CP was hostile to these organizations and their organizing efforts. In line with their Third Period strategy, the CP considered them to be a danger to the movement they were trying to build and their leaders to be “social-fascists.”  Party opposition went beyond denouncing these groups.  UC activists were encouraged to undermine their work, sometimes by physical force, other times by infiltrating and disrupting their meetings. This sectarianism clearly weakened the overall strength of the unemployed movement.  At the same time, local UC activists would sometimes ignore CP and UC leadership directives and find ways to build solidarity around joint actions on behalf of the unemployed.

The unemployed were not the only group whose organizing threatened the status quo.  As Steve Fraser pointed out: “Farmers took to the fields and roads in shocking displays of lawlessness. All across the corn belt, rebels banded together to forcibly prevent evictions of fellow farmers.” The Farm Holiday Association, an organization of midwestern farmers founded in 1932, not only mobilized its members to resist evictions, it also supported a progressive income tax, federal relief for the urban unemployed, and federal government control of the banks.  “In the South, tenants and sharecroppers unionized and conducted what a Department of Labor study called a ‘miniature civil war.’”

Veterans also organized.  World War I veterans from around the country, many with their families, traveled to Washington DC in summer 1932.  The call for a national Bonus March, although made by a largely anti-communist leadership, was inspired by the CP organized First National Hunger March. The veterans had been promised a bonus to compensate for their low war-time pay, but the Congress had delayed payment until 1945.  The veterans wanted their money now and set-up camps near the Capitol to pressure Congress to act.  Their camps were destroyed and the veterans violently dispersed by troops led by Douglas McArthur and Dwight Eisenhower.

In short, the political trajectory was one that concerned a growing number of political and business leaders.  Working people, largely anchored by a left-promoted, mass-based movement of unemployed, were becoming increasingly militant and dismissive of establishment calls for patience.  Continued federal inaction was becoming ever more dangerous.  Recognizing the need for action to preserve existing structures of power, it took Roosevelt only three months to drop his commitment to balanced budget orthodoxy in favor of New Deal experimentation.

Lessons

The multifaceted crisis we face today is significantly different from the crisis activists faced in the first years of the Great Depression.  But there is no question that, much like then, we will need to build a powerful, mass-movement for change if we hope to harness state power to advance a Green New Deal.

The First New Deal was not the result of administration concerns over the economic and social costs of the Great Depression.  Rather, it was political pressure that forced Roosevelt to begin experimenting with programs responsive to the concerns of working people.  And, not surprisingly, these experiments were, as will be discussed in the next post in this series, quite limited. It took new organizing to push Roosevelt to implement more progressive programs as part of his Second New Deal.

There are also lessons to be learned from the period about movement building itself, specifically the CPs organizing and strategic choices in targeting the unemployed and building a national movement of the unemployed anchored by a network of UCs.   The UCs helped transform how people understood the cause of their hard times.  They also created a local, collective, and direct outlet for action in defense of immediate shared basic needs.  The CP also emphasized the importance of organizing those actions in ways designed to overcome important divisions among working people.  Finally, the party and the UCs created broader campaigns for public policies on the national level that were directly responsive to local concerns and actions. Thus, organizing helped create a momentum that built political awareness, leadership capacity, class unity, and national weight around demands for new public initiatives.

The call for a Green New Deal speaks to a variety of crises and the need for change in many different sectors, including food production, energy generation, transportation, manufacturing, social and physical infrastructure, housing, health care, and employment creation.  It also projects a vision of a new more sustainable, egalitarian, and democratic society.  While it would be a mistake to equate the organizing work in the early years of the depression, which focused on employment and relief, with what is required today given the multifaceted nature of our crisis, we would do well to keep the organizing experience highlighted above in mind as we seek to advance the movement building process needed to win a Green New Deal.  It offers important insights into some of the organizational and political challenges we can expect to face and helpful criteria for deciding how best to respond to them.

For example, it challenges us to think carefully about how to ensure that our organizing work both illuminates the roots of our current multifaceted crises, building anti-capitalist consciousness, and challenges existing racial, ethnic, and gender divisions, strengthening working class unity.  It also challenges us to think about how to ensure that that our efforts in different geographic areas and around different issues will connect to build a national presence and organizational form that strengthens and unites our various efforts and also projects our overall vision of a restructured society.  And it also challenges us to think about how we should engage the state itself, envisioning and preparing for the ways it can be expected to seek to undermine whatever reforms are won.

What the New Deal can teach us about winning a Green New Deal: Part I–Confronting Crisis

The New Deal has recently become a touchstone for many progressive efforts, illustrated by Bernie Sanders’ recent embrace of its aims and accomplishments and the popularity of calls for a Green New Deal.  The reasons are not hard to understand. Once again, growing numbers of people have come to the conclusion that our problems are too big to be solved by individual or local efforts alone, that they are structural and thus innovative and transformative state-led actions will be needed to solve them.

The New Deal was indeed a big deal and, given contemporary conditions, it is not surprising that people are looking back to that period for inspiration and hope that meaningful change is possible.  However, inspiration, while important, is not the same as seeking and drawing useful organizing and strategic lessons from a study of the dynamics of that period.

This is the first of a series of posts in which I will try to illuminate some of those lessons.  In this first post I start with the importance of crisis as a motivator of change.  What the experience of the Great Depression shows is that years of major economic decline and social devastation are not themselves sufficient to motivate business and government elites to pursue policies likely to threaten the status quo.  It was only after three and a half years of organizing had also created a political crisis, that the government began taking halting steps at serious change, marked by the policies associated with the First New Deal.  In terms of contemporary lessons, this history should serve to dispel any illusions that simply establishing the seriousness of our current multifaceted crisis will be enough to win elite consideration of a transformative Green New Deal.

The Great Depression

The US economy expanded rapidly throughout the 1920s, a period dubbed the Roaring Twenties. It was a time of rapid technological change, business consolidation, and wealth concentration.  It was also a decade when many traditional industries struggled, such as agriculture, textiles, coal, and shipbuilding, as did most of those who worked in them.  Growth was increasingly sustained by consumer demand underpinned by stock market speculation and debt.

The economy suffered a major downturn in 1920-21, and then mild recessions in 1924 and 1927.  And there were growing signs of the start of another recession in summer 1929, months before the October 1929 stock market collapse, which triggered the beginning of the Great Depression.  The collapse quickly led to the unraveling of the US economy.

The Dow Jones average dropped from 381 in September 1929 to forty-one at the start of 1932.  Manufacturing output fell by roughly 40 percent between 1929 and 1933.  The number of full-time workers at United States Steel went from 25,000 in 1929 to zero in 1933.  Five thousand banks failed over the same period.  Steve Frazer captured the extent and depth of the decline as follows: “In early 1933, thirty-six of forty key economic indicators had arrived at the lowest point they were to reach during the whole eleven grim years of the Great Depression.”

The resulting crisis hit working people hard.   Between 1930 and 1932, the number of unemployed grew from 3 million to 15 million, or approximately 25 percent of the workforce.  The unemployment rate for those outside the agricultural sector was close to 37 percent.  As Danny Lucia describes:

Workers who managed to hold onto their jobs faced increased exploitation and reduction in wages and hours, which made it harder for them to help out jobless family and friends. The social fabric of America was ripped by the crisis: One-quarter of children suffered malnutrition, birth rates dropped, suicide rates rose. Many families were torn apart. In New York City alone, 20,000 children were placed in institutions because their parents couldn’t support them. Homeless armies wandered the country on freight trains; one railroad official testified that the number of train-hoppers caught by his company ballooned from 14,000 in 1929 to 186,000 in 1931.

“Not altogether a bad thing”

Strikingly, despite the severity of the economic and social crisis, business leaders and the federal government were in no hurry to act.  There was certainly no support for any meaningful federal relief effort.  In fact, business leaders initially tended to downplay the seriousness of the crisis and were generally optimistic about a quick recovery.

As the authors of Who Built America (volume 2) noted:

when the business leaders who made up the National Economic League were asked in January 1930 what the country’s ‘paramount economic problems’ were, they listed first, ‘administration of justice,’ second, ‘Prohibition,” and third, ‘lawlessness.’ Unemployment was eighteenth on their list!

Some members of the Hoover administration tended to agree. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon thought the crisis was “not altogether a bad thing.”  “People,” he argued, “will work harder, live a more moral life.  Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.”

President Hoover repeatedly stated that the economy was “on a sound and prosperous basis.”  The solution to the crisis, he believed, was to be found in restoring business confidence and that was best achieved through maintaining a balanced budget.  When it came to relief for those unemployed or in need, Hoover believed that the federal government’s main role was to encourage local government and private efforts, not initiate programs of its own.

At time of stock market crash, relief for the poor was primarily provided by private charities, which relied on donations from charitable and religious organizations.  Only 8 states had any type of unemployment insurance.  Not surprisingly, this system was inadequate to meet popular needs.  As the authors of Who Built America explained:

by 1931 most local governments and many private agencies were running out of money for relief.  Sometimes needy people were simply removed from the relief rolls.  According to one survey, in 1932 only about one-quarter of the jobless were receiving aid.  Many cities discriminated against nonwhites.  In Dallas and Houston, African-Americans and Mexican-Americans were denied any assistances.

It was not until January 1932 that Congress made its first move to strengthen the economy, establishing the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to provide support to financial institutions, corporations, and railroads.  Six months later, in July, it approved the Emergency Relief and Construction Act, which broadened the scope of the RFC, allowing it to provide loans to state and local governments for both public works and relief.  However, the Act was structured in ways that undermined its effectiveness. For example, the $322 million allocated for public works could only be used for projects that would generate revenue sufficient to pay back the loans, such as toll bridges and public housing.  The $300 million allocated for relief also had to be repaid.  Already worried about debt, many local governments refused to apply for the funds.

Finally, as 1932 came to a close, some business leaders began considering the desirability of a significant federal recovery program, but only for business.  Most of their suggestions were modeled on World War I programs and involved government-business partnerships designed to regulate and stabilize markets.  There was still no interest in any program involving sustained and direct federal relief to the millions needing jobs, food, and housing.

By the time of Roosevelt’s inauguration in March 1933, the economy, as noted above, had fallen to its lowest point of the entire depression.  Roosevelt had won the presidency promising “a new deal for the American people,” yet his first initiatives were very much in line with the policies of the previous administration. Two days after his inauguration he declared a national bank holiday, which shut down the entire banking system for four days and ended a month-long run on the banks. The “holiday” gave Congress time to approve a new law which empowered the Federal Reserve Board to supply unlimited currency to reopened banks, which reassured the public about the safety of their accounts.

Six days after his inauguration, Roosevelt, who had campaigned for the Presidency, in part, on a pledge to balance the federal budget, submitted legislation to Congress which would have cut $500 million from the $3.6 billion federal budget.  He proposed eliminating government agencies, reducing the pay of civilian and military federal workers (including members of Congress), and slashing veterans’ benefits by 50 percent.  Facing Congressional opposition, the final bill cut spending by “only” $243 million.

Lessons

It is striking that some 3 ½ years after the start of the Great Depression, despite the steep decline in economic activity and incredible pain and suffering felt by working people, business and government leaders were still not ready to support any serious federal program of economic restructuring or direct relief.  That history certainly suggests that even a deep economic and social crisis cannot be counted on to encourage elites to explore policies that might upset existing structures of production or relations of power, an important insight for those hoping that recognition of the seriousness of our current environmental crisis might encourage business or government receptivity to new transformative policies.

Of course, we do know that in May 1933 Roosevelt finally began introducing relief and job creation programs as part of his First New Deal.  And while many factors might have contributed to such a dramatic change in government policy, one of the most important was the growing movement of unemployed and their increasingly militant and collective action in defense of their interests.  Their activism was a clear refutation of business and elite claims that prosperity was just around the corner.  It also revealed a growing radical spark, as more and more people openly challenged the legitimacy of the police, courts, and other state institutions.  As a result, what was an economic and social crisis also became a political crisis.  As Adolf Berle, an important member of Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust,” wrote, “we may have anything on our hands from a recovery to a revolution.”

In Part II, I will discuss the rise and strategic orientation of the unemployment movement, highlighting the ways it was able to transform the political environment and thus encourage government experimentation.  And I will attempt to draw out some of the lessons from this experience for our own contemporary movement building efforts.

The 1933 programs, although important for breaking new ground, were exceedingly modest.  And, as I will discuss in a future post, it was only the rejuvenated labor movement that pushed Roosevelt to implement significantly more labor friendly policies in the Second New Deal starting in 1935.  Another post will focus more directly on the development and range of New Deal policies in order to shed light on the forces driving state policy as well as the structural dynamics which tend to limit its progressive possibilities, topics of direct relevance to contemporary efforts to envision and advance a Green New Deal agenda.