3
Peak Populism in the Proletarian Decade
In 1929 and over the four years following, the global capitalist system slowly collapsed. It kicked off with the great crash on Wall Street, then descended slowly in a vicious spiral of contraction and despair. Banks failed; businesses went bust; farm prices plummeted. Every stock market rally ended in another capitulation; every coordinated corporate effort to hold the line on employment eventually failed.
By 1933, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had fallen some 90 percent from its high point. Unemployment had hit the almost unbelievable figure of 25 percent, or 12 million souls. There was no federal system of relief or unemployment insurance in place to deal with the crisis, and local charities had been tapped out after the first year. Middle-class savings had disappeared with the banks that had safeguarded them. The really unlucky lived in dumps, in boxes, and in doorways. The gold standard was still in effect, naturally, and dollars once again became scarce. In some cities Americans turned to barter in place of money.
Workers were still physically able to do their work, of course, and farmers were still producing food. But somehow that didn’t suffice to make the great American machine go. Thus developed one of the decade’s cruelest ironies: bumper crops in the countryside while people went hungry in the cities, and through it all both elements of society losing their livelihoods, their savings, their homes and farms. By the time the system hit rock bottom, workers with paychecks couldn’t cash them, since the banks were almost all closed. “We are not in a mere business recession,” announced New York senator Robert Wagner; “we are in a life and death struggle with the forces of social and economic dissolution.” 1
Civilization was unraveling before the nation’s eyes, and the ultracompetent President Herbert Hoover—a Stanford-educated engineer who was renowned for organizing humanitarian relief efforts—seemed to have no idea what to do in the face of the disaster. The laissez-faire tradition had come to the end of its string.
“There have been financial depressions before but never one exactly like this—never one for which the defenders of the system could find so little justification,” wrote Floyd Olson, the governor of Minnesota, a few years into the catastrophe.
The old shibboleths no longer have their catch and power. Rotary clubs and Lions clubs are at a loss to create “pep.” It is hard to find something to cheer for. The average person laughs when the business man talks of restoration of confidence. Industrial leaders no longer speak of prosperity just around the corner; an audience would howl a speaker down if he made such a reference. 2
The echoes of the 1890s were obvious. Farmers organized themselves again and tried to take direct action. So did unemployed veterans, calling themselves the Bonus Army and staging a huge, multiracial march on Washington in 1932 after the model of Coxey’s Army. This time, on the orders of President Hoover, the government met the ragged marchers with armed force, with bayonets and tear gas and tanks.
The confrontation of rich and poor was on again. Mostly it was a political war, a contest of words and votes, but sometimes it was a matter of more forceful methods, of union organizing and of business counterorganizing. Also of violence, on occasion. During the strike wave of 1934, an army of police deputies fought an army of Teamsters on the streets of Minneapolis; the strikers gave as good as they got. During the strike wave of 1937, police opened fire on supporters of a strike at a steel mill in Chicago; ten people were killed. Throughout the decade and across the country, employers hired thugs to restore order while fascist groups sprang up to meet the demand for strikebreakers. 3
There was an important difference from the experience of the 1890s. Once Herbert Hoover departed the White House in 1933, the federal government no longer automatically took the side of the business class—and without Washington at their back, employers found they could do little but rage against strikers and then settle their demands for shorter hours and better pay. Ordinarily, hard times are particularly tough for unions, since there is a vast sea of unemployed workers sloshing around the economy, undercutting any demand that other workers might make. But in the 1930s, with the capitalist faith in ruins, everything was different. People flocked to labor organizations as their grandparents had flocked to the Farmers’ Alliance during the hard times of the 1890s. Organizing seemed like the only way out of the crisis; unions won battle after battle; and as a result they tripled in size in the eight years from 1933 to 1941. 4
In truth the Great Depression discredited capitalism around the world and made people into radicals in every land. This did not happen because those people were especially enlightened, but because they were desperate. Communism suddenly became appealing, to intellectuals as well as proletarians. France and Sweden turned to socialism. Mexico nationalized the oil industry. And Americans embraced our native radical tradition of populism.
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IN SAYING THIS, I do not mean that anyone called themselves a “populist.” In the 1930s, the p-word still referred strictly to partisans of the long-dead third party of the 1890s; when it made an appearance in the papers, it was nearly always in a nostalgia story or an obituary for some colorful hero from the radical days of yore. As a designation for a general political style the word was extremely rare.
However, there were plenty of observers who made the connection between the politics of the Depression and those of the 1890s. The adventures of Coxey’s Army, for example, were an obvious topic for reflection when the Bonus marchers were in Washington. When two elderly Pops were retrieved from obscurity and elected to the Kansas state legislature in 1932—as Democrats, this time around—newspapers across the country took the obvious lesson. 5 When indebted Iowa farmers rose in revolt and blockaded cities in 1933, the comparison was made once more. 6
William Allen White, the Kansas newspaperman who got his start describing Populism as a kind of collective madness, was still in the game during the Depression and in 1936 he wrote a retrospective on the matter for the New York Times . His views had mellowed with age and now when he looked back he saw Populism not as an episode of mass hysteria but as the respected granddaddy of all the reformers who had come since—Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and now FDR. 7
Franklin Roosevelt was, of course, a Democrat, and he did not call his New Deal “populist,” but the lineage was clear to historians and popular writers of the day. 8 With the culture of the 1930s, the connection was even more obvious. Everywhere you turned in those days, optimism about ordinary people was the mood of the moment. There was populism in Hollywood movies, in plays, in popular poetry, in radio programs, in art photography, in strike manifestos, in folk music, in WPA murals, and in the patriotic propaganda the government issued as the nation prepared for World War II. There was populism in Congress, as it broke up banks, gave workers the right to organize, protected farmers from price fluctuations, investigated monopolies, and enacted landmark antitrust legislation.
But above all there was populism in the White House. This was the great difference between 1892 and 1932: in the latter contest, the man who brought farmers and workers together against Wall Street came out on top. And then he won again, even more triumphantly, four years later. Franklin Roosevelt and his successor proceeded to win three more times, serving five presidential terms in all. And this most consequential president of the twentieth century didn’t merely talk in a populist way; he delivered. FDR bailed out farmers and homeowners, he protected unions, he pulled the teeth of the Wall Street wolves, he smashed oligopolies, he took America off the gold standard, and—although we don’t remember it today—he was roundly condemned by the nation’s respectables as the most dangerous demagogue of them all, a sort of one-man mob rule.
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“ WHAT WAS THE New Deal anyhow?” asked Frances Perkins in a speech in 1963. She had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s labor secretary through his entire presidency, and she was in a position to furnish an answer. “Was it a political plot? Was it just a name for a period
in history? Was it a revolution? To all of these questions I answer ‘No.’ ”
It was, I think, basically an attitude. An attitude toward government, toward the people, toward labor. It was an attitude that found voice in expressions like “the people are what matter to government,” and “a government should aim to give all the people under its jurisdiction the best possible life.”
Perkins understood that a concern for “the people” sounded trite to her audience in 1963, but she persisted: to Roosevelt it meant something very real. Before the New Deal, she said, “the people had been left out of the planning, except for the economic plans of their employers.” Discovering the people and taking their well-being into account in economic policy—this was something new and radical in the thirties, something that our government still formally heeds even though the old, business-centric attitude is clearly dominant again. 9
One chapter of Perkins’s memoir of her days with Roosevelt is called, simply, “He Liked People.” FDR, she reminds us, was a master of radio communication, speaking directly to ordinary Americans without journalistic intermediaries. After describing this famous talent of his, Perkins wrote that “the quality of his being one with the people, of having no artificial or natural barriers between him and them, made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being or thinking of being a dictator.” 10
Present-day observers sometimes find it difficult to think of the age of Roosevelt as a populist time. FDR was, after all, the consummate insider: the scion of an aristocratic New York family, a Harvard man, a devotee of no ideological system, and a master politician who did almost nothing else in his adult life except govern and campaign. In his spare time he loved martinis, yachting, and collecting postage stamps. In the first few years of his administration, he was open to the distinctly un-populist idea of a cartelized economy, in which business got to write its own rules (FDR turned strongly against that idea later). He was also the first president to methodically incorporate scholarly expertise into his administration, and for plenty of scholars, this is the most critical aspect of his twelve years in the White House. Here, they say, is the man who pushed the tycoons aside and placed experts like us atop the “commanding heights” of the economy. 11
The best corrective to that understanding is the most direct one: listen to the words Roosevelt actually spoke. FDR talked constantly about the urgent need to take power away from economic elites and return it to the average American. The theme was there, for example, in his rousing 1932 acceptance speech to the Democratic convention in which he introduced the phrase “a New Deal” and in which he described that year’s campaign as nothing less than a “crusade to restore America to its own people.”
But before he got to that phrase, Roosevelt had echoed a famous passage from Bryan’s 1896 convention speech, denouncing an administration that “sees to it that a favored few are helped and hopes that some of their prosperity will leak through, sift through, to labor, to the farmer, to the small business man.” Roosevelt criticized orthodox economics, with its insistence that “economic laws—sacred, inviolable, unchangeable—cause panics which no one could prevent.” And like an Old Testament prophet, Roosevelt even called on his audience of Democrats to repent, since “many amongst us have made obeisance to Mammon” and since “the profits of speculation, the easy road without toil, have lured us from the old verities.” 12
Roosevelt talked like this all the time: the virtue of toil versus the hollow allure of finance; the nobility of the many versus the perfidy of the economic elite. In September 1932, his campaign train took him to Topeka, Kansas—he would carry the home state of the old People’s Party twice—to address the crisis of agriculture. Up until then, he pointed out to his audience, economic policy had been the province of bankers, not of the people. What this meant, he continued, was that our government had instructed farmers “to put their interests into the hands of their bitterest opponents—men who will go to any and all lengths to safeguard and strengthen a protected few, but who will coldly say to American farmers: ‘One-third of you are not needed. Run a race with bankruptcy to see which will survive.’ ”
A “race with bankruptcy” turned out to be an apt phrase. FDR beat Hoover in an easy landslide that November, but by the time he was sworn in the following March, the numbers of unemployed had skyrocketed and the banks of the nation were closed. There was no economy to speak of. In the face of all that, Roosevelt delivered one of the all-time classics of populist oratory. “The unscrupulous money changers,” which is to say, Wall Street bankers, had led the nation into disaster, Roosevelt declared in his inaugural address. And now:
Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.
The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths.
The virtuous people, brought to the brink of ruin by corrupt financial elites, had arrived at the seat of government to set things right.
Roosevelt played upon this theme constantly. His January 1936 State of the Union speech, delivered in the midst of an epic fight with the nation’s business leaders, carried the idea to its most inflammatory expression. Everywhere you looked, Roosevelt said as he surveyed the nation and the world, “popular opinion is at war with a power-seeking minority.” This minority, which he defined as the nation’s “financial and industrial groups,” was “numerically small” but had been “politically dominant” during the 1920s. The coming of the New Deal, however, had forged “a new relationship between Government and people.” It had dislodged these tycoons from power and made government “the representative and the trustee of the public interest.”
Now the war between the tycoons and the New Deal was on in earnest. Roosevelt had found it necessary, he said, “to drive some people from power and strictly to regulate others.” In so doing, “we have earned the hatred of entrenched greed.”
Simply put, our “resplendent autocracy” wanted their power back. They longed for an order in which the winnings again “went to the ruthless and the strong.” But they faced a federal government—“a people’s government,” Roosevelt called it—whose power matched their own. And so, he charged, they aimed to conquer it and turn its powers to their own advantage. “Give them their way,” the president warned, “and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”
To repeat, these are lines that appeared in an American president’s State of the Union speech, a speech of the greatest importance that was broadcast nationwide at prime time in an election year. The words shock the modern-day reader not because they weren’t true, but because they are so starkly at odds with our modern-day conception of the office. The president, we think (or, rather, we thought until recently), is supposed to be a conciliator, a builder of confidence, a seeker of consensus. He or she is expected to avoid class conflict. So outrageous are Roosevelt’s phrases that we can scarcely conceive he uttered them.
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THE AGE OF Roosevelt was also the age of the mass movement. Huey Long, the senator from Louisiana, had his Share Our Wealth societies, and author Upton Sinclair had his End Poverty in California movement, which revived the old Populist idea of the “cooperative commonwealth.” Farmers in the Midwest signed up for the Farmers Union; in Iowa for the Farmers’ Holiday Association; in Wisconsin for the state Progressive Party; and in Minnesota for the Farmer-Labor Party.
This last group, the “apostolic successor” of the old People’s Party according to one historian, elected the aforementioned Floyd Olson governor of Minnesota in 1930. 13 Minnesota was the scene of spectacular agrarian protests and industrial strikes in those years, and as farmers and workers went through the tribulation of the Depre
ssion, Olson took extraordinary steps to alleviate their plight: spending on relief, proposing state-level versions of Social Security and health insurance, suggesting that government take over and run idle factories along with utilities and railroads, and, in 1934, declaring a moratorium on foreclosures. Olson had once been a member of the radical IWW union, and traces of its teachings persisted in his days as chief executive of the state. “We are in a fight,” Olson said in a 1934 speech. “It is the people’s fight.”
Let us not betray them. Let us answer predatory entrenched wealth as Maine answered, as California answered, and as the whole nation answered when it elected Roosevelt. 14
The most dynamic mass movement of the era was organized labor. As in the depression of the 1890s, workers were growing militant again, and they were coming together in enormous numbers. Over the objections of the traditional craft unions and in the teeth of the country’s biggest employers, an outfit called the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) set about enlisting the country’s millions of unskilled workers. It is not a coincidence that the nucleus of the CIO—the United Mine Workers—was one of the unions that had aligned with the People’s Party back in the 1890s. This time around, though, their efforts succeeded, as the CIO’s dramatic organizing drives swept the country’s steel and automaking industries. Led in many departments by immigrants, the CIO organized African Americans as well as whites, and for about ten years it seemed unstoppable, the volcanic power that was rewriting America’s social contract. The CIO was the emblematic social force of the period: populist-proletarian solidarity was its characteristic aspiration, and the sit-down strike was its great symbol.
The People, No Page 8