by Philip Dray
Despite this concern, Roosevelt was not out to revive the antitrust antagonisms of prior decades. His objective was to obtain results. He would work with the corporations, with the big-city political machines, and with workers and their unions. All able hands would be needed. The crisis was immense, a “national emergency” as it was described in the preamble to the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) soon rolled out by Congress, “productive of widespread unemployment and disorganization of industry, which burdens interstate commerce, affects the public welfare and undermines the standards of living of the American people.”
The NIRA created an enforcement agency in the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which was to frame a working partnership between business and government to get the nation’s economy back on track. It arranged for corporations, working with government, to design codes of fair competition to regulate prices and wages; its goal was to restore consistent profits so that jobs might be saved and wages elevated.
An encouraging step toward setting organized capital and organized labor on a more equal footing had already been taken in March 1932 with the passage of the Norris–La Guardia Act, which abolished yellow-dog contracts and restricted injunctions in labor crises to only a very few special circumstances. Norris–La Guardia was a seminal piece of legislation in that it removed the federal courts from labor disputes, and with the courts went the threat of intrusion by militia or U.S. soldiers sent to enforce injunctions. Taking the suspended weight of injunction from above labor’s head, it opened the way for unions to strike, boycott, and maneuver more spontaneously. But this was just a start. Except for railroad workers, whose rights to union membership were safeguarded by the Railway Labor Act of 1926, most employees could still be dismissed for union affiliation or forced into company unions, and the right of collective bargaining had yet to be secured.
Initially, Roosevelt and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, his colleague from the New York legislature in the era of that state’s Factory Investigating Commission (FIC), did not necessarily perceive a need for workers’ representation or collective bargaining elements in the New Deal. Labor unions were generally weak, and it appeared the government could do more for workers directly than by empowering unions. “I’d much rather get a law than organize a union,” Perkins later recalled, “and I think it’s more important.”18 While the president did not shy away from strong rhetoric regarding corporate arrogance—“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he’d said upon signing the NIRA into law—he was also cautious about ceding too much authority to workers’ organizations. Perkins tended to place high value on the Progressive efforts she’d seen effective in New York, such as the National Consumers League, the Women’s Trade Union League, Louis Brandeis’s “Protocols for Peace,” or government regulatory action in the manner of the FIC.19
Winning and enforcing safety regulations in New York through the FIC had given Perkins a special appreciation of the reforming power of the law, and she had come to believe that some form of national labor regulation was essential. It must be a federal effort, for state-by-state laws would always remain piecemeal and ineffective in that capital would likely exploit the availability of those locations where workers had the fewest protections. She expected national labor reforms would not come easily; they would be questioned by Congress, challenged by employers, and subjected by the courts to tests of their constitutionality.
Perkins had an experience in 1933 while touring the steelmaking facilities at Homestead, Pennsylvania, that helped galvanize her feelings about both the need for federal authority and the resilience of laboring Americans. The mayor of Homestead, who was accompanying her, had stopped her from speaking to a group of steelworkers gathered at the city hall. Perkins then suggested they move to a nearby park, only to be informed by the same official that local laws forbade meetings in city parks. Growing irritated with her companion, and spying a U.S. post office, Perkins asserted that as the secretary of labor, she had the right to address an assembly of citizens anywhere an American flag flew above a federal building. To the chagrin of the mayor and other local authorities, she proceeded to convene her meeting with the workers in the lobby of the post office, standing on a chair to speak to them and hear their concerns. “We ended the meeting with hand-shaking and expressions of rejoicing that the New Deal wasn’t afraid of the steel trust,” Perkins recalled,20 and announced soon after the incident, “I have come to the conclusion that the Department of Labor should be the Department FOR Labor, and that we should render service to the working people, just as the Agriculture Department renders service to the farmers.”21
The first woman cabinet member in the country’s history, Perkins received special scrutiny from the press, not all of it kind—it was said her clothes looked “as though they had been designed by the Bureau of Standards”—but her Progressive roots were unimpeachable, and she enjoyed the president’s full confidence.22 Fiercely loyal to Roosevelt—she was his oldest friend in the administration—Perkins had contributed to his positioning for the 1932 election against the incumbent Herbert Hoover by publicly questioning Hoover’s misleading statements about the unemployment rate in the United States. Never starry-eyed about labor’s leadership (she personally distrusted or had low expectations of many of its “big men”), she nonetheless proved a staunch advocate for unions, particularly as she became impressed by their response to the organizing opportunities afforded by the New Deal.
Senator Robert Wagner of New York and the UMW’s John L. Lewis also contributed to the discussion of the administration’s labor strategy. Wagner believed that finding a way out of the Depression required kick-starting industry by increasing consumer purchasing power, which could only be done by turning workers once again into buyers. Reducing unemployment meant stabilizing the workforce, a function both men thought organized labor could provide. The government’s role would be to guarantee workers the right to organize and bargain collectively and to set standards for hours and wages. Hopefully, with such a secure means of redress in place, labor unions would gain confidence and their leaders would not be driven to prove their mettle through strikes or the threat of strikes. And as labor developed new habits of restraint and enjoyed reasonable expectations of fair contract negotiations, so, too, would management grow less paranoid and cease trying to disrupt worker organizing.
On February 17, 1933, Lewis went before the Senate Finance Committee to suggest emergency powers for the government to safeguard collective bargaining and oversee national economic strategy. His words had considerable sway, for he was at the moment labor’s most recognizable national figure, a flamboyant character with a shock of unkempt hair, prominent bushy eyebrows, and “the majestic presence of a veteran ham actor.”23 Born in Iowa in 1880, he had gone to work in the mines at age twelve, detoured briefly as a young adult into a life in regional theater, then became immersed in labor issues and ascended through a number of posts to become UMW president. He had initially graced the national labor stage (and been credited as a man of substance) in 1919 when he had refused his own rank and file’s demand for a coal strike against the wishes of the Wilson administration, saying, “We are Americans. We cannot fight our government.”24
Now he wanted the government to fight for Americans. He defended the granting of the authority he sought for Washington by recalling that similar emergency measures had been deemed appropriate in the First World War, “when the enemy was three thousand miles from our shore. Today the enemy is within the boundaries of the nation, and is stalking every community and every home.” In late March, Lewis and other UMW leaders convened with the president, as well as Perkins and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes; in these strategy sessions the Roosevelt administration listened closely to Lewis’s ideas for revitalizing the economy.25 UMW economist W. Jett Lauck, an adviser and speechwriter for Lewis, worked with Perkins, Senator Wagner, and Wagner’s aide, Simon Rifki
nd, among others, to devise the NIRA’s Section 7(a). This heroic segment of the legislation guaranteed to workers “the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing,” free of employer interference or coercion.
With the labor movement having been some years at low ebb, and industry focused most intently on the bill’s implications for business recovery, the full consequences of Section 7(a) were likely at first not immediately evident.26 Business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and elements in Congress did challenge it, although the law’s proponents had firm union backing as well as Roosevelt’s support. Section 7(a) was nothing short of a “charter of industrial freedom,” in the admiring words of AFL president William Green, who had assumed the federation’s leadership upon the death of Samuel Gompers in 1924, and who had lobbied for the collective bargaining clause in the act.27 Lewis concurred, certain that “from the standpoint of human welfare and economic freedom … there has been no legal instrument comparable with it since [the] Emancipation Proclamation.”28
Lewis’s most famous response to the passage of Section 7(a) was to instruct the country’s workers, “President Roosevelt wants you to join the union!” The wide dissemination of this message on posters and lapel buttons was said to annoy the president, since it put words in his mouth he had not said, but its meaning was not lost on those who began to fill union ranks. One and a half million new members joined the AFL between June and October 1933, and 3,537 new locals were created, bringing total federation membership to 4 million, an increase so dramatic Green was moved to predict a future membership of 25 million.29 Other organizations witnessed comparable growth, including the UMW. “It was the most remarkable thing I ever saw,” labor reporter Louis Stark told Frances Perkins of the surge in mine union membership. “Those miners came out of those towns … like an army moving out of the mountains. They signed up by the thousands, which showed that they always did really want to belong to a union.”30
SOME OF THIS WILLINGNESS by America’s workers to act and to organize can be attributed to efforts by the Communist Party USA, which had busied itself not only on behalf of labor but also for the rights of the unemployed. Since the late 1920s the party had viewed the rapidly growing U.S. economy as ripe for crisis or collapse and possibly some form of workers’ upheaval. The economic disaster of October 1929, when it came, surpassed even the party’s expectations: wages fell precipitously in Alabama textile mills as they did in the major industries of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan; tens of thousands of jobs were lost; and for those fortunate to have work, the available days and hours of employment were reduced. In Detroit the Ford Motor Company laid off 90,000 of its 130,000 workers between March 1929 and August 1931; elsewhere in that city the Briggs Manufacturing Company cut most of its employees to half days, for which men earned 10 cents an hour and women 4 cents.31 The Communists, seeing desperation as well as opportunity in such widely shared pain, launched the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), dispatching organizers to assist restive agricultural workers in Southern California and miners in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, as well as Northern autoworkers. Although the TUUL focused on everyday goals such as improved wages and conditions, employers, the local press, and patriot organizations reacted with special animosity to the Communist interlopers; management frequently used their presence as an excuse to void any chance of reasonable negotiation or settlement with workers. Several of these struggles turned violent. In Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929, the local police chief and a young union songwriter named Ella May Wiggins were killed when a Communist-led union took on textile mill interests and vigilantes; dozens of people were wounded, and eleven workers were sent to prison. Communist labor organizers were also jailed in California when they came to the aid of unionized lettuce pickers and cannery workers.32
More significantly, the party led a campaign to turn legions of newly unemployed workers into an organized protest movement, the Unemployed Councils. Outside of Coxey’s Army, the New York church-invasion crusade led by Frank Tannenbaum, and other scattered efforts, this had never been attempted before on a large scale; but the vast number of people out of work—15 million by March 1933, up from 500,000 in spring 1929—and the paucity of available public and private relief greatly enabled recruitment.33 The looting of bread trucks and other food sources by the homeless and unemployed had become an ugly feature of the Depression’s early years, and the councils introduced a degree of purpose and even civility to these individuals’ urgent, fundamental needs. They staged rent strikes and helped tenants avoid eviction; showed poor residents how to turn their gas back on when it was shut off by a public utility; raised money through such traditional means as raffles, dances, and bingo parties; and led marches on relief agencies. Men and women who on their own had been ignored or refused by bureaucrats found their demands taken more seriously when they returned in the company of an Unemployed Council delegation. While the usual tactic was to present a show of numbers and, if necessary, occupy agency offices and refuse to leave, there were occasional reports of more aggressive invasions, such as the demonstration in Harlem in June 1932 in which members of a local council were arrested after smashing down a relief agency’s doors and destroying its furniture.34
The organization generally focused less on Communist ideology than on people’s everyday problems, although as labor writer Len De Caux observed:
In hundreds of jobless meetings, I heard no objections to the points the Communists made…. Sometimes, I’d hear a Communist speaker say something so bitter and extreme I’d feel embarrassed. Then I’d look around at the unemployed audience—shabby clothes, expressions worried and sour. Faces would start to glow, heads to nod, hands to clap.35
The Council movement gained wide attention with massive public demonstrations on March 6, 1930, which it dubbed International Unemployment Day. San Francisco and Chicago saw large parades and demonstrations; cops in Washington needed tear gas to chase a crowd away from the White House; and in Los Angeles a bizarre confrontation occurred when baton-wielding cops encountered Japanese American Communists trained in martial arts combat. Similar confrontations brought vicious street fighting to Detroit, Boston, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, while in New York a fracas ensued when activists including William Z. Foster defied police orders and tried to lead some thirty-five thousand protestors down Broadway after a rally in Union Square.
Hundreds of policemen and detectives, swinging nightsticks, blackjacks and bare fists, rushed into the crowd, hitting out at all with whom they came into contact, chasing many across the street and into adjacent thoroughfares and rushing hundreds off their feet…. From all parts of the scene of battle came the screams of women and the cries of men, with bloody heads and faces. A score of men were sprawled over the square with policemen pummeling them. The pounding continued as the men, and some women, sought refuge in flight.36
Foster and other leaders were jailed, although the city was moved by the disturbance to begin gathering contributions for those without jobs. Overall the day’s organizers were pleased enough with the nationwide turnout—the CPUSA claimed 1 million participants—that the council declared itself a national entity, convening in Chicago in July 1930 to found the Unemployed Council of the United States. It followed up in February 1931 by sending a delegation to Washington to lobby Congress.
The council’s work differed from earlier efforts on behalf of the unemployed in that now the jobless were more closely aligned through the TUUL with the labor movement, and their plea for help had become not so much a call for immediate relief, although that was important, as a demand for lasting government reforms—federally administered unemployment insurance and public works programs. The efforts of the Unemployed Council and other attempts to aid the destitute had made it abundantly clear that the existing system of relief based on local public and private methods, some permanent, many ad hoc, were designed for small numbers of the needy and were totally inadequate for dealing with a countrywide emerg
ency. When Congress rebuffed the delegation the council had sent in February 1931, the organization planned and carried out a hunger march on Washington on December 6 of that year, parading in phalanx down Pennsylvania Avenue and ringing the Capitol; after serenading officials inside with “The Internationale,” they attempted to enter both Congress and the White House before being pushed back by authorities. These protests anticipated a related effort in spring 1932, when twenty thousand veterans of the First World War, forming what became known as the Bonus Army, descended on Washington for four months, encamping in makeshift tents and lean-tos, to demand payment of a disputed $50 or $100 cash bonus due them retroactively for their military service. In a lamentable climax, the ex-soldiers and their supporters were ultimately driven from the city by federal troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur, with several veterans killed and numerous others hurt in the process. The Unemployed Council’s own “army” returned to the capital in December 1932, after Roosevelt’s election, to remind the incoming president of the persisting crisis for those without work.
These highly visible demands by impoverished, forgotten Americans for respect and inclusion in American society helped inspire a parallel cultural development—a surge of national feeling for old-stream patriotism and curiosity about the lives of common people. Rocked by unprecedented internal economic chaos and eyeing warily the surge of Fascism abroad, America seemed to find reassurance in historic reminders of the country’s basic decency, fairness, and collaborative spirit. “The American ‘people,’ declared obsolete by [Walter] Lippmann in the 1920s and viewed by many intellectuals in that decade as a repository of mean-spirited fundamentalism and crass commercialism,” writes historian Eric Foner, “was suddenly rediscovered as the embodiment of democratic virtue.”37 This vigorous interest included a new veneration for mainstays of freedom such as the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, the Liberty Bell, and Revolutionary figures like Paul Revere, and was displayed in an array of artistic works, from Work Projects Administration murals to the Hollywood films of William Wellman and Preston Sturges. It surfaced in the photographs of Dorothea Lange and in James Agee and Walker Evans’s compelling Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an innovative prose and photographic essay about three Alabama sharecropping families; the works of playwright Clifford Odets; the collecting of slave narratives by members of the Federal Writers Project; and an appreciation of African American music and art. As literature it found its greatest resonance in the novels of John Steinbeck, particularly The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which told of the Joad family’s trek from Dust Bowl Oklahoma to the harvesting fields of California in search of home, work, and security—the 1930s’ ultimate quest vividly brought to the page. This latter preoccupation lay at the heart of the Unemployed Council’s renewed push in early 1934 for legislation guaranteeing relief for the unemployed, following Minnesota congressman Ernest Lundeen’s introduction of the first unemployment insurance bill in the nation’s history.