What Can We Learn From the Great Depression by Dana Frank
4/5
This book is full of information about the 1930s that I didn’t know, and I’d say if your only exposure to the time period is from high school (history and Steinbeck) to give this a read. There’s something illuminating and interesting to learn that some of our social issues are rooted in something so recent in history. Social issues and federal program/institutions that seem to us as always being around are, in fact, less than 100 years old. It turns out that the racist inaccessible lack of support for impoverished people isn’t a bug. It’s a feature!
The book’s premise isn’t an accurate reflection of the information presented and it took me nearly half the book to meet it where it was instead of where it said that it’d be. I also think that the first half of the book is information dense, less engaging, and lacks a central focus in the way that chapter three onwards has. While I understand that they have a lot of information to present about the 30s it often felt like it was providing lots of information with little of it being connected to the central argument.
TL;DR A book full of interesting information on historical events that minor our own. Worth a read if you can get past the slow and dense opening chapters.
Quotes
Quotes
“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed. By 1933 a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed ; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward.” (ix)
“As we face our own crises today - a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change - and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer us new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.” (ix)
“I am looking squarely at the hard parts here, as well as the beautiful stories. Collective action during the Great Depression at times meant protest against inequality and racism, or it meant new strategies to simply survive such hostilities. Or it meant finding new ways to blame and oppress others.” (x)
“During the 1970s, when historical scholarship on the Great Depression boomed, its authors looked to the 1930s models of how to build powerful social movements in their own time. I do the same today. But I am also conscious that this book has been written in a darker time, in which racism is viciously resurgent, democratic systems are under attack, and real fascism looms one again. The limitations of the New Deal are also clearer to us now. New themes resonate; new lessons can be learned.” (xii)
Chapter 1, A New Social Order
“Seattle’s Hooverville offers us a vivid example of the ways in which ordinary people, faced with a nonfunctioning economy, a federal government that was utterly failing to address the crisis, and few prospects for a viable economic future, chose the path of collectively managing their needs from below.” (4)
“These activist believed they were modeling a future ideal society based on reciprocity and caring. They dreamed of a different way of organizing human life.Over and over, they remarked that their projects brought out the best in people. What did that mean, though, in a larger society rife with racism? How did women fit in - if they were allowed in at all?” (4)
“But those benefits were mostly - if not entirely - designed for white men. The new programs built in racial exclusions that echo powerfully and destructively to this day. And when the New Deal’s prizes were handed out, there wasn’t much in the bag for women, especially those who worked in the home, and least of all for women of color.” (5)
“All these grassroots organization, as they faced the poverty and fears of the Great Depression, struggled with the tension between modeling reciprocity and mutual aid in the present, on the one hand, and on the other hand, using their organizing power to transform the larger system of capitalist rapacity in which they were trapped, as they tried to build a long-term future for themselves and their children.” (5)
“Historian Lois Rita Helmbold has shown how white women themselves restricted to a very narrow range of occupations, began the decade with better jobs than Black women, and then during the Depression bumped Black women down the hierarchy of female jobs - from clerical work to factories to domestic service - and in some cases out of the labor market altogether.” (7)
“Multiple studies found that unemployed men, although they now had more spare time at home, didn’t do more housework.” (7)
“Usually organized on the basis of racial/ethnic identity, mutual benefit societies delivered concrete services to their members in exchange for dues payments, augmented by fundraising.” (10)
“It’s easy to dismiss these mutual aid associations as old-fashioned or even boring - as more staid, somehow, and less potentially transformational than other forms of political action. But to their founders and to the ordinary people who sustained them for decades and decades, they were thriving cultural and social spaces that modeled the good society, in which community members took care of each other on an intensely local scale, outside the sphere of profit-making. Some of the largest were in fact self-consciously devoted to getting rid of capitalism and replacing it with socialism or anarchism.” (11)
“We’re taught that US history and culture are all about individualism - bootstraps, rugged men, the pioneer with his axe. But over and over again, members of mutual benefit societies dedicated themselves to the opposite: to horizontal reciprocity institutionalized from below by ordinary people through organizations they managed themselves.” (18)
“Again, the challenge was not only managing an increasingly complex business enterprise, but also bridging the gap between those who saw cooperation as a path to a beautiful social transformation, and those who saw it as a path to dinner.” (25)
“The cooperatives’ gender politics limited the beautiful dream still further. Although women expressed interest in co-ops, over and over male cooperators blocked them from membership or only allowed them to perform subordinate roles, dramatically limiting the co-ops’ ability to grow, let alone to enact democratic practices that would model a new society. Or perhaps the men were modeling their ideal society, and it was patriarchal.” (26)
“The New Deal’s support for producer cooperative and government funded work relief reflected a deep belief that men should be put to work in jobs that paid cash.” (36)
“In the self-definition of the unemployed movement, the unemployed were implicitly male, as were the much exalted “workers.” Women’s unpaid work in the home putting food on the table, raising children, and tending to the old, the sick, and the disabled didn’t qualify as work. Nor did housewives get to qualify as workers.” (52)
“The movement produced two seismic shifts, they argue: first, many men stopped blaming themselves, and second, people came to believe they were entitled to aid from the government - that the government in fact owed them relief, whether through direct cash payments or through government created jobs.” (55)
“In the late 2010s and early 202s, mutual aid has had a creative and enthusiastic resurgence, especially among young people. Through new horizontal networks built on democratic practices, they were consciously modeling a future society based on neighborliness and solidarity. Local groups have provided food, medical care, housing, and transportation to neighbors and those in need.” (61)
“Then and now, the question remains of who creates those jobs, who gets them, who doesn’t, how people are compensated, and who reaps profits from the often brutal, degrading, or mind-numbing labors of others - and what a “job” is, anyway.” (61)
Chapter Two, A Tale of Two Caravans
“These people weren’t being deported, exactly - they are referred to as “repatriados” - those repatriated, distinct from the eighty-two thousand Mexicans the US government formally deported during the 1930s. Officially, they left voluntarily, but it’s more accurate to describe their departure as coerced removal. They were made to feel unwelcome and unsafe in the US during the Great Depression, as hostile employers, local authorities, relief officials, and the press turned on them with racist and increasingly vitriolic blame for the economic crisis.” (66 - 67).
“Within California, the two migrations were in fact intertwined: as Mexicans and Mexican Americans vacated farm labor in California, white and Black migrants from the Midwest and Southwest moved in to take their places.” (68)
“It’s important to underscore that tens of thousands of Mexicans who lived in the US were never immigrants - they first became part of the country in the 1830s and ‘40s when the US government conquered the parts of Mexico that became Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah.” (68 - 69)
“In 1933, their efforts climaxed in a massive strike wave throughout California agriculture.” (76)
“They have been enshrined ever since in a codified tale of poor white farmers who were driven westward by the Dust Bowl and ended up as impoverished migrant farm laborers living in California ditches, nobly surviving. But the reality of their migration is far different.” (84)
“In the cities, studies have shown, they actually fared as well as previous residents, on average, and sometimes better, getting jobs in construction but also in white-collar work. But wherever you lived, whatever your racial/ethnic background, you couldn’t get that kind of well-paying job if you were a woman.” (89 - 90)
“Despite repeated, concerted efforts to organize them, white Southwestern migrants for the most part resisted unionization and other forms of collective labor action during the 1930s. Historians have noted that unlike Mexicans and Filipinos, white migrants didn’t have a decade or more of experiencing migrant labor and learning how to organize and fight back collectively. They thought of themselves as individualistic entrepreneurs about to build a new life as farmers, with help, perhaps, from relatives.” (93)
“If we put the pieces together, it’s clear that white Southwestern migrants were precisely the “Americans” in the vicious anti-immigrant campaigns of the 1930s that demanded “Jobs for Americans.” As individuals, as families, and collectively, they benefited from private vigilante activism, from social workers who forced impoverished people onto trains, from contractors who fired Mexican workers and other workers of color in order to hire whites, from union demands to the government that no Mexicans work on military bases. They moved into the houses, the jobs, the business opportunities that Mexicans had just been forced to vacate. The racism here wasn’t merely a question of white migrants’ personal distaste for Mexians or Chinese or Japanese, or even individual discriminatory acts by employers. It was also deeply institutionalized racism on the part of the government, designed, in the face of economic crisis, to take care of white people.” (95)
“How, then, did the invented tale of the noble Dust Bowl migrants become so central to the national narrative about the Great Depression, so ingrained in public memory ever since?” (95)
“At the exact moment when California farm labor became overwhelmingly white, much of the nation, through The Grapes of Wrath, discovered the terrible plight of the white California farmworker. Farmworkers of color evaporated from the story, appearing only in minor instances.” (99)
“He simply disappeared the workers of color - whose leadership as well as rank-and-file militancy had made the strikes successful.” (99)
“Steinbeck’s nonfiction writings from these years explicitly promoted white superiority and racist concepts about people of Mexican and Asian descent.” (99)
“Yet in fact it was workers of color who organized and fought back, not the individualist white workers.” (101)
“Ironically, even white migrants on whose behalf The Grapes of Wrath was supposedly written and promoted were unhappy with the way it portrayed them.” (101)
“The cultural politics or Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck, with their compassion, distortions, racism, and immense impact, thus grew directly - if not entirely - out of federal policy in the 1930s, through the FSA’s promotional activities in the arts. More broadly, and with much greater impact, the New Deal cut farm labor out of its otherwise monumental programs serving working people, under pressure from Southern white agricultural elites who controlled the Democratic Party and didn’t want their workers organizing.” (104)
“Here the plot twists: If hundred of thousands of white and African American farmworkers were drafted or left to work in wartime factories, who, then, would pick the crops? White people jumped quickly out of farm labor into the newly booming war jobs and other good jobs that opened up.” (108)
“Initially enacted as an emergency wartime measure, the Bracero Program was so popular with the growers that it was renewed over and over again after the war. Between 1948 and 1964 the US, in cooperation with the Mexican government, brought in an average of two hundred thousand braceros a year. Through all that time, non-bracero farmworkers had to compete with a labor force that was paid much less, and that couldn’t unionize - almost completely quashing farm labor organizing. Only when the program was finally abolished in 1964 were Filipino and Mexican farmworkers able to successfully organize, and soon build the United Farm Workers union.” (109)
“Few people in the country who aren’t of Mexican descent know that the expulsions happened at all. The Grapes of Wrath, meanwhile, remains widely popular. It’s taught in schools and colleges throughout the country, held up as a historically accurate account and model work of literature…where no mention is made of the writer’s racism.” (110)
“Within the United States, the Chicano movement of the 1960s and ‘70s prompted new attention to repatriation, and with it new research, especially oral histories of repatriados who’d returned to the United States. Balderrama and Rodriguez, who conducted dozens of interviews, recount the enormous trauma they unearthed.” (110)
Chapter 3, Whose Labor Movement?
“But the occupation of “wet nurse” depends on the existence of one group of women rich and powerful enough to hire or enslave others, and another group of women so poor or oppressed that they have to relinquish their milk to those rich women’s babies.” (115)
“The actual work of nursing was exhausting and never-ending. Masters required wet nurses to sleep next to the baby and follow both its whims and those of its parents. On top of the anguish of being enslaved, the nurse had to endure vast emotional pain specific to the task: she was forced to share her breast, all day, all night, with the white child of her enslavers, and separated from her own children.” (117)
“Did not object to having Black women nurse their babies, because they were accustomed to the deeply intimate dynamic of dependency on and domination over Black people in which every inch of their lives was embedded.” (119)
“With the milk stations, health-care professionals achieved the full commodification of breast milk, now a substance isolable from the woman whose breast had created it, in what Golden has called “the separation of the women and the milk.” Thus the long history of wet nursing in the US culminated in an industrialized human milk factory, in which poor women were paid to extract a bodily fluid, and others distributed it to a different mother’s child, who the wet nurse would never know.” (121)
“All these “inspections,” which sound like government regulation of the dairy industry, were not designed because the city wanted to improve the health of poor women working as wet nurses. They were instituted to guarantee the quality of the milk delivered to the babies of other women - albeit largely poor women as well.” (127)
“The wet nurses were paid by the ounce, not by the hours. They were not wage workers. THey were selling part of their body by piece rate, in a payment system like that used to pay for the number of blouses sewn or boxfuls of peaches picked.” (127)
“We can also note that Sarah Morris Hospital, when it sold its excess milk, gave the proceeds back to Micheal Reese Hospital, rather than to the mothers who produced the milk in the first place.” (128)
“She spoke respectfully and enthusiastically of their commitment to sanitary procedures, but her accounts also carries whiffs of longtime racist US narratives of “happy darkes,” still alive and well in Hollywood at the time, in which white observers described enslaved men and women as happily dancing and singing under slavery.” (129)
“Their milk, they knew, was a perishable commodity that the city needed urgently. They knew the babies who received it were perishable too.” (132)
“As women engaged in an occupation involving breasts, providing fodder for titillating innuendo, in a white-dominated world in which Black were routinely infantilized and stereotyped as “pickaninnies,” “mammies,” and prostitutes, they would have needed to deflect those images and instead counter them with their own chosen self-presentation.” (135)
“Black women’s choices for paid work were narrow and grim. The great majority of Black men in 1937 could only work in unskilled and semiskilled jobs - if they could find them - or in their own enterprises in the informal economy. It was even worse for Black women, who couldn’t get the jobs in construction, in heavy industry, in coal, lumber, and railroad yards, or in other occupations where some Black men could. The great majority of women worked in domestic service, approximately twenty thousand in Chicago at the time.” (139)
“During the Great Depression, any jobs, even in domestic service, were few and far between, as employers laid off their servants; and working-class white women, facing their own job crisis, bumped Black women down the hierarchy of women’s employment and often out of the labor market altogether.” (140)
“African American women in Chicago who choose to sell their breast milk to stranger, then, did so in a context of few other options, almost all of them involving the devastating of their bodies, subservience to white people, or most often both.” (141)
“The wet nurses would also have known about the new daring sit-down strikes popping up all around them and involving workers of almost every kind imaginable.” (152)
“Whatever the wet nurses gained or lost monetarily from their strike, they were nonetheless part of the enormous labor uprising of hundred of thousands of US workers during the 1930s that included working people of hundreds of different ethnic groups, all choosing to speak up and take action to demand more of their employers, of the state, and of their lives. The wet nurses were both inspired by that mobilization, and themselves contributed to it.” (159)
A Nest of Fascists
“As noted above, the Black Legion’s oath, to which he personally swore inductees, declared African Americans, Jews, and Catholics to be enemies, along with “anyone owing any allegiance to any foreign potentate.” The category of “foreigners,” here, did not in practice include Protestant immigrants from northern and western Europe - it signaled Italians, Eastern Europeans, Russians, Greeks, and other so-called New Immigrants of the first three decades of the twentieth century.” (171)
“Much of this hyper-militaried structure must have emerged out of Effinger’s head, as a veteran of the Spanish-American War. The Legion’s membership would have included many other veterans, too, especially from World War I…Theses veterans would have been knowledgeable of and comfortable with the military titles and salutes the Legion employed, and they would have aspired to move up within the ranks and achieve the self-importance, deference, and affirmation that came with being an officer.” (173)
“Much of the Black Legion’s most well-documented ire, though, was directed at men who refused recruitment, failed to stay active, defected, or squealed.” (174)
“As these accounts illustrate, the Black Legion in Lima was thick with guns and gun culture.” (176)
“By 1935 the Black Legion was armed and dangerous and armed with dangerous ideas, with an unstable fanatic at its helm and thousands of men at his command, in paramilitary formation.” (179)
“These men were the Legion’s core membership, neither the poorest of the poor, nor the elite. Some middle-class people did belong, too: an elementary school principal, a lawyer, a “manager.” (180)
“The Black Legion, like the fraternal societies, also offered its members an opportunity for male bonding, much like going fishing or hunting together - a night out away from their wives. To that, the Legion added a frisson of militarism. Those were veterans got to relive their time in the military when they’d bonded with other men. Others, who hadn’t served, got to have the quasi-military experience they might have felt they had missed out on. Members also, as adults, got to play dress-up, in long silly robes. With pirate hats!” (180 - 181)
“The second powerful attraction was the bigotry. If offered both an explanation for the nature of the problems facing white people during the Great Depression, and a path forward to act on their racism, antisemitism, and anti-Catholicism in concrete ways.” (181)
“These observations underscore that both the KKK in the 1920s and the Black Legion in the ‘30s were considered by many white people in Lima, perhaps most, to be mainstream - that is normal in their vicious, exclusionary hate.” (183)
“White men in both towns, who were not - apparently - members of the Legion themselves, were consistently dismissing the terror it deployed. They cast racist facism as both innocent and normal.” (183)
“White people joined the Black Legion, lastly, because it could provide them with jobs. Unpacking how that worked takes us deep into a final layer of the Legion’s power and appeal - into local politics, into complex intersections of race and class, and into law enforcement and its sobering failures.” (187)
“The white Protestant men who joined the Legion, for the most part, were used to being above all those people. Now they themselves were unemployed, impoverished, scared. To that fear they brought a deep sense of entitlement to staying in their prosper place on the ladder. Their sense of entitlement, in turn, bred resentment against potential competitors. And resentment, in the nativist, racist, antisemitic sea in which they swam, led to blaming those below them on the ladder. And hence attacking them.” (188)
“In other words, Legion members did not just discriminate against African Americans, Catholics,, and Jews; they proactively served white, native-born Protestant men. That’s who got the jobs instead of those denied relief.” (189)
“Like the Black Legion, the New Deal relief office had a place for women, but that place was under men, in a patriarchal family in which economic dependency was presumed and enforced.” (191)
“It wasn’t just that the police protected the Black Legion. The police and the Black Legion were, more accurately, two arms of the same policing project working hand in black leather glove, one the official institutions of law enforcement (with their own terrors), the other paramilitary terrorists. Together, Legionnaires, cops, and Legionnaire cops placed the daily lives of African American, Catholic, and Jewish members of “their” town. They policed white Protestant they didn’t like, too, and, increasingly, each other. They had a lot of weaponry, and a lot of votes, which they deployed through democratic processes to install and instill terror.” (195)
“The Black Legion was not some obscure fringe group. Rather, it emerged out of a swirling nationwide sea of hate, economic anxiety, and repression. Its adherents might not have succeeded in their goal of storming the Capitol but they nonetheless marched in their own quiet and not-so-quiet ways, from the smallest of small US towns all the way up to the top of the United States government in Washington, DC.” (211)
“It was the FBI, though, that knew the most about the Legion, and most aggressively chose not to act.” (214)
“But it wasn’t a crime to belong to the Black Legion, or to advocate fascism or white supremacy. The First Amendment protected free speech, and the slop on this front was already slippery.” (217)
“Yet, African Americans people in Lima continue to struggle with poverty, discrimination, and enforced subservience to white people - especially at the hands of the Lima police.” (225)
Epilogue
“All of them, along with the inspiring collective actions of which they were part, have seemingly disappeared from history. So, too, the more chilling figures here: The men who held the flashlight. The policemen who threw down their badges and guns when told they could only use sticks, not bullets, against African American relief protesters.” (229)
“We need their stories, though, for our own time, full of its own terrors - resurgent fascism, steel borders, climate change. Neither capitalism nor racism has collapsed; patriarchy hums along. Today, we need our own New Deal, too, an activist state that cubs the rich, defends labor rights, redistributes wealth, and provides a safety net and free health care for everyone.” (229 - 230)
“Trying to use the state to contain capitalism won’t ever be enough, though, because in its very nature the system dedicates itself to slipping out of, and tearing apart, any fetter. We need, like those seeking social justice in the 1930s, to dream of our new social order, to build social movements that demand it, and to model it in our own collective lives.” (230)
“Most importantly, we can learn from the grassroots activists of the time who sought justice and equality, and carry them in our hearts as we step off our stoops, step over borders, and march into the streets, sinking our toes deep into the rich, messy muck of history.” (231)
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