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25 Million
Unemployment is not, of course, a phenomenon peculiar to our times. It has always been an integral part of capitalist economic organization, a useful and necessary weapon in the hands of the ruling class. Likewise, there has always been a certain amount of unemployment relief. In the last century, Boston had its Provident Wood-yards, where the jobless cut wood for their bed and supper. (When more wood was produced than could be sold, boondoggling was resorted to: half the men would be set to work cording up logs into piles which the other half would then tear down.) In the winter of the 1877–1878 depression, the city of Washington set its unemployed to grading streets, at fifty cents a day. During another winter of deep depression, 1893–1894, Philadelphia spent $2,000,000 to keep alive 100,000 jobless men and their families – $20 a family. [1] That terrible winter brought forth Coxey’s Army, the first great “hunger march” of unemployed citizens to the national capital. It also produced President Cleveland’s celebrated epigram, when it was suggested to him perhaps the Federal government should appropriate funds for relief: “The people should support the government. The government should not support the people.” This majestic pun remained the last word on Federal unemployment policy throughout the next forty years.
In these early decades, there was mass unemployment and great suffering during the periodic economic crises, but these were emergencies, disasters like floods or fires which were brief and violent interruptions of the normal order of things. After the war, however, mass unemployment arose for the first time as a chronic problem. The Federal government remained as aloof as ever, but the city governments had to take over more and more of the relief burden. Long before 1929, private charity had proved inadequate. “As early as 1929 more than three-fourths of the relief bill was paid from public funds.” [2] Between 1911 and 1929, in sixteen large cities, population increased 41%, general expenses of government 256%, and relief expenditures 1,118%. [3] In the 1921–1922 depression, the number of unemployed was estimated at between 4,000,000 and 5,000,000, or one out of every seven non-agricultural workers in the country. President Harding met the crisis in the best Cleveland tradition, convoking a great “committee” of bankers, industrialists, and “labor leaders” under the chairmanship of his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover. The committee, after much longwinded deliberation, decided that unemployment relief was “primarily a community problem”, talked vaguely of housing, roads, and public construction programs, suggested that the number of available working hours be evenly divided among the number of available workers (the ancestor of Hoover’s later “share-the-work” campaign, the most barefaced and unblushing attempt ever made by big business to shift the entire burden of unemployment onto the shoulders of the working class), and finally adjourned with an admonition of “patriotic patience on the part of all our people”. [3a]
But even more alarming than the unprecedented number of unemployed in the 1921 depression was the fact that all through the booming Twenties, except for 1929, there were never less than 1,500,000 men out of work, according to the minimum figure of the conservative Hoover Committee on Recent Economic Changes. [1*] By the time the bottom dropped out of things in 1929, unemployment was already a serious social problem.
As the economic decline went on unchecked from 1929 to 1930 to 1931 to 1932, as the total number of unemployed reached five million, seven million, eight, ten million, and as the Hoover administration refused to do anything about it except issue optimistic statements, more and more strange and – to the bourgeoisie – disturbing things happened. American capitalism seemed to be going to pieces right before every one’s eyes, not because of any revolutionary upsurge of the masses – there were only sporadic outbursts – but because the system’s own contradictions were shattering it. Capitalism seemed, for a few years, to be breaking up of its own weight.
One million boys and men, and a few women, wandered about the country, homeless, looking for work, riding the freights. In the winter of 1932, fifty of them were killed on a single railroad, one hundred crippled. The police chief of the Southern Pacific Railway told a Senate committee that 79,200 “trespassers” were thrown off SP trains in 1929, 683,500 in 1932, and that of these three-quarters were under 25 years of age. The Kansas City police estimated that 1,500 men and boys rode into or out of the city every day on the freights ... In Oakland, Cal., the unemployed lived in sections of sewer pipe. In Arkansas, they took to caves and burrows in the Ozark mountains ... Detroit’s relief rolls listed two families after whom streets were named ... In West Virginia, children stood shoeless in the breadlines in the dead of the winter of 1931, and in one school 99 out of 100 of the miners’ children were found to be ten pounds or more underweight ... The records of the hospitals of New York City – where relief was comparatively generous – noted under “Cause of Death” in fifty cases during 1931: “Malnutrition” or “Starvation” ... When Henry Ford made a public offer of jobs in March, 1932, tens of thousands of men mobbed the great River Rouge plant, were met by city and company police with riot guns and dispersed, leaving four dead and fifty wounded ... Father Cox led an “army” of unemployed to Washington. The Bonus Army, primarily an unemployed movement, camped along the Potomac until Hoover had their hovels burned by the police and army ... Two hundred miners and their families were found living under a bridge in Arizona. Such encampments of the jobless, expropriated from their homes by the depression, sprung up on the outskirts of every big city, and were universally known as “Hooverville” ... Sometimes people refused to obey the rules of the game. It took a squad of deputies and three hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition to evict one family from its farm near Elkhorn, Iowa ... Mayor Cermak of Chicago wired the RFC: “If I cannot have funds for relief, I cannot answer for law and order.” ... The Hoover Administration deported 18,000 aliens in a single year of the depression ... In New York City evictions increased 30% in 1930, foundlings 100% ... Orders were issued to the Illinois National Guard in 1931:
“Blank cartridges should never be fired at a mob. Never fire over the heads of rioters. The aim should be low, with full charge and battle sight.” [4]
They tried everything, except relief, to “solve” the unemployment “problem”. Everything, that is, which would put the major burden where it rightfully belonged under capitalism: on the shoulders of the working class. Some one figured out that if everybody bought an apple every day from an unemployed man, the “problem” would be solved, and there was a period when every street corner in the business and shopping districts of New York had its apple seller with his box of apples. There were great national drives to raise funds for the “Community Chest”, to which every one, rich and poor, was expected to contribute his “fair share” for relief. In some cities, “block aid” campaigns were staged, the idea being that the inhabitants of each city block took care of their own unemployed. Thus the Astorbilts were responsible for seeing that their neighbors, the Vanderpoels, didn’t starve; and the Tony Pasquales, jobless for two years, had to see to it that their neighbors, the Mike Wochniks, also jobless for two years, got enough to eat. Equally ingenious was the great “share-the-work” campaign initiated by the Hoover administration and cheerfully promoted by the big employers. The idea here was that such work as there was should be equally divided among the available workers. The effect of this equitable arrangement was to relieve unemployment by cutting in half the average earnings of each worker. According to National Industrial Conference Board figures, average earnings in manufacturing in June 1929 were $28.69, and by the end of 1932, were $16.88. (Also, despite all this work-sharing, 40% of all workers by then had been laid off completely.) Finally, many of the unemployed themselves were driven to seek to escape completely from the capitalist system by organizing cooperative and barter exchange groups. Such islands of a more primitive economy were to be found all through the American capitalist structure in 1932. But there was no escape here, either. The history of the Unemployed Citizens League of Seattle, the most famous of such groups, illustrates clearly the ultimate futility of such efforts to build socialism in one county.
But in spite of apple-selling, Community Chests, block-aid, share-the-work, and barter groups, the unemployed continued to increase and to ask to be fed. “No one has starved,” was the only reply the Hoover administration made to all criticisms of its refusal to give relief. Even this modest claim was shown to be a lie by a well-documented and scathing review of Federal relief policies printed in Fortune in September 1932. The quintessence of Hooverian relief policy was summarized in a sentence in a letter written in September 1931 by Walter S. Gifford, head of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. and then chairman of the President’s Organization on Unemployment Relief. “To date,” wrote Mr. Gifford, “this committee has recommended that, as far as possible, unemployment relief be given to the individual in his home, thereby keeping him out of the public eye.” [5]
But no amount of keeping the jobless out of sight could prevent their numbers increasing daily. As the depression worsened, as new millions joined the ranks of the unemployed, as the savings of the unemployed were inexorably exhausted, the mass pressure for relief, militantly led at that period by the Communist and other radical parties, became increasingly hard to resist. Private charity first tried to cope with relief, and nation-wide drives for contributions were put on in 1931 and 1932 by Mr. Gifford’s committee. This proved inadequate, and the resources of local governments were next drawn upon. In twelve Pennsylvania cities, for example, private relief expenditures jumped from $1,700,000 in 1930 to $9,000,000 in 1932, but in the same period public relief funds rose from $2,400,000 to $16,800,000. [6] After 1932, private charity fell off sharply, and today less than 5% of all relief comes from this source. By 1932 the states were forced to come to the rescue of their local governments, and when Roosevelt took office in March, 1933, about $200,000,000 had been spent or appropriated by the states for relief. [7]
In the spring of 1932, Congress made relief history when it voted to permit the Reconstruction Finance Corporation to lend $300,000,000 of its funds to the states for relief purposes. The money was loaned, not granted outright, and Congress’ action was dictated as much by concern over the financial condition of the states and cities as over the sufferings of the unemployed. Its action was, even so, a historic event: for the first time the Federal government had accepted some responsibility for unemployment relief. President Hoover vetoed the bill, and it was repassed over his veto a week later. Its significance was more as a gesture than anything else, for up to the inauguration of Roosevelt a year later, the RFC had only lent out $80,000,000 for relief purposes. Relief even in this last year of the Hoover regime never got much above a national average of $7 a month per family. But Hoover’s instinct as a bourgeois politician was correct: this bill set a precedent. It opened the sluice gates, however small a crack, of the only reservoir of capital large enough to keep the unemployed millions above the level of slow starvation: the credit of the Federal government. Hoover’s genial successor, after a few years of experimentation, is doing his best to close the gates.
1*. Just how conservative this figure is may be gathered from the fact that the Hoover Committee put the unemployed for 1927 at 2,055,000. while Lewis Corey, writing in The Annalist for March 9. 1928, set the figure at 3,606,000.
1. Leah H. Feder: Unemployment Relief in Periods of Depression, 1857–1922 (Russell Sage Foundation, 1936).
2. Anne B. Geddes: Trends in Relief Expenditures, 1910–1935 (Division of Social Research, WPA, Research Monograph X, Govt Printing Office, 1937).
3. Report on Public Assistance – to the WPA Administrator of New York City – of the Advisory Council and of the Research Staff (WPA, New York City, March 14, 1939).
3a. Report of the President’s Conference on Unemployment, Herbert Hoover, Chairman, Sept. 26 to Oct. 13, 1921 (GPO, 1921).
4. Facts in this paragraph mostly taken from Lewis Corey’s The Decline of American Capitalism; Fortune for September 1932; Maxine Davis’s They Shall Not Want.
5. Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work, Seattle, June 26–July 2, 1938 (U. of Chicago Press, 1938).
7. Rowland Haynes: State Legislation for Unemployment Relief, Jan. 1, 1931 to May 31, 1932 (President’s Organization for Unemployment Relief, GPO, 1932). Also, M. Stevenson & L.W. Brown: Legislation for Unemployment Relief, June 1, 1932 to March 23, 1933 (Am. Public Welfare Assn., Chicago, 1933).
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