DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: Prosperity Spawns Social Ferment, Much Like 1930s
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It's deja vu all over again
It's deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra famously said.
Eighty years ago the nation was in economic ferment, much as it is now.
But unlike today, noble politicians from the wealthier classes, like Franklin D. Roosevelt, stepped forward to lead.
Today's ruling classes, led by so-called conservatives purchased lock, stock and barrel by political donations from wealthy connivers like the infamous Koch brothers, appear determined to take the nation to the brink.
Return with us now to yesteryear when "liberals" and labor unions were in disrepute, when robber barons refused the most obvious pleas for social justice, when jobs were scarce and pay for those who could find work was penurious.
Gosh -- that sounds a lot like what's going on today, doesn't it? No tax increase too small to oppose, no compromise too reasonable to consider, no thoughts of "nation first."
One aspect is very different, however: In the early Depression days communists dominated radical politics in the epicenter of ferment -- Chicago, Illinois.
A principled woman from a well-to-do Bay City family, working as a social activist in Chicago, played a part in the movement that perhaps kept the nation from violent anarchy then advocated by communists and other radicals.
Under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected in 1932 as the effects of the Depression worsened to crisis proportions, the New Deal emerged to rescue the poor and elderly.
The so-called "fiscal cliff" of those perilous days was, of course, much worse than today's contrived crisis concocted by ultra-conservative political hacks to protect the bloated incomes of their patrons in the "one percent."
Historian Sharon Smith has written: "The 1920s was a decade of rapid expansion for American capitalism, and ruling class confidence soared. Leading economists proclaimed that the era of booms and slumps was in the past, and the U.S. economy could look forward to "permanent prosperity." The banking magnate Melvin A. Traylor declared confidently, "We need not fear a recurrence of the conditions that will plunge the nation into the depths of the more violent financial panics such as have occurred in the past."
"But they spoke too soon. Before the decade was over, the U.S. economy had plunged into the worst depression in U.S. history. The 1929 stock market crash which marked the beginning of the Great Depression ushered in a period of immiseration for virtually the entire working class. By 1932 it was estimated that 75 percent of the population was living in poverty, and fully one-third was unemployed. And in many places, Black unemployment rates were two, three, or even four times those of white workers.
"But the richest people in society felt no sympathy for the starving masses. They had spent the previous decade slashing wages and breaking unions, with widespread success. By 1929, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had lost a million members.
"With the onset of depression, they banded together as a group to oppose every measure to grant government assistance to feed the hungry or help the homeless. Most employers flatly refused to bargain with any union, and used the economic crisis as an excuse to slash all wages across the board. But in so doing, they unleashed the greatest period of social upheaval that has ever taken place in the United States."
Riding to the rescue, like the proverbial hero on a white horse, came a courageous protector of the working classes -- U.S. Sen. Paul H. Douglas, Democrat of Illinois, then a professor at the University of Illinois.
At first he spurned politics: "Overall he found the Democrats too corrupt, the Republicans too backward, and the Socialists too ideological," commented the Unitarian Biography. But soon the professor and author took the bit of leadership under the Democratic banner.
The "official" history of the United States Social Security system gives no credit to a leader who perhaps was its real founder, Sen. Douglas.
And no credit has gone to native Bay Cityan Florence Tye Jennison, great-granddaughter of James G. Birney, who served as research aide to Sen. Douglas and co-authored a book with him.
Wrote historian Edward L. Schapsmeier, professor at Illinois State University: "Through the influence of Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes, a fellow civic reformer from Chicago, and Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who knew him as a professional economist, Douglas was appointed in 1933 to the Consumers' Advisory Board of the short-lived National Recovery Administration.
"All the while, he was generating ideas and agitating for enactment of such New Deal legislation as the Social Security Act, Wagner Act, and Fair Labor Standards Act. He published Wages and the Family (1925), Real Wages in the United States, 1890-1926 (with Miss Jennison, 1930), Standards of Unemployment Insurance (1933), Theory of Wages (1934), Controlling Depressions (1935), and Social Security in the United States (1936).
"Long a friend of organized labor, Douglas served from 1925 to 1942 as chairman of the board of arbitrators for the newspaper industry."
"During Douglas's three-term (Senate) career -- which spanned the presidential administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson -- he was a forceful champion of civil rights, social welfare programs, public housing, extension of Social Security (including Medicare), federal aid to education, concern for the environment, and legislation beneficial to labor unions. Known as an uncompromising idealist, Douglas marched to his own drumbeat."
"Social Security has been touted as one of the great moral successes of the 20th century, providing economic security to citizens in their old age and in the face of sickness, disability, or the death of a provider," states the New York Society of CPAs.
The Social Security Act was adopted in 1935, giving small financial boosts to needy segments of society, but labor unrest escalated and Michigan then became the epicenter of social activism.
The legendary Flint sit-down strike, (and a similar strike in Bay City) which began at the end of 1936, turned the tide most dramatically, according to Sharon Smith. Flint was the center of the General Motors (GM) empire: with a total population of 160,000, some 47,000 were employed by GM in 1936. UAW membership in Flint had grown from 150 at the end of October to 4,500 by the end of December."
There was a decisive missing element in the working-class movement of the 1930s: an organization of revolutionaries that was large enough to influence the course of the struggle, according to Sharon Smith. The Communist Party was large enough, but it had long ceased to be a revolutionary organization and it discredited itself when it turned its back on the class struggle at its turning point in 1937.
When Stalin signed a pact with Hitler in 1939, suddenly, five years of alliances with liberals and support for Roosevelt went out the window. The writer recalled: "The war buildup that the party had enthusiastically supported was now condemned as a war between 'rival imperialisms for world domination.' The Stalin-Hitler pact resulted in an exodus of members, including a large number of Blacks, from the CP, who could not stomach the idea of defending a Soviet alliance with the world's most renowned racist.
"Nevertheless, one of the most important lessons to be learned from the 1930s is how it might have ended differently. If sections of the labor movement had broken with the Democrats, and if the sit-down strikes had escalated instead of subsiding in 1937 -- the Depression decade could have ended in victory for the working class movement. Instead, it ended in a series of defeats, followed by world war."
The question today is: where are the heroes who will help us avert anarchy, who will find solutions to the fiscal cliffs that will confront us ceaselessly in the future, who will be the noble patrons of American working class society?
Who will come to the fore like Sen. Douglas and Miss Jennison, and FDR, to find a solution to what may otherwise become real class warfare?
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