This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Feb. 23 2011 - As the fracas between state workers and the governor continues in Wisconsin, an economist who researches labor unions says it isn't surprising that today's tough times have not spawned the deep and widespread economic protests that beset the nation in the 1930s.
The social safety net that was largely established during the Great Depression has made the difference, says Richard Levins, a professor emeritus of the University of Minnesota, whose work emphasizes the connection between labor unions and the middle class.
"A lot of people who would be riding the rails right now are still hanging on to some benefits from those programs. So they aren't in the absolute desperate situation that they would otherwise be," Levins said.
Unemployment insurance, for example, owes its beginnings to the Social Security Act of 1935, while the modern food stamp program -- the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) -- is a Depression-era concept revived in the early 1960s.
The scope of just these two programs is staggering:
- More than 9 million Americans are collecting some type of state or federal unemployment benefits, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
- More than 43 million Americans -- a record one in seven -- were assisted by the SNAP program in 2010, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. By contrast, 26 million Americans received food stamps in 2007. (The Great Recession officially started in December 2007 and officially ended in June 2009.)
Levins suspects that attempts to reduce benefit programs for unemployed and financially struggling Americans could lead to more visible public reactions than the nation has witnessed so far.
"When I look at what's happening in Wisconsin, I wonder if maybe we are getting there," he said.
Levins taught applied economics for 25 years before leaving the university in 2003 to do full-time research and public speaking centered around his belief that strong labor unions are essential for a strong middle class. He is in the camp that believes the struggle in Wisconsin goes deeper than budgets cuts and has become an excuse to strip away collective bargaining rights of state workers.
"I can understand the governor saying, 'We're out of money so we can't give you a raise.' I can't understand the governor saying, 'We're out of money, therefore you lose your rights,' " he said. "Collective bargaining won't get blood out of a turnip."
Levins believes that Americans have come to take the middle-class standard of living -- and the nation's social safety net -- for granted.
"We don't think of the middle class as being born; we think it's part of the American economy. We're Americans, so we're middle class," he said.
In the meantime, he said, the nation's wealth distribution has gradually returned to the lopsided level of pre-Great Depression years: Just 1 percent of the U.S. population takes home roughly 25 percent of the nation's income. That's up from the 9 percent they took home in 1976.
And he sees a common characteristic of the current economy and the years leading up to the Depression: relatively weak unions.
"We've come to have weaker unions, and we're back to where we were," he said. "If most of the money goes to the top 1 percent, that's not a middle-class society. It's not hard to see cause-and-effect. We're still a productive economy, and we're still a large economy, but we're not the middle-class economy that we once were."
Levins sees two separate issues in the Wisconsin struggle: the attempt to solve a budget crisis and an attempt to bust unions.
"Solving a budget crisis may or may not affect your ability to maintain a middle-class economy," he said. "Busting unions in my view will clearly diminish your ability to maintain a middle-class economy."
The Hunger Marches of the Depression
As Levins points out, the nation's out-of-work labor force had few options for "relief" during the early days of the Great Depression. On Dec. 7, 1931 -- the third Christmas season after Wall Street's collapse -- America's hungry marched on Washington.
According to news reports of the day, an estimated 1,500 men and women, including a contingent from the Midwest, converged on the nation's capital in a ragtag fleet of trucks and automobiles to deliver petitions to Congress demanding relief for the unemployed. The group's leaders were refused admittance to the Senate chamber, so the marchers turned their attention to the White House.
It was a diverse parade -- "men and women, white and Negro" -- marching four abreast in the cold under the scrutiny of police on motorcycles, the Associated Press reported. William Poindexter, a protester from Cleveland, headed the delegation that attempted to meet with President Herbert Hoover.
But the invasion by this "shivering" army was repelled once again by District of Columbia police, and the marchers left for home the next morning, escorted to the D.C. line by police, the AP reported. With shouts of "We'll be back again," the caravan rumbled away.
Although protests had been taking place in cities across the U.S., the Washington hunger march was one of the first to be organized on a national scale. And, like many of the local protests, this one had direct connections to the Communist Party. Newspaper accounts described the radical nature: Participants sang the "Internationale" -- "the Red Hymn" -- and urged workers to "fight for food" as they protested outside the U.S. Capitol.
The march was criticized by labor union chief, William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor who accused the leaders of having ulterior motives.
"They do not want relief," Green said in the AP's account. "They represent communism. They want to overthrow the government and substitute the Soviet Union."
Just a few days before, Green had suggested his own proposal to improve the unemployment crisis: a five-day, 35-hour workweek.
"If every employable person who wanted a job had one, the total of work for each would be 35 hours weekly," Green had told a Senate subcommittee. "There's work enough for all on the basis of five days a week, seven hours a day."
The unemployed want work, "not charity and relief," Green said, adding that industry must care for workers replaced by mechanization and other reasons.
'Please Send Us Something'
As the Depression deepened, St. Louisans relied on aid provided by private agencies. While the hunger marchers in D.C. made headlines in St. Louis that December, so did local charities' efforts to assist the unemployed:
- The Post-Dispatch reported that appeals from the needy were pouring in to its annual Christmas drive at a rate of one application a minute. "My daddy is not working," wrote a little girl named Mary. "My mother is sick and we haven't a thing in the house. The grocery man won't give us any more things to eat. Please send us something."
- The Globe-Democrat's society page was aglow with plans for a unique thrift party planned by "society belles" to benefit the Welcome Inn, a food relief station in the city that provided 2,200 families with food. The novel affair was invitation-only and set for Jan. 14 at the Hotel Chase. With the emphasis on thriftiness, guests were asked to bring their own box suppers.
- The sports pages of both newspapers praised St. Louis University and the University of Missouri for a charity football game that had raised $16,400 for the local Citizens Committee on Relief and Employment.
The city was hard-hit. By April 1929 -- even before the stock market crash -- St. Louis already had 75,000 unemployed, according to Rosemary Feurer, an associate professor of history at Northern Illinois University, who grew up in the St. Louis region and studies the local union movement.
And, as was the case elsewhere, it was the local Unemployed Council organized by the Communist Party that started the St. Louis protests, said Feurer. She detailed the activities of the Unemployed Council in her work "The St. Louis Labor History Tour."
Feurer notes that the Unemployed Councils recruited and attracted a diverse membership. Women were among the most militant members, and African-Americans took leadership roles, making the unemployment protests the first major integrated movement in St. Louis. The initial protests at City Hall demanded that the wealthy contribute to relief efforts, which relied heavily on workplace drives and the contributions of employees who were struggling financially themselves.
In January 1931, several thousand protesters marched on City Hall demanding that $10 million be raised to aid the unemployed through taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Police broke up a "sit-down" of demonstrators with clubs, tear gas and arrests. The marches continued, culminating with a mass demonstration in which at least four people died. In response, the city leaders held what Feurer describes as an "extraordinary" meeting and appropriated $2 million of city funds and passed recommendations to issue bonds for a $4.6 million loan from the federal government to reinstate thousands of families who had been cut from the relief rolls.
As serious as the local demonstrations were, Feurer said St. Louis never experienced the mass uprisings of the unemployed that occurred in such cities as Detroit and Cleveland -- despite unemployment that reached 30 percent in 1932 and a "Hooverville" of the destitute living along the Mississippi River.
Feurer said it was the association with the Communist Party that led to the eventual decline of the Unemployed Councils. But labor unions -- including the newly formed American Workers Union -- adopted the community mobilization model that cut across gender and race.
"To really make a breakthrough, community-based unionism needed to be created across the country," said Feurer. "It wasn't the CIO [Committee for Industrial Organization] sitting off in Washington that got things going. It was a community-based movement across the country, and that came out of this massive unemployed movement and struggle."
