“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? “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… 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.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Frank about her new book and what taking a fresh look at poor and working people’s struggles in the dark 1930s can teach us about how to navigate our own perilous moment in history.

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  • Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

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Transcript

Analysis:  Good evening, everybody. Welcome, as always, to Red Emma’s bookstore coffeehouse, and we are always glad to see you. There are many places you could have been this evening. You chose to be here with us in community and in struggle, and it is never thought of lightly.

I’m the poet known as Analysis. On behalf of the entire team, we’re glad you’re here, and we want you to know a few things. I look around the room and I believe all of you are Red Emma’s fam, I’m not sure we have any first time visitors to this space. But I want to remind you that you are welcome and encouraged to get something to eat or drink and bring it down during our discussion. Keep in mind that the last orders are taken at 8:00 PM. The stove will cut off at 8:00 PM, so you want to get in an order before that.

The bookstore is open until 8:00 and I may reopen it after our event just so that folks have some time to get in it. 12,000 volumes of a radical left independent bookstore, so it is worth your while always to spend some time in there.

Don’t forget about the Baltimore Free School classroom. That’s your place where you can teach a workshop to uplift the community or perhaps your rad org would like to rent it for a staff meeting and have us cater an event. There are all kinds of things you can do with the Free School classroom.

Where can you find out everything? As always, on redemmas.org, R-E-D-E-M-M-A-S.org. You can find out about the history and philosophy of the project. You can tell your family and friends that they can order books from us, and we mail within the US.

And you can see all of the great events that are coming up — Far too many to name right now due to time, but I will give you a teaser of a couple: Mohammed Bamyer will be here Tuesday the 15th in conversation with Eleanor Goldfield. The discussion will be the no-state solution, looking at, instead of two-state or one-state solutions in Palestine, what would a more anarchist approach be in terms of a no-state solution? That is this coming Tuesday.

And then the following day, Wednesday the 16th, Andrew Zonneveld and Modibo Kadalie present “All Will Be Equalized!: Georgia’s Freedom Seekers of the Swamps, Backwoods, and Sea Islands 1526-1890”. Andrew and Modi are always bringing rad information whenever they visit Red Emma’s, we hope that you can join us for that evening too.

Information is what this evening is all about. The Great Depression is a time period that lives iconically in American culture. I almost was going to say shared memory, but it is not shared memory for a variety of reasons. That generation, of course, is fast passing on.

But what our guest tonight is going to talk about is that even our understanding of the Great Depression needs to be reexamined from some of the stereotypes and some of the mythology that’s surrounded. And so I’m very much looking forward to getting some more accurate information, especially in terms of what kind of organizing and what kind of agency persons during that period were taking for themselves.

Dr. Dana Frank is professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz — Go Banana Slugs. My father did his undergrad at Santa Cruz as well. A well-regarded senior historian, she’s the author of many books on labor, women, and social justice in the US and Honduras. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, many other things. She’s testified before US Congress and Canadian Parliament. The sister knows what she’s talking about.

We are joined by Red Emma’s fam Max Alverez, who is the editor-in-chief of The Real News Network, the host of the podcast Working People, dealing with the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of today’s working class, has done so much, an alumnus of the University of Michigan. And his book, which was published by OR and which we had a wonderful event on recently here at Red Emma’s, is called The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.

We are going to get some real information about a misunderstood period in US history. What can we learn from the Great Depression? We are small in number, we are mighty in spirit. Let us give up some real radical roof raising Red Emma’s applause for a conversation with Max Alvarez, Dana Frank.

Maximillian Alvarez:  All right, thank you so much, Analysis. Thank you to Red Emma’s cooperative cafe and bookstore. Such an incredible institution, a vital institution here in Baltimore. It’s an honor to be back here, and it is a true honor to be in conversation with the great Dana Frank.

As Analysis mentioned, Dana’s CV runs a mile long, but I just wanted to emphasize at the top that if you are just being introduced to her work now, you have a feast ahead of you. She’s the author of incredible books, including The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America; Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; and Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-1929.

Dana, thank you so much for being here tonight. It’s a real honor and pleasure to be in conversation with you.

Dana Frank:  Well, what a thrill and what an honor. And boy, it’s really amazing to be here at Red Emma’s and seeing Baltimore for the first time, and to be with all the folks here, it’s really a thrill. Thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Man. Well, we could not be more excited that you are here, and could not be more excited for this book, frankly. As Analysis mentioned at the top, your new book is called What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times.

Now, I could try to summarize this book over the next 10 minutes, but I will spare our listeners that. And I want to ask if just by way of introducing this incredible, rich text, if you could read a little from the introduction and give us the bird’s eye view of this book. Where did it come from? Why was it so compelling for you to write this book at this moment? And yeah, read a little from the intro and give us a sense of what it’s about.

Dana Frank:  I’ll read the introduction and then I’ll tell you a little something about how I came to write the book. This is the very beginning.

“In a crisis, people lie awake at night trying to imagine a way forward for themselves and their families. They talk to their neighbors, they talk to their loved ones, they listen to the news, to the gossip, to the streets. They read notices pasted to telephone polls or, in more recent times, posted online. And sometimes, sometimes, they hear about a path forward with other people and choose to join them.

“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed. By 1933, a third of all those who 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.

“I offer here four little-known stories of how ordinary working people, facing the enormous crisis of the Great Depression, responded by taking up creative, powerful, and often visionary collective action. I follow their paths from panicked impoverishment to shining hopes for a better future, through the joys and achievements of their collective projects, to the barriers and challenges they faced along the way, including the often unromantic world of actually organizing with other people.

“As we face our own crises today, a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, glowing racism, climate change, and ourselves lie awake at night facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.

“Two chapters focus on inspiring, often audacious militants, especially by women. One of them tells the story of seven African American women who worked as wet nurses, selling their breast milk to the city of Chicago Board of Health, who daringly staged a sitdown strike at City Hall to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination. It follows their path from hyperexploitation to empowerment.

“The other looks at the ways people sought to meet their basic needs nationwide through mutual aid cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief. Some by building institutions of horizontal reciprocity among themselves independent of state control, others by making immediate demands on the state. In the process, often imagining alternative societies that over and over again look like socialism, even if they didn’t always call it that.

In these movements, as in the wet nurses’ strike, women militants lay at the center of working-class activism, yet both the labor and unemployed movements marginalized women, including their work in the home.

“In another chapter I look at the forcible expulsion, known as repatriation, of millions of Mexicans and Mexican Americans During the Great Depression, I explore its roots, in part, in farm workers, successful multiracial union activism, and follow the ways in which Mexican repatriados and their allies organized collectively and proudly to survive racist hostility and removal.

“I contrast their story, which has received extensive scholarly attention but remains largely ignored in mainstream histories of the 1930s, with the exalted, in many ways, fictional narrative of white so-called Dust Bowl migrants who stepped into the jobs vacated by Mexicans.

“In the final chapter, I look closely at the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist group in the upper Midwest organized by white working-class men and a few women, whose hundreds of thousands of members believed that racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and a fascist seizure of the state were the answer to the Great Depression.

“I zero on the city of Lima, Ohio, and its Lima — ” They say Lima [pronounced LIE-mah], not Lima [pronounced LEE-mah] — “Where the Legion was founded, and trace its appeal, its activities, and the forces that brought it down, and its chilling legacy.

“Today, I’m looking squarely at the hard parts here, as well as the beautiful stories. Collective action during the Great Depression at times meant process 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.

“At its best, it meant powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity through which ordinary men and women, by working together, sought to provide the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life, drawing on long traditions and new ideas alike. In acting collectively, they built carefully from below, interlocking their lives and visions, planting seeds for the next generation, and laying roots for struggle in our own times.

“Together, these stories point a moving portrait of the Great Depression at the grassroots, deep in the hearts and dreams of working people and their abilities over and over to organize themselves and try to improve their lives in the community. At its core, this book is about point of view, both our own viewpoint and understanding US history and the viewpoints of working people during the ’30s. What did the world look like to them? Where did they think the answer to their problems lay?”

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. There’s so many juicy turns of phrase in there that I keep getting hung up on, and I just can’t emphasize enough how beautifully written and tenderly written the book is, along with being incredibly gripping and informative, which is not an easy feat for digging up dusty —

Dana Frank:  Thank you so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:  — 1930s history.

Dana Frank:  That means so much to me because I worked so hard on the writing. I mean my whole life, and I poured a lot of thinking about writing and the poetic nature of writing and storytelling.

I want to say that the book is stories, as you can tell, four stories, but there are stories within stories, and it was possible because of oral histories that were conducted by all different kinds of people all over the country, mostly in the late ’70s and early ’80s. And those oral histories of all different kinds of people, from fascists in Ohio to repatriados that are coming back after being sent to Mexico, to so-called Dust Girl Migrants in the San Joaquin Valley in California, to have their stories and their worldviews and have them talking in their own voices, it was a real honor to be able to put their stories forward.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Well, I want to come back to that in a second, but to reemphasize the need to retell the history of the 1930s in a way that grips people. Because I know from personal experience in my past academic life when I was doing my history PhD at the University of Michigan, I had to read a bunch of history about this period, and all of it was dry as an overcooked Turkey. So I’m very grateful to have this book now.

But that also got me thinking. I identify so much with your academic, intellectual career arc as someone who has accomplished so much in the history of Latin American studies, but who has also done incredible deep work on labor, economics, politics here in the United States. I was wondering if you could say a little more about that trajectory, where this book fits into it, and your work in Latin America, particularly Honduras, and your work here in the United States, are they informing each other in your mind?

Dana Frank:  Well, that’s really a wonderful question, because, of course, I think about this all the time. Most of my wage life and what I came to call my day job was studying and teaching, writing about US labor and working class history in transnational perspective. And that’s what I taught all my whole life. And I taught classes on the Great Depression in the last years before I retired, and that was who I was. And I wrote a lot of books about that from different angles.

And then 25 years ago, I was pulled into supporting the banana unions of Honduras and Central America, and I started having another life on the side. And then in 2009, there was a military coup in Honduras, and that changed my whole life. I put on trim little suits and started going to Congress, and I wrote 35 op-eds, and anything I could do to keep people alive and to be part of the Honduran resistance was this huge honor, which I would still, it changed my whole life.

And this book was about coming back. And I was exhausted with fighting the State Department and US imperialism in my lifetime for 15 years. I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So I return — And also with the rise of Trump and Trumpism and racism in the United States, not that it was ever abated, but with more ferocious racism, I made a political decision, as well, to return to using my skills as a historian to fight racism in the United States. And hence this book. And also, frankly, I needed a lockdown project, something I could do sitting there alone in my study every day and try to feel useful in the world.

And so it was very much a coming home. But it’s interesting. What were the connections there? When I first started writing about Honduras and Central America, I was definitely terrified — What do I know about Honduras? I was very humbled by that. Still am. But I wrote a book about women’s projects in the banana unions, and I was working with these women and I felt like I was just channeling them, but I could understand the analytical categories of what they would understand as women’s projects, we might say feminist labor activism.

And so I had some analytical categories that I could understand to talk about that work, but my voice is not in that book. I’m just trying to channel as much as possible.

And then once the coup came and I was involved in the resistance, it was a very different thing because a lot of the book about Honduras and us and the resistance came from articles I’d written for The Nation or op-eds, and some first person stories that where I was using to show that you too can get involved here, to show how people, government officials lie, to show the arc of the narrative of the building, and also to make it not so boring. So that was developing different literary skills there, because also I just couldn’t stand to write op-eds anymore, frankly.

So this book is really coming home. It was much more difficult than anything I ever wrote. The research was really hard. The literary side of it was really hard. The footnotes, the proofreading, the copy editing, the index. The index alone took three and a half weeks of 11 hour days. It looks like nothing, but actually, there’s a lot of analytical categories involved in doing an index.

So I really underestimated how hard it was going to be, and also emotionally hard. I wrote the chapter, we can talk about the chapter of the net Nurses. I wrote that one first, I always, and we can come back to that, and it was like I wrote it the year of the insurrection, and I spent a year, how do I get this right as a white person writing about African American women’s history? And I’m still not sure. I mean, I’ve had a lot of support, but that was a big challenge when I got to the fascism chapter. That was a really big thing, difficult.

And the book is structured as four very long chapters. They’re 50 pages type set, and that’s much longer than a normal chapter of a book. And it makes a certain kind of storytelling possible. You can go in and out of the story, you can do context, you can have stories within stories, you can have characters in a way you can’t in a 25-page chapter.

But that means as a writer, you have to carry your conversation with the audience and with the imaginary reader for about three months of daily life. And that was especially hard when I got to the fascism chapter, because living up to what I needed to say about that story, the one about the caravans and the repatriados, and about the Dust Bowl migrants, I knew what I wanted to say. And by the time I wrote the first one, last one, I was so tired. And I’ll say a little bit more later about the epilogue, but it was a very exhausting book to write —

Maximillian Alvarez:  I can imagine.

Dana Frank:  — Emotionally, and in terms of the labors involved.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I was thinking that as I was reading it. As someone who had academic training as a historian and being able to see a little more of what I knew was a whole lot of labor going into a seemingly simple sentence [laughs].

Dana Frank:  Thank you so much.

Maximillian Alvarez:  But also as someone who now, postacademia, is doing oral history journalism. I’m interviewing working people for a living these days, and that work has taught me just how hard it is to recreate a sense of place and time without those stories and those voices.

And of course we have oral histories of the 1930s. There are famous examples like Studs Terkel’s Hard Times in there, of course. And yeah, you cite ’em here, but that’s very different from trying to narrate and recreate the daily life of working people at one of the most horrific economic moments in our country’s history.

I wanted to ask if you could talk a bit about how you did that, and also why it’s so important to do that. Because within a generation, these stories can get lost. My generation, let alone our daughters’ generation, these are not stories that are readily remembered, or even remembered at all. And the farther away we get from that, the easier it is to forget the destitution, the hard scrabble realities that people were contending with, as well as the forms of organization, solidarity, and struggle that you write about.

So I wanted to ask if you could, for folks out there listening who don’t have that memory through family connections or research or anything, take us back to the 1930s, and let’s really remind people what it was like to live at that time as a working person. What were folks actually going through on a day-to-day basis?

Dana Frank:  Well, the statistic that I read a minute ago, it’s at the beginning of the thirties, and this is before Roosevelt was elected, before the New Deal comes in in 1933, is that it’s about one third of the country is unemployed and one third is what’s called underemployed, which means people have dropped down or they’re getting lesser hours.

But also, it really depends on your sector, because some things like steel factories, a lot of factories were just everybody was laid off. Or cotton picking like the cotton economy [loud vehicle] — The motorcycles did well. Cotton prices, agricultural prices just completely plummeted, so cotton workers in Texas were just starving. And so there’s a lot of agricultural crisis as well as urban employment crisis, but it’s important to understand that it didn’t hit everybody the same.

I mean, African American people were so poor to begin with. And there’s some great quotes that I have in the book, and from three completely different sources, where they say, oh, the Great Depression, that was a white people thing because we are always in the Great Depression [Alvarez laughs]. There’s three different, I think it’s Maya Angelou says it, somebody else does it, [inaudible]. So who has this collapse?

And of course, Black people are even poorer than ever because there was what’s called racial bumping, which is people among the jobs available to women, white women, middle-class women bump down the working-class women, who bump down the African American women, even from cleaning houses, who then ended up with no work. So it’s very racial and gender specific.

And one of the things I’d say about what made the book so hard is that I’m keeping all these variables of race, class, and gender going the whole time. And not just race on a single axis because I’m talking about Mexicans and Filipinos and African American people and white people and European immigrants that are being racialized. All of that is going on in the ’30s in really complicated ways.

And in the story, and I’m trying to keep a gender analysis going, which I was actually shocked by some of the… I’ve been studying women’s history my whole life, and the raw patriarchy in these mutual benefits societies and the co-op movement. And my editors said the same thing. I’m like, why am I surprised by this? But they didn’t even want women to belong. They didn’t want to give healthcare to the women. And I’m like, whoa. They didn’t want women at the meetings. And that was kind of shocking to me, which is a different question.

Where were we about? Well, I think the main thing is that the 1930s was a huge crisis of capitalism. And the capitalist system collapsed, but also that gave prestige to the left because the people on the left, particularly the Communist Party, had been saying, hello, the sky’s going to fall, capitalism is an unstable system.

And elites were very concerned about a revolution because it was only like 10, 15 years since the Russian Revolution, depending on which year. It was not a revolutionary moment, but the elites were very worried. And, as I say in the book, there were demonstrations of up to 100,000 people in cities all over the United States demanding unemployed relief in March of 1930, which is like six months after the stock market crash.

So that specter of potential chaos and revolution is looming over the elites. And that’s part of why we get the New Deal farther into the… But mostly people are scared and they don’t know what’s going to happen next. They don’t know that the state is going to step in, particularly in these early years.

But I just want to say something else about what you learned about the Depression. Of course, my father was the generation that lived through it, and his father died in 1932, and they lost the life insurance money in the stock market crash. And my grandmother, who was Italian with four kids, eventually got a WPA job teaching sewing classes and then was working as a home healthcare worker by the end of the ’30s.

But both my parents’ families were middle-class people that were very, very poor. And there were certain personality traits. My dad, that you could never leave a light on in a room that you were not in, for example. And a certain kind of frugality that was that Depression mentality. And these were people that survived OK, eventually.

But I also, from my generation, and I was born in 1956 and I’m 68 now. I went to graduate school in 1980, and there was a whole left generation of new generation scholars that turned to the ’30s — And I’m surprised you read boring books because there are all these wonderful books that were written in the late ’70s and early ’80s about all kinds of organizing. Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe, for example, is a really shining example, but all kinds of wonderful work. And then, of course, Studs Terkel’s Hard Times came out, amazing oral histories.

People looked at the ’30s with this optimism of the new left generation, the boom of the economy from the ’60s and ’70s, and before deindustrialization kicks in.

So it was like, gee, how do we make a revolution? Look at the explosions of tens of millions of people in the CIO into the labor movement, look at all these amazing cool things that we can write about to make a revolution.

And that’s really different now. And when I took up this book, I chose topics that instinctively I felt like writing about. Frankly, I didn’t have an overarching scheme. But when I was done, I realized this is a really different point of view.

For one thing I’m taking seriously fascism in the ’30s, which that generation, except for Alan Brinkley, did not want to talk about it, particularly. It was not a burning question. And also the sobering reality about immigration politics, which some people did look at, usually more in the ’80s, turned to pioneering Chicano historians and others. And I realized when I was done, I wanted those inspiring stories. And there it is, half of the book.

The other half is like, whoa, we do not take things for granted that we’re going to have a booming economy. We don’t take it for granted we’re not going to have fascism, and that we have a lot more sobering questions to pay attention to. It’s really different than that moment of 1980 with that other scholarship that I read in graduate school and was inspired by,

Maximillian Alvarez:  This is a message to my advisors, the great Howie Brick and the great Geoff Eley. They let me read the exciting books eventually, but they made me read a lot of dusty labor history first [laughs].

I want to talk about some of these specific stories and they upend a lot of our really stubborn cultural misconceptions about this period. But by way of getting there, I wanted to again ask the bird’s eye view question first, which is what are some of the most persistent, even pernicious ways of understanding the Depression era that we still have today? And what is this book doing to turn those on its head and provide a new perspective?

Dana Frank:  Well, I think the best place to start is the visual imagery. Now imagine what you picture when you picture the visual imagery of the ’30s, and you get a white man and a breadline, passively, alone. You might get an African American man and a white man depressed on a stoop in New York. You get Grapes of Wrath, white people suffering in the fields in California. And you get Dorothea Lange and the “Migrant Mother”, the poor woman with the babies, looking exhausted.

And all of these images are individualized, suffering, passive people, usually almost always white. And that’s the image we have.

There is one other counter image, which is massive numbers of white men, factory workers rising up in the CIO building, the auto workers in the sitdown strikes. And so that’s a more heroic image.

But the people in my book are, and I deliberately picked photographs that are disrupting that image. And certainly I have a long section, the chapter called “The Tale of Two Caravans” is half about the repatriados and these Mexicans and their communities and how they banded together to support themselves while they were being forced out of the country.

And really beautiful stories I found in the papers in Texas of people supporting these caravans of thousands of people moving off Texas because they were being forced out by employers and social workers and the police and forced into Mexico, a million people.

And I bet how many people listening to this or that are here even knew this ever happened. People know it in the Mexican American Chicano history world. But it is really one of the things I want to say is let’s get that out there that this thing happened. And I just had an op-ed about this in the LA Times a couple of days ago if you want to see the quick summary.

But the other image we have comes from Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and the Grapes of Wrath. And the migrant mother herself in real life was a Cherokee woman. She found out many years later the photograph had been used without her permission, denounced it. Her daughter has said it wasn’t anything like that.

And so we have this iconic image which rises up, you just blink and there’s a migrant mother, and it gets used — We can talk about later — It gets used to talk about migrant women crossing from Central America into the US and Mexico border. They became migrant mothers, and it’s like this thing.

And then the John Steinbeck, you mean can read it in the book, John Steinbeck was, in his nonfiction writing, wrote stuff that was very white supremacist, it was very explicit. And he wrote Mexican and Filipino farm workers out of the story of farm labor organizing in the ’30s very consciously.

And actually we think of the Dust Bowl migrants, but actually only 6% of the migrants from the Southwest experienced the Dust Bowl — This is Jim Gregory’s research — Half of them were urban to urban. 

So there were farm workers that were white that experienced [that], the people in Grapes of Wrath. But there are a number of interviews with people from that world that were done in the late ’70s at Cal State, Bakersfield of African-American and white, mostly white, but some African-American people, and they all hate the Grapes of Wrath. They say it was completely inaccurate. And I found this in this archive.

And actually if you read the stories about the white workers, and also what the African-American workers say about the white workers, it’s clear that the white migrants had subtle white privileges. They had an uncle with a store, they had a cousin that was the foreman that got ’em a job as a foreman. They had some money from a piece of land that they’d sold. So they get footholds when they come into California in ways that African American workers did not, and the Mexican and Filipino workers who had been militantly organizing had been deported.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s talk about how — I have so many thoughts on that, but I want to zero this in on some of your chapters here and show how the stories that you write about give us a very different understanding of how this decade unfolded and how history was shaped and who was doing that shaping.

We have a couple of big competing dominant narratives here in the ’30s. You could have the great men of history narrative where, out of the morass, Roosevelt rose and benevolently bequeathed the New Deal to all of us and gave us the National Labor Relations Act, and then workers started organizing.

Or you have more of a flip side narrative, that it was the predominantly white industrial workers leading the charge, radicalizing, through the CIO, the labor movement.

But your picture’s more complicated. So let’s talk about the wet nurses chapter and what that adds to our understanding of history and how it upends a little bit of those dominant narratives we have of the 1930s specifically as the genesis of the modern labor movement.

Dana Frank:  Yeah, I’ll just read this introduction to the chapter, and I say this chapter is called “Whose Labor Movement?”. And this question that you’re raising about, I want to say something a little bit first about the New Deal, which is one of the things I’m trying to do in this book is that a lot of young people are interested in the Green Deal, Green New Deal, they hear a AOC talk about it, but don’t know what the New Deal was. And so I’m trying to weave through things about the New Deal, both the amazing power of it in terms of transforming class politics and the limits to it.

And in each chapter I talk about what each of these groups did and didn’t get from the New Deal depending on where they are in the economy, what their gender is, and their racial ethnic background. Also that the New Deal is not just this gift that comes from above, it comes from struggle, it comes from defensive maneuvers by elites, but it is still an amazing achievement.

So let me just read. I’ll say something about this chapter. People have said to me like, oh, I didn’t know about the strike. Well, it has never been written about by historians. I think the people in their families, the women told the stories. But I saw it in Life magazine from 1937, 25 years ago, when I was researching the strike of Woolworths workers, white women that worked at Woolworths in Detroit. And I saw this photograph and two sentences about it, and I’m like, whoa. And I told a friend of mine who researched this African American history and said, find someone to write about it. She forgot about it, and I sort of always remembered it.

So when I went to write this book, this is where I started. And the photograph is amazing. And if you don’t want to buy the book, if you look at Hammer and Hope magazine, the new Black left online magazine, it’s free, absolutely amazing. You can see a beautiful reproduction in it. They excerpted this chapter

Maximillian Alvarez:  And we’ll link to that in the notes for this episode.

Dana Frank:  OK, great.

“On a usual day, seven young Black women would show up first thing in the morning at a ‘milk station’ on the South Side to work as wet nurses selling their breast milk to the city of Chicago. They’d change out of their street clothes into uniforms, seat themselves around a table, and silently express their milk for an hour.

“But on Monday morning, March 15, 1937, they instead walked into the City Hall office of Dr. Herman Bundesen, president of the Chicago Board of Health, sat down on two rows of straight-back white chairs along the sides of his ante room, and announced they were on strike.

“They kept on their coats and their dark round hats with small feathers tucked into the brims. They kept on their long scarves with bright stripes or flowers that wound around and down their necks, their knees almost touching in the tiny space. They took off their gloves and held them tightly on their laps under their hands, folded atop their purses.

“In the photo captured by Life magazine, the women’s faces are turned to each other, laughing, smiling, full of joyous friendship and audacity. One of them, in the rear of the tiny room, leans forward and the side a bit to better catch her fellow striker’s words.

“When a reporter asks the women how long they plan to stay, Mary Hart, age 20, declared, ‘We can strike as long as we have to and we certainly will. We’ll be here every day, 8:30 to 4:30.’

“This extraordinary strike by Chicago wet nurses was just one of thousands of sitdown strikes that erupted throughout the United States in 1936 and ’37, especially in the upper Midwest. Most famously, workers newly organized in the United Auto Workers staged a sitdown strike at the General Motors plant in Flint, Michigan, outside Detroit. On Feb. 11, 1937, the biggest corporation in the world agreed to recognize the union and soon negotiated higher wages and improved working conditions.

“Over the next few weeks, sitdown strikes, or even the threat of one, produced immense union victories for workers in steel and auto plants nationwide, and for many other workers as well, especially factory workers. All told, in March, 1937, a total of 167,210 workers sat down in 170 different strikes.

“But those seven women in Chicago weren’t factory workers. Their job was selling part of their bodies. Their work represented one of the most highly exploited forms of women’s labor imaginable.

“What does a heroic labor movement of the 1930s look like if we center our story on Black women’s reproductive labor, moving the frame far away from white men working in factories? What can the striking wet nurses tell us about imagining and building a labor movement today that includes all forms of labor and the labors of all working people?

“During the 1930s, the New Deal instituted a system of labor rights that is celebrated rightly for its gains for working people. But using the wet nurses as our compass, we can ask whether the New Deal’s labor system’s key elements delivered for all workers.

“To appreciate the wet nurses and their militant determination, we have to go deep into their world and try to understand the labor they perform, then gradually pull back to understand their daily lives, their city, its culture and political offerings, and what the broader labor movement and the federal government did and didn’t offer them.

“We don’t have a great deal of evidence about the strike itself, but newspaper reports at the time give us the gift of photographs of the strikers, their names, and, miraculously, their voices. As we trace the women’s path from oppression to empowerment, we can trace the resources and examples of protests available to them in the Black community of South Side Chicago at that exact moment in time, especially among African American women that made it possible for them to sit down on those white chairs, their hands tightly folded in their laps, with smiles on their faces, gloves off.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Hell yeah. This is such an incredible chapter to read, and we’re not going to be able to summarize it. For everyone out there listening, the whole point of this conversation is to get you interested and go read the book, and then write to us and tell us what you thought about it. Write to Dana and ask follow-up questions, get involved in this history.

And this reminds me of a book talk that I did with the great Kim Kelly with her new book on the untold stories of American Labor. It reminds me of a part where she talks about Black washerwomen in the South who went on strike and had a significant amount of leverage, and they exercised it at a critical moment. But that story, just like this story, is just never really talked about as part of the narrative of labor, particularly in the ’30s.

So what does that narrative look like if we do include this and if we center it, like you said?

Dana Frank:  Well, the story that Kim Kelly [inaudible] is actually taken completely from the work of Tara Hunter and her book To ‘Joy My Freedom, and —

Maximillian Alvarez:  It’s not taken, it’s cited.

Dana Frank:  OK, I’m sorry. The story and the research is from Tara Hunter. And Tara Hunter first talked about that strike at a paper I heard in the 1980s at the Berkshire Conference on women’s history. And for me, that was this defining moment where you could take the most oppressed workers and show how they shut down the city of Chicago.

And it had a huge impact on me. This is the kind of history that I want to write, and I want to honor Tara’s work in this foundational moment of reframing what we understand to be labor and working class history.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Each chapter, I meant to mention this at the beginning, but I think one of the most critical and engaging parts about this book is you end each chapter with taking an elevator back to the present from the past, and it really does communicate to you the central question: what can we learn from the Great Depression, and what can these struggles of the past teach us about our struggles today?

And I wanted to ask if you could talk about that for a second. And then I want to talk about the fascists and the deportations in the same vein. But we’ve been living in a moment of labor resurgence, especially in the COVID era, a lot of new unionization efforts that we’ve covered at The Real News, but also a lot of folks in sectors that have been traditionally ununionizable.

You’ve got the Union of Southern Service workers in the South, you’ve got this new effort in California to organize fast food workers. So what can folks, working people living through the kind of crap that we’re all living through today, what can they learn from this period in history?

Dana Frank:  Well, thanks for liking the part. It was a risky thing for me to bring each chapter up to the present because it’s a big, no-no it’s called being presentist. And I’m like, I’m all, I don’t care [Alvarez laughs], this is what I’m doing. And I do it in different ways in each chapter, playing off the themes and carrying it up to the present. And that was important to me. So thank you for that.

In terms of now, in fact, a friend of mine I’m here with was asking me, like, well, it’s not like that now. All these amazing things they did in the ’30s. I’m like, oh, no, no, no. It’s totally amazing now. And look, as you say, all this, the whole Starbucks campaign, some of the stuff that hotels and restaurants are doing, jobs of justice all over this place. We have to want to honor these really creative rank and file, bottom up explosions and creative moments that are happening all over, particularly among young people.

And the institutionalized labor movement is an extremely important power that a lot of people underestimate, but it’s wooden and it’s bureaucratized, and it has a stake in containing rank and file energies.

And that’s why you want to have a sense of, we really need to recreate and rethink what a labor movement is and what happens to housework in this, what happens to the unemployed? And that’s part of what I’m playing with in the book, and I owe to lots. Again, I’m drawing on so many other people’s work here in thinking about all this. And we want to say, yeah, the whole point is to be creative.

The first chapter, which we haven’t talked about, is I’m really speaking to young people that are committed to mutual aid and the notion that we can organize things ourselves, and that there’s often this phrase that people use called “a new social order”.

And I’m also talking about mutual benefit societies, which every single ethnic group, you name it, has mutual benefits societies, and they’re also often overlapping with anarchists and socialists and the African freedom movement, you name it. And what do we do with that whole history and those meeting halls? In my town, the Portuguese meeting hall or the Lithuanian meeting hall.

And also looking at the cooperative movement. But also I’m contrasting that with the demands that we’re like, no, we’re not going to pretend that we can fix this ourselves. We’re going to make demands on landlords. A tremendously successful eviction protest movement, and the unemployed people’s movement, which really made huge demands on the state and brought us unemployment insurance.

I used to have a bumper sticker: the labor movement, the folks who brought you the weekend, and Priscilla Murolo and Ben Chitty took that and put it into a book title.

But wait a minute, the unemployed movement, the people who brought you federal unemployment insurance, but not everybody gets it. That movement was full of African American, white women doing all kinds of militant things, including beating up on cops, being beaten up by cops. And unless you were in a dependent relationship, in a marriage with a man who had been in the labor force, you didn’t get federal unemployment benefits.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Of course, we got to shout out again our amazing hosts here at Red Emma’s, they are a worker-owned cooperative. And just thinking about that through the lens of your book, you start to really notice the absences in our current society.

In your chapters, you read, especially in that first one, you read about these Hoovervilles and other areas of life where people were providing for one another at a moment when so much scarcity was all around.

And then you start thinking, well, why don’t we do that now? There are many answers to that question, but it’s like we’ve usurped communal interdependence with credit and forms of allowing people to access those things without relying on each other for it. But then those systems are very fragile.

I was just interviewing folks in Asheville, North Carolina, who are still organizing and mobilizing in a disaster zone. And they’re talking about this. They’re saying the anarchists are helping us distribute food, and they know how to organize, but a lot of people don’t. And that stuff is deeply relevant for the moment that we’re in now, especially with these cascading catastrophes that we’re dealing with.

Dana Frank:  Well, I think this history of horizontal mutual aid, particularly in disasters that people have written about, including Mexico City, in Nicaragua, one of the catalysts for the trying for the revolution in 1979 in Nicaragua.

But part of what I’m exploring is what is enough? We have ways people naturally want to do things, I think, horizontally and among ourselves, over and over again. And we have this stuff that you get here about, it’s one of these myths about American individualism and the guy with the bootstraps. I never quite got it about the bootstraps. But lifting ourselves up individually, getting ahead, which is actually not how people get ahead — They get ahead through families and neighborhoods and associational life and faith-based communities.

But it’s also, there is this thing humming along out there called capitalism, now, corporate capitalism, transnational capitalism, and a very powerful armed police state, and what is the relationship between dealing with that and taking care of ourselves among ourselves?

And we have to confront that. It’s like we can’t escape that. And also, when you start having functional ways of taking care of yourself, capitalism has all these tentacles that moves in on it, never gets threatened, and will undermine you.

So there’s a long history. You have to think about how do we get there from here, of course, which is always the $64,000 question.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to talk about the Black Legion for a second, and I was just so impressed that you included this chapter in this book because I think it’s something so many of us would’ve been afraid to, but it works so well.

And in terms of communicating why this history is relevant today, in that way, it almost felt like the most important chapter because you also write about these cohorts based on bonds of racist white supremacist solidarity as forms of survival for people who were wrong. But I mean, that’s why they were doing it.

And we are seeing that now as working people are facing exacerbating, drastically exacerbating inequality. People are still struggling to get by. They’re being beaten down, not just by pandemics, but by inflation, yada, yada, yada. Again, these are the folks that we talk to, listen to, and read about every single day.

And I see how easy it is for people to, especially white workers, but not exclusively, Latinos can do this too. But there’s an allure to giving in to the fascistic offerings to destitute working people that this chapter really highlights what that looks like, why people are doing it, and also why it’s so dangerous and ultimately not what the working class needs to achieve the world that we want.

But tell our listeners and the folks here a little more about the Black Legion and about this chapter, and what it tells us about our situation today.

Dana Frank:  You’re so articulate, moving. I wish you had written the book [Alvarez laughs]. Could you just write all that down and I’ll shove it in there at the beginning?

Well, this chapter was the other seed of the book because I originally was interested in the question of whether the New Deal stopped fascism in the ’30s by offering things to white working class men. And I think it actually did in part because that didn’t mean they stopped being racist and antisemitic and anti-Catholic, it meant they stopped organizing in certain ways.

And then the rise of the CIO and the World War II economy and then the World War II boom, which is based on US imperialism, offers certain things to white working class men. And when it doesn’t offer that to them anymore, they turn back to this bedrock.

And when the Great Depression hit, I don’t think people necessarily know that the Ku Klux Klan, how big it was in the 1920s, in the decade before. I think people know about the Reconstruction era Ku Klux Klan, which is in the South, which was opposed to African American people, but it died out and then rose again in the 1920s and was known as the second klan.

And that second clan was anti-Black, but also anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant, and very powerful. It had 500,000 members in Ohio alone. It had millions and millions of members all over the country, especially in the South, it was actually much more, if not more, in the North. And it fell apart for a number of reasons by the end of the ’20s. But when the Depression hit, that legacy is still there.

And I talk about this organization called the Black Legion, which is sort of the missing link in the history of US fascism. And it was based, it was founded at the time of the town of Lima, Ohio, and spread throughout the upper Midwest, especially in Detroit. It was secret. They had black robes and pirate hats — I’m not making this up — With skulls and crossbones, that killed at least 50 in Detroit, including probably, the family thinks, Malcolm X’s father.

We don’t know how many people they killed in Lima, but they clearly beat up a lot of people, burned some things down. One in five white men in the city of Lima were members of this, including the chief of police, the mayor, the chief of detectives, the county prosecutor, who then became elected to Congress and then refused to prosecute the members of the Black Legion for their crimes.

So very much embedded. And also took over the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, which is the predecessor to the WPA Federal Relief Agency. So they actually not only controlled almost all the 48 people that worked for the agency, but the thousands of jobs, they sent the jobs out to members of the Black Legion. So this is active white supremacy within a New Deal agency. And so very chilling.

And so what I traced in this, I had really amazing records from FBI investigations, the FBI never acted on it, but there were a lot of different government agencies that investigated them, and the records are available. And also had oral histories, and I had a lot of sources. The Black Legion became very famous in 1936 when a prosecutor in Detroit, himself a former Black Legion member, prosecuted 12 men in a very famous national trial. And the Black Legion pretty much fell apart, but it was big national news about fascism in the United States.

There’s a really great film starring Humphrey Bogart that’s pretty historically accurate, except it doesn’t talk about the antisemitism, the anti-immigrant, and the anti-Black parts. It’s just anti-democratic. But it backs off. It takes a step back from who the Black Legion really was.

So I was trying to understand exactly what you’re talking about. Its appeal to white working class men. Who were these members? What did they do, and how did they take over this town? And it’s the legitimation of it. There’s a lot of middle class-ministers and other folks who keep being referred to as harmless.

And then I was also interested in who stopped it and who didn’t. A lot of people whose job it was to stop it, including J. Edgar Hoover, looked the other way. They didn’t want to touch it. And a lot of very brave people, from rank and file people, to prosecutors in Detroit and Toledo, and just rank and file people who talked to the FBI very bravely.

And also I looked at the African American and Italian Catholic communities in Lima. There’s no direct evidence of resistance, but I talk about their amazing community survival in the ’30s and the ways in which survival was very much clearly resistance.

Maximillian Alvarez:  And again, the elephant in the room that we are watching this play out right now. We see it most prominently in Donald Trump’s campaign and all the spillovers of the MAGA movement. There is such a deep attachment to this reclamation of lost national pride, lost manhood.

So many of those same dynamics at play in this chapter are at play now, and are traditionally across the world at play when political systems collapse, economic systems collapse, and people are destitute. They’re much easier to turn against one another in those moments.

And it breaks my fucking heart — Pardon my French – To see it happening to people that I know and have spoken to, and I’ve interviewed in places near Lima, Ohio, like East Palestine where the train derailed almost two years ago. This is a white working-class town. I’ve been there.

I’ve interviewed people, working people whose lives have been upended by this train derailment. They’ve been abandoned by their government, turned into a political football for a time, and then forgotten by the national media.

And they’re still going to vote for Trump. Overwhelmingly. I’ve been seeing on my Facebook feed people that I know buying into Donald Trump’s latest lies about how the disaster relief that should be going to communities in North Carolina devastated by the hurricanes, all that money is going to “illegals”. It’s seizing upon people’s destitution, preying upon it and turning it against their fellow worker in ways that you can see how that plays out in your book. And it’s playing out in front of us right now.

And that also leads me to the chapter about the mass deportations. Because one of Donald Trump’s biggest slogans right now, people at the RNC were holding signs saying “mass deportation now”.

You actually write about a period in history where that happened. And as you said, a lot of people don’t know it happened. So tell us a little bit about that chapter and what it can tell us about what people in the half country are calling for right now.

Dana Frank:  [Good] question. We’re all trying to figure out how is it that Trump’s appeal is so mind boggling and strong, including in communities of color? This has been shocking to so many of us. And you’re the media expert. So much of it is like Fox News and narratives that are being fed to people that don’t have access to other critical thinking about the news. And it’s unbelievably chilling, as we all know.

And I would just say that Lima, Ohio, is in Jim Jordan’s district, and although Lima itself did not vote for Trump, there’s also a Black Lives chapter. Lima is now 25% African American. There’s still truly terrifying police control there of the African American community, but there’s also pushback now. And I want to underscore it’s not just a victim story of the African American community in Lima, not that it ever was.

The second chapter is called “A Tale of Two Caravans”, and half of it is the part I was talking about, about the Dust Bowl migrants and that myth, but the main thrust is about the people who were called repatriados, or the repatriated ones. And these were people who were not technically deported. There were 82,000 Mexicans who were legally deported by the federal government in the ’30s. And a lot of those were union activists in California and other parts in the Southwest.

But most of these, it was somewhere between 300,000 and 1 million people. There’s different estimates because the records were not kept at the border properly. And they were people who’d been living in the US for a decade or two, they had US-born citizen children, and they’re being laid off by jobs, by employers that lined up all the workers and say all the Brown people are on one side and all the white people on the other — This is in Los Angeles — And telling them that only the white people, American jobs for American workers. We’ve heard that slogan that has risen up again since the ’30s.

Or they would go to the welfare office, the relief office, the way white workers did, and be told, no, we have nothing for you. Here’s a train ticket to Mexico. You don’t belong here. Or they were put on boats, sometimes, from San Diego. Or a lot of people in Texas were just starving by the tens of thousands. And so they formed caravans.

And of course, having somebody who had been working on Central America for a long time, I was conscious of a reference to caravans. And there were these very beautiful caravans of up to 2,000 people. And I open the chapter with one from a place called Karnes City, which is near Laredo. And they traveled in vehicles that were donated by Mexican middle-class people, and trucks. And they traveled to San Antonio and then to Laredo and over the border.

And the middle-class community greeted them by the streets by the tens of thousands, donated whole steers to cook food. And there’s some beautiful lists that I found in La Prensa from San Antonio, a Spanish language newspaper, of things that were donated by regular people to give to the people that were going south over the border.

And it’s very complicated because the Mexican government actually supported repatriation because it was threatened by the Mexican revolution and its own social movements and wanted to demonstrate that it was the father taking care of the children. If they would just come back to Mexico, they would be taken care of, which did not happen. There were some big schemes that completely fell apart.

Most of the people who left that went back to Mexico went to their original villages and were absorbed in the villages. But many of them then come back after or even during World War II. Because what happens is in World War II, the economy booms, so white men in particular get good factory jobs. And who’s going to pick the crops? So then the US creates a Bracero program, which brings hyper exploited Mexican men into the United States to terrible conditions, and some of those were actually the ones that had left under repatriation.

Now here’s the story of this, unbelievable, as many as 1 million people, and a third of them were US-born children. And there was terrible family separation because the younger kids went with their parents, but a lot of the older kids did not want to go and stayed, and there were terrible separations of families. It was really hard for those older kids because they didn’t necessarily speak Spanish, they were acculturated to US culture in very different ways. So it was a lot of very traumatic family separation.

And this has been written about, memory was kept alive in the Mexican American community. But as Francisco Balderrama, and I forget his first name, excuse me, [Raymond] Rodriguez, a really great book called Decade of Betrayal. They did a lot of interviews in the ’70s and ’80s, I [don’t] know the exact dates. And that there were people that they interviewed that had never talked to their children about it because of the trauma of it.

And they did really beautiful work. That book, Decade Betrayal, I would encourage people to read. It includes a lot of these voices. And they actually got an apology from the state of California, if not reparations. It’s taught in Chicano and Mexican American Latino history classes, but it has not crossed over into the mainstream of US history. And how does this happen, that something like this could just be forgotten?

And then you have the enshrinement of the white Dust Bowl migrants as the central narrative [Alvarez laughs] of farm workers in California when it’s largely a fiction, or those people were in that situation for three or four or five years.

And there are also some African American farm workers in California, but the Mexicans and the Filipinos in the early ’30s were super militant. And there was a strike of tens of thousands of cotton workers in 1933 that raised wages in the middle of the Great Depression, and all kinds of amazing organizing, and that was shut down.

Deborah Weber has shown that the white workers didn’t have a tradition of union organizing because they had been farmers, or not even farmers, and the Mexicans and the Filipinos, they had been farmers too, but a decade before, and they lost their land in Mexico or in the Philippines. And so they were accustomed to wage labor and having to make demands, and the white workers were not militant and did not want to unionize for the most part. And so it also had this tremendous effect on farm labor organizing for those that were still there.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I could genuinely talk to you for hours about this, but I know that we probably only have time for maybe two more questions that I want to squeeze in. And I just want to emphasize one more time for everyone listening to this, everyone out here right now, go read this book. It is full chock-full of rich stories, important insights inside of US history that many of us have never actually heard about before.

And I want to end on a bigger picture question about, again, what can we learn from the Great Depression. But by way of getting there, you mentioned how there is one key echo in contemporary times to the period of the 1930s that does resonate with younger folks these days, and that is the Green New Deal.

This is a demand that grew out of the last 10 years in a lot of young progressive left-leaning folks who were all, understandably, terrified and freaked out about the climate crisis looking to the New Deal as a model for how to address a global crisis of this magnitude.

Now there’s a whole lot there that we can get into that we don’t have time for, but I think one thing that really struck me reading your book, you mentioned the WPA, which stands for Working Progress Association?

Dana Frank:  Works Progress Administration.

Maximillian Alvarez:  Works Progress Administration, sorry. But the WPA, the New Deal, one of the things that most stick out to people about that is the notion of the government putting people to work and public works being a thing. And this is very key for whatever a sustainable economy and society needs to be in the era of the climate crisis. There’s a lot of work to be had in reclamation. There are a lot of union jobs to be had in green sectors. But we’re not there.

So I wanted to ask what from the period of the New Deal can we actually learn to apply to the climate crisis today? And how can we learn to better articulate our demands and shape our vision for the future by looking back at that time?

Dana Frank:  Well, that was nice what you said. I’ll take what you just said.

I think it’s about being able to imagine an activist state and demanding an activist state. The New Deal didn’t just come out of the sky because elites were worried, which it did partly, but that people demanded it.

One of the things I talk about, which other people have documented, this is not original to me, is that the ways in which people at the beginning of the Depression internalize their failure, particularly white men, not so much African-American men, but white men, and that they had failed their families, and it was their fault, even though a third of the country was unemployed. It was very obviously an external crisis causing their supposed individual failure.

And one of the things the unemployed movement of the early 30’s did to organize by the left and the anti-racist left was it took that stigma off of the individual person and said, not only is it not your fault, but you have a right to demand of the state, and the state has to give you a job or give you relief or give you housing or whatever. This sense of entitlement to the redress by the government. And that happens over the course of the first three years.

So by the time you get the New Deal, it’s like the government is supposed to be doing this. This is not about my individual failure. And that demand and that entitlement is this important transformation that the social movements bring about.

And that I think we don’t even know how to imagine that the state does good things, especially on this enormous scale that the New Deal did on so many different fronts.

But not only did it give people relief jobs to tens of millions of people, but the jewels in the crown are actually the structures that open Social Security and the social security system, and federal unemployment insurance, and the National Labor Relations Act, which, what’s his name, Trump wants to get rid of in the National Labor Relations Board, this system that protects the right to organize and demand of your employer.

And although it didn’t say give more money to the workers, it said give the workers a legal framework to be protected while they demand it. But it was designed to tip the balance of power between labor and capital very consciously.

And the notion that the state would do these things, I’m like, hello, let’s think big. And so the New Deal is this amazing and, in many tremendous ways a successful thing, but you also have to have your eyes open about the limits to it because there are race and gender politics to it. And these sectors that were excluded from all of those things I just mentioned, as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which creates the federal minimum wage and agricultural labor in the fields, government workers and domestic workers in the home, and women working not for pay, or anybody, but in a home, but they were all excluded from the benefits of those systems.

Now, eventually, most of those groups are going to be included in complicated or limited ways. So the space is open there to expand them. But it’s really important to see who did and didn’t benefit from the New Deal because it’s those white male industrial workers in the upper Midwest who are most likely to benefit from it, and it’s the wet nurses who are least likely to benefit from it.

So you also have to have your eyes open about the race and gender structural… It wasn’t like they got up in the morning and said, let’s be racist. All the [inaudible] Democrats that pushed a lot of this through [Alvarez laughs], they did, how are we going to keep the Black people down? But it’s also true that it was also compromises that were made by Roosevelt and others to get these programs through, and then people have fought since to get them expanded to apply to other people.

So there are a lot of debates about the race and gender politics in the New Deal, but there’s no question that it was this huge activist intervention by the state. That is a really different thing than saying, let’s take care of ourselves and model what we want down here. Let’s think big about what the state should be. And then you’re getting these questions about big bureaucratized state enterprises and how are you going to manage them. So it’s not a simple thing.

Maximillian Alvarez:  I want to come back to the central question in the title of your book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Because as this conversation has shown, and as this book shows time and again, this is a period that we can learn a lot from. Not just in the optimistic, what are the hopeful signs of how to make a better world that we can find in the ’30s — And there are many, and you write about them beautifully, and we should learn from them.

But you also give us examples of how things can go bad and how they can get worse, and how people can be duped or dupe themselves into taking easier routes to salvation that sacrifice the well-being of their neighbors or other people.

I guess there’s no easy answer here, but I wanted to end this incredible conversation first by thanking you for writing this incredible book. Thank you for this incredible conversation. And yeah, I want to give you the final word here, both in the bad and the good. What can we learn from the Great Depression today?

Dana Frank:  Do we have time for me to read the epilogue?

Maximillian Alvarez:  Absolutely.

Dana Frank:  Well, I am very conscious that I don’t have any simple lessons. I ended up feeling like when I tell these stories, there’s some failed things about listening to working people, working people can run things themselves, working, people are creative. You have to understand the roots of people’s anxieties and address them. You have to take immigration politics seriously. And all of those things are the bedrock of this book.

And when you think about work and working people, you have to imagine all working people and all work. And there’s some bedrock principles in the book. And after that, I got kind of sobered by thinking about them like I wrote the book in a way that’s open ended. I got a lot of opinions in here, as I always do, but I also try to just say, OK, we’re in this together. Let me do the best I can to tell you this story and let’s think about it.

So let me just read the epilogue, OK, if there’s time. And the people at the beginning are all characters in the book.

“William Smith, the Lima Farmer in his overalls who talked back to Virgil Effer, the fascist leader, even though he was surrounded by hundreds of armed men with flashlights.

“Ruby Lucas, who sat on the stoop in her squirrel coat with a cup of coffee and announced, ‘I’m warring on the millionaire bankers whose greed has turned widows and orphans and destitute into slaves.’

“Mary Hart, camped out in a white chair at City Hall, who told reporters what they’d been paying ain’t enough for car fare.

“The unnamed elderly man on horseback who, as he crossed the border, threw his hat up in the air and shouted ‘Viva Mexico!’

“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 flashlights, the policemen who threw down their badges and guns when told they could only use sticks, not bullets, against African American relief protestors.

“Indeed, a common theme emerges in these chapters: Invisibility. Women’s domestic labor was invisible to both the menfolk and to the state. The expulsion of a million Mexicans and Mexican Americans was invisible to most non-Mexicans and remains so. And then there was the Black Legion trying to hide its clandestine work of hate. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, was known as the Invisible Empire.

“Today in most mainstream renditions of the Great Depression in the United States, these stories from the grassroots remain largely invisible, largely forgotten. 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 curbs the rich, defends labor rights, redistributes wealth, and provides a safety net and free health care to everyone. We can join those who advocate for a Green New Deal to help stave off climate disaster.

“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 fetters. We need, like those seeking social justice in the 1930s, to dream up our own new social order, to build social movements that demand it and to model it in our own collective lives.

“During the time I wrote this book, three scary plagues visited my community. The first, of course, was the COVID pandemic. The second was a set of fires in August [2020] that destroyed over 700 homes in the Santa Cruz area, including those with people I knew, burned down acres and acres of beloved forests, and crept close enough to my house that the evacuation line was eight blocks away. For another year, we prayed for rain, but instead got more drought.

“In the last months before I finished this book, drenching rain was finally predicted for the day after Christmas, so I hurriedly planted grass where gophers had torn up the more or less lawn covering my backyard and had left bare dirt that turned into gunk that I tracked constantly into the house. I raked the soil, sowed grass seeds, covered them with mulch. Then over it all spread burlap coffee sacks to protect the seeds from the birds, anchoring down the corners with bricks.

“Then it rained in biblical proportions for days and days. Plague number three: sinkholes four blocks from my house appeared on the national news, as did a levee breach in a nearby town that destroyed the homes and livelihoods of hundreds of already impoverished people.

“Less disastrously, my own backyard turned into a lake, which inched into my study and garage. It was only one inch deep. No historical research was hurt, but the seeds were underwater. For three weeks, I watched the lake drown them. When the lake finally receded, I lifted off the burlaps sadly. The seeds were still there but no grass.

“One morning, though, I detected individual thin, dark blades miraculously scattered across the ex-lake. Then it flooded again for another entire week. Now I mourned my drowned grasslings, which I imagined waving for help underwater, kelp-like in the murky swamp.

“Finally, the water sank for good. With a bit of sun, the grass babies flourished, their roots happy in the rich muck, locking with each other and spreading horizontal networks that joined other thicker patches on nearby higher ground. I looked out the window and saw a beautiful sea of green fur.

“We are not grass, but we know how to survive fire and flood and beasts that tear up our landscapes. We know how to lay low, then rise up. We know how to survive when we are underwater. We know how to link our roots with others. We know our roots can flourish in deep muck. We know how to thrive. And we know how to learn from history.

“William Smith, Ruby Lucas, Mary Hart, and the man on horseback didn’t, in fact, disappear. They all appeared in newspapers at the time, which is where I found them, and they are now in this book almost 100 years later, speaking to us. They aren’t invisible.

“In taking on the terrors of our own time, we can learn from the grassroots activists of the 1930s who sought justice and equality, and carrying 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.”

Maximillian Alvarez:  Let’s give it up for Dana Frank, everybody [applause].

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
Follow: @maximillian_alv