The Unemployed People's Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929-1941

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments When I first arrived in Georgia to assume a position as Eminent Scholar of History at Gainesville State College, my initial perception of the state’s history led me to believe that the prospects for an exploration of a traditional labor studies topic would be decidedly limited. A brief discussion with one long-established scholar of southern history seemed to confirm the paucity of sources for a study of Depression-era unemployed organizing in the state. Nonetheless, a deep personal interest in the response of the dispossessed to the economic crisis of the “hungry thirties” compelled me to launch an investigation of any attempts at collective action that might be identified in the story of one of the nation’s hardest-hit states. While labor unions may have struggled to be born, I reasoned, unorganized workers must certainly have searched for their own solutions to human suffering and family distress. It was my task to uncover the remaining traces of their struggle. Undeterred by the apparent scarcity of evidence, I undertook a search for the record left by the voiceless masses and those who emerged to speak for them. Fortunately, modern historians have begun to examine the experiences of Georgia workers in a number of innovative contributions to the state’s labor history, most recently in the work of Karen Ferguson , Georgina Hickey, Randall Patton, Clifford Kuhn, and Michelle Brattain, among others. Likewise, older studies have illuminated other important aspects of that Depression experience, especially the valuable analyses of the New Deal by Michael Holmes and of the radical initiative viii Acknowledgments by Charles H. Martin. While many touch on the trauma of unemployment , few explore in any depth the effort to organize the jobless, especially the pressure from below. The search for primary source material led to documents infrequently consulted in the effort to capture the history of desperate men and women. While the oral history accounts of the Georgia worker experience have been brilliantly exploited by several recent students of the 1930s, other sources have become available to enrich our understanding of worker experiences. The client correspondence in the archives of the National Recovery Administration (nra) and the Works Progress Administration (wpa), for example, contain an exhaustive record of both individual and collective efforts to expand the boundaries of governmental concern for the victims of the Depression. Similarly, various oral history accounts document the fierce struggle between workers and both management and public authorities to create a more humane public welfare system, a battle that took place against the background of racial division, historical tradition, and long-established social assumptions. Finally, the records of radicals and radical organizations shed substantial light on the unemployed movement; of these, none are more significant than the papers of the Communist Party U.S.A. (cpusa), which have become available in recent years to historians interested in the role of the Left in community activism in the 1930s. As a useful supplement to the party’s internal correspondence, the fbi files on the Georgia Workers Alliance help to complete the picture of organizing activity on the Left in an unreceptive state. In view of the expanding source base, it now seemed possible to reconstruct the history of the unemployed movement in 1930s Georgia. The result is the current study, which explores the halting efforts of the jobless to find a voice and improve the status of the state’s hard-pressed workers, farmers, relief recipients, and “unemployables.” This analysis reveals substantial grassroots pressure for improved relief and public welfare spending from elements in the Georgia population sometimes thought to be inarticulate or silent. It further indicates that Communist, Socialist, and mainstream labor organizations all worked to channel that energy into collective protests at one time or another, thus disturbing the status quo in ways that horrified middle-class elites and provoked sometimes brutal official reactions to the perceived threat from Georgia’s impoverished masses. The narrative that follows confirms the willingness of Georgia workers to combine in pursuit of humanitarian goals and enlightened self-interest. Contrary to a widely held assumption, denizens of the state’s underclass Acknowledgments ix were often willing to organize in self-defense and self-assertion. In short, Georgia citizens were fully able to accept the principle of collective action . The unemployed movement demonstrated that mass action was, in fact, an acceptable option for hard-pressed men and women who were perfectly willing to...