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

1. Economic Crisis as Opportunity: The Great Depression as Seedbed for Radical Activism in Georgia, 1928–1930

16  chapter 1 Economic crisis as opportunity The Great Depression as Seedbed for Radical Activism in Georgia, 1928–1930 Following the onset of the Great Depression, the fortunes of American working families sank as the ravages of a battered economy hit home. While the national unemployment statistics record the misery visited upon the highly urbanized Northeast and Midwest in stark numbers, the South suffered from poverty levels found in relatively few of the more densely populated areas of the United States. As historian David Goldfield has observed, the cities of the South qualified as the country’s “basket case” during the hungry thirties. What further complicated the southern predicament was the region’s predominantly rural economy and the abject poverty that pervaded the area soon to be labeled the nation’s “foremost economic problem.” In no southern state was the human distress more acute than in Georgia, where the rural poor and displaced urban laborers struggled to cope with the ravages of a broken economy. Confronted with the consequences of soil exhaustion, insect infestation, and a collapsed market, hard-scrabble farmers, many of them tenants and sharecroppers, struggled unsuccessfully to compete with their counterparts in the more fertile and productive cotton lands to the West. Following his return in 1930 to Wrens in eastern Georgia, the budding novelist Erskine Caldwell regarded the condition of the landless and poverty-stricken of his home region as “dispiriting,” recoiling at the “sight of children’s stomachs bloated from hunger” side by side with the elderly “too weak to walk to the fields to search for something to eat.” With two-thirds of Georgians residing in “unincorporated rural territory,” the widespread dispersal of Economic Crisis as Opportunity 17 the population ensured great difficulty in the delivery of statewide aid to the unemployed. Theirs, it seemed, was a losing battle.1 Despite the devastating effect of the Great Depression on both urban and rural workers, the human casualties of a broken economy refused to submit quietly to their fate; and before long many unemployed Georgians were prepared to embrace collective action to redress their grievances. This chapter demonstrates that the economic crisis paved the way for the development of a radical movement in Georgia, which as early as 1930 would reach a point of confrontation over the demands of the unemployed and the state’s response to the rise of collective action. As will be seen, the eventual result was the rise of several militant organizations, the likes of which had not been part of the previous social and political landscape in what had once been a conventional rural southern state. Whether Socialist, Communist, liberal Democratic, or politically unaffiliated , these working class activist groups would challenge the economic and political overlords who dominated the social structure of Georgia in the 1930s. Their most dramatic departure from the politics of the past lay in the unprecedented, if momentary, willingness of the white and black jobless to bridge the racial gap that had separated them in previous years and ensured their economic marginalization. While impoverished farmers fought to meet the most basic human needs, the residents of Georgia’s cities and towns confronted a serious unemployment crisis that exacerbated long-standing class and racial tensions as the competition for scarce jobs heated up. On the surface, unemployment in the Depression’s first year did not appear alarming. The grossly understated unemployment census of 1930 reported joblessness in Georgia’s largest cities ranging from 6.2 percent in Atlanta and Augusta to 8.2 percent in Macon, levels that, while elevated, seemed manageable . More realistic were the figures provided by federal agencies, which estimated that in the years between 1930 and 1933, almost 50 percent of Atlanta’s employable workers were unable to find employment. And in some black districts, unemployment ranged as high as 75 percent, a figure that reflected a common business policy dictating that when employment contracted, “a black person would be bumped by [a] white person for his job.” In 1935 the federal Committee on Economic Security concluded that throughout Georgia, unemployment for those years ranged around 19 percent, slightly less than was true in urban states like Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, where almost 27 percent of workers were without work. The committee argued that the lower figure for Georgia probably reflected the greater opportunity for the urban unemployed to move out of the industrial labor market to 18...