Doing What We Can: Governments and the Unemployed During the Great Depression

There is something iconic about the Great Depression. Writers like John Steinbeck immortalized the struggling family that was forced from their farm to an unknown and at times dangerous future. Charlie Chaplin’s satirical motion pictures captured the humour, conflict and frustrations that characterized the Depression’s economic and social circumstances. News reels brought to the North American public the images of poor, unemployed, thin, dirty young men, women, and families who could no longer support themselves. These images, both fictional and real, have burrowed their ways into our collective historical consciousness.

Given the compelling pull of Depression folklore, the considerable volume and breadth of scholarship into the Great Depression is not surprising. This research into the Depression, beginning as early as 1930 and continuing today, has repeatedly shown that there are many Depression stories that merit our attention and our analysis. Nonetheless, the perennial issue of unemployment is nearly constant. Indeed, the three books that are considered here are bound together by their focus on unemployment and relief. James J. Lorence’s The Unemployed People’s Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929-1941 explores the formidable process of organizing a racially and politically divided unemployment movement in the American South. He points out the surprising successes and less surprising failures over more than a decade of economic depression, stagnation, and recovery. Eric Strikwerda’s The Wages of Relief: Cities and the Unemployed in Prairie Canada, 1929-1939 considers the challenges facing Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Edmonton in responding to the sudden and dramatic increase in the number of urban unemployed and their urgent needs for relief. Lara Campell’s Respectable Citizens: Gender, Family, and Unemployment in Ontario’s Great Depression unearths how families—parents, grandparents, and children—confronted the Depression within prescribed notions of appropriate gender relations in their homes, on the streets, in relief offices, and in courtrooms. Each of these works expands and enriches our knowledge of the Depression experience so that it becomes more inclusive and more complex.

The pervading myth about labour organization in the South, Lorence asserts, “is the timeworn argument that the region’s workers were somehow impervious to the drive toward organization that affected urban, industrial America” (pg. 1). In The Unemployed People’s Movement, Lorence assures us that the South was a busy, complex, and promising site of organization for workers and, during the Depression, the unemployed. Lorence, borrowing heavily from James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, spends much of his introduction asserting that the unemployed engaged “in a form of protest politics denied them by the existing political discourse of the Depression-era South” (pg. 3). As Lorence points out, this discourse disadvantaged people according to class, race, and region of residence. Unfortunately, Lorence directly connects his evidence to Scott’s ideas only once in the body of the work, leaving the allusions to innovative methods of protest in the introduction as unfulfilled promises.

Lorence’s method of working through the Depression is an impressive accomplishment. His work reveals years of research and careful examination of documents ranging from newspaper articles to oral histories, from government relief agency files and police records to letters complaining about the egregious division of relief provisions. His resulting conclusions combine the closely connected issues of class and race, arguing that for brief moments the growing unemployed movement was, as a result of Georgia’s long history of favouring white over black employees, at the forefront of organizing demands for greater economic and social equality for African-Americans. In part this was a result of both a Communist push for equal treatment under federal relief programming—a push that Lorence explores...