American Experiment (294 page)

As psychology overrode economics on both sides, the business community’s intensifying feelings of guilt, apprehension, and lowered self-esteem fueled a mounting hatred for Roosevelt that began to assume pathological dimensions. He was called, privately or publicly, the Pied Piper of Hyde Park, the High Priest of Repudiation, Franklin “Deficit” Roosevelt, a Little Napoleon, Roosevelt the Tyrant, a Svengali, and of course a communist. One card that was smirkingly passed around had the caption “Can you answer the $64 Question?”:

WHAT MAN SAID TO “THAT” WOMAN?

“You kiss the negroes

I’ll kiss the Jews,

We’ll stay in the White House,

As long as we choose.”

Another card read:

THE PRESIDENT’S WIFE

IS SUING FOR DIVORCE BECAUSE

SHE IS NOT GETTING WHAT HE IS GIVING

THE OTHER PEOPLE

There developed a curious obsession with Roosevelt’s physical disability; “that cripple in the White House” was also rumored to have cancer or syphilis. But the main charge was of insanity—like fervent ideologues everywhere, his foes felt that their chief enemy could not merely be wrong; he must be crazy.

On the farthest reaches of the right—a world away from responsible conservatism—lay the political scavengers of anti-Semitism, and “Rosenfeld” became a prime target. His “Jew Deal” was run by Frankfurter, Brandeis, Baruch, Morgenthau, Cohen, and other “legal kikes.” A host of groups sprang up—white shirts, silver shirts, blue shirts—to purvey this line through speeches and pamphlets with such titles as
There Is a Jewish World Plot, The Jewish New Deal, Aryan Americanism,
and—inevitably—the fake
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,
the final proof of the international Jewish plot to take over the world. All these groups—as well as the white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan—were united by hate and fear of liberalism, socialism, and communism and by the passionate belief that the New Deal embodied these heresies.

With the Liberty League as its political action committee, American capitalism by late 1934 had declared war on the New Deal. Even more, it had declared a kind of class war on militant unions and all the hostile elements it perceived on the underside of American life. In the charges and the whispers against Roosevelt, in the hatred of the upper class for the President as a “traitor to his class,” capitalists largely initiated the very class war they imputed to Roosevelt and the left.

But where was the class enemy? The forces of labor, liberalism, and the left in 1933 and 1934 resembled more a guerrilla army living off the land than the solid ranks of the proletarian masses. For a half-century or more, labor and other groups—most dramatically the Knights of Labor in the 1880s—had made sporadic efforts to unite workers, skilled and unskilled, in a broad and durable radical movement. All had failed. A national organization mainly of craft unions, the American Federation of Labor, had come to dominate the labor field under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, apostle of business unionism. During the “business decade” of the 1920s the AFL had declined in membership and influence. During the “Hoover
depression” the Federation had declined even further. No other national labor or left-wing organization yet challenged it. No political party had arisen to unite workers and farmers politically since Robert La Follette’s short-lived Progressive party of 1924.

A rash of strikes had broken out across the nation with the first flush of prosperity in 1933. As union organizers exploited NRA’s Section 7(a) and the slightly tighter labor market, workers flocked into the big AFL organizations—into Lewis’s United Mine Workers, into Sidney Hillman’s Amalgamated Clothing Workers, into David Dubinsky’s International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, into the United Textile Workers of America, and to a lesser degree into the hundreds of craft unions of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, bricklayers, and other skilled workers. And with more organization—and with more employers’ counterattacks against organization—came more waves of walkouts during 1934. Some strikes failed in their objectives, some succeeded—but one in particular served to arouse the fears of upper and middle classes alike. This was the San Francisco general strike of late spring 1934.

In no other city were the workers historically more militant, the employers more anti-union, and the newspaper owners—Hearst, the Knowlands—more reactionary than in the city by the Golden Gate. Few workers had sharper grievances than the longshoremen over the way the shipping companies ran the daily shape-up. Men gathered in bleak hiring halls along the Embarcadero at six in the morning, hoping to catch the eye of the dispatcher for a day’s work. This functionary could choose one man because he was a good worker, or was a cousin, or would slip him a five-spot, and send another man back into the street because he was “unreliable.” Longshoremen despised this “slave mart,” for even if chosen they remained slaves—slaves to the hook that inexorably plunged into the cargo hold and “must never hang,” that is, must never dangle idly for even a few moments.

Enflamed by this issue, the San Francisco conflict followed the classic path of escalation in the spring of 1934. The International Longshoremen’s Association demanded union recognition under the NRA; the shipping companies rejected the demand; the longshoremen struck on the Embarcadero; the companies hired strikebreakers, boarding them luxuriously on vessels; strikers hunted down scabs, kicking in their teeth or breaking their legs over a curb. Then the battle widened as the Teamsters and other unions struck in support of the longshoremen, the bosses unified their ranks through their Industrial Association of industrial, banking, railroad, and shipping interests, and more radical union leaders gained influence. Foremost of these was an intense, wiry immigrant from Australia
named Harry Bridges, whose determination to win justice for labor and cynicism about ways and means had both been strengthened in the years he had spent as sailor and longshoreman.

Violence erupted when the employers sent trucks full of strikebreakers through picket lines; strikers let fly with bricks and spikes, police responded with billy sticks, tear gas, and bullets. San Francisco became a sprawling, shifting battlefield as thousands more strikers and sympathizers converged on the scene. Two men died on “Bloody Thursday”; scores, perhaps hundreds, were hurt. Now a general strike was imminent, as more and more unions fell into line.

The threat of a general strike—the nation had experienced perhaps two in its entire history—touched off widespread hysteria. The press warned of revolution and the Red Menace; rumors circulated about an imminent communist invasion of the Bay area; vigilantes smashed union offices; the mayor swore in several hundred deputy policemen; the governor called out the National Guard; Bridges and his men hung tough. Would the nation’s armed forces also be necessary? Officials turned to the Commander-in-Chief. But Roosevelt was not at his White House GHQ. He was in fact cruising Pacific waters on the USS
Houston.
“Everybody demanded that I sail into San Francisco Bay,” the President said later, “all flags flying and guns double shotted, and end the strike. They went completely off the handle.”

One person who had not gone off the handle was Frances Perkins. Controlling in Washington much of the communications with the President, the Secretary of Labor and her aides played down the gravity of the crisis in messages to the cruiser. She then helped arrange for a series of arbitration efforts that produced settlements by the fall. In the give-and-take of the new agreements one item stood out: the ILA alone now had the power to name the dispatcher. Despite his communist connections and rhetoric, Harry Bridges emerged as a hero of waterfront labor. But Frances Perkins, resolute and discerning under the most intense pressures, was the true heroine of deescalation.

Class war had been raging in Minneapolis in the same weeks that violence swept San Francisco. The broad pattern was much the same: employers traditionally dead set against unionization and especially the union shop; workers suffering from unemployment and low wages in the city’s great railroad, timber, iron ore, farm, and transportation industries, now battered by depression; probably the nation’s most militant workers’ leadership, headed by Ray Dunne. He had five brothers, all brought up as Roman Catholics, all unionists, several of them leftists of various hues. The escalation too followed the familiar pattern: organization of workers—in
this case truck drivers—under the spur of 7(a); categorical rejection by employers of the closed shop because they could never bargain away the “workers’ liberties”; elaborate preparations on both sides for a showdown; an incident; bloody skirmishes between police with clubs and pickets with baseball bats; a truce; new tension; then “Bloody Friday”—July 20, 1934— as police with shotguns killed two strikers and left scores of others with wounds in their backsides.

Both sides had sought this showdown, but it settled nothing. As tension mounted again Governor Floyd Olson, onetime Wobbly and longtime farm-labor progressive, called in the National Guard and with fine impartiality raided first the union headquarters and then the anti-union Citizens Alliance. Both sides turned to Roosevelt, but he would not intervene— publicly. Privately he put pressure on the employers through Jesse Jones, who used as leverage the RFC’s power to give or withhold credit to Minneapolis’s beleaguered banks and businesses. Attacked on their weakest flank, the employers finally agreed to representation elections for the workers and to other concessions. The agreement left the Dunne brothers with a notable victory and also in the same kind of theoretical quandary that confronted Harry Bridges at the end: How could the State—which in the Marxist view of capitalism must of necessity reflect the interests of the ruling classes—have come ultimately to the aid of the workers? And in this case through that embodiment of Texas wealth, enterprise, and individualism, Jesse Jones?

Where union organization was weak, however, business control of the State was far more naked. Such was the case with textile workers, especially in the South. Embittered over cruelly low wages and long hours, and over the body-racking stretch-out that tied machine tenders to heavier workloads, cotton workers struck in nine states from Maine to Georgia. Over 350,000 workers walked off the job or stayed home. “The 1934 general strike in the textile industry,” according to Robert R. R. Brooks, “was unquestionably the greatest single industrial conflict in the history of American organized labor”—and it struck concomitant fear among employers. In mill towns across the South they fought back through sheriffs deputies, the National Guard, espionage, and terrorism, and the strikers suffered hundreds of casualties. In North Carolina, Roosevelt’s old boss Josephus Daniels wrote him that in almost every instance “the troops might as well have been under the direction of the mill owners.”

In the North, Rhode Island governor Theodore Green called in troops, in part because he saw the strike as virtually a communist revolt. Workers were shot down in Saylesville and Warren. The governor, nearly beside himself, called on the President to prevent communists and outlaws from
“destroying cities” and marching on the statehouse. After checking with the FBI, the President took no such action. But on the other hand he gave the textile workers little help, and the big strike collapsed. Labor failed also in other big industries: steel, automobiles, tires.

Workers were facing once again a hard truth—unorganized, they were almost impotent economically and politically. This reality also confronted poorer Americans who lived on the land. Farmers who owned their own spreads in the Midwest and Northeast acted through the big farm associations like the Grange and the American Farm Bureau Federation. But sharecroppers in the South and farm workers in the West and elsewhere lacked organizational muscle. And they were suffering.

“Sharecropping, once the backbone of the South’s agricultural empire, is rapidly giving way to an even more vicious system of labor extraction,” Erskine Caldwell wrote in the mid-thirties. “The new style is driving the sharecropper away from the fertile land, away from schools for his children, away from contact with civilization. The sharecropper of yesterday is the wage worker of today, the man who peddles his brawn and muscle for twenty-five and thirty cents a day, and who is lucky if he works one day a week during the winter months, and still luckier if he can collect it in cash instead of in corn meal or old clothes.”

The AAA had aroused the hopes and expectations of sharecroppers too, but little of Washington’s money trickled down to them. Some whites and blacks, working together, formed the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union under local and outside—mainly Socialist party—leadership, only to be met with threats from farm owners, vigilantes with whips and loaded shotguns, sheriffs with arrest orders. An Arkansas preacher told a
New York Times
reporter: “It would have been better to have a few no-account, shiftless people killed at the start than to have all this fuss raised up.” The federal government was attacked for stirring up “niggers” to think that they would be given forty acres. To some observers blacks were still in a condition of slavery—but so were many whites.

Even more wretched than the sharecroppers were the itinerant farm workers, who had no land or place to call their own and existed in a succession of shanties and hovels, many of them lacking running water, sanitation, or even window screens. Many of these farm workers were former sharecroppers who had made their way north or west to join Arkies from Arkansas and Okies from dust-ridden Oklahoma in a vast army of wanderers. They had been infected by New Deal hopes and promises, as had their brothers and sisters in the East. In the summer of 1933 tobacco workers in the Connecticut Valley rose in indignation over their meager wages, as did cranberry pickers in the bogs of Cape Cod and citrus fruit
pickers in Florida. Next year onion diggers in southern Appalachia, farm and cannery workers in New Jersey, pecan shellers in the San Antonio area, and hosts of other farm workers struck over wages and other issues. This wave of protest culminated in the spacious farmlands of California’s Imperial Valley.