Popular Radicalism and the Unemployed in Chicago during the Great Depression

As historians have long argued, the social and economic crises that accompanied mass unemployment during the Great Depression transformed working-class attitudes about their rights in the economy, as well as the state's relationships to unemployment relief, democracy at work, and economic regulation. At the same time, more and more working-class Americans viewed organizing from below and the industrial union movement as important ways to secure better living standards and more on-the-job rights—“making a New Deal” in the process, as Lizabeth Cohen once argued. The employed and the jobless alike pushed politics more to the Left (and away from laissez-faire traditions) as they pressed for state and local governments to do more for struggling working people and their families. Chris Wright revisits this well-known terrain. In a book that confirms the work of his predecessors while elaborating on this scholarship in important ways, he argues that mass unemployment during the 1930s both intensified working-class organizing efforts on behalf of social and economic justice and brought the principles of the Left into the mainstream of American life for the first time. Focusing on the social and political history of the unemployed in 1930s Chicago, Wright explains that while only limited numbers of working-class men and women ever joined the Communists, many more cultivated an everyday communist ethos in their communities that included standing up for one's neighbors or sharing room and board with those who could not care for themselves.While Wright's main goal for the book is to highlight the growth and the influence of the Left during the Great Depression, his greatest contributions are his forays into the social history of joblessness and relief in Chicago. Relying on numerous University of Chicago student papers and theses in the fields of sociology and social work, as well as the archives of the Chicago Welfare Council and various newspaper sources, he explains in rich detail how unemployed Chicagoans struggled to survive amid the overall collapse of the economy. As steady jobs became few and far between, unemployed workers pulled together a precarious existence for themselves and their families with odd jobs, collecting and selling discarded items such as glass bottles, and even the pilfering of groceries. The most downtrodden of unemployed workers relied on the few local relief shelters to survive. Wright carefully explains how shelter clients dealt with intrusive interviews and medical exams when they sought assistance, only to be granted entry to crowded and uncomfortable sleeping areas. Men struggled to sleep amid loud snoring, yelling, and frequent extremes of hot or cold. Clients also spent much of their time waiting in long lines for dreary, repetitive meals. The jobless gathered in shelter basements to smoke, sit, and talk—seeking to separate themselves from the scrutiny of relief officials who constantly invaded their privacy. As a result of long nights with little peace and quiet, many relief clients were often tired as they waited throughout the day for the dormitories to be reopened.Amid the pervasive human suffering of the Great Depression, elected officials in Illinois and Chicago regularly failed to intervene. “In fact,” Wright explains, “it bears emphasis that the misery of the poor and unemployed in the 1930s was made possible by one circumstance above all: the unwillingness of government on the local, state, and federal levels to provide aid in sufficient amounts” (p. 42). In Illinois, troubles with tax collection and politicians’ desires to limit government involvement in the business of relief ensured the unemployed would be left largely to their own wits to survive. The city of Chicago suspended the collection of taxes between 1927 and 1929 and faced a tax strike by major property owners between 1929 and 1932. The effects of the Depression quickly overwhelmed the Chicago city government. A new sales tax in 1933 greatly improved state revenues, but Wright explains that relief expenditures remained pitiably low throughout the decade. When the Roosevelt administration's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) stepped in to provide supplemental funds for state relief mechanisms, they did so for a period of only two-and-a-half years before retreating to the smaller-scale Works Progress Administration (WPA) program of work-as-relief. As Wright reminds readers, the political failures of government at all levels to maintain adequate aid for the unemployed and the poor fueled the organizing of the Communist-led Unemployed Councils and other Left-led organizations. Mass unemployment in Illinois, coupled with the state's willful disregard of its citizens’ struggles with joblessness, did much to energize the Left.Much of Chris Wright's study will be very familiar to historians of Illinois and the industrial Midwest during the 1930s, as he revisits subjects (such as the collapse of relief in Chicago or the rise of the Unemployed Councils) that have been examined earlier by scholars such as Lizabeth Cohen, Roy Rosenzweig, James J. Lorence, Randi Storch, and Daniel J. Leab. He focuses on the Great Depression because mass unemployment ultimately propelled the Left's greatest period of growth during the twentieth century. However, Wright might have considered fresher approaches to the topic. For example, what happened in Chicago politics in the aftermath of the Unemployed Councils? How did the World War II–era employment boom or the later Red Scare impact local activists’ concerns for the jobless? Did the Left's intense activism during the Depression years ultimately help to sustain working-class concerns for the jobless? Wright does much to add new depth to his predecessors’ work but could have done more to extend his own contribution beyond just the 1930s. Still, his book does much to enhance our understanding of the social and political history of unemployment and working-class activism in Depression-era Chicago.