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25 Million
THERE ARE at the present time in this country between 10,000,000 and 12,000,000 completely unemployed workers and – with their dependents an army of at least 25,000,000 men, women and children. In a social system based on the production and consumption of goods, these twenty-five million – one-fifth of the nation – are excluded from all part in the normal work and life of society. In the most highly rationalized productive system in the world, it is impossible to “find” jobs for one-fifth of the workers. In the richest and most powerful capitalist society in history, one out of every five citizens is a pauper. If he is lucky, his destitution is officially recognized by the state and he and his family are maintained by the state on a level just above starvation. The less fortunate beg, borrow, and steal – if they can. But however they keep themselves alive, or don’t, these twenty-five million have no place in the nation, no value to society. They are outcasts, pariahs, parasites on the body politic.
The great majority of these outcasts will never, under capitalism, find a place in society again. Mass unemployment has been a feature of our capitalism since 1929, nor do most economists see any reasonable prospect for it to be liquidated. Every year half a million new workers enter the job market. Every year technological advances – stimulated rather than discouraged by the “hard times” – raise the productivity of labor to new levels. The business boom of 1936–1937 raised production almost to 1929 levels, without reducing unemployment at any time below 7,000,000.
Several years ago, President Roosevelt and his advisers began to realize that mass unemployment is a permanent feature of American capitalism. The question of relief thus came to take on an entirely different and much grimmer political aspect than it had in the early years of the New Deal. It is no longer a matter of “tiding over” the unemployed until the next period of prosperity sets them afloat again. It is a matter from now on, of providing state sup-
port for them permanently. This explains the unprecedentedly vicious attack the Congressional reactionaries have made this year on relief standards, and also the extreme faintness, to say the least, of the New Deal opposition to this attack. “No other administration measure of equal importance has been so weakly defended,” wrote the New Republic’s Washington correspondent of the 1940 relief bill. For the brutal fact is that the political weight of the unemployed is far from enough to outweigh the bad political effects of the deficits which their support has cost the Federal treasury. All hands in Washington, Republican and Democrats alike, want desperately to get out from under. And the movement to do so – by reducing relief payments once more to Hooverian levels – has made enormous progress since the first of the year.
But mass unemployment, the major social symptom of capitalist decay, is a problem for revolutionary as well as bourgeois politicians. Unemployment is the great splitter of the ranks of the working class. Already antagonism is growing dangerously between the unemployed and the employed, especially those whose jobs are protected by strong unions. Already Father Coughlin and other fascist demagogues are making the same overtures to the unemployed that Hitler so successfully made in Germany. Already the New Deal’s reformist program has gone far along the road to failure which the Weimar Republic trod, with the same disillusioning effects on the masses of the unemployed. Above all, since the first of this year, the political drive of the two major bourgeois parties against relief standards has reached a new and unprecedented stage of intensity. Without an understanding of unemployment and the problems of the unemployed, it will be impossible for any revolutionary party to defeat fascism and bring about socialism in America.
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This article is divided into two sections. Part I, presented here, is a survey of unemployment relief. It traces the development of Federal relief policy from 1929 to 1939, analyzes in detail the relief legislation this year, and considers the political and social implications of the current drift of New Deal relief policy. Part II, which will appear next month [1*], will be devoted to the social, economic and political aspects of unemployment: the future of technological unemployment, the social composition of the unemployed, the role of unemployed organizations like the Workers Alliance, the lessons to be drawn from this summer’s WPA strike, etc.
The history of New Deal relief policy can be divided into three periods.
The first period lasted from the establishment of the FERA in the spring of 1933 to its liquidation and replacement by WPA at the end of 1935. In this period, when unemployment was still considered a temporary problem – “FERA” stands for “Federal Emergency Relief Administration – and before any great political pressure had developed against Federal relief spending, the New Deal accepted responsibility for all the unemployed, putting up three dollars for relief to every dollar spent by state and local governments. “While it isn’t written in the Constitution,” President Roosevelt declared in 1933, “nevertheless it is the inherent duty of the Federal government to keep its citizens from starving.”
The second period began with the establishment of WPA in 1935 and lasted up to the beginning of this year. The New Deal narrowed its relief responsibilities down to between 1,500,000 and 3,000,000 of the unemployed (the total varying from year to year) to whom it gave WPA jobs, at wages which came to something more than 35% and less than 60% below a “minimum emergency budget” as defined by the WPA itself. The rest of the unemployed – about three-fourths of the total number – were turned back to the states and communities, that is, to a standard of relief compared to which the wretchedly inadequate WPA wage is positively lavish. The keynote of this period was struck in President Roosevelt’s famous pronouncement to Congress early in 1935: “The Federal government must and shall quit this business of relief.” How this can be reconciled with his earlier statement about “the duty of the Federal government to keep its citizens from starving” neither the President nor his many advisers have tried to explain.
In the third period, which began with the opening of Congress in January of this year, the New Deal’s persistent effort to “get out of this business of relief” has been reinforced by a powerful reactionary drive in Congress. The 1940 Federal relief bill, passed by Congress on June 30 and signed by the President a few days later, is a long step toward liquidating WPA and reducing all relief once more to the local-community levels of Hoover’s regime.
Until this year, President Roosevelt has been remarkably successful in concealing from the masses the real nature of the New Deal’s post-1935 relief policies. This was partly because the New Deal appears to be positively lavish compared to the relief standards of Roosevelt’s immediate predecessor. The New Deal has been able to show a rise in average monthly relief payments per family from less than $7 under Hoover to $17.22 by October, 1933, and $30.30 by January, 1935. But there are two important qualifications to be made here.
Barring recourse to actual mass starvation, the New Deal had no choice but to greatly increase relief payments. Also, note that, although the 1937 collapse hit the workers after eight years of “hard times”, and hence with even greater impact than the 1929 slump, yet relief rolls increased comparatively little and are at present being drastically reduced again. According to the NY Times of August 21, 1939, the combined home and work relief rolls of New York City on that date stood at the lowest figure since the beginning of 1933.
The other reason the masses have been so slow to wake up to the real direction of New Deal relief policy is the consummate political skill of President Roosevelt. Year after year, he has made speeches dripping with humanitarian sympathy for the unemployed. Just as persistently, though not quite so publicly, he has done his best to keep WPA appropriations down (see Chart II for the record) and ordered Harry Hopkins to purge hundreds of thousands off the rolls at the slightest upturn in business. The New Deal’s left-wing supporters – the liberals, organized labor, even a large section of the unemployed themselves – have listened to the speeches and overlooked the actions. This master of shell-game politics knows just how to use his spiel to divert the crowd’s attention from his deft manipulations.
This year, however, the New Deal has come out so openly against the unemployed that large sections of the masses are beginning to lose faith in Everybody’s Friend in the White House. But if the masses are growing restive, not so the top leadership of their organizations. All the organs of reformism – the liberal weeklies, the CIO News, the New Leader, the Daily Worker – have kept silent about the increasingly open relief-wrecking policy of the New Deal. This has produced a really fantastic situation. When President Roosevelt proposes that 1,000,000 WPA workers be dropped next year, John L. Lewis addresses a militant letter of protest to – Chairman Taylor of the House Appropriations Committee. When the President’s WPA administrator suggests to the Woodrum Committee that the 1940 relief bill abolish the paying of union wages on WPA, the Daily Worker damns – the Woodrum Committee. When the White House assumes leadership of the drive to smash the WPA strike, when the President declares “You can’t strike against the Government” and instructs his Department of Justice to prepare indictments against the strike leaders, the entire liberal and labor press with one mighty voice denounces – the Congressional Tories. The more the right wing presses the New Deal, the more the New Deal gives ground. And the more the New Deal retreats, the more frightened become its left-wing supporters, the more frantically insistent on complete support and the Trotskyist immorality of any criticism of the New Deal which will “divide the ranks” of the hard-pressed forces of righteousness. Practically, however, this policy means that the New Deal these days feels enormous pressure from the right and practically none at all from the left.
The result is that by now the President can hardly be said to be yielding to Tory pressure on the relief issue.
Since 1935, his skirmishes with the Tories on relief have been at best sham battles. But this year he has openly put himself at the head of the “enemy” forces – so openly as to suggest that he is gambling on a European war in the near future to take care of the whole unemployment and relief issue. In the meantime, the unemployed millions are rubbing their heads and wondering what hit them. In truth, they were ganged up on by one of the most formidable coalitions in our political history, ranging from the bureaucracy of the CIO and the Workers Alliance through the White House to the “Republicrats” in Congress. Every actor has played his appropriate role in the tragi-comedy. Unless the unemployed come to realize that in this cast the ostensible heroes are really the worst villains of all, the play will not have a happy ending. It is one of the purposes of this article to help along this process of enlightenment.
1*. Part II does not appear to have been published.
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Last updated: 4 March 2016