The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ economy.” This was to be accomplished through economic planning and “corporatism” aimed at eliminating class conflict and curbing what Roosevelt lieutenant Rexford Tugwell called “the anarchy of the competitive system.”¹⁶

      As a grand experiment in industrial planning, the Recovery Administration flopped badly. The Southern Democratic members of Congress who had voted for the underlying legislation turned against the Recovery Administration when they saw that Black workers might have to be paid as much as whites. And the voluntary codes ended up being written and edited largely by the trade associations and powerful corporations, with labor having little say in the matter. It was Katznelson’s nicely understated conclusion that “uneven class power made planning for cooperative capitalism difficult.”¹⁷ In 1935, the Supreme Court delivered the death blow, declaring the Recovery Act unconstitutional. But 1935 also saw the creation of one of the New Deal’s most highly visible recovery programs, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The WPA pumped enormous stimulus into the economy by hiring more than 8 million unemployed Americans to construct countless public works. Meanwhile, the Recovery Act’s failed attempt to foster voluntary reform of private industry was eventually succeeded by toothier regulation under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which mandated the national minimum wage, the eight-hour workday, overtime pay, and the end of child labor.

      KIND OF GREEN

      With the climate emergency, the Green New Deal is sharply focused on solving the headline issue of our time. The New Deal had its own, less conspicuous green side, one that sought to resolve the headline environmental problem of its day: the Dust Bowl.

      Every state but Vermont and Maine experienced at least one period of severe drought between 1930 and 1936. At times, fine brown dust fell like snow across the eastern half of the country; it had flown all the way from the plowed-up wheat lands of the High Plains two thousand miles to the west. Exposed, desiccated soil was being eroded by the region’s characteristic high winds, filling the sky and drifting in roadside ditches. In 1932, there were fourteen major dust storms, each covering vast portions of the region; that annual total rose to sixty-eight in 1936 and seventy-two in 1938. According to the historian Donald Worster, it took a monster record-breaking dust storm in May 1934, to finally “make the plains visible to Washington.” He wrote, “As dust sifted down on the Mall and the White House, Roosevelt was in a press conference promising that the Cabinet was at work on a new Great Plains relief program.”¹⁸

      In general, the Dust Bowl and the economic devastation of Depression-era rural America sprang from the same roots: The drive for maximum production resulted in maximum exploitation of the soil, at the same time creating a massive glut of grain that an impoverished populace couldn’t afford to buy. Worster put in this way:

      Linking the two disasters was a shared cause—a common economic culture, in factories and on farms, based on unregulated private capital seeking its own unlimited increase. In the 1920s that culture had created a high-producing, high-consuming life for Americans. Few people at that time questioned its premises; business was the national faith. But it could also be, as both the bread lines and the dust storms of the following decade revealed, a self-destructive culture, cutting away the ground from under people’s feet.¹⁹

      The immediate economic problem was addressed by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), passed in 1933. Under the act, the Department of Agriculture worked out agreements to reduce production and raise prices to farmers for the major crops and animal products as it sought to get rid of surpluses and expand markets. Later, the Food Stamp Plan was created not only to address widespread hunger, but also to pump up demand for agricultural commodities.²⁰ The most prominent initiative aiming directly at the Dust Bowl was the Soil Conservation Service (SCS). The agency was created in 1935 by Public Law 74-46, which declared that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands . . . is a menace to the national welfare.”²¹ The Soil Conservation Service undertook numerous projects, both in the arid High Plains and also farther east, where rainstorms caused severe “gully erosion.” The efforts included acquiring unoccupied land and running public demonstrations of soil-conservation practices such as terrace-building; planting wind-blocking rows of trees with the U.S. Forest Service; subsidizing farmers’ soil-saving farming methods; organizing watersheds into Soil Conservation Districts in which farmers were officially designated “cooperators”; and launching many valuable research and extension programs.²²

      Another greenish initiative of the New Deal era was the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). With notions of environmentalism as we now know them then still decades in the future, the Conservation Corps grew out of the Progressive-era conservation tradition, focusing on preserving and managing the nation’s “natural” lands rather than preventing ecological damage by industry and agriculture. Between 1933 and 1942, some 3 million young men—and only men—took jobs with the Conservation Corps and headed out to train, live, and work in the nation’s forests and grasslands. They planted 2 billion trees, built eight hundred state parks, addressed erosion on 40 million acres, built 13,000 hiking trails, and stocked rivers with more than a million fish. They also took up emergency assignments such as firefighting and flood control. (Other accomplishments, such as building 46,000 vehicle bridges, 10,000 small reservoirs, and a million miles of fence, as well as eradicating almost a half-million “predatory animals” were, by current standards, not so green.)²³

      There are obvious echoes of these laws and agencies in the economic justice and stimulus goals of the Green New Deal. Other agencies also were apt precedents. They included the Rural Electrification Administration, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration, among others.

      THE UPRISING OF 1934

      In their study of the two blockbuster recovery bills passed during Roosevelt’s first hundred days in office—the Agricultural Adjustment Act for rural America and the National Industrial Recovery Act for industry—Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold see both measures as efforts to create a new system under which “economic functions formerly shaped by market competition would be planned and regulated in the public interest.” Had that goal been achieved, they write, the United States would have ended up with business and labor working together congenially under a “centralized system of politically managed corporatist capitalism.” But that plan didn’t work out. While the Agricultural Act did lead to long-term federal management of the farm economy, things veered off course in industry, which was dominated by corporations much more powerful than the upstart government agencies that were trying to herd them into collective recovery. Furthermore, the National Recovery Administration’s leading officials had been drawn from the business world and were more sympathetic to its desire to maximize private profit than to the noncommercial goal of collectively advancing the public interest. In the end, write Skocpol and Finegold, “the dream of harmony between corporate management and industrial labor dissolved into even more bitter conflict.”²⁴

      The “bitter conflict” was an astonishing labor uprising in 1934 that cross-pollinated with the growing social movements of the unemployed, students, African American communities, and farmers, along with local political movements such as the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and the Progressive Party in Wisconsin. A general strike in San Francisco spurred long-term militancy up and down the West Coast. Tens of thousands of unemployed people helped striking workers in Toledo fight off National Guardsmen and scabs. A labor struggle in Minneapolis drew help from the Farmer-Labor Party and a radical group called the Farmers Holiday Association. There was a surge in radical organizing in Detroit’s auto industry. The labor uprising and the violent response to it by police, corporate security forces, and the National Guard struck terror in the hearts of national politicians, some of whom started talking publicly about the prospect of open industrial warfare, revolution, and even the imminent opening of the “gates of Hell.”²⁵

      The radical labor upsurge of 1934 was essential to passage of one of the most important pieces of 1930s legislation: the National Labor СКАЧАТЬ