The Green New Deal and Beyond. Stan Cox

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СКАЧАТЬ the right of workers to form independent trade unions. The bill had been fiercely opposed by employers, business owners, many members of Congress, and even some on the Left, who saw it as too business-friendly. But with a labor revolt under way nationwide, mainstream leaders came to see the Labor Relations Act as the necessary alternative to permanent industrial turmoil or even Communism. The bill’s chief sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, cited the uprising as a compelling reason to pass the act. The unrest posed a dire threat not only to capitalists but also to the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the mild-mannered organization that had officially been representing organized labor for decades. Its leader, desperate to see the passage of the Labor Relations Act in order to help quell the uprising, went a little radical himself, announcing to a massive rally in Madison Square Garden that if Congress did not pass the act, the AFL would lead a national general strike.²⁶

      The Labor Relations Act ended up passing easily and was signed into law by Roosevelt. It benefited the working class for decades, but, not surprisingly, the 1934 uprising’s aim of reversing the imbalance of power between capital and labor was never achieved. Indeed, in recent decades, the labor movement has lost enough power to take it all the way back to 1932.

      Like the Labor Relations Act, ambitious legislation aimed to resolve the climate crisis is likely to pass only if there is a broad-based, grassroots uprising that leaves Congress no option but to pass it. And the Labor Relations Act example suggests that getting laws passed is only the beginning; they have to be backed up by long-term public support demanding that they be enforced in both letter and spirit.

      “RAISE PLENTY OF HELL”

      The Green New Deal breaks most sharply with its 1930s namesake on one issue in particular: race. Recognizing that the New Deal had the effect of cementing rather than dissolving institutional racism, the drafters of the Green New Deal have kept marginalized communities at the forefront in every document they have turned out so far.

      Steve Valocchi of Trinity College in Connecticut was one of many scholars who argued that the New Deal didn’t just ignore racial discrimination; in several ways, it directly harmed Black communities. The Works Progress Administration, for example, allowed payment of locally prevailing wages, which hurt people living in predominantly Black areas. Earlier, the National Recovery Administration had similarly allowed lower wages in the South and in occupations that were dominated by Black workers. The underwriting manual of the Federal Housing Administration required banks to, in effect, perpetuate residential segregation:

      Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups. If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values.²⁷

      Finally, there were no significant New Deal initiatives to guarantee civil rights or voting rights or to fight racial discrimination; those would have to wait another thirty years.

      Several policies unjustly shortchanged the 40 percent of Black Americans who were working in agriculture at that time. For example, many Black sharecroppers never received payments for which they were eligible, either because the local office of the Adjustment Agency failed to disburse the funds to them, or landowners held the money back on the pretext of covering bills. Some plantation owners who were paid to take their cotton crop out of production would evict the Black tenant farmers who were cultivating that land. Meanwhile, another New Deal headliner, the Social Security Act, did not cover farm laborers or domestic workers, and two-thirds of all Black people employed at the time were working in those occupations.²⁸

      One of the more courageous and tenacious campaigns of resistance to the New Deal’s built-in racial discrimination was launched in 1934 by the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Black and white sharecroppers and farmworkers across northeast Arkansas, angered with being cheated by planters and the Agricultural Adjustment Agency, began organizing door-to-door and field-to-field, with encouragement from the Socialist Party and its leader, Norman Thomas. By late 1935, they had formed two hundred local chapters with a total of 25,000 members. In September of that year, five thousand members of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union staged a successful strike for higher wages. That brought a surge of enthusiasm and a flood of new members.²⁹ In his May 1936 account of the Arkansas rebellion, Jerold Auerbach wrote:

      Union members marched hundreds abreast across the cotton fields to gather additional recruits. Instead, they incensed planters and politicians. Memphis police broke picket lines at the Harahan bridge; striking croppers were arrested and leased to planters to work off their fines and court costs; and a Crittenden County landlord built and filled a small concentration camp. On the fourth day of the strike Governor Futrell sent in National Guardsmen and State Rangers and the union quietly surrendered.³⁰

      In another incident, cops assaulted and jailed the organizer of a new chapter of the union, a Black minister. A delegation of fifty white sharecroppers with a lawyer in tow managed to get the minister released. But Arkansas landowners, local cops, and the state government were proving to be crueler and more recalcitrant than the local officials from the Adjustment Agency and the New Dealers in Washington.³¹

      The union’s strategy was to combine “relentless pressure on the New Deal with trade union tactics,” but, wrote Auerbach,

      Viewed from the perspective of traditional trade unionism, the organizing drive of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union seemed an anomaly. Its most effective weapons were agitation and publicity, not strikes or collective bargaining. During these early years, the union’s organizing drive always had twin objectives: recruitment of new members and propagation of radical alternatives to New Deal agricultural policy. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union sought to organize a protest movement no less than to organize the sharecroppers.³²

      The union newspaper’s call to action was, “Raise plenty of Hell and you will get somewhere.”³³ The hell-raisers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union deserve much credit for bringing to America’s attention the racial injustices that were built into the New Deal.

      THE WAR CURE

      Roosevelt worried that if his efforts failed and the Depression dragged on, it would send a message to the world that democracies are ill-equipped to deal with severe economic crises, and this at a time when fascism was on a winning streak in Europe and Japan. Early on, the head of the National Recovery Administration, Hugh Johnson, and other New Dealers had even openly admired the way the dictator Benito Mussolini was handling Italy’s economy, but that sort of talk ended in 1935 with the Italian invasion of Ethiopia.³⁴ Then, in a quick twist of history, it was the 1940s fight against fascism that finally brought full employment and prosperity back to the United States. (Almost eight decades later, the Green New Deal is being envisioned at a time when Americans are once again confronting a slide toward authoritarianism, if not full-blown fascism—this time not only in Europe and Asia but in Washington, DC, as well.³⁵)

      In 1936, the Roosevelt administration, concluding that the recovery it had jump-started could sustain itself, decided to start easing off the stimulus spigot. Federal spending dropped by 25 percent over two years, and unemployment promptly leaped by a quarter, to 19 percent by 1938. This economic decline was even steeper than that of 1929–33, and unemployment remained above 14 percent until 1941.³⁶

      Supplying allied nations already at war in Europe while at the same time building up the U.S. arsenal and inducting millions into the military finally accomplished what the New Deal could not. By 1940, Congress had spent $62 billion over eight years trying to dig itself out of the Depression. In the next five years, it would spend $321 billion on World War II—according to Patrick Renshaw, СКАЧАТЬ