This was a welcome change after thirteen years in which the unions had taken a pounding and suffered sharp declines in membership. Aided by New Deal legislation that helped level the playing field between management and labor, the labor movement even began to penetrate heavy industry with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935. Communists played a major role in the organizing. Corporate resistance often resulted in violent and bloody confrontations. But militant workers adopted new tactics like sit-down strikes that proved particularly effective in the right circumstances.
African Americans’ economic hardship was exacerbated by racism and discrimination. Black unemployment skyrocketed as the Depression effectively eliminated an entire category of “Negro jobs.” Urban black unemployment reached over 50 percent in the South in 1932. The North was not much better; in Philadelphia, black unemployment topped 56 percent. Many blacks, struggling for both jobs and civil rights, thought the legalistic approach of the NAACP was too slow given the tenor of the times and turned instead to the CP and its front organizations. Though the national party leaders may have taken their marching orders from Moscow, that information often did not trickle down to the grassroots level.
And scientists, who were among the most conservative groups in the country at the start of the decade—in 1933, sociologist Read Bain called them “the worst citizens of the Republic” because of their apathy and social irresponsibility—had been transformed into one of the most radical by decade’s end, standing in the forefront of the antifascist movement and questioning whether capitalism thwarted the socially beneficial application of science and technology.45 In the December 1938 election for president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s largest body of scientists, the five leading vote getters were leaders of the left-wing science and society movement and the winner, renowned Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon, was one of the most openly left-wing scientific activists in the country.46
During those turbulent years, many liberals began calling themselves socialists or radicals. Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson proclaimed, “I am not a liberal…. I am a radical.”47 For many on the left, even liberalism connoted a moderation that bordered on cowardice. Lillian Symes wrote in The Nation in 1934, “No worse insult [than being called a liberal] could be hurled at anyone’s mentality at a time like this.”48 Many felt the same way about joining the Socialists when the Communist Party seemed to offer a viable and more radical alternative. John Dos Passos explained his support of the Communists in 1932: “Becoming a Socialist right now would have just the same effect on anybody as drinking a bottle of near beer.”49
Ironically, during the 1935–39 Popular Front period, when the Communists garnered their greatest support, Norman Thomas’s Socialists were often to the left of the Communists, who deliberately toned down their rhetoric in hope of building a broad coalition against fascism. Hundreds of thousands of Americans joined the Communist Party or worked with its affiliated organizations. Among them were many of the country’s best writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Sinclair Lewis, Langston Hughes, Sherwood Anderson, James Farrell, Clifford Odets, Richard Wright, Henry Roth, Lillian Hellman, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Mann, William Carlos Williams, Nelson Algren, Nathanael West, and Archibald MacLeish.
But as the 1930s advanced, Western intellectuals’ early enthusiasm for Soviet communism began to wane. Encircled by hostile capitalist nations and fearing a new war, Josef Stalin embarked upon a policy of breakneck industrialization that would claim many victims. Reports filtered out of the Soviet Union of famines and starvation, political trials and repression, ham-fisted bureaucracy, secret police, brutal prisons, and ideological orthodoxy. Kulaks were slaughtered for resisting forced collectivization of agriculture. More than 13 million people died under Stalin’s despotic rule. Organized religion was stifled. Military leaders were purged.50 And even those who refused to believe the horrific reports filtering out of the Soviet Union were shocked by Stalin’s apparent treachery in concluding the Non-Aggression Pact with Germany in 1939. Communists left the party in droves at that point, but diehards blamed Stalin’s about-face on Western capitalist nations’ refusal to assist the Soviet Union in stopping Hitler despite Stalin’s persistent calls for collective defense.
The combination of a left-leaning Congress, an energized, progressive populace, and a responsive and caring president made possible the greatest period of social experimentation in U.S. history, especially after the upsurge in mid-decade radicalism drove the New Deal farther left. In December 1935, Harold Ickes told the president that he “believed the general sentiment of the country to be much more radical than that of the Administration.” Roosevelt agreed and sharpened his attack on the business community. He saved his heaviest artillery for his annual message to Congress on January 3, 1936, which he delivered at night over national radio. The only previous time that a president had addressed an evening session was on April 2, 1917, when Wilson read his war message to the House. Roosevelt lashed out at his enemies on the right: “We have earned the hatred of entrenched greed. They seek the restoration of their selfish power…. Give them their way and they will take the course of every autocracy of the past—power for themselves, enslavement for the public.”51
Having been pushed to the left by the progressive upsurge, Roosevelt kept up his harsh attack on business throughout the 1936 campaign. He trumpeted the list of progressive achievements. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other government programs put millions of unemployed back to work in government jobs. The economic and banking systems had been reformed. The government, for the first time, sided, however tentatively, with labor against the employers and nurtured the growth of unions. Social Security guaranteed a modicum of comfort in old age that few workers had previously enjoyed. The tax burden was shifted increasingly to the wealthy.
On the eve of the election, Roosevelt took his defiantly antibusiness message to supporters at Madison Square Garden, declaring,
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob… They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.52