I like the spirit in which this is written but it fails to account for
the absence of class forces that can play the same role that factory
workers led by the CP played in the 1930s. Take NYC, for example. Back
then, there was a massive garment industry with leftist Jews living in
tenements in the outer boroughs who had social and political ties that
could be deployed in the kind of protests this editorial looks back upon
fondly. If you're looking for an equivalence today, it would have to be
something much more like BLM and Occupy Wall Street but with a far more
working-class composition. I'm all for that, but then again I'm also for
a dictatorship of the proletariat for what that's worth.
If Biden Wants to Be Like F.D.R., He Needs the Left
Radical agitation helped bring Social Security and much of the New Deal
into being.
Jamelle Bouie <https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie>
ByJamelle Bouie <https://www.nytimes.com/column/jamelle-bouie>
Opinion Columnist
* Nov. 20, 2020
*
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Joe Biden’s pilgrimage to Warm Springs, Ga.
Joe Biden’s pilgrimage to Warm Springs, Ga.Credit...Brian Snyder/Reuters
Not long before Election Day, Joe Biden traveled to Warm Springs, Ga.,
todeliver a speech
<https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-virus-outbreak-georgia-cdb5338433d60566329e97617da11e8e>on
the healing of America.
This place, Warm Springs, is a reminder that though broken, each of
us can be healed. That as a people and a country, we can overcome a
devastating virus. That we can heal a suffering world. That yes, we
can restore our soul and save our country.
The location was intentional. Warm Springs is where Franklin Delano
Roosevelt went to rest and recover, beginning in 1924, after his polio
diagnosis and subsequent paralysis in 1921. As president he made it,
along with his home in Hyde Park, N.Y., a kind of winter White House. He
died there in 1945, just a few months after taking the oath of office
for a fourth time. The town remains a shrine to the 32nd president, an
ideal stop for someone whohopes to channel
<https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/joe-biden-presidential-plans.html>Roosevelt’s
ambition (and also saw electoral opportunity in the state).
We now know that Biden will be president, but he won’t have the votes
for F.D.R.-size legislation. This doesn’t mean he’s dead in the water,
but it does mean that Biden will have to marshal every resource and rely
on every possible ally to win whatever victories he can. And he should
know, as Roosevelt did, that this means grappling with the left — all of
the left, including its most radical edges.
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The Social Security Act of 1935, which established the nation’s old age
and unemployment insurance programs, as well as its first stab at
maternal assistance, represents traditional Democratic Party liberalism
at its best: simple, broad-based and pragmatic. The basis for the
American welfare state — and derided by opponents at the time as an
example of “creeping socialism” — it remains a potent example of the
power of government to help ordinary people. What the public knows is
that it was the product of Roosevelt and the New Deal. Missing from this
story is how much the law owes to the activism and agitation of the
American left.
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On Feb. 10, 1931, four years before Senator Robert Wagner of New York
and Representative David Lewis of Marylandintroduced
<https://www.ssa.gov/history/ew25.html>President Roosevelt’s Social
Security legislation to Congress, tens of thousands of Americans
nationwide took to the streets at the height of the Great Depression to
march for unemployment assistance and food aid. Organized by a
then-burgeoning Communist Party, demonstrations ranged from peaceful
protests to tense confrontations with law enforcement. In Boston, noted
The New York Times ina contemporaneous report
<https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/02/11/102214043.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0>,
“Two hundred Communists and sympathizers and about as many police staged
a series of fights and scuffles along the Boston Common.” In St. Paul,
Minn., “Communist-led demonstrators jammed their way into the House
chamber of the Minnesota Legislature and held possession for more than
two hours while they demanded relief for the unemployed.”
In New York City,similarly
<https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/02/11/102214049.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0>,
“nearly 4,000 men, women and children heard half a dozen speakers call
upon the government to grant unemployment insurance, stop evictions and
to furnish free food, heat and light to the unemployed.”
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These demonstrations weren’t just for the idea of unemployment
insurance. The Communists had a particular bill in mind: the Workers’
Unemployment Insurance Bill, which the party had drafted the previous
year. The Workers’ Bill, as it was called, promised generous assistance
for the unemployed, for the sick and the old, and for new mothers, all
financed by taxes on corporate income and inheritances.
With ongoing activism and agitation came greater support; rank-and-file
pressure from within the American Federation of Labor, for example,led
to the creation
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Organizing_the_Unemployed/DV068Q8E-GsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=%252522the%252520organization%252520of%252520the%252520unemployed%252522&pg=PA98&printsec=frontcover&bsq=%2525E2%252580%25259Cworkers%252520unemployment%252520insurance%252520bill%2525E2%252580%25259D>of
the A.F.L. Trade Union Committee for Unemployment Insurance and Relief,
headed byLouis Weinstock
<https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/29/obituaries/louis-weinstock-91-a-top-communist-and-a-union-leader.html>of
the New York Painters’ Union, himself a Communist. The committee
endorsed the bill, which was later introduced to Congress by the
Minnesota Farmer-Labor congressman Ernest Lundeen on the urging of
Herbert Benjamin of C.P.U.S.A., who led the party’s effort to organize
the unemployed.
Lundeen’s version of the “Worker’s Bill” quickly became a rallying point
for unions and associations of the unemployed across the country. Here
is the historian James J. Lorence in “Organizing the Unemployed
<https://www.sunypress.edu/p-2371-organizing-the-unemployed.aspx>:
Community and Union Activists in the Industrial Heartland”:
Although the Lundeen Bill drew only lukewarm congressional backing,
its strong rank-and-file support helped shape the debate that ended
in the creation of the American unemployment insurance system.
Over the course of 1934, grass roots organizers arranged marches,
letter-writing campaigns and conferences in support of the bill. “The
popular pressure crested in January 1935 with a major national
demonstration to support the Lundeen Bill,” Lorence writes. “Among the
groups endorsing the legislation were MESA [Mechanics Educational
Society of America]; AWU [Auto Workers Union]; Railway Carmen;
Machinists; Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers; the rebel AFL unions; and a
large number of ethnic and fraternal organizations.”
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Concurrent with the demonstration was a Communist-organized National
Congress for Unemployment and Social Insurance. There, thousands of
delegates from dozens of states agitated for its passage. Proponents of
the Lundeen bill, like Thomas Arnold Hill of the National Urban
League,urged its passage
<https://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1987&context=bclr>:
There must come before the Congress of the United States,
legislation that will guarantee, for all workers regardless of age,
occupation, color, sex, or political belief, full compensation for
all loss of time occasioned by involuntary unemployment, industrial
accident, and sickness. Minimum standards must be set below which
this compensation must not fall. Costs must be placed not upon
workers, but upon Government and capital; and workers must not be
excluded from administering the benefits of such a plan.
Aware of the Roosevelt proposal, which had been percolating within the
administration for most of the previous year, proponents held out the
Workers’ Bill as the only viable solution to the unemployment crisis.
“It is the position of the Communist Party that it is the responsibility
of the national government to provide, against all those vicissitudes of
life which are beyond individual or group control, a guarantee of a
minimum standard of decent livelihood equal to the average of the
individual or group when normally employed,” declared Earl Browder, the
leader of C.P.U.S.A., in a statement made at Senate Finance Committee
hearings on the Wagner-Lewis Bill. “The Communist Party opposes the
administration bill because it violates each and every one of these
conditions for real social insurance.”
On March 9, 1935, the House Committee on Labor, following hours of
testimony from a cross-section of Americans, voted to send the Lundeen
bill to the House floor, where it was promptly defeated by an
overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans. In death, however
the Lundeen bill, as well as the activism that brought it to Congress,
helped clear the way for Wagner-Lewis, a proposal which even in its
modesty redefined the relationship between state and citizen.
ImageF.D.R. arrives in Warm Springs, Ga., with Eleanor and their
daughter Anna, after winning the 1932 election.
F.D.R. arrives in Warm Springs, Ga., with Eleanor and their daughter
Anna, after winning the 1932 election.Credit...Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Paul H. Douglas, a University of Chicago economist and future senator
from Illinois, made this clear inhis 1936 book
<https://www.google.com/books/edition/Social_Security_in_the_United_States/6C-wiceaQlgC?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=%2525E2%252580%25259Ca%252520club%252520against%252520the%252520right%2525E2%252580%25259D>on
the Social Security Act (as quoted in the essay “A Decade of Dissent:
The New Deal and Popular Movements
<https://global.oup.com/academic/product/when-government-helped-9780199990696?cc=us&lang=en&;>,”
by Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg).
The radical and sweeping nature of its proposals enabled the
administration forces to say to the indifferent and to the
conservative that unless the latter accepted the moderate program
put forward by the administration they might later be forced to
accept the radical and far-reaching provisions of the Lundeen bill.
From roughly 1930 to 1935, an amalgamation of leftists and laborers —
employed or otherwise — made social insurance an urgent priority for the
federal government. It is possible that something like the Social
Security Act would have passed without this agitation, but knowing how
difficult it is to move the American government in any direction without
the pressure of organized public opinion, I doubt it.
Let’s return to the present. The conditions of January 2021 will be very
different than those of January 1935. The situation isn’t as dire and
the left isn’t as strong. Neither is the Democratic Party. What, then,
can Democrats take from this story?
Simply put, an ambitious, active left is one that widens the scope of
reform. It’s a left that, even if you disagree with it, helps clear the
pathways for action. It brings energy and urgency to liberal politics.
And if nothing else, it’s a foil against which moderates can triangulate
and make the case for more than marginal change, should they want it.
Roosevelt was often frustrated with the left, but recognized its power
and the importance of its vitality to his own cause.
There was no building the American welfare state without the left, and
if it’s to be rebuilt, the left will have to be part of it. Democrats,
especially would-be heirs to F.D.R., should take care to remember that fact.
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