Among the most urgent crises facing the country in the IWO’s founding years was the mass unemployment to which Bedacht alluded, and the lack of “social insurance” for those discarded Americans. In many parts of in-dustrial America, the Depression was only an exacerbation of the periodic
downturns that had brought seasonal unemployment and lack of relief.
Communist organizers had responded to these crises, as when they orga-nized rallies in 1928 at Cleveland’s Public Square featuring a Christmas tree with “garbage from the market place” for the unemployed ignored by city fathers.10
With the onset of the Depression, though, attention to the needs of the unemployed intensified. In October 1931 Bedacht took to the lecture circuit, appearing at the invitation of IWO Lodge 161 of Duluth, Minnesota, to speak on “The Capitalist Crisis and the Workers’ Problems.” Chief among these, according to the IWO’s leader, was unemployment, which already af-fected “15,000 able bodied workers” in Duluth who, along with their fami-lies, faced starvation. Those lucky enough to still have a job faced “one wage cut after another,” he asserted, before exhorting workers to organize as the only means of fighting for “cash relief for the unemployed workers.” The fol-lowing month Bedacht spoke in Buffalo on “Workers Mutual Aid and the World Economic Crisis.” Ever since the crash, he said, workers’ marginal existence had become even worse. He argued that the only solution was so-cial insurance, to guarantee both income and health care in times of need.
The IWO also urged workers to “support the National Hunger March to Washington” and “demand all war funds for unemployment insurance.”11
From its inception the fight for legislation to alleviate the suffering of the unemployed was one of the main tenets of the Order, and for IWO “build-ers,” a central recruiting tool in soliciting new members. As early as 1930 leaders demanded unemployment insurance paid for by the government, years before mainstream politicians embraced this goal. A 1932 draft pro-gram labeled the Order “a fighter for social insurance for the American working class,” noting, “Never in the history have the workers of the United States had greater need for mutual help than now. The present economic crisis demands of the workers most categorically to organize mutual help among themselves. It demands . . . the establishment of Social Insurance.”
Although the draft also asserted, “Our International Workers Order must become a bridge for the American workers onto the battlefields after class struggle,” the battle it envisioned was a union recruiting drive.12
Although in 1932 the IWO pledged to work to build up a revolutionary commitment among its members on the need for government unemploy-ment insurance and old age pensions, the memorandum stressed, “The In-ternational Workers Order is a genuine organization whose actions are determined by the decisions of its own members.” Party fractions operating within the IWO were also given guidelines: “These fractions must win the membership of the IWO for revolutionary policies but the fraction cannot force these policies upon the membership against their will.” The IWO’s memorandum argued, “Our task is not to dictate to these workers what to do; our task is to win them for our proposals.”13
Since these memoranda were for internal dissemination by the CP’s frac-tions in the IWO, it seems the emphasis on the need to persuade workers and take instruction from members on what policies they found most desirable was genuine. In the case of social insurance and the need to alleviate the problems of the unemployed, many workers were in agreement.
In the depths of the Depression, workers demanding relief were indeed shot by panicky police and soldiers, most famously at Anacostia Flats, Wash-ington, when the Bonus Army of unemployed World War I veterans was repulsed by troops under Douglas MacArthur’s command. In 1932 Hungar-ian branches of the IWO denounced the repression that greeted Unemployed Council demonstrations, asserting, “Hungry workers are fed with police clubs, jails and bullets.” The Hungarians charged that “workers resisting wage cuts, are terrorized by hired thugs, police and the capitalist courts.
Volleys are fired upon workers who ask for bread. But the problem of unem-ployment and mass misery cannot be solved by these methods.” Discontent with the hollowness of free-market assurances of prosperity’s return, and the police clubs greeting those who remained unconvinced, was growing.14
To mobilize its members behind demands for unemployment insurance, the Hungarian IWO pursued a policy of cooperating with fraternal societies under more “reactionary” leadership. Gardos of the Party’s Hungarian Bu-reau reported that the IWO had fought for the “release of frozen funds in the bank” to aid unemployed people in Easton, Allentown, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was organizing laid-off steelworkers and miners in a cam-paign to demand federal unemployment insurance, and was recruiting for this cause in Akron around the “Salvation Army Flop House.” The IWO worked with other CP organizations such as the Trade Union Unity League and Unemployed Councils in various locales on campaigns for social insur-ance. On a national level, in January 1934 the Hungarian IWO took part in the Washington Conference on Social Insurance. Similar conferences were held for African American IWO members, and discrimination against foreign-born workers by relief agencies was decried.15
Early calls for a “united front” on social insurance suggest that the peri-odization of Communist cooperation with non-Marxist progressives as be-ginning only with the 1935 espousal of a Popular Front needs to be rethought.
Even in 1930, Polish and Ukrainian IWO members were instructed to build a united front on a campaign for an unemployment and insurance bill. To be sure, this may have been only a tactic, and only palatable so long as Commu-nists directed the movement. During the campaign Italians in the IWO cau-tioned against letting the “movement for social insurance . . . [fall] into the hands of the bourgeoisie.” Perhaps to prove their bona fides, the Italians ended their meeting “by singing the ‘International’ and the ‘Bandiera Rossa.’”16
Polish militants in the IWO were also at the forefront of mobilization to enact social insurance and worked with more conservative ethnic societies
in the January 1934 Washington Conference on Social Insurance. Podolski, who would later be an official in the Polish Section of the IWO, noted that fifteen delegates from their Polish organizations had attended the conference and had managed to assemble other Polish organizations in support of a bill for federal social insurance. “These delegates authorized the Polish Chamber of Labor to act in their name in the struggle for social insurance,” Podolski wrote. The chamber went further, introducing into the conference a resolu-tion endorsing a “Right to Work Bill.” Unlike similarly named bills designed to weaken labor unions, the Polish Chamber’s bill made it a crime not to hire workers because of their race, religion, ethnicity, or political beliefs and con-tained provisions designed to give workers access to any livelihood for which they were qualified. The measure had been introduced into Congress after pressure from left-wing Polish groups, Podolski said. Philadelphia Poles bus-ily organizing new IWO lodges were instructed to concentrate on lobbying for the social-insurance bill. He also urged them to work with more conser-vative organizations but not assume more mainstream groups would do all the work on behalf of unemployment insurance. Communists, within and outside of the IWO, did not seek to dominate campaigns for unemployment relief, but tried to work with larger Polish organizations on behalf of a wor-thy common purpose.17
Talk of revolution was mostly political, espousals of militant, nonviolent agitation. When blood was shed, it was mostly law-enforcement officers who deployed guns or clubs. In January 1931 an interracial unemployment dem-onstration was broken up by Chicago police officers, causing consternation for the Party when B. D. Amis answered “all right” to police demands that he name names of Party superiors. Hearings looked into whether Amis had breached security, but a comrade said it was understandable that Amis had responded the way he did: “I have seen Comrade Amis at our unemployed demonstrations. . . . I know he was in the thick of the fight and that a few times he was brutally beaten up; I have seen myself how the cops beat him.
We must remember that in Chicago particularly the terror against the Negro workers is great.”18
For a while it was feared that Amis, who had “received a beating almost up to the point of unconsciousness,” would be rendered blind due to this police terror. Lieutenant Barker later threatened to take Amis and black or-ganizer Harold Williams “for a ride.” Under such circumstances, his de-fender felt it excusable that Amis had answered “all right” when police torturers demanded information.19
Anti-Communists argued that Stalin’s terror was something people such as the Chicago Unemployed Councils should have known about. Perhaps they should have, though these activists were too busy dealing with home-grown terror of U.S. police torturers to look farther afield. Communists who advocated civil rights for black people in the early 1930s were particular
targets of municipal torture, and in that era the word “terror” was explicitly deployed to refer to state-sanctioned violence against the left. Amis and other activists in the Unemployed Councils recognized the intertwining of racial and class oppression. Thompson, too, faced the force of Jim Crow vio-lence when she lent the IWO’s support to strikes in Atlanta, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South in the 1930s. Police broke up an interracial meeting in support of strikers in Birmingham with a good deal of force, although police treated the light-skinned Thompson more gently, perhaps assuming she was white judging by an officer’s admonishment that the Communists would be all right if they did not mix with black people. As Mary Helen Washington argues, “It is quite clear why the Party attracted blacks in Chi-cago, especially during the Depression.” The commitment of organizers such as Amis and Thompson in facing up to capitalism’s racism “were beacons of light to the African American community.”20
The IWO sought to deliver tangible relief to the jobless by collecting food for the hungry in between demonstrations for more systemic relief. Two de-cades later, when the Order faced the threat of liquidation as a “moral haz-ard,” members offered affidavits that spoke of collecting food and clothing for the jobless during the Depression, as well as lobbying for social insur-ance, as some of the most prized activities of their time in the IWO. Greene noted that charter members could recall the organization’s “struggle for un-employment insurance and social security in the early ’30s—now the law of the land.” SWS president Helen Vrábel likewise reminded members of the struggles they had engaged in to ensure enactment of the Social Security Act when reviewing the SWS’s campaign for universal health care.21
Sometimes the IWO’s engagement in hunger marches caused trouble within its own ranks, from prosaic matters of dollars and cents. Bedacht sought the intervention of the National Committee of the Unemployed when an IWO organizer asked sympathizers in Jacksonville, Florida, to contribute in aid of a national hunger march to Washington. “Comrade Berenhaut,” a man sympathetic to the march, wrote “since only a few of us are still making a living and nothing but a living, we decided that we would already stretch a point if we would contribute $15.” The IWO organizer seemed satisfied with this, but a week later came back to Berenhaut saying he needed a truck to get the hunger marchers to Washington. Berenhaut and a few other com-rades managed to scrape together $46 for rental of a truck but had to guar-antee its owner it would be returned. Unfortunately, the truck was abandoned in Washington by the IWO marchers, who wrote to Berenhaut that “the truck will remain in Washington until hell freezes over, that it was a lousy truck anyway, that the gear case was wrecked.” An irate Berenhaut wrote the IWO’s national office seeking restitution, exclaiming, “I wouldn’t expect such a dirty deal even from Al Capone’s men.” He added, “I am long enough in the movement to swallow such slaps in my face but the young movement
here in Jacksonville will not outlast this affair if it is not settled. . . . We are willing to be used but not abused.”22
Hoping to salvage the IWO’s reputation, Bedacht wrote the National Committee of the Unemployed that the truck had to be returned and “such irresponsible behavior” ended. “Some comrades seem to think that the tak-ing serious of obligations we undertake is an anti-revolutionary bourgeois quality that a good revolutionary must get rid of,” he wrote. “What this leads to can be seen here. . . . When we started out, we had five friends, when we got through we have five embittered and antagonized former friends.”23
If “property is theft,” to quote a popular anarchist cry, such cavalier treatment of other comrades’ items would do nothing to build the move-ment. Still, the story of the shabby truck and Berenhaut’s stress over raising even $46 suggests that conservatives’ fears of a tightly disciplined left-wing conspiracy were greatly exaggerated, in the 1930s and by historians examin-ing the CP thereafter. The IWO, and other militant left-wexamin-ing organiza-tions, were often strapped for cash. Such squabbles suggest that the anti-Communist movement mischaracterized a sometimes disorganized, often underfunded Left as “a conspiracy so immense.”24
In pushing for an effective social insurance bill, various groups cooper-ated with the IWO in publicity and lobbying campaigns. Left-wing Lithua-nians maintained “constant contact” with the IWO as they translated the Worker’s Bill for Social Insurance, the Frazier-Lundeen Bill, into Lithuanian and arranged for their newspaper to publish the bill as a pamphlet. The Frazier-Lundeen Bill went farther in providing relief to unemployed, aged, and disabled workers than the eventually enacted Social Security Act.
African Americans in the Order, too, championed Social Security, with the Baltimore Afro-American approvingly publicizing an IWO Conference on Social Security; other black organizations were joining the IWO at this con-ference, and the paper urged its black readership to support the Order’s drive for this legislation. Thompson represented the IWO at a New York Urban League “Conference on Industrial and Labor Problems” in Harlem. Thomp-son appeared on a panel addressing “Employer-Employee Relations. How Shall the Worker Obtain Security?” Perhaps because security for the family could be, in mid-twentieth-century terms, foregrounded as a domestic con-cern, women in the IWO often played a role in advocating for social security.
Then again, Thompson’s notes on her copy of the Urban League program indicate that she spoke on “pressure of need for unionization to protect the job,” “traditional position of the Negro as a marginal worker,” and “Union the medium thru which Negro can overcome these hurdles,” suggesting that the Order’s officers were attentive to the particular “hurdles” people of color faced. The IWO played a role in pushing politicians and other progressives to enact as comprehensive a social safety net as possible.25
An IWO flyer, Why Not Social Insurance? framed the pertinent question as one of the free market’s inadequacies. “The worker has only wages as a source of livelihood. When disabled because of sickness, accident, child-birth, old age, etc., . . . [h]e and his dependents face privation. This privation is caused by the method of operation of present-day society. It is therefore the duty of society to relieve it.” While committed to mutual aid, the IWO’s author labeled “the problem of economic insecurity . . . much too big to per-mit a complete solution by mutual aid.” Only the government had the means to redress the miseries of capitalism, the writer argued. Moreover, he empha-sized, “Society must approach this problem not as one of charity, but as a duty of the government toward the working masses.” At a time of 25 percent official unemployment in cities such as Detroit, one can understand that, whether red or not, the Order’s recruiting drives sounded attractive to many workers. And while Communists hoped the IWO would attract workers to the Party, they admitted that “the basis on which the masses will test Com-munist leadership in the Order is its ability to organize the most effective immediate solution of the problem which brings them into the organiza-tion.” The Order would be judged by its lobbying campaign’s results.26
The IWO was ahead of its time in critiquing the demeaning features of traditional outdoor relief, too. As Michael Katz, Frances Fox Piven, and Richard Cloward argue, one of the key features of welfare provisions in the United States has been to deliver the minimal support possible in maximally demeaning circumstances. Families’ living arrangements, consumption pat-terns, and overall moral worth were assessed by deliverers of supposed char-ity to separate truly deserving sheep from shiftless goats.27 The author of Why Not Social Insurance? however, was having none of it. “It is a disgrace that an unemployed, destitute worker is treated as a miserable beggar,” the writer proclaimed.
He is adjudged a pauper. When he asks for relief, his antecedents are investigated, his morals are gone into, his religious beliefs are in-quired into, his politics are checked up. A worker who for many years of his life has done useful work, . . . made the things society needs to live, is investigated just because he committed the “crime” of being unable either to find or to fill a job. In very many cases he is investi-gated by a useless parasite who never in his life did any useful work and who holds a political sinecure.28
Rather than this moralistic scrutiny, the writer said workers unable to find employment “are entitled to maintenance by society on the same level on which they did maintain themselves while working,” anticipating later pro-posals for a guaranteed annual income. This IWO pamphleteer concluded
that by taxing the profits of the wealthy and corporations, and reducing need-less military spending, adequate relief could be provided for the jobneed-less.29
In its denunciation of moralistic means testing for welfare applicants, the IWO prefigured by three decades the rise of the National Welfare Rights Organization, which, as Premilla Nadasen and George Lipsitz demonstrate, engaged in militant lobbying to increase cash, food, and furniture allow-ances for the poor as guaranteed rights, not grudging handouts.30
Such analyses might have been uncomfortable for capitalists to hear dur-ing the Depression, but not inaccurate. For workers still awaitdur-ing substantive relief from the government, such paeans had resonance and explain the
Such analyses might have been uncomfortable for capitalists to hear dur-ing the Depression, but not inaccurate. For workers still awaitdur-ing substantive relief from the government, such paeans had resonance and explain the