Shortly after my return from Canada the Uj Elore moved to Ohio and I with it. The six years I spent there as a full-time party functionary in various capacities, including that of heading the Ohio Bureau of the Daily Worker, the official organ of the party, were years of the greatest social unrest in the history of the United States since the early days of the American Revolution. There was a widely felt popular recognition of the need for a drastic change in government which was manifested most dearly in the rapid radicalization of the intellectuals—the opinion molders of society. A substantial number of writers, artists, teachers, musicians, performing artists, and even preachers not only joined the chorus of discontent but even led it by their voices. For famine stalked the land, not because of flood, drought, or other ravages of the elements, a famine caused by a failure not of crops but of men in high places in government, in legislature, in banking, and industry.
The fields of the small farmer lay prostrate.
“All the peaches you can pick, 25 cents. Bring your own baskets,” read the home-scrawled signs in orchard after orchard in the fertile fields of Ohio. One farmer once proved to me with both bills and vouchers that after having sent two truckloads of peaches to market the check he received from his commission produce-broker was twelve dollars less than he had to spend for baskets alone.
Desperate as the situation of the farmer was, pressed as he was by debts, he was still better off, at least temporarily, than his his urban brother. He could raise at least part of his food and barter for the rest. He couldn’t be evicted overnight for nonpayment of rent; at least until foreclosure, which usually takes time, he was sure of a roof over his head.
The real pariah was the unemployed and there were more than 15 million of him in the land. Daily he had to face the anguished tears of his wife who was struggling to put some kind of a meal together out of scraps for her hungry children. He with his family had to go about with toes sticking out of disintegrating shoes, in tatters that would no longer hold a patch.
But this was not all. He was also turned into a moral leper. In newsprint, in pronouncements from high places, and in conversation he was constantly reproached and damned in tones that only the well-fed self-righteous can command. He was told that he, and he alone, was responsible for his sorry state. He was accused of lacking the habit of industry; that he was a wastrel; that he was deficient in those qualities of thrift and sobriety that elevate the worthy in the eyes of God and make him the rightful recipient of His bountiful blessings. After all is said and done, one has to face up to reality. Not all men are created equal, some are created weaklings. Some men are born with the crazy idea that the world owes them a living. These men are no good, they are too lazy to labor because one truth is self-evident in this here country: “Nobody needs to starve, anybody who wants to work can always get a job.”
The unemployed worker himself soon began to feel a sense of guilt about being out of a job. He developed a feeling of inferiority; he became mentally unstable, alternating between fits of rage and dumb submission, between outbursts of rebelliousness and hopeless lethargy. Those experiences, which some fifteen years later were given the collective label “the scars of the depression,” were to leave indelible marks on an entire generation.
Those who still had a job lived in constant dread of the day when they too might end up on the scrap heap of the unemployed.
Unorganized and thus unable to put up collective resistance, the employed worker fell easy victim to the iron law of unregulated capitalism which, as defined by Marx, was forever driving to extract from him the maximum production while attempting to reduce his share in the products of his labor to the minimum. He was speeded up relentlessly and, far from being given a share in his increased productivity, he was subjected to periodic cuts in his wages. He now lived under the whip:
“If you won’t do it, there are plenty men outside who will, and for less money, too!”
The self-employed-the small storekeepers, the white collar men, the professionals, the lower middle class—all feared for their survival. Empty stores lined the business streets; their show windows gaped dark at night like missing teeth in the shriveled gums of shabby old men. Lawyers, real estate men, insurance agents, accountants paced up and down fretfully in their deserted offices. Only the collection agencies hummed wIth increased activity. Engineers, chemists, technicians had to watch their skills rust away from nonuse. It takes many long years to train a physician—there were eight of them on Home Relief at one time in the city of Cleveland alone, I was told in confidence by a disheartened social worker.
However, not all was shade for everyone.
Maid for general housework,
experienced cook. White. Must
be neat, and good with children.
Sleep in. Every other Sunday
afternoon off. $15 a month.
Good references required!
read the “Help Wanted, Female” ads in the daily papers. There were less jobs than takers.
Colleges of the highest academic standing graduated their yearly quota only to add them to the swelling army of the idle. Countless young men and women, holders of coveted academic degrees had to go back home after graduation and live off their parents. I had met many of these, some of them couldn’t even pay for a cup of coffee; bright, educated, ambitious young persons in their mid-twenties who had not been given the chance to know what it felt like to have a dollar bill in their pocket which was neither begged nor borrowed, but earned by their own talent. A father of one such young man, a mixer in a chemical plant whose wages had been cut to $30 a week, once complained to me about the unreasonableness of the young generation. His son, a graduate of Western Reserve out of college for two years but still without a job, insisted on going steady with a girl. He kept pressing his father for a quarter spending money every time he took his girl out, as often as three and even four times a week. His girl, incidentally, was a qualified high school teacher who also never had a chance of finding employment.
Young daughters, mainly from foreign born families in which there were usually too many younger brothers and sisters to feed and who discovered they still had one commodity to market, took to hanging around lunchrooms and cafeterias. Their demand was modest and geared to the times—it was a meal, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
“I don’t eat much,” most of them would add with serious entreaty. Capitalism seemed to be coming apart at the seams, all according to the book. The objective preconditions of a coming revolution, as outlined by Lenin, were beginning to ripen right here in America.
1. There was a widespread feeling of contempt for the ruling classes in and out of government. The bankers, the “Captains of Industry,” and not only those in Wall Street, became objects of scorn and hatred throughout the land. President Hoover’s name was mud. A man in St. Louis or maybe it was New Orleans—I do not remember which, I recall reading it in the Miscellany column in Time—had been arrested for committing assault and battery in a movie house on a man sitting peacefully a few rows ahead of him. The accused had suddenly left his seat, walked over to that other man, who was a stranger to him, and punched him repeatedly in the nose. When asked in court what his motive was for this unprovoked assault, his only defense was: “He looked like Hoover!”
2. There was a breakdown of the capitalist system of production, choked in its own surpluses. The most efficient mass-production system in the world, equipped with the most up-to-date machinery, was grinding to a standstill. Fully one third of the greatest army of technically skilled workers the world could boast was reduced to spending its days in enforced idleness. Men highly skilled in weaving textiles, garment workers expert in tailoring clothes, were walking around in tatters; carpenters, masons, building trade workers were huddling in run-down hovels.
3. There was the demoralization of the ruling class, an abdication of their responsibilities. The White House conference called by Hoover in February 1932 of the nation’s most outstanding capitalists, the leaders in business, industry, and finance, revealed their bankruptcy in ideas. Not one of them professed to understand what caused the economic crisis, not a man among them stated it was their responsibility to come up with a constructive remedy. The most they would hazard was hope and prayer. To quote W. W. Atterbury, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad:
“The depression is bound to hit a bottom sooner or later and then things would be slowly building up.” That was his contribution—the only one of even dubious cheer at that conference.
4. Law enforcement was breaking down. Plants and mills were laying in firearms, tear gas, and machine guns, recruiting their own private armies of hired thugs to stave off the anticipated debacle. Agencies like Berghoff’s who dealt in supplying professional strikebreakers and agents provocateur did not share in the general business decline, they were thriving and expanding.
Hunger riots, spontaneous flare-ups of violence challenged the authorities of every state.
Near Bowling Green, Ohio, at a Sheriff’s Sale to satisfy a foreclosed mortgage on the land and chattels of a farmer with small children the farmers themselves came into the act, carrying fire arms. When the Sheriff, the auctioneer, the agent of the mortgage holder, an Eastern insurance company, arrived on the scene they found themselves confronted with a thick noose of shiny rope hanging from a stout limb of the oak tree beneath which were arrayed the Harvester tractor, the battered family Ford, and the rest of the farm implements scheduled to go under the hammer.
When the Sheriff wanted to postpone the sale he was informed by the men who called him by first name that they had dropped their work to attend this auction and they felt sure he wouldn’t want to inconvenience them. The frightened agent who looked deathly pale was assured in friendly tones that they had nothing against strangers who knew enough to keep their mouths shut and not to butt their noses into other folks’ affairs.
The auction went on as scheduled—no item up for sale brought more than one single bid. The farm, barn, outbuildings were knocked down for $10, the tractor brought $1.40, the car even less, a team of fine horses went for 22 cents. The total came to a little under twenty dollars, all paid in cash and in full by the neighbors, then presented free and clear to the original owner.
Home owners, the traditional upholders of the private owner ship system, the embodiment of conservatism, turned out in howling mobs in Cleveland (also in other cities) battling the combined forces of police and firemen to prevent the dispossession of other home owners on whom the banks had foreclosed, until they succeeded in bringing that banking practice to a halt. Most of them were churchgoers and deeply religious, yet they were denounced as Communists which they were definitely not—at least not until the Communists organized them into a Small Home and Land Owners Federation, when many of them did join up.
In Barberton, Ohio, a spontaneous mass strike in a match company flared into armed violence when under a police escort a group of strikebreakers were brought into the plant. I still have in my possession that “Proclamation of Riot” which I rescued after it was torn down contemptuously and trampled in the mud, ordering the strikers to disperse, an order the police were unable to enforce.
In nearby Kent, a few weeks later, when the workers refused to accept another wage cut, the management locked them out and brought in a force of armed professional strikebreakers to intimidate the workers and force them to submit. The sight of those armed thugs sauntering provokingly up and down be hind the steel-link fence surrounding the plant produced an effect totally different from that planned by the management. Many of those locked out workers happened to be mountaineers from Kentucky. They rushed home for their long-barreled squirrel guns and laid armed siege to the plant.
By the time I reached the scene the strikebreakers had all been driven inside one wing. I squatted down next to one of the mountaineers and watched him draw a bead on the water tower in the yard. The bullet hit near the bottom but drew no squirt of water from that riddled reservoir. He grunted with satisfaction and told me he only wanted to make sure, those yellow bellied skunks must be pretty parched by now, they must be asweating aplenty. He filled his pipe, then took a shot at a win dow from which someone had just fired a gun.
“They are whupped!” he apprised me of the situation, reckon ing that the ammunition of the strikebreakers must be nearly spent; they had been so “scairt” when they found themselves besieged that they shot most of their ammunition away at the start. He proved right, for in less than a half hour a white towel was hoisted from the window. The sheriff and his deputies, who had been disarmed at gun point when attempting to aid the strikebreakers, were now ordered to go fetch the men and escort them out of town. The professional strikebreakers came out thoroughly subdued, some of them wearing makeshift blood soaked bandages; they followed the sheriff with dragging feet. My companion, a bony man with a stubble beard, spat, but it might have been the tobacco. In talking with those workers one singular fact struck me. Not one of them was conscious of having committed a rebellious offense by launching a concerted armed assault against governmental authority as represented by the sheriff.
In Toledo, striking Auto Lite workers, women mostly, rushed the strikebreakers, ripped off their clothes leaving only their ties on, then paraded them stark naked down the street in broad daylight, hooting in derision.
That was the mood, the temper, the spirit of the people as I witnessed it in that great state of Ohio, the “Buckeye State,” endowed by bountiful nature with fertile valleys and rich mineral deposits; a state boasting of industrial plants and mills among the most modern in the world, and populated by six million industrious, God-fearing citizens.
The conditions prevailing in Ohio reflected the situation throughout the country. Even the dullest sensed that a change had to come. History ceased to be a recital of events long past; it became the living present pulsating with dynamic energy.
People suddenly became aware that the making of history need not necessarily be left to Washington alone. They learned that history can also be shaped by the unemployed on the streets; by strikers on the picket lines; by street brawls and organized assaults on defenseless minorities; by crude but determined men in shabby union halls organizing the unorganized; by intellectuals beating the drums.
The battle lines were shaping up; Red and Black on the two extreme wings, the undecided and the cautious in the middle—the New Deal a bit left of center trying its best to establish a new equilibrim, to restore and preserve the dream that was America.
The land was split into those who hoped for a revolutionary change and those who feared it. There were few indeed who dared maintain with genuinely felt assurance:
“It can’t happen here!”
