Expanded Jobs Program

• 1935 $5 billion Emergency Relief Appropriations Act
• NYA, RA, Harry Hopkins, WPA

Social Security

• "the law represented a fundamental break with traditional elitist notions that the poor and the unemployed were to blame for their condition."
• supported by Townsend, employers, women reformers
• financed by payroll tax; federal-state partnership
• "racially coded" to exclude 60% blacks

Fair Labor Standards Act

• banned child labor, set national minimum wage, required overtime pay, set standard two-day "weekend"
• excluded agriculture, servants, restaurants, lumber

Wagner Act

• NLRA was "the most radical and far-reaching piece of legislation passed" in 2nd New Deal
• "by encouraging the growth of trade unions, the Wagner Act helped not only to raise incomes but also to democratize the world of work through a set of protections and procedures that enabled wage earners to exert their collective power."
• it banned unfair labor practives, guaranteed right of collective bargaining, the right to organize non-company unions, to strike, to picket, to boycott
• new NLRB supervised elections, complaints, jurisdictions

Committee for Industrial Organization

• corporations opposed Wagner Act, hired labor spies, fired union activists
• AFL philosophy of "exclusive jurisdiction"
• John L. Lewis of UMW, Sidney Hillman of ACW organized CIO
• "bastard" Lewis socked William Hutcheson at AFL convention in Atlantic City Oct. 1935
• CIO grew from grass-roots activists, including radicals such as Walter Reuther, Harry Bridges, Mike Quill
• "Lewis hired scores of communists and socialists because of their exceptional ability as mass organizers: Who gets the bird, the hunter or the dog?"
• March of Time issue of Nov. 13, 1935, on strikebreakers and Gov. Eugene Talmadge
• March of Time issue of Sept. 30, 1936, on John L. Lewis

Roosevelt Landslide

• CIO contribution of $500,000 "unprecedented"
• Alf Landon of Kansas supported by Liberty League, chamber of Commerce, NAM
• William Lemke of Union party supported by Coughlin, Long, Townsend
• Earl Browder of Communist party supported by Popular Front
• FDR supported by workers, African Americans, attacked the "economic royalists" and "organized money" who hated FDR: "I welcome their hatred"
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial

Flint Sit-Down Strike

• six-week strike in winter 1937 by CIO against GM, "the largest and most profitable corporation in the United States, and one of the most sophisticated," with 110 plants and 250,000 employees
• CIO followed example of the sit-down strike by rubber workers at the Firestone Akron plant in Jan. 1936 - the sit-down tactic prevented use of scabs, discouraged violence due to fear of damage to machinery
• "The Flint strike was emblematic of countless other labor battles between 1936 and 1942 because it revealed rank-and-file worker's extraordinary creativity and bravery in the struggle for industrial unionism."
• new Michigan governor Frank Murphy was pro-labor, pro-New Deal, did not use troops
• Genora Johnson led Women's Emergency Brigade with red berets and 2x4s
• police failed to retake Plant No. 2 in "Battle of the Running Bulls" Jan. 11, 1937
• GM gave in and signed four-page contract that "proved an enormous victory"

Industrial Unionism at High Tide

• wave of strikes swept through Detroit
• Myron Taylor of USS recognized SWOC
• Supreme Court upheld Wagner Act in April 1937
• AFL gained 1 million members; Teamsters grew to 440,000
• total union membership rose from 3 to 8 million, including 1 million women
• rise of "a new participatory culture that gave life and spirit to the industrial unionism of the era"
• would "deploy huge American flags in all its struggles, symbolizing the ethnically diverse Americanism of the new unionism and the New Deal."

Women's Place

• women's auxiliaries showed family solidarity during strikes
• "But women's activism did not win them equality."
• leaders were atypical: Florence Luscomb of United Office and Professional Workers' Union
• problems of sexism of male union leaders, structural isolation of women's workplace, contractual structure replaced participatory democracy
• Eleanor Roosevelt and Francis Perkins were New Deal leaders, but "only modest gains for women as a group" and older progressive agenda sought only "special protection" for women rather than equal rights
• March of Time issue of Dec. 24, 1936, on business girls of New York City

Popular Culture

• Diego Rivera and socially relevant mural art
• WPA artists, writers, musicians, theater
• Cradle Will Rock film
• FSA photographers
• Woody Guthrie folk songs, John Steinbeck's novel
• Golden Age of Hollywood
• Popular Culture was a conservative response

African-American Struggle

• NAACP legal strategy, Thurgood Marshall
• New Deal "black cabinet" of Mary McLeod Bethune, William Hastie
• Eleanor Roosevelt helped Marian Anderson sing at Lincoln Memorial Easter 1939
• "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work" campaign of Adam Clayton Powell
• socialist A. Philip Randolph revitalized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters union, led the National Negro Congress in Popular Front era
• blacks comprised 25% of Chicago packinghouse workers, joined the Packinghouse Union
• SWOC recruited black organizers and officers, reduced discrimination in steel, but not segregation
• the new unionism "generated a kind of industrial citizenship that liverated African Americans from the paternalism, deferential subordination, and overt racism of the old social order."

• Depression Links and Causes and Responses and Films and Articles and Chapter 8 and 9