Hard Times (58 page)

In retrospect, I don’t think there was a revolutionary situation in America in the early Thirties, certainly not the kind of situation that would have led to socialism if the New Deal reforms hadn’t been carried out. There was a demand for vigorous, authoritative leadership. Industrialists clamored for central control, even nationalization of some industries. Harold Ickes, in his diary, talks of industrialists descending on Washington, demanding that the Government take over the oil industry. I think if a semblance of vigorous leadership hadn’t been forthcoming on the part of Roosevelt, there might have built up the kind of pressure that swept Mussolini into power in Italy. It is conceivable, in other words, that the government might have been forced into extreme measures, but I doubt that these would have taken a left-wing direction.

The NRA was a clear example of how the New Deal worked. All points of view were entertained. All kinds of advisors were summoned up. People
got together and at one point were simply put into a room Roosevelt said: You have to come up with something, whatever it is. The result was a compromise between things labor wanted and things business wanted. It’s a pretty fair indication of the one-sidedness of the kinds of compromises that were arranged in the early New Deal. Business got a suspension of anti-trust laws and labor got a kind of token recognition.

All during the Twenties, corporations and trade associations had campaigned for a new anti-trust law which would exempt price-fixing arrangements of this kind. They didn’t manage to get it until ’33, with a combination of the Depression and a new President who wasn’t as dogmatically committed to laissez faire as Hoover had been.

If the Supreme Court hadn’t declared the NRA unconstitutional, Congress would probably have voted down its renewal. Because there was too loud an outcry from small business and old-line progressives like Borah.
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The prime purpose of NRA was to raise prices and stimulate investments. This could not be done without cartel-like arrangements. Its other purpose was to keep industrial peace by throwing a bone to labor.

There’s a whole school of historiography that talks of two New Deals. The first, represented by the NRA and the AAA, a kind of economy of scarcity, and the second, aimed at raising production and recognizing the rights of labor.

But there were no clear lines of policy followed. The whole New Deal, as far as I can see, was really chaotic. All kinds of experiments were being tried constantly. The immediate aim of all the reforms was simply to end the Depression by whatever means came to hand. It’s a case study of what can happen if you don’t have a clear policy.

Yet that’s not quite the point I want to make about the New Deal. When people look back at the feverish activity of the Thirties, it resolves itself into a conflict between two different points of view within the business community, within a shared body of assumptions about American society.

That it would stay capitalist, there was no doubt. Other alternatives were excluded from the beginning, as a range of serious ideas that might be considered. But within these shared assumptions, two distinct points of view could be discerned. On the one hand were the so-called enlightened businessmen who reflected the view of large, progressively-minded corporations, who recognized the need for regulation, the need to admit labor as a partner in the industrial enterprise—as a junior, and distinctly inferior, partner. They proposed to recognize labor’s right to bargain and to enact welfare programs, if for no other reason than to head off more drastic proposals.

On the other hand, there were the people who clung to a laissez faire ideology, who resented all these measures, partly because—the NRA being
a beautiful example—they were clearly detrimental to the interests of small, independent outfits. They were clearly in the interests of giant corporations, in spite of New Deal rhetoric.

 

 

I’m not sure they were real alternatives at the time. Socialism, for instance, was written off from the very beginning. This point of view was not offered by anyone in the New Deal as far as I know.

To talk in retrospect is to do so coldly and, in a sense, to falsify what people experienced in the Thirties. While one can say, in the relative comfort of the Sixties, that the New Deal measures were palliatives, they were more than that to the people living in the Thirties. They were, in many cases, matters of life and death.

Hardly any of the observers of the Thirties sensed a revolutionary mood among the people. Almost all describe the same sense of dismay and disorientation, futility and shame. Being unemployed seems to have been experienced more often as a humiliation than as evidence of class exploitation. A matter of personal fault. A crisis in capitalist society doesn’t necessarily produce revolutionary changes or even a sense of alternatives, unless people have an awareness of some other kind of social order in which disasters of this kind wouldn’t happen. Depressions have been regarded as natural disasters, much in the same way as earthquakes and floods, and not as social catastrophes, which they are.

People first have to think about alternatives in a very serious way. The fact that there was so little discussion of alternatives, prior to the Depression, partly explains why people reacted as they did.

It doesn’t make any sense to criticize Roosevelt’s Administration for not raising the question of Socialism. You couldn’t very well expect him to. When you talk of alternatives like Socialism not being seriously raised in the Thirties, it’s no criticism of Roosevelt, but of the American Left.

The difference between the pre-World War I Socialist Party in America and the Communists of the Thirties is instructive. Both regarded the union movement as their primary concern. But the Socialists organized workers in their capacity as Socialists. Through this activity they created an awareness of other kinds of social arrangements. The Communists went about organizing as though it was an end in itself.

The failure applies to the whole American Left. If the pre-World War I Socialist Party had been around in the Thirties, working the way it did in that earlier period, devoted to propagating Socialist consciousness—at the same time, being aware of the immediate interests of its constituency, the workingmen, mainly, and not taking the position that every reform was bad because it put off the day of reckoning—if such an organization had been around in the Thirties, things might have been very different.

What you had was a Left, very much like today’s, vacillating between
hopes of an immediate revolutionary crisis and a kind of reformism that made it impossible to discuss alternatives.

People who talk in terms of revolution today underestimate the capacity of American capitalism, its resiliency and inventiveness. Whatever else you may say about the New Deal, there was an inventiveness. Aside from its tremendous resources, American capitalism has the capacity to foreclose other alternatives.

 

MY FATHER had been a salesman all his life, a very successful one. Even though he had only a fifth-grade education. In the great financial period of the middle Twenties, he sold bonds. The house he worked for went broke. The president of the company overextended himself and committed suicide.

My father went back to selling trucks, but there were no trucks to be sold. There were times when we didn’t know whether we’d have anything to eat at night. I tell that to my children today, and they think the old man’s flipped his lid.

My dad lost the house he was buying, and we rented for a while. He went through bankruptcy, which was a common thing at the time. He grubbed a great deal with all his remarkable energy, but he was plenty worried. Could he provide for his family? I have a great understanding of the Negro male today, because I saw it first-hand with my father.

But he had no doubts. He believed in the system he had grown up with. He was an inspirational man, like many good salesmen are. You have to believe in it. Because he had only a limited education, he believed all his sons and daughters should go to college. And we did.

When the Crash came, he talked about the fortunes that were lost that day. He felt there’s nothing really wrong with our system. Just a few speculators. It was a popular theme in those days. He was wrong, of course. Radical changes were called for. And Roosevelt made them. But this was the kind of salesman’s spirit in him.

Things kept going downhill in Detroit. The automobile plants laid off so many men. They began organizing the unions. They were organizing
everything there for a while. I remember being in Stouffer’s Restaurant and someone blowing a whistle and all the waitresses sitting down. People were reacting against the suffering. What could be a better way?

I can remember the trouble at Ford’s, the clash at the Rouge plant.
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A big demonstration. The chant of the crowd that was marching: We wanted bread, you gave us bullets. It’s funny how a little thing like that sticks in your mind.

When I got out of college, I went to work at the Packard plant. I hoped eventually to get into the industrial relations end of the business. After working in the plant for six months, I could understand the men and their grievances. I was working on the assembly line. I can still remember my badge number. FSG348. This was ’37.

I learned a great deal about employee relations. I learned how not to treat men. They did a lot of things at the Packard plant in those days that earned them the animosity of their workers.

They used to take a train into the plant. They’d often do it when the workers were coming to work. So you were held up fifteen or twenty minutes by the train. If you were a minute late, they docked you thirty minutes’ pay. That was the way it was. There were no ifs, ands or buts about it. I can remember talking to my foreman about it. It made no difference.

We were making new models of the 1938 car for the New York Auto Show. On the assembly line, you work at a certain pace. If they change the speed, and don’t tell you about it, pretty soon you’re working in the next man’s space trying to keep up. This chassis has gotten ahead of you. This goes all down the line. Finally, you have to shut it down. Nobody wanted to shut the line down, because you got hell if you did.

I can remember how they speeded up the line and we got in everybody’s way, and finally they hollered: Shut the line down. Steve, the big foreman, weighed about three hundred pounds, came swearing all the way down the line: What was the trouble? The union was new then. The steward said: We’re not working.

An hour later, out comes the plant manager with the foreman. The steward explained. The manager said he was sorry. He apologized to the men. He said, “We have a train waiting to take the cars to the New York Auto Show. Next year’s business depends on us getting a good start in the show.” The steward said, “Why didn’t you tell us? We’ll knock these cars out.” They got those guys going at twice the speed. Nobody complained.

It illustrated to me something I never forgot. If you tell people what you want them to do and why you want them to do it, they’re very cooperative. I’ve always said around here: We could sell any reasonable program to
our union if we looked at it from their standpoint, and made a reasonable explanation. But if you try to push them around, they aren’t going to stand for it.

I got laid off in December of 1937. It was the down draft of the Roosevelt recession. In Detroit, when the automobile industry goes down, everything goes down.

I wrote a series of letters to companies that had interviewed me when I was in college. A large mail-order house said if I wanted to come to their city, they had a job for me. So I came over on the bus. It cost $6 to ride from Detroit to this city. I got the job.

I had about an hour and a half to kill before going back to the bus station. So I stopped in to see a fellow at this company. He had also interviewed me while I was at school. I thought it would be nice to know him. He talked me into working here. So I called up the other company and said no.

 

MY FATHER talks about the Depression didactically. He tries to draw little lessons from it. He has an anecdote every time the subject comes up. It’s sort of a heroic past for him. It makes him an extremist: you have one analysis you can fit everything into. He has an extremist definition of what the goal of a nation should be … what a guy should be preparing for at school. Since most people feel this way, it’s not called extreme. But it is.

All the clichés that you hear. Americans are always saying, “I’m not enjoying what I’m doing now, but I’m making money. I’m preparing to do a thing which will be more important in the future.” In the meantime, make a buck. That’s pretty extreme. They all agree and reinforce one another, the people who lived through the Depression.

They won’t allow any argument about other ways, which
they
call extreme. In any major corporation, you can’t depend on getting the same profit every year. You’ll fold. The only way a corporation, which sells stock, can keep existing, is to increase profit. This seems to me unlikely as a policy that will last a hundred years. Yet, the welfare capitalism they built can’t be denied….

My father is slick. He tries to say something we will dig. The other night, we played Billie Holiday, and he started naming some of her other
songs. You see, he’s really saying, “I am one of you.” He uses the same sort of mechanism at work.

He’s become a king in welfare capitalism, because he knows how to work with labor. He’s always said that unions are the greatest. I’m sure he was a real slick worker, when they were changing their roles from real unions to company-minded unions. Which they are today. He learned all this in the Depression. It was his war.