CLASS

The Great Depression had a significant impact on class relations in the United States. Although the Depression did not create class divisions, it did help to magnify the divisions that already existed. The working class, the group most likely to criticize capitalism as immoral, was joined by growing ranks of middle-class Americans who not only sympathized with those in the working class but also began to question the system that had caused so much grief. These class divisions became a battle over values. As historian Robert S. McElvaine explains in his book The Great Depression (1984), the working class and middle class valued the ideals embodied in cooperative individualism, calling for more equity, cooperation, ethics, and justice in the economic system, while elite Americans remained wedded to the ideal of acquisitive individualism, which was generally amoral, self-interested, and competitive.

While motion pictures certainly provided an opportunity for people to escape from the economic and emotional hardships of the Depression, many of the films also offered critical windows on to that very world. Many of the most popular gangster films of the era, including Little Caesar (1930) and The Public Enemy (1931), offered critiques of unbridled acquisitive individualism. Other films, including I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Dead End (1937), offered more explicitly stinging critiques of the amoral marketplace that had ravaged the lives of millions of moviegoers. One sign of the growing influence of the state in society is the fact that films in the post-1933 era increasingly portrayed the federal government as a moral institution capable of addressing real questions of inequity and injustice.

While President Roosevelt proved adept at using class rhetoric to forge his New Deal coalition, he also found himself pushed further to the left by grassroots militancy on the streets and in the voting booths. In 1934, workers in San Francisco and Minneapolis engaged in successful general strikes with a great deal of support from the middle class. The 1934 congressional elections were a victory not only for Democrats but for those who were politically much further to the left than Roosevelt himself. Moreover, the popularity of governors Floyd Olson of Minnesota, who was elected on the Farmer-Labor Party ticket in 1930, and Philip La Follette of Wisconsin, who helped to bring that state's Socialist and Progressive parties together in 1935, was a clear sign that many working-class and middle-class Americans were willing to consider radical alternatives. And perhaps most important, the phenomenal popularity of Louisiana senator Huey Long and "Radio Priest" Charles Coughlin, both of whom gathered a great deal of support from millions of lower-middle-class Americans tenaciously trying to hold on to their status, was a clear sign that the early New Deal alone could not satiate the appetite of an increasingly discontented, vocal, and class-conscious (albeit not necessarily in the Marxist sense) populace.

The growing influence of working-class Americans who questioned the morality of the market helped to convince Roosevelt that his political future lay with meeting their demands legislatively and not just rhetorically. The fruits of this influence were apparent in the most significant legislation of the second New Deal, including the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave workers the legal right to bargain collectively and offered government oversight with the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. Congress also passed the Social Security Act in 1935, which provided unemployment insurance and old-age pensions to workers and their dependents. And finally, in 1938 Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established minimum wages, maximum working hours, and child labor laws. All of these acts, although not completely supported by organized labor, insured that questions of equity would become a part of the emerging welfare state. In other words, the state would no longer simply protect property; rather, it would recognize class differences and attempt to broker those differences.

One of the most significant developments regarding class relations during the Great Depression was the creation of the Committee for Industrial Organization (later called the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO) in 1935. While United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis became the organization's first leader, it is clear that the impetus for industrial unions arose from below, among the ranks of industrial workers who had been excluded from the craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). Although the CIO is best remembered for organizing mass production workers, it is also important to remember that it represented not just an organizational shift, but an ideological one as well. Unlike the AFL, which often excluded racial and ethnic minorities, the CIO unions confronted racism and segregation by inviting African Americans, eastern and southern European immigrants, and other ethnic Americans into their organizations. The CIO also pioneered in the use of new tactics, including sit-down and slowdown strikes, which paved the way for unionization in some of the nation's most powerful industries, including most famously General Motors. However, the CIO grew increasingly conservative by the end of the decade by helping to contain grassroots militancy within the parameters set up by the state for union organizing and bargaining.

Although the Great Depression exacerbated class differences between the working and elite classes, it also helped to remake the working class itself. As historian Lizabeth Cohen argues in her book Making a New Deal (1990), thousands of immigrant and ethnic Americans who had previously identified primarily with their ethnic communities came to see themselves in class terms. Certainly this process had begun before the decade of the Depression, as thousands of immigrants participated in a burgeoning national consumer culture and experienced the homogenizing influences of welfare capitalism during the 1920s. However, during the Depression, thousands of immigrant and ethnic Americans were disappointed by the inability of their own communities—from churches to ethnic banks to mutual aid societies—to meet the needs of their members. Increasingly, ethnic Americans, many of whom had joined CIO unions and had begun voting for the first time, began to look toward their unions and the state to address their needs.

Social scientists, who had largely ignored class as a conceptual tool to explain society before 1929, grew increasingly interested in analyzing American society in class terms during the Great Depression. In their 1929 study Middletown, sociologists Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd played a pioneering role in developing the concept of class. Although they relied largely on a notion of class that revolved around income and occupation, they also paid close attention to social behavior, individual expectations, and consumption patterns. In Muncie, Indiana, they identified two main classes—a business class and a working class. In a later study, Middletown in Transition (1937), they further refined their definition of class by identifying six main classes. Based on these studies, the Lynds warned that either American democracy would transform the economy or that the economy, as represented by big business, would overwhelm and take over American democracy.

Though less well known than the Lynds, social scientist W. Lloyd Warner also played an important role in creating new conceptions of class to explain American society. After taking part as a consultant in a study of industrial fatigue among workers at the Western Electric Plant in Hawthorn, Illinois, Warner began his own investigation into class relations in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Like the Lynds, Warner identified six classes; however, he focused more on the cultural and social components of class by highlighting the important role that housing, neighborhoods, source of income, social contacts, and voluntary activity played in creating class divisions. While Warner largely accepted the necessity of class divisions because of the complex division of labor in modern industrial society, he nonetheless asserted that opportunity and mobility remained essential to maintaining a democratic nation and ideals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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