Just listen to the commentary and the bias in reporting.
A friend shared a Robert Reich article with me criticizing the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who spoke at a public event recently blaming the “progressive era” and I assume progressives. For the “worst crimes of the 20th century” Reich is correct to take Thomas up on this but then goes on to praise Theodore Roosevelt and his grandson Franklin D Roosevelt as the forces behind the progressive era. I respond to this false argument below, it is propaganda really in order to negate the role of the US working class in changing history.
The Real History of the New Deal: Reform From Below
Richard Mellor
Afscme Local 444 retired
Robert Reich, one of the architects of NAFTA, invokes the New Deal while leaving out its most important dimensions — the explosive class struggle that actually forced Roosevelt's hand. Liberal labor leaders and Democrats love to cast Roosevelt as the friend of the working man, the hero who saved capitalism from itself. The real story is more uncomfortable for them.
The legislation of the 1930s — the National Recovery Act of 1933, the Wagner Act of 1935, the WPA and the broader social legislation of the era — was the capitalist class codifying what workers had already won in the streets and workplaces of America. Roosevelt didn't lead the working class. He managed the crisis it created.
The Ground Shifts
After the 1929 crash, industrial production collapsed by 48% between 1929 and 1933. The early strikes of the period were led by the American Federation of Labor, but the AFL was a craft union federation with little interest in industrial workers, who were considered unskilled and unorganizable. John Lewis's United Mine Workers stood as the major exception. Those early strikes were defeated.
The Depression ground people down, and radicalism filled the vacuum. The Communist Party organized in auto and steel, led rent strikes in working class neighborhoods, and recruited thousands. It was building a base in the most strategic sectors of the economy.
Then came 1934 — a turning point in American labor history that deserves to be remembered the way July 4th is remembered, and isn't.
Three general strikes erupted that year. In Minneapolis, 40,000 workers took to the streets in a truckers' strike led by organizers who would go on to found the Socialist Workers Party. They battled police in pitched confrontations and won. In Toledo, workers struck the Auto-Lite plant — and critically, the unemployed joined them on the picket line, refusing to be used as scabs against their employed neighbors. The left-wing Lucas County Unemployed League was central to that solidarity. In San Francisco, longshoreman Harry Bridges led a general strike that shut the city down. Socialists and Communists played leading roles in all three. All three won.
Legislation Follows Power
It was in the aftermath of this upheaval that Roosevelt passed the Wagner Act in 1935, guaranteeing private sector workers the legal right to organize. This sequence matters. The law didn't create the movement — the movement created the conditions under which the law became necessary.
The AFL, shaken by events, made a belated attempt to organize auto workers. But its craft union structure was incompatible with industrial unionism. The break came dramatically when John Lewis — heading what was then the Committee for Industrial Organization within the AFL — punched the Carpenters union president and walked out. The CIO was born. Lewis, a shrewd tactician whatever his politics, used Communist Party activists as his organizers. At the CIO's height, roughly 43% of its affiliated unions were led by CP supporters. Critically, the CIO had no color bar. Black workers joined in enormous numbers, and the impact on Black working class life was substantial and lasting.
Flint
In 1936, workers took on the world's largest corporation. General Motors had vowed it would never recognize a union. It paid workers in company scrip. Workers lived in GM-owned houses and bought from GM-owned stores. It was a company that owned people's lives.
On December 30, 1936, workers occupied the Fisher Body plant in Flint, Michigan. Sit-down strikes spread across GM facilities throughout the country, echoing the great French sit-downs of that same year. The occupation lasted 44 days. Women organized a network outside the plant walls, passing food through windows and holding the line against police. The GM bosses were reluctant to storm the plants — the workers were sitting beside the dies and tooling, and could destroy them. The Michigan governor threatened to send in troops. The workers' response was unambiguous: if soldiers came in, the blood was on his hands and they were prepared to die.
GM capitulated. The UAW was recognized. It remains one of the greatest victories in the history of American labor.
The War and What Came After
The economic crisis deepened again in 1937. What ultimately rescued the capitalist system was not the New Deal but the Second World War — at the cost of 57 million lives.
Roosevelt was an astute ruling class politician. He forced GM to retool its factories for war production — a private corporation compelled by the state to produce what the state required. During the 2008 financial crisis, the same logic applied when the government effectively nationalized large sections of the financial industry, calling it "conservatorship" to avoid the political freight of the word. The lesson in both cases is the same: through public ownership and democratic control over production, societies can produce what people need rather than what generates profit. That is the fundamental contradiction the New Deal exposed without resolving.
The Lesson
Twenty years after Flint, the gains of the civil rights movement followed the same logic. Legislation came from pressure in the streets, in the churches, on the buses and at the lunch counters — not from the goodwill of politicians. Politicians responded, sometimes reluctantly, to power they could not ignore.
That is the consistent lesson of this period. Legislative gains that benefit working people come from organized power from below. They are then managed, institutionalized, and where possible, defused by those above. Understanding that sequence clearly is the beginning of not being fooled by the next Robert Reich who invokes the New Deal while burying its actual history.
For Further Reading
- Sit-Down — Sidney Fine
- Labor's Giant Step — Art Preis
- Strike! — Jeremy Brecher
- Poor People's Movements — Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward
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