Although the Tomkins Square rally was mainly a plea for relief and public works, there was some talk of marching on Wall Street. Such radical rhetoric, not to speak of actual violence, was hardly unusual in such confrontations then, a measure of how raw class relations were and how profoundly disturbed people had become by the haunting presence of mass unemployment.
Just as telling, the unemployed and those still at work but at loggerheads with their bosses frequently displayed their solidarity in public. During the "Great Insurrection" of 1877, when railroad strikers from coast to coast faced off against state militias, federal troops, and the private armies of the railroad barons, they were joined by regiments of the "reserve army." Often these were their neighbors and family members, but also strangers who, feeling an affinity for their beleaguered brethren, preferred setting fire to railroad engine houses than going to work in them as scabs. Amid the awful depression of the 1890s, a cigar maker caught the temper of the times simply: "I believe the working men themselves will have to take action. I believe those men that are employed will have look out for the unemployed that work at the same business they do."
Marching Armies (of the Unemployed)
Demonstrations of the unemployed resurfaced with each major economic downturn. In the depression winter of 1893-1894, for example, ragged "armies" of the desperate gathered in various parts of the country, 40 of them in all. (Eighteen-year-old future novelist Jack London joined one in California.) The largest commandeered a train in an effort to get to Washington, D.C., and was chased for 300 miles across Montana by federal troops.
The most famous of them was led by Jacob Coxey, a self-made Ohio businessman. "Coxey's Army" (more formally known as "the Commonwealers" or the "Commonwealth of Christ Army") made it all the way to the capital, a "living petition" to Congress. It was led by his 17-year-old daughter as "the Goddess of Peace" riding a white horse.
In the nation's capital, the "Army" lodged its plea for relief, work, and an increase in the money supply. (Jacob's son was called "Legal Tender Cox.") President Grover Cleveland wasn't hearing any of it, having already made his views known in 1889 during his first term in office: "The lessons of paternalism ought to be unlearned and the better lesson taught that while the people should patriotically and cheerfully support their government, its functions do not include support of the people."
Christian charity was not Cleveland's long suit. Others of the faith, however, believers in the social gospel and Christian socialism especially, staged spectacular public dramas on behalf of the "shorn lambs of the unemployed" -- even a mock "slave auction" in Boston in 1921 during a severe post-World War I slump, in which the jobless were offered to the highest bidders as evidence of what "wage slavery" really meant.
The Great Depression brought this protracted period of labor turmoil to a climax and to an end. In its early years, the ethos of "mutualism" and solidarity between the employed and unemployed was strengthened. In those years, railroads began to report startling jumps in the numbers of Americans engaged in "train hopping" -- the rail equivalent of hitchhiking. On one line, the "hoppers" went from 14,000 in 1929 to 186,000 in 1931.
In 1930, when the unemployment rate was at about today's level, in cities across the country the first rallies of the unemployed began with demands for work and relief. Later, there were food riots and raids on delivery trucks and packinghouses, as well as the occupations of shuttered coalmines and bankrupt utility companies by the desperate who began to work them.
"Leagues" and "councils" of the unemployed, sometimes organized by the Communist Party, sometimes by the Socialist Party, and sometimes by a group run by radical pacifist A.J. Muste, marshaled their forces to stop home evictions, support strikes, and make far-reaching proposals for a permanent system of public works and unemployment insurance. Muste's groups, strong in the Midwest, set up bartering arrangements and labor exchanges among the jobless.
In support of striking workers, unemployed protestors shut down the Briggs plant in Highland Park, Michigan -- it manufactured auto bodies for Ford -- pledging that they would not scab on the striking workers. A march of former and current employees of the Ford facilities in Dearborn, Michigan, made the unusual demand that the company (not the government) provide work for the jobless. For their trouble, they were bloodied by Ford's hired thugs and five of them were killed.
President Herbert Hoover took similar action. In a move that shocked much of the nation, he ordered Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur to use troops to disperse the Bonus Expeditionary Army, World War I jobless veterans gathered in tents on Anacostia Flats in Washington asking for accelerated payments of their war-time pensions. They were routed at bayonet point and MacArthur's troops burned down their tent city.
How the New Deal Dealt
The Great Depression was, however, so profoundly unsettling that the unemployed finally became a political constituency of national proportions. The pressure on mainstream politicians to do something grew ever more intense. The Conference of Mayors that meets to this day was founded then to lobby Washington for federal relief for the jobless. Even segments of the business community had begun to complain about the "costs" of unemployment when it came to workplace efficiency.
Unemployment insurance, work relief, welfare, and public works -- all of which had surfaced in public debate since the turn of the twentieth century -- made up the basic package of responses offered by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the inherent insecurity of proletarian life. None were exactly expansive either in what they provided or in their execution, and yet all of them found themselves under chronic assault from birth (as they are today).
The most daring legislation under consideration, the Lundeen bill (authored by a Minnesota congressman), would have provided unemployment insurance equal to prevailing wages for anyone over 18 working part or full time. Though it never became law, it was to be financed by a tax on incomes exceeding $5,000, and administered by elected worker representatives. It was not atypical in its most basic assumption which once would have been thought intolerable -- that unemployment at significant levels would continue into the indefinite future.
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