In the 1930s economic winter settled down across the United States, and the Great Depression blighted lives from coast to coast. By 1933 a quarter of the nation's workforce was unemployed.
A tradition of experiment
Resourceful people cast around for ways to ease the suffering. They came up with some ingenious cooperative schemes. A few of these rejected the capitalist system altogether, in favor of a more collective approach to generating wealth. Many began in California, a state with a tradition of social experiment going back to the late 1800s. Californians, always willing to try something new even during the best of times, were readier than most to give new ideas a go in this time of depression.
The Townsend Clubs
One idea that caught the public imagination early in the Depression years was the setting up, in 1933 of 'Townsend Clubs'. Their founder, retired physician Francis Townsend, began promoting what he called 'Old Age Revolving Pensions'. He campaigned for California to pay its retired senior citizens a state-funded pension, a radical notion in those days. By 1934 California had 1200 actively lobbying Townsend Clubs, and the idea was spreading. As it turned out, Townsend was putting forward an idea whose time had come. In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal established the Social Security Act of 1935, providing state retirement pensions for the whole nation.
Ham ‘n Eggs
In the previous year Robert Noble, a radio show host with KTMR in Los Angeles had proposed his ‘Ham ‘n Eggs’ scheme, to give every elderly person a weekly payment, that would have to be spent by a specific deadline. The use-it-or-lose-it plan was designed to encourage consumer spending, in the hope that such spending would in turn stimulate the economy. Noble's idea gained over a third of a million active supporters, and later that year was put to a state-wide referendum. Although Ham ‘n Eggs went down to defeat at the polls, it did gain 45% of the vote: 1,143,670 votes in all. (Burke 55).
Upton Sinclair and EPIC
1934 was also the year Christian socialist writer Upton Sinclair decided to run on the Democratic ticket for California state governor, with a campaign unlike that of any U.S. Democrat before or since. In his election manifesto, I,Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty in California, Sinclair called for setting up a network of cooperative enterprises across California, helping employed people to get back to work, but also enabling them to exchange their skills and support one another through the economic crisis. The work of each cooperative would be co-ordinated by professional managers, but with ordinary members remaining the collective owners of each democratically run unit. Sinclair hoped to prove, he said, that ‘human beings do not have to be prowling wolves or sly lynxes, but can be rational, just, and kindly members of a commonwealth’(55). In the cooperatives, he claimed, formerly jobless people would learn to work together as equals, make democratic decisions for the benefit of all and be able to 'build something more powerful than any of them could alone’.
Dirty tricks at the polls
Sinclair predicted that the new way of organising, initially involving only a few people in one state, would in the long run set an example for others to follow, so transforming society for ever. 'Co-operation,’ he asserted,‘is the coming idea.’(318). The candidate's program (impossibly radical by today’s standards) proved, in the depths of economic crisis, surprisingly popular. In the 1934 gubernatorial election Sinclair polled 37% of the vote; and this despite an unscrupulous dirty tricks campaign by his Republican rivals. One such trick, according to California historian W.A. Swanberg, was the creation and distribution of a bogus newsreel, in which Hollywood actors played homeless vagrants supposedly riding the freight trains into California. They were said to be flooding into the state in quest of the welfare payments promised in Sinclair’s manifesto (448). Even in the face of such negative propaganda, over two million voted for Sinclair and EPIC.
A novel for President Roosevelt
Sinclair never gave up on the EPIC ideal. Two years later he wrote Co-op, a fictional portrayal of a ‘production for use’ cooperative. An unemployed manager, an Italian immigrant, a student, a jobless carpenter, an ex-convict, a family of displaced farm workers, and a host of others from the most diverse backgrounds band together to exchange their skills and share a new productive life in the'Co-op'. The novel ends with Sigvald Soren, one of the Co-op's most active supporters, on his way to a meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt. Sig hopes Roosevelt will give his blessing to the idea of cooperatives and adopt them nationwide. Sig struggles to explain what he views as the essential difference between work in the cooperative and the Workfare of Roosevelt's New Deal. The latter, according to Sig is, however well-intentioned (and indeed effective in reducing unemployment), 'work that nobody cares anything about'. It is 'all done listless and dead-like, there's no hope in it, no future ...' In the cooperative, on the other hand, according to Sig, people 'are working for themselves; their heart is in it; they work and plan day and night. The Co-op builds their self-respect; they see a future, a way to be independent, to build something for their children to have and enjoy.' (422).
Federal Government picks up the idea
As a matter of historical record FDR. was too canny a mainstream politician to incorporate anything so radical as Sinclair's ideas into the Democratic Party's national program. On a small scale, however, his administration did discreetly pursue a few collectivist experiments of its own. One successful example was the New Deal cooperative farm at Mineral King Farm near Visalia, California, which made a profit but was eventually disbanded. (In 1943 the homeless and displaced migrant workers who had shared the land at Mineral King divided the profits among themselves, and went their separate ways.)
However short-lived the Mineral King experiment had been, it had provided those who shared in it with a refuge and a means of survival. If, in more prosperous times, the participants preferred to go back to their old lives as individual entrepreneurs, still Mineral King lives on in memory as an example of effective mutual help in hard times.
Lessons for today?
Hardship can sometimes bring out the best in people. From welfare reform proposals to the founding of cooperatives, the Depression called forth creative energies that not only bettered individual lives, but enabled people to think in new ways about the organisation of society, and the shortcomings of an economic system that in good times was largely taken for granted.
Are there lessons here for those of us living through recession today?
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Sources
Burke, Robert E. Olson’s New Deal for California. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1953.
Jones, Margaret C. Prophets in Babylon: Five California Novelists in the 1930s. New York: Lang, 1992.
Sinclair, Upton B. Co-op: A Novel of Living Together. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936.
--- I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty in California: A True Story of the Future. Los Angeles: Upton Sinclair, 1933.
Stein, Walter J. California and the Dust Bowl Migrants. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973.
Swanberg, W.A. Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961.
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