Andor Skotnes, Russell Sage College -- Presented at the Southern Labor Studies Conference
Austin, Texas, October 26-29, 1995

This paper is based on a book-in-progress about the intersections of working class, African American, and radical movements in the Baltimore urban area during the Great Depression and World War II. The focus in this paper is the movement of the unemployed in the early- and middle- Depression period.

Few would have expected segregated Baltimore in the Depression era to generate one of the largest, most interracial movements of the unemployed in the country. Yet, by the middle of 1934, tens of thousands of Baltimore's unemployed -- with African America ns represented well above their percentage of the population -- were organized and in motion in the struggle for relief and jobs. From early 1933, the main organization in the city's jobless movement, and the focal point of this paper, was the People's Un employed League (PUL). After a little more than a year of existence, the PUL reported a membership of 18,000, over twenty percent of whom were Black, divided into 33 locals.

The PUL was no paper organization. It advocated effectively for the unemployed and won 542 adjustments to the 600 cases it appealed in its first year. It mobilized around demands for broad structural reforms at City Hall, at the state capitol, and in Wash ington, D.C. It developed self help projects, putting the unemployed to work distributing free food and renovating vacant houses. It held a plethora of cultural and educational events. And it involved itself in broad coalition politics, such as the anti lunching movement of late-1933, early-1934.

The PUL was led by a small group of mostly younger, white, middle-class Socialist Party intellectuals. It is important to emphasize that the Socialist Party in Baltimore in the early 1930s had only a tenuous base in the overall working class, had no Afric an American members, and, before 1933, was involved in almost no organizing among the unemployed, in the Black community, or across racial lines.

The question arises, how was the PUL organized so rapidly and so successfully, by such an unlikely group, under such seemingly difficult circumstances? The paper will suggests answers in terms of structural shifts in the Baltimore metropolitan region; the complex contours and traditions of the progressive community in the city; the recent rise of a new, home-grown, militant, youth-led Black freedom movement; and, above all, the invisible (to historians) unemployed and anti- racist agitation of the small l ocal Communist Party group -- agitation that began in earnest in early 1930. It also argues that, in this context, the handful of SPers at the core of the PUL were able to turn themselves into "organic intellectuals" of this bi-racial, lower-working-class movement by skillfully implementing a popular-front-like series of alliances, and creatively utilizing the contacts they had through SP and progressive circles.

Another set of questions about the PUL raised in this paper address the organization's somewhat paradoxical character. The PUL often found itself in confrontation with both governmental and social elites who regarded it as radical and dangerous and was fr equently aligned with the most militant sections of Baltimore's people's movements. On the other hand, previous PUL leaders have characterized it, decades after the fact, as moderate or even conservative -- and, indeed, it often won the cooperation of imp ortant businesses, elite universities and colleges, and government officials (especially those identified with the New Deal). What was the real nature of the practices, politics, and policies of this organization, internally and externally? Indeed, what r eally were its practices with regard to such key social questions as class stand, racial-ethnic equality and justice, gender relations and oppression? What were its real relationships with the other contemporary local social movements? What was its trajec tory over time, and its legacy? This paper holds that the PUL did represent a form of radicalism on almost all of the above counts, but a very particular and sometimes contradictory one.

Underlying this investigation into the PUL and the unemployed movements of Depression-era Baltimore -- work that builds on the earlier writings of historian Jo Ann E. Argersinger -- is a concern with how and under what conditions the forces of class, raci al-ethnicity, and radicalism can combine to produce viable social movements in this country. Hopefully, an examination of this city, during this time period, has something more general to suggest in this regard.