By
Chris Mahin
They travelled in automobiles so
dilapidated they were nicknamed “tin lizzies.” They had only gunny sacks and
blankets to protect them from the extreme cold. There were 1,670 of them but
each was a delegate representing many others. They had come to confront the US
Congress, to insist that it give aid, not charity, to the unemployed.
December marks the
anniversary of the First National Hunger March, which arrived in Washington, DC
on 6th December 1931, and marched to the US Capitol and the White
House the next day.
When the Great
Depression began, there was no such thing as unemployment compensation or
welfare in the USA. What little help the poor received, they obtained from
private charities, mainly religious ones. Employers took advantage of workers’
desperation to slash wages – sometimes as much as 10–20 per cent. A wave of
evictions took place.
The call for the
march demanded:
(1)
unemployment
insurance;
(2)
the
seven-hour workday with no cut in pay;
(3)
a
federal work programme paying union wages;
(4)
an
end to racial discrimination, and an end to deportations of immigrant workers;
(5)
support
for the demands of the veterans and poor farmers; and
(6)
that
all funds being built up for making war be used instead to help the unemployed
– and be administered by the Unemployed Councils.
The National
Hunger March was carefully organised. The first step was a series of actions at
the state level. In April 1931, five columns of unemployed marchers started out
from different points in Ohio. They met in Columbus. Despite a heavy rain,
3,000 people came out to greet them. During the last week in May, four columns
of marchers started out from different parts of Michigan. As they marched,
large gatherings of workers greeted the contingents in Kalamazoo, Battle Creek,
Pontiac, Wayland, and Detroit. Some 15,000 people were present when the columns
met in Lansing, the state capital. These protests were followed by hunger
marches in at least 40 other cities.
Whereas the
state-level marches were meticulously organised, the national march to
Washington was planned with military precision. The caravan was not a mass
procession of the jobless; it was strictly limited in size.
Here is how
historian Franklin Folsom described the huge logistical challenge facing the
march’s organisers: “Plans called for the formation of four separate columns,
all of which would meet in Washington on 6th December to be on hand
for the opening of Congress the next day. On 1st December, Column
One was to leave Boston and Column Two would leave Buffalo. On 30th
November, Column Three would leave Chicago and Column Four would leave St
Louis. Delegates from the West Coast would leave cities there on 23rd
November and would join columns in either Chicago or St Louis. …
“It was no simple
matter to get 1,670 delegates transported, fed, clothed and sheltered – all on
a strict schedule. Each delegate wore an armband reading ‘National Hunger
March, December 7 1931.’ Each truck, which typically carried 10 delegates,
elected a captain, and each column of trucks elected a guiding committee and a
leader. In every truck there was a map telling exactly the route to be
followed, and with each column went a scout car, sometimes pushing ahead to
look for difficulties and sometimes following behind to watch for breakdowns.
Each column also had a medical aid squad and a mechanic.”
En route, the
National Hunger March had to deal with local authorities who were often very
hostile and had to respond to a media campaign designed to discredit the march.
In Hammond, Indiana, the police tried to stop a rally called to support the
march, but the crowd was so large and militant that the police gave up. The
{New York Times} claimed that the marchers would be “furnished with rifles.”
This was completely untrue and even the Secret Service felt compelled to
dispute the claim.
When the marchers
entered Washington, there were as many cops lining the streets as there were
marchers. Secretary of War Patrick J Hurley had ordered all soldiers at nearby
Fort Myer to be ready for active service. Two companies of Marines had been
called up. Nearly 1,000 additional Marines were brought from Virginia to the
Marine barracks in Washington. Four hundred police officers were also brought
in from Eastern cities to bolster the Washington, DC police force.
On the morning of
7th December, the marchers met at John Marshall Place. On their
picket signs were slogans such as: "We demand unemployment insurance equal
to full wages"; "Down with charity slop; we demand cash relief";
"Milk for our children"; "We American workers refuse to
starve"; "Not a cent for war – All funds for the unemployed."
At John Marshall
Place, Washington's commissioner of police, Pelham Glassford, sped around on a
bicycle, dressed in civilian clothes and smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He had
deliberately laid out the longest routes for the marchers to march, to tire
them out.
Rows of policemen
-– about 1,000 officers in all – stood along the line of the march. More than
400 additional police officers were stationed at the Capitol. There, the
marchers were forced to move into a roped-off area where they were a wide
distance from the thousands of people who had come to watch them. Machine guns
were pointed at the marchers. The police officers present were armed with
sawed-off shotguns and tear-gas guns. (One journalist reported that there were
also hand grenade launchers.) An ambulance stood by.
Vice President
Charles Curtis had decreed that the marchers could not enter the Capitol
grounds with signs that criticised the president or Congress or that were
offensive. But since the authorities had not issued any regulations about
music, the marchers' band struck up the battle song of the world's working
class, The Internationale. On the
steps of the US Capitol, the anthem's words rang out:
Arise, ye prisoners of starvation!
Arise, ye
wretched of the earth,
For justice thunders condemnation,
A better
world's in birth.
The march's
organisers had wanted to send committees of delegates on to the floor of the
House of Representatives and the Senate to present their demands, but marchers
were not admitted to either the Republican-controlled Senate or the Democratic
House. (In fact, on the Senate side of the Capitol, the delegates had to
present their demands to the sergeant at arms whilst they were standing at a
basement door.)
From the Capitol,
the demonstrators proceeded to the White House. The White House grounds were
swarming with police officers. Ambulances and patrol wagons were stationed nearby.
President Hoover was inside the White House when the delegates from the Hunger
March called but he refused to see the marchers.
Unable to secure
meetings with members of Congress, the hunger marchers headed home. At each
place along the return route that the caravan stopped, mass meetings were held,
with marchers reporting on what had happened when they tried to speak to the
president and the members of Congress. Although some newspapers sneeringly
described the marchers’ return to their original assembly points as a
"retreat," that term was not accurate; the marchers proceeded back to
their starting points exactly as planned.
Determined,
militant and impressively organised, the National Hunger March of December 1931
re-asserted the right of the American people to go en masse to the capital city
to petition for change. It showed unemployed workers that they could organise
themselves. It forced Depression-era America to admit that the hunger stalking
the land could not be ended simply with charity. It compelled the federal
authorities to face the fact that to end the massive poverty in the country,
the economy was going to have to be restructured in some way.
Within a year,
another Hunger March had taken place. This time, the vice president and the
speaker of the House of Representatives had no choice but to meet with
marchers. Later, the first Unemployment Insurance Bill was introduced in the US
House of Representatives by Congressman Ernest Lundeen from Minnesota's
Farmer-Labour Party. Ultimately, the first system of federal Social Security,
including a national unemployment compensation law, was enacted early in the
New Deal administration of President Franklin D Roosevelt.
The National
Hunger March – and the preparatory marches that took place before the main
march to Washington occurred – had far-reaching effects. They helped to spur on
the fight not only of unemployed workers but of employed workers as well. A
state-level hunger march that took place in Pennsylvania before the national
march helped inspire 40,000 miners in Pennsylvania to go on strike. Local
hunger marches in Ohio stimulated efforts to organise steel workers into a
union.
The Hunger March
of 1931 helped pave the way for the establishment of a social contract in the
USA. Today, that social contract has been torn to pieces by developments in the
economy. But even as different as the world is today from what it was in 1931,
there is still much to learn from the First Hunger March. The delegates and
captains of that protest understood that nothing would change until people
spoke up. They understood that pressure had to be put on Congress (even the
part of it controlled by the Democrats). They deliberately timed their protest
to coincide with the opening of a session of Congress.
The more news that
comes out about Congress, the more timely the demands of the Hunger March of
1931 seem to be. That's especially true of the demand to stop all deportations
of immigrant workers and the demand that all the money being set aside for war
preparations be used instead to help the unemployed. Clearly, our predecessors
in the fight against hunger were on to something!
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