Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andor Skotnes is Professor of History at The Sage Colleges.

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A New Deal for All?

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

About the Series................................................................................................viiIllustrations...................................................................................................ixAbbreviations...................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.................................................................................................xiiiIntroduction....................................................................................................31. Communities, Culture, and Traditions of Opposition...........................................................112. Disrupting the Calm: The Communist Party in Baltimore, 1930–1933.......................................453. The City-Wide Young People's Forum, 1931–1933..........................................................694. Garment Workers, Socialists, and the People's Unemployment League, 1932–1934...........................925. The Lynching of George Armwood, 1933.........................................................................1196. Buy Where You Can Work, 1933–1934......................................................................1407. The Baltimore Soviet, the ACW, and the Pul, 1933–1935..................................................1638. Seeking Directions, 1934–1936..........................................................................1879. The CIO and the First Wave, 1936–1937..................................................................21510. The CIO, the AFL, and the Baltimore Workers' Movement: The Second Wave, 1938–1941.....................24511. The New Baltimore NAACP and the Metropolitan Region, 1936–1941........................................26912. The New Baltimore NAACP, the State, and the Country, 1936–1941........................................290Epilogue........................................................................................................313Notes...........................................................................................................319Bibliography....................................................................................................353Index...........................................................................................................365

Chapter One

In its industrial development Baltimore is northern; in its social customs it is more southern than Virginia. —CHARLES JOHNSON, National Urban League

The social movements of the Baltimore metropolitan region during the era of the Great Depression emerged within a definite context and on particular historical foundations that had been constructed over a long period. To understand these movements, and to locate them within a national framework, this chapter will consider six features of the Baltimore region on the eve of the Great Crash; its location on the middle ground between North and South; structure and community of its metropolitan space; economic and political power in the region; the working class and its traditions; race and ethnicity; the African American community and its culture.

On the Middle Ground

Baltimore, situated fifty miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, was at the time of the Crash the pre-eminent border city of the pre-eminent border state. It remained, as it had long been, the proverbial "middle ground" between South and North, between historic territories of slavery and of free labor, between the subsequent homelands of Jim Crow ruralism and U.S. corporate capitalism. The region had a dual nature, an in-betweenness.

By the time of the Crash, Baltimore was a major industrialized metropolis of a type familiar in the North and on the West Coast but hardly known in the South. With a municipal population of 804,874 and a metropolitan population approaching 1 million in 1930, it was the seventh largest city in the country. By contrast, the two largest comparable southern cities, New Orleans and Houston, ranked far below in population, at sixteenth and twenty-third, respectively. Baltimore had a huge, diversified industrial sector; it was a center of food processing, iron and steel production, copper smelting and refining, fertilizer and chemical production, men's clothing fabrication, aircraft construction, and electronics and automobile manufacturing. It was also a major commercial center with road and railroad links to the rest of the country, and a harbor that connected the city to the nation and the world (see figure 2). By the end of the 1920s, its port was the third busiest in the United States; by 1937, it was second.

Baltimore was a very northern-like, working-class metropolitan region. By 1930, those holding working-class jobs represented a large majority of the total employed. Sharply divided by hierarchies of skill, race, ethnicity, and gender, the region's complex working class spread across the industrial, transport, and service-commercial sectors of its economy. A large fraction of the working class was composed of first-and second-generation European immigrants, who often lived in traditional or newly formed enclaves with others of the same national background. In addition, Baltimore's working class had long traditions of class struggle and organization comparable to those of workers in the older industrial regions of the country. In all of these ways, Baltimore was similar to northern and western urban centers; more than that, it was a constituent part of the emerging northeastern megalopolis, the largest urban system in the United States. It was a southern anchor of a chain of metropolitan regions that extended along the northern Atlantic seaboard from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., in the south, through the commercial-industrial port regions of Philadelphia and New York, to Boston in the north. Moreover, Baltimore's hinterland in northwestern Maryland—with its small Black population, Appalachian subsistence agriculture, commercial dairy farms, wheat fields, coalmines, railroads, local small industries, and occasional small cities with a few large industrial concerns—had deep historical ties to the Susquehanna River Valley and mountain regions of Pennsylvania; it was strongly oriented to the U.S. North.

However, Baltimore, in its in-betweenness, was also profoundly southern, and several of its socio-demographic features indicated this fact. While the proportion of immigrant White ethnics in its population (29.1 percent) placed it between the major northern cities, on the one hand, and southern cities, on the other, its "White American" population in 1930 was about 53 percent of its total—much closer to the southern than the northern pattern (see table 1). Moreover, much of Baltimore's White population had roots in and strong ties to the rural South. Baltimore's African American population of nearly 130,000, about 18 percent of the total, was proportionately larger than the Black populations of major northern urban areas. Although a few northern cities had bigger absolute numbers of Black residents because of explosive immigration during the Great Migration of the previous decade and a half, the large African American community in Baltimore, unlike the communities in the North and similar to...