What Working People's Struggles to Survive The Great Depression Can Teach Us Today

“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the U.S. economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? ​“By 1933, a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward… As we face our own crises today — a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change — and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from the Great Depression offer us new and often surprising insights into our own time, our own choices.” In this live episode of Working People, recorded at Red Emma’s cooperative bookstore, cafe, and community events space in Baltimore, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Frank about her new book and what taking a fresh look at poor and working people’s struggles in the dark 1930s can teach us about navigating our own perilous moment in history.”

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 

Maximilian Alvarez: It is a true honor to be in conversation with the great Dana Frank, whose CV runs a mile long. But I just wanted to emphasize at the top that if you are just being introduced to her work now, you have a feast ahead of you. 

Dana is the author of incredible books, including The Long Honduran Night, Bananeras, Buy American and Purchasing Power. Thank you so much for being here tonight. It’s a real honor and pleasure to be in conversation with you.

Your new book is called, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times? Could you give us a bird’s eye view of this book? Where did it come from? Why was it so compelling for you to write this book at this moment?

Dana Frank: I offer here four little-known stories of how ordinary working people, facing the enormous crisis of the Great Depression, responded by taking up creative, powerful and often visionary collective action. Two chapters focus on inspiring, often audacious militance, especially by women. In another chapter, I look at the forcible expulsion, known as repatriation, of one million Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression. In the final chapter, I look closely at the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist group in the Midwest whose over 100,000 members believed that racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism and a fascist seizure of the state were the answer to the Great Depression.

[The book] was possible because of oral histories that were conducted by all different kinds of people all over the country, mostly in the late 70s and early 80s. And those oral histories of all different kinds of people — from fascists in Ohio, to repatriados that are coming back after being sent to Mexico, to so-called Dust Bowl migrants in the San Joaquin Valley in California — are their stories and their world views in their own voices. It was a real honor to be able to put their stories forward.

Alvarez: As someone who has accomplished so much in the history of Latin American Studies but who has also done incredible, deep work on labor, economics and politics here in the United States, I was wondering if you could say a little more about that trajectory. Where does this book fit into it? Does your work in Latin America, particularly Honduras, and your work here in the United States inform each other?

Frank: Most of my day job was studying and teaching writing about US labor and working-class history in a transnational perspective. I taught classes on the Great Depression before I retired. That was who I was. I wrote a lot of books about that on different angles. And then 25 years ago, I was pulled into supporting the banana workers’ unions of Honduras and Central America, and I started having another life on the side. And then in 2009, there was a military coup in Honduras, and that just changed my whole life. 

I started putting on trim little suits and started going to Congress. I wrote 35 op-eds. Anything I could do to keep people alive and to be part of the Honduran resistance was this huge honor. But I was exhausted from fighting the State Department and US imperialism for 15 years, I just couldn’t stand it anymore. So I made a political decision to return to using my skills as a historian to fight racism in the United States. And hence this book. 

This book is coming home. It was much more difficult than anything I ever wrote. I really underestimated how hard it was going to be, and also emotionally hard. Just for chapter three, I spent a year questioning, how do I get this right, as a white person writing about African American women’s history? And I’m still not sure. I’ve had a lot of support, but, you know, that was a big challenge.

The book is structured as four very long chapters. They’re 50 pages typeset, and that’s much longer than a normal chapter of a book. It makes a certain kind of storytelling possible. You can go in and out of the story. You can do context. You can have stories within stories. You can have characters in a way you can’t in a 25-page chapter. But that means as a writer, you have to carry your conversation with the audience, with the imaginary reader for about three months of daily life.

Alvarez: I was thinking that as I was reading it. As someone who had academic training as a historian, I was able to see what I knew was a whole lot of labor going into a seemingly simple sentence. But also, as someone who now is doing oral history journalism, I’m interviewing working people for a living these days. And that work has taught me just how hard it is to recreate a sense of place and time without those stories and those voices.

What are some of the most persistent, even pernicious ways of understanding the Depression era that we still have today? What is this book doing to turn those on its head and provide a new perspective?

Frank: I think the best place to start is visual imagery. Now imagine what you picture when you picture the visual imagery of the 30s. You get a white man in a bread line, passively alone. You might get an African American man and a white man depressed on a stoop in New York. You get Grapes of Wrath, white people suffering in the fields in California. And you get Dorothea Lange and the Migrant Mother, the poor woman with the babies looking exhausted. All of these images are individualized, suffering, passive people, usually, almost always white. There is one other counter-image, which is the massive numbers of white male auto workers rising up in the sit-down strikes— a more heroic image. But the people in my book are deliberately-picked photographs that are disrupting that image. 

The chapter called ​“The Tale of Two Caravans,” is half about the repatriados and the Mexican communities who banded together to support them while they were being forced out of the country. They were really beautiful stories I found in the papers in Texas of people supporting these caravans, thousands of people moving out of Texas because they were being forced out by employers and social workers and the police and forced into Mexico. One million people. I wonder how many people listening to this or that are here even knew this ever happened? 

The other images we have come from Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother and then the Grapes of Wrath. The migrant mother, in real life, was a Cherokee woman. She found out many years later her photograph had been used without her permission and denounced it. Her daughter has said it wasn’t anything like that. And John Steinbeck, in his nonfiction writing, wrote material that was very white supremacist. It’s very explicit. He wrote Mexican and Filipino farm workers out of the story of farm labor organizing in the 30s, very consciously.

Alvarez: I have so many thoughts on that, but I want to zero in on how the stories you write give us a very different understanding of how this decade unfolded and how history was shaped, and who was doing that shaping. The whole point of this conversation is to get you interested and go read the book and then write to us and tell us what you thought about it. Write to Dana and ask follow-up questions. Get involved in this history.

One of the most critical and engaging parts about this book is how you end each chapter by taking an elevator back to the present from the past. It really does communicate the central question, ​“What can we learn from the Great Depression?” What can these struggles of the past teach us about our struggles today? We’ve been living in a moment of labor resurgence, especially in the COVID era. What can working people who are living through the crap that we’re all living through today learn from this period in history?

Frank: It was risky for me to bring each chapter up to the present, because it’s a big no-no. It’s called being ​“presentist.” But I don’t care. I do it in different ways in each chapter, playing off the themes and carrying it up to the present. That was important to me. A friend of mine was telling me that today isn’t like the 30s, with all the amazing things they did then. But oh no, it’s totally amazing now. Look at the Starbucks campaign, the stuff that hotel and restaurant staff are doing, all over the place. 

We have to honor these really creative rank-and-file, bottom-up explosions and creative moments that are happening all over, particularly among young people. An institutionalized labor movement is an extremely important power that people underestimate, but it’s wooden, bureaucratized and contained. We need a sense of how to recreate and rethink labor movements, and that’s part of what I’m playing with in the book.

Working people can run things themselves. Working people are creative. You have to understand the roots of people’s anxieties and address them. You have to take immigration politics seriously. And all of those things are just the bedrock of this book. And when you think about work and working people, you have to imagine all working people and all work. 

I wrote the book in a way that’s open-ended. I got a lot of opinions in here, as I always do, but I also tried to just say we’re in this together. Let me do the best I can to tell you this story, and let’s all think about it.