From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

by Priscilla Murolo

  The media themselves were consolidated like other businesses. Newspaper chains like the Hearst syndicate bought or drove out independent publishers; by 1927, the chains controlled more than a third of newspaper circulation. Syndicated fare—advice columns, sports features, political cartoons, and editorials—dominated the “news.” In the new radio industry, the government promoted consolidation. Broadcast radio began in late 1920. sBy the end of the decade stations broadcast from cities all across the country, and one-third of U.S. households owned a radio set. Many early stations were run by churches, ethnic associations, and labor councils, each broadcasting as many hours with as much power as it could afford. Once Congress created the Federal Communications Commission to regulate frequency, power, and schedule in 1927, the best slots went to commercial stations.

  The profit in media came from advertising, which expanded tremendously as companies competed to sell the huge volume of goods they produced. Besides manipulating fantasies and anxieties to create demand for products, advertising also promoted good work habits. For ad agency executive Bruce Barton, advertising’s chief value lay in its capacity to “make people dissatisfied with the old and out-of-date and . . . send them out to work harder to get the latest model—whether that model be an icebox or a rug, or a new home.” Corporate public relations infiltrated advertising into the news itself, using techniques pioneered by the wartime Committee on Public Information. For many corporations, a reputation for service to the community was at least as useful as brand-name recognition. Corporate donations to parks, recreation centers, libraries, churches, Boy and Girl Scout troops, made effective advertising when reported as news. One investigator found that over half the stories in the December 29, 1929, issue of the New York Times originated with press agents.

  If business sometimes seemed to be a religion, sometimes religion looked like business. One of the bestselling titles of 1925 and 1926 was Bruce Barton’s The Man Nobody Knows. He portrayed Jesus as history’s greatest business executive, who “picked up twelve humble men and created an organization that won the world.” Many churches borrowed advertising and public relations techniques to recruit members and raise money.

  Business values influenced some feminists. The National Women’s Party (NWP) opposed protective labor legislation for women, echoing business arguments that labor laws restricted individual freedom and that corporate executives understood that treating women employees well was good business. When a press agent for the tobacco industry approached journalist Ruth Hale of the NWP, she recruited ten feminists to march in New York City’s 1929 Easter Parade smoking cigarettes—described in the press release as “torches of freedom.” In the real world, women working in offices were mostly confined to low-paying, dead-end jobs, and many employers hired only single women, and dismissed them when they got married.

  Business methods could certainly make bigotry profitable. One-time preacher William Simmons made his living promoting fraternal organizations; in 1915, he started a new Ku Klux Klan, which grew to about 5,000 members in Georgia and Alabama by the end of the war. In 1920, Simmons made a deal with Atlanta-based public relations agents Edward Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler: for 80 percent of each initiation fee, they would market the Klan. Clarke and Taylor hired paid organizers (“kleagles”) and trained them in market research, studying communities to identify whichever group was most hated by local white, native-born Protestants—not just people of color, but also radicals, immigrants, bootleggers, Catholics, Mormons. Kleagles encouraged women to “stand alongside our men,” and admitted them to full Klan membership. They marketed a full range of regalia and literature. By mid-decade, Klan membership reached about 4 million, with chapters all across the country and influence in both Democratic and Republican parties. Enriched by shares in the proceeds, the Klan’s national and regional leaders then turned on one another in an orgy of lawsuits and allegations of arson, blackmail, kidnapping, and murder. By the end of the decade membership had fallen to about 40,000.

  To the extent that operations like the Klan threatened social peace, many businessmen opposed them; financial considerations could restrain even virulent bigotry. Henry Ford hated Jews. From 1920 to 1926, his Dearborn Independent newspaper (distributed nationally through Ford dealers) ran articles alleging Jewish involvement in monopolies, Bolshevism, wars, foreclosures, political corruption, bootlegging, high rents, and short skirts. In 1925, American Farm Bureau attorney Aaron Sapiro sued the Independent for libel. To avoid paying damages, Ford publicly repudiated his accusations, though his personal opinions did not change, nor did his admiration for Nazi programs diminish.

  To some people, poverty seemed to be on the verge of disappearance, thanks to the acumen and benevolence of business. President Coolidge saw a divine plan at work: “The man who builds a factory builds a temple, the man who works there worships there. We have seen the people of America build a new heaven and a new earth.” Campaigning for the presidency in 1928, Herbert Hoover boasted that Washington’s cooperation with Wall Street had brought Americans “nearer to the abolition of poverty, to the abolition of fear and want, than humanity has ever reached before.”

  True for some but not all. Five percent of households had accounts with stockbrokers, and 95 percent did not. About a third of the nation’s total personal income went to the richest 5 percent of the people. The top 10 percent spent half the nation’s expenditures on health care, education, and recreation. Modern research suggests that half of all U.S. families in the 1920s had to skimp on necessities. In New York City, some 2 million people lived in substandard housing. Half of U.S. households lacked indoor flush toilets; a third lacked electric lights. Workplaces were dangerous: deaths on the job averaged around 25,000 a year, work-related injuries 100,000 a year, throughout the decade.

  Average real wages (adjusted for inflation) rose about one percent annually from 1923 to 1929. Some workers did better. Skilled construction workers in unions did very well: depending on their trade, their wages rose between 22 and 36 percent overall. Printers, paper makers, hosiery and knitting mill workers, autoworkers all did better than average.

  Others did worse. Wages for domestic work rose about two percent over the period. For women in manufacturing, wages hardly changed. Though skilled railroad workers made much better wages, unskilled railroad laborers actually made less. Wages also declined in textile, leather, glass, tobacco, and mining. Cotton textile workers did poorly: in the South wages fell more than 10 percent, close to 5 percent in the North. Coal miners did very poorly: anthracite miners’ wages dropped 14 percent from 1923 to 1929, bituminous 30 percent. Agricultural workers’ wages fell in the early 1920s and did not recover—they ended the decade at about the level of 1914.

  Better hourly wages did not always translate to better annual income for workers not steadily employed. The federal government did not yet keep unemployment statistics, but the national average among nonagricultural workers was probably about 7 percent. Local surveys showed some higher rates: 10–25 percent in Cincinnati’s six poorest wards. Rising industrial productivity contributed to this unemployment. While manufacturing output nearly doubled from 1921 to 1929, the industrial workforce in 1929 remained about the size it had been in 1919, close to 8.6 million.

  Mechanization also affected farm work—tractor use increased by a factor of ten during the decade. New crop-management methods and greater use of fertilizers also increased farm productivity. But agriculture never recovered from the postwar depression, and overproduction just made the market worse. By 1929, average farm income per capita was little more than a third the nonfarm average. Over the decade about 13 million acres of farmland were abandoned, and by 1930 almost half the country’s farmers were tenants, and about half of family-owned farms mortgaged.

  Farm workers suffered the most. A California grower described migrant farm workers in 1920: “They camped along the roadside, and lived in tents under which a family, invariably a large one, slept. They cooked in the open exposed to a
ll manner of dust and filth and drew water from a creek, many times a creek that ceased to flow but [left] enough in the holes for them to drink.” Child labor was common in the fields. In upper Midwest beet fields—where harvesting was especially back-breaking—investigators found about half the harvesters under fifteen, and quite a few as young as six. Government Indian schools sent students to work in the Colorado and Kansas beet fields for wages as low as 9 cents a day. Children were especially useful to beet growers—the plants were thinned with a short hoe (declared illegal many years later). Beets were harvested with a hook-topped machete, which could pick and top the beet in a single swing. Experienced betabelaros usually had a permanent stoop in their backs, and often fewer than ten fingers.

  Even prosperity might be deceptive. Some workers could afford to flee the city for a home in one of the proliferating suburban developments, but this material comfort had an underside. Many suburban communities barred home sales to people of color, Jews, and other racial and ethnic minorities, and Klan organizers found many suburban customers. Suburban households were often deep in debt for houses, cars, furniture, appliances—consumer credit was easy to get and hard to pay off. For housewives, suburban life could be more isolated than city life, shopping less convenient and more expensive. Even with modern labor-saving appliances, housework and childcare in the 1920s still required about the same amount of time as two decades earlier—about fifty-five hours a week—and some wives had to work outside their homes to help pay the bills.

  THE LABOR MOVEMENT OF THE TWENTIES

  For the labor movement, the 1920s were an era of defeat, retreat, and division. Total union membership fell from about 3.6 million in 1923 to 3.4 million in 1929; AFL unions had 2,769,000 members in 1929, 1.3 million fewer than in 1920. The losses were not evenly spread. The railroad brotherhoods and craft unions generally maintained their strength. Building trades unions actually grew. But industrial unions in mining, mass production, and agriculture suffered enormous losses. The United Mine Workers—half a million strong in 1920—had only 84,000 members in 1929. The Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers barely survived, as did industrial unions in clothing and textiles. Unions of agricultural workers virtually disappeared. Organized labor moved in increasingly conservative directions.

  Before Gompers’s death, the AFL experimented with independent political action, endorsing the 1924 Progressive Party presidential candidate Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin. When Gompers was succeeded by William Green, a Mine Workers official who had served more than a decade on the Federation’s Executive Council, the Richmond Times-Dispatch predicted, “Capital has nothing to fear during his regime.” Under his leadership, the AFL abandoned independent political action and militant demands. Cooperation with employers became the guiding principle of AFL and railroad brotherhood leaders. They endorsed scientific management and other speed-up schemes. Twenty rail unions dropped demands for permanent government control of the railroads in return for union recognition, and joined with railroad executives to draft the Railway Labor Act. Passed by Congress in 1926, the Act set up a system of compulsory arbitration and presidential intervention that made legal strikes almost impossible.*

  Labor leaders echoed businessmen in their love of capitalism. Some even became capitalists themselves, starting union-owned banks and other business ventures. The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers pioneered this experiment, sponsoring more than a dozen banks by the late 1920s, investing more than $60 million in real estate, and buying coal mines that employed nonunion labor. Other labor banks were started by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, the Ladies Garment Workers, the Brotherhood of Railway Clerks, and the New York State Federation of Labor.

  Some union business was less respectable. By the outbreak of the Great War, labor racketeering was well established in the building trades in San Francisco, Chicago, and New York, where it functioned like any other trust combination. Employers’ associations rigged bids and divided up the work, and union strikes disciplined would-be competitors, or drove them out of the industry. Unions also sometimes hired their own thugs. “Dopey Benny” Fein enforced union rules on employers in New York’s needle trades and sold favors. Raiding a manufacturer cost $150 to $600 depending on size; removing an individual usually cost $200. Fein’s mob could also help inside a union, persuading any trouble maker to retire, in at least one case executing a strikebreaker after a “trial.” Fein even accepted out-of-town contracts, dispatching men to jobs in Philadelphia and Cleveland for $7.50 a day plus expenses. Profits from Prohibition promoted even more syndication in the crime industry, and gangsters like Al Capone in Chicago and Dutch Schultz in New York City took over some local unions entirely, raided their treasuries, and sold “strike insurance” to employers.

  AFL and national union officials—like public officials—proved unable or unwilling to clean out these gangsters, and sometimes shared in the profits, while organizing activity faltered. Craft union leaders ignored most workers in their own industries, and everywhere else.

  Labor radicals had not entirely disappeared. After the failure of the 1919 steel strike, William Z. Foster, one-time Wobbly and member of the steel drive’s organizing committee, had started a new organization, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), to work for industrial unionism in the AFL and amalgamation of the railroad brotherhoods, and to promote independent political action and racial harmony in the labor movement. When Foster joined the Workers (Communist) Party (after it renounced dual unionism), Communists began to build the League. TUEL activists and sympathizers were elected to office in a number of unions, including some districts of the United Mine Workers, and won top posts in the Ladies’ Garment Workers and the Fur and Leather Workers. Tens of thousands of workers went on strike under TUEL leadership in New York’s garment industry (1926), the silk factories of Passaic, New Jersey (1926), and the cotton mills of New Bedford, Massachusetts (1928). After AFL leaders expelled these radicals from their unions, the banished insurgents started their own “red” unions among coal miners, garment workers, and textile workers. In August 1929, the TUEL reorganized as the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) and set out to build a left-wing labor federation to rival the AFL.

  Radicals also kept a foothold in labor education. Their best-known project was the Brookwood Labor College, a residential two-year school in Katonah, New York, where about 50 students a year were financed by unions like the Mine Workers, Machinists, Ladies Garment Workers and several railroad brotherhoods. The AFL ordered its affiliates to dissociate from the school in 1928, but Brookwood had already graduated hundreds of rank-and-file activists, and the school stayed open until 1937.

  Workers themselves often resisted corporate power, sometimes covertly. Writer Louis Adamic recalled his days as a factory hand in eastern Pennsylvania: “After the suppression of the radical element in 1922 or thereabouts, workers’ radicalism . . . found individual, personal expression in doing as little as possible for the wages they received and wasting as much material as possible.” At the Swift meatpacking plant in Chicago, women packing bacon slices enforced an agreement to turn out no more than 144 packages an hour by passing twisted, tattered slices to anyone who tried to break the quota. Many employees called their Employee Representation Plan the “Kiss Me Club,” and declined to vote in elections for ERP committees.

  Organizing drives and strikes continued to break out among workers abandoned by organized labor. Black railroad workers employed by the Pullman Company turned away from their ERP and started the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids in 1925 under the leadership of A. Philip Randolph (by then no longer associated with the Socialist Party). The AFL refused Randolph a national charter and left the members in federal locals. But neither red-baiting nor Federation indifference deterred the union, though it took twelve years to win a national contract. In August 1927, immigrant workers from northeastern factories to southeastern mines struck to protest the execution by electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti in Massachusetts.
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br />   Agricultural workers began organizing again in the late 1920s. Mutual benefit societies among Mexican farm workers helped form the Confederación de Uniones de Obreros Mexicanos and La Unión de Trabajadores del Valle Imperial. La Unión led 3,000 cantaloupe harvesters on strike in 1928. Tejano organizer Clemente Idar organized beet field workers in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming into a multiethnic Beet Workers Association, affiliated with the AFL. Led by the “red” National Textile Workers, and organized into integrated locals, southern textile workers unleashed a wave of strikes and drives in 1929.

  The labor movements in Puerto Rico and the Philippines moved into politics and slipped into accomodation and corruption. In Puerto Rico, the Partido Socialista Puertorriqueño (PSP) entered into coalition with conservative politicians, winning elections and gaining considerable political patronage—Santiago Iglesias even became the colony’s resident commissioner in Washington. But the sugar industry dominated the island, and the Federación Libre de Trabajadores (FLT) failed again and again to win permanent contracts with the growers. The Depression began sooner (and lasted longer) on the island than on the mainland, but when the PSP took over Puerto Rico’s Department of Labor in the early 1930s its appointees showed little interest in wages and working conditions. In 1933, when the FLT finally won a sugar-industry contract for the next year’s harvest, the terms were so bad the field workers briefly went on strike against it. In the Philippines the alliance of the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas with the government began to take a toll too. When Filipino field workers in Hawaii went on strike in 1924, the COF supported them. But COF founder Hermenegildo Cruz, now director of the Philippine Labor Bureau, conducted his own investigation, and reported conditions in Hawaii to be satisfactory. His consistent support of the colonial government became so controversial that the COF began to come apart, finally splitting in 1929, and existing in name only after 1932.