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External Resources and the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s: Evaluating Six Propositionsfrom Social Movement TheoryAuthor(s): Steve ValocchiSource: Sociological Forum, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 451-470Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/684570 .Accessed: 11/04/2013 11:01

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Sociological Forum, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1993

External Resources and the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s: Evaluating Six Propositions from Social Movement Theory1 Steve Valocchi2

This article uses six propositions developed from the resource mobilization and political opportunity structure approaches to social movements in order to highlight the importance of external resources and political environment in explaining the emergence, development, and decline of the Unemployed Councils-the major organization of the unemployed workers movement of the 1930s. The analysis emphasizes the dominance of the Communist Party on the inner life of the Councils but notes both the important exceptions to that dominance and the social functions served by that dominance. The analysis also suggests that conflicts among elites opened up the political space for short-term political concessions on the local, state, and national levels. Because Council leaders did not perceive the changing political opportunities of the New Deal, however, they were unable to consolidate these concessions nor build stable organizations among the working class. These conclusions speak to several unresolved or problematic issues in both resource mobilization and political opportunity structure approaches. KEY WORDS: social movements; resource mobilization; political opportunity structure; Communist Party; Unemployed Councils.

INTRODUCTION

This article looks closely at the structure, functioning, and political impact of the Unemployed Councils in the early 1930s, and develops a series of testable propositions about the rise, development, and decline of the unemployed workers movement.

'An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Providence, Rhode Island, April 1991.

2Department of Sociology, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 06106.

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0884-8971/93/0900-0451$07.00/0 ? 1993 Plenum Publishing Corporation


The unemployed emerged as an organized presence in 1929 with a few street marches and rallies. Protest increased dramatically with the for- mation of Unemployed Councils in 1930. These Councils, which sprang up in many cities throughout the United States, were organized in neighborhoods by block committees with each committee sending delegates to city- wide coordinating bodies (Leab, 1976). The activities of the Councils were diverse and ranged from individual grievance work to mass protests over relief cutbacks or rallies at state capitols demanding unemployment insur- ance (Folsom, 1991). Most of these activities took place between 1930 and 1933. After 1933, protest declined precipitously as Council leaders moved into trade union organizing or as these Councils became absorbed into a national organization that represented public works employees and discouraged social protest (Prago, 1976; Rosenzweig, 1976).

Although the Unemployed Councils did not leave written minutes of their activities, they did leave several other paper trails. Three are pursued here: the reports of leaders of the unemployed published in the journals of the Communist Party (CP), the directives of the leadership regarding the Unemployed Councils also published in CP journals, and the memoirs of movement leaders. These sources, as well as existing historical and contemporary accounts of the Councils, help identify several relationships of interest to theorists in the resource mobilization and political opportunity approaches to collective action.

THE RESOURCE MOBILIZATION MODEL: THEORY AND PROPOSITIONS

While the classical theories of collective action see social movements as spontaneous reactions to accumulated individual grievances, the resource mobilization approach sees collective action as the conscious, rational activity of either aggrieved groups using their own resources to launch social protest or as the outcome of external leaders bringing their own resources to mobilize an aggrieved group (Jenkins, 1983; McCarthy and Zald, 1977; Morris, 1984). Research within this approach has identified a cadre model of organization as most frequently associated with social movements among "deprived groups and broad disorganized collectivities" (Jenkins, 1983:531). Because these groups have neither material resources nor political power (Gamson and Schmeidler, 1984; Jenkins, 1979), they rely on "a profession- ally trained cadre backed by outside sponsors" to organize collective action (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977:252). It is these outside sponsors that resolve a basic problem of social movement organizations: how to stabilize the flow

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of external resources while mobilizing grievances and building member commitment (McAdam et al., 1988).

Research on organizing among the poor does demonstrate that external leaders and funding are crucial resources that deliver both insurgency and political success (Jenkins and Perrow, 1977; Zavella, 1988). Piven and Cloward (1977), in their research on the unemployed movement of the 1930s, argue that leaders drawn from radical organizations external to the unemployed enlisted the unemployed periodically to create enough of a crisis to force political elites to act. According to their account, however, this role of facilitating disruption was the only impact that the radical organizations had on the early development (i.e., 1930-1933) of the unemployed movement. As soon as the leaders of the unemployed tried to build a formalized structure and centralized organization, protest activity declined (Piven and Cloward, 1977:74).

Because Piven and Cloward do not adequately theorize the nature of external influence (cf. Valocchi, 1990), they tend to conflate external influence with only one of the many ways in which that influence can be grafted onto collective action by a resource-poor group. External resources can be used in a variety of ways within a movement depending on the already existing networks of the aggrieved group (Morris, 1984), the ideology and organizational forms of the external group that is supplying those resources (Jenkins and Eckert, 1986), or the larger political environment within which both movement entrepreneurs and collective action exist (McAdam, 1982).

The term "cadre organization" tells us only about the origins of the movement's leadership and resources. It says nothing about either the relationship between those cadres and the preexisting organizations that are contributing time, money, and expertise to the movement, or to the relationship between the leadership and the membership of the social movement organization. Cadres can be dependent on, or independent of, their parent organization; they can accept the ideology of that organization or reject or remold it; they can enlist the support of their constituency for leadership roles or choose to ignore that constituency; they can organize that constituency formally in mass membership organizations or informally through loosely organized decentralized locals. Research needs to "unpack" the idea of cadre organization to determine why those organizations facilitate or hinder collective action among the poor.

In the case of the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s, historical research uncovers two different relationships that the Councils had with their parent organization: Councils that were directly controlled by the CP (the dominant pattern) and Councils that managed to obtain a significant degree of autonomy from the parent organization. These two types provide an op-

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portunity for assessing the different ways in which cadre organizations mobilized grievances and built member commitment.

This brief description of the resource mobilization approach suggests four propositions about the emergence and development of collective action among the unemployed:

Proposition 1: There was only a weak relationship between economic deprivation and collective action among the unemployed; there was a stronger relationship between preexisting organizational resources and collective action.

Proposition 2: Collective action among the unemployed was developed and sustained by the resources of external groups/leaders. When these resources were withdrawn, collective action declined.

Proposition 3: Organizations of the unemployed that developed strategies to facilitate disruption rather than build formalized structures were the most successful in wresting concessions from political elites.

Proposition 4: Those organizations of the unemployed that were able to secure the external resources of the parent organization (yet gain enough autonomy from the parent organization to cultivate the already existing networks or cultural resources of the unemployed) were the organizations that were most successful in both mobilizing grievances and building member commitment.

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURE MODEL: THEORY AND PROPOSITIONS

Political opportunity structure theory broadens the concept of resources with the recognition that "shifting alignments in the polity" may also be a resource that affects the emergence, development, and political impact of collective action (Tarrow, 1988). Research on collective action among the unemployed suggests that political opportunities come in many forms. Piven and Cloward's account of the unemployed workers movement shows how the electoral realignments of 1930s and the fiscal crisis of cities provided the space in which a cadre-led poor peoples movement (and other working class movements) emerged and achieved a modicum of political success. Kerbo and Shaffer (1992) supplement this account with evidence that political elites were making symbolic statements in the late 1920s and early 1930s about the necessity for aid programs to the unemployed. These statements politicized the issue of unemployment and provided the "open- ing" for a movement around it.

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None of this research, however, deals with the thornier problem of if and how these opportunities are perceived by social movement actors and what difference the perception of political opportunities make to the development and success of social movements. As Tarrow (1988:18) asks, "doesn't a political opportunity have to be perceived in order to affect an actor's behavior?" In other words, can movement leaders know whether they are in a period of expanding or contracting political opportunities and then fashion their strategies and discourse to exploit existing opportunities or create new ones?

This description of political opportunity perspective suggests two propositions bout the emergence and success of collective action among the unemployed.

Proposition 5: Collective action among the unemployed was sustained when some segment of elites became witting or unwitting allies to the movement. Collective action declined when this segment withheld its support.

Proposition 6: Those organizations of the unemployed that were able to perceive the latent political opportunities of the 1930s, and act upon them, were more politically successful than those that were not.

The account of the unemployed movement told below evaluates these propositions by focusing on the decision-making processes of the Unem- ployed Councils as well as the political and economic landscape within which these processes took place.

Proposition 1: Grievances, Resources, and the Unemployed Councils

Contrary to the argument that protest among the unemployed emerged spontaneously from the accumulated grievances of the unemployed during the Great Depression, the greatest surge of protest came early in the 1930s before massive unemployment, and declined as the dec- ade progressed and unemployment increased (Kerbo and Shaffer, 1992:145). This early surge from 1930 to 1933, moreover, did not occur spontaneously but was engineered primarily by the CP (Leab, 1967; Prago, 1976; Rosenzweig, 1976).3 Len De Caux, a journalist and participant ob- 3The Socialist party and the Musteites (a labor organization named after its leader, A. J. Muste) were also involved in organizing the jobless. For the most part, these groups entered the field later than the CP. The Socialist Party was more reformist in its orientation; the Musteites limited their activities to the Midwest (Karsh and Garman, 1957; Rosenzweig, 1975, 1979).

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server of many of the labor struggles of the early 20th century, noted the mobilizing efforts of the CP:

If they [the Communists] didn't start things themselves, they were Johnnies- on-the-spot. The anti-eviction fights were their babies, or adopted babies. They brought demanding crowds to the relief offices. They organized block committees, mass meetings, demonstrations. (De Caux, 1970:162)

Although most protest was orchestrated by the CP, some newspaper accounts of rent riots or relief takeovers by the unemployed make no mention of the Unemployed Councils. However, Rosenzweig (1976:40) and Hillman (1934:234) note that in the few cases where spontaneous protest emerged, it did so with knowledge of similar activities in other cities sponsored by the Councils.

The CP had made attempts to organize the unemployed in the early 1920s but these attempts met with little success (Draper, 1986:176; Leab, 1967:301). It was only when the CP broadened its organizing efforts beyond the factory floor in 1929 that mass protest among the unemployed mate- rialized. This broadening of the movement came as the Communist Inter- national announced the onset of "the third period" in 1929, the final period of advanced capitalism when the heightened mobilization of capital re- quired a similar mobilization of the working class (Klehr, 1984:11; Naison, 1983:34-35).

This evidence of a more direct relationship between organizational resources and collective action than between economic deprivation and collective action is not to deny the rhetorical value of some threshold level of deprivation. The resource mobilization model emphasizes that it is not the objectively given increase in deprivation that predicts the emergence of a social movement but the organizationally generated mobilization of that deprivation that leads to social movement emergence. The leaders of the Unemployed Councils not only mobilized this deprivation but inter- preted it in explicitly political terms. This transformation of deprivation from a personal to a political issue derived in part from the nature of the external organization sponsoring the Councils and from the leaders who were trained by that organization.

The CP's highly cohesive internal structure with its emphasis on teach- ing Marxist-Leninist theory and linking that theory to concrete action gave meaning to personal experience and forged a solidarity among isolated in- dividuals and a high level of commitment to political work. As Vivian Gor- nick states in her oral history of American Communists, the energy and commitment of organizers stemmed from this galvanizing experience:

It was the Party whose awesome structure harnessed the inchoate emotion which, with the force of a tidal wave, drove millions of people around the globe toward Marxism. It was the Party whose moral authority gave shape and substance to an

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abstraction, thereby making of it a powerful human experience. It was the Party that brought to astonishing life the kind of comradeship that makes swell in men and women the deepest sense of their own humanness, allowing them to love themselves through the act of loving each other. (Gornick 1977:7)

Dorothy Healey, a Party member and unemployed organizer in Berkeley, California, spoke more directly to this transformation from personal trou- bles to public grievances among the unemployed:

At the start of the depression many of the unemployed blamed themselves for having lost their jobs, thinking it was all their fault. Watching the changes in consciousness that took place over the next few years taught me lessons I never forgot, as we moved from agitation to organization and began to form neighborhood based unemployment councils. (Healey and Isserman, 1990:31)

In the case of Unemployed Councils, then, the intense commitment of its leaders forged through both ideology and direct action was a crucial preexisting resource that transformed individual grievances into collective protest.

Proposition 2: The Communist Party and the Unemployed Councils

The Unemployed Councils were originally organized by the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), the CP organization designed to build alternative labor unions to the American Federation of Labor. After a national conference on unemployment in March 1930, the leaders of the TUUL decided to establish a new independent organization to launch a national protest movement of the unemployed (Leab, 1967:301, 309). Al- though nominally independent, every leader was a party member and the national platform of the Unemployed Councils included the recognition of and support for the Soviet Union (Leab, 1967:310).

Virtually all accounts of the Unemployed Councils reveal a "wave of pressure" from the CP headquarters to the locals (Howe and Coser, 1957; Klehr, 1984; Naison, 1983). The first column of Table I lists the 20 accounts of the unemployed workers movement where the organizational structure of the Unemployed Councils was discussed. Seventeen of these accounts (85%) considered the councils significantly influenced by the directives of the CP. This influence "could wash away district organizers, section organizers, unit organizers" (Howe and Coser, 1957:219). Movement observers of the time frequently noted this influence: the local in Detroit depended on "orders from Moscow" (Hallgren, 1932d:101); the local in New York City was "a tail to the Communist kite" (Kahn, 1934:72). Even an organizer of the unemployed in Connecticut observed that "the rigid authoritarianism of the cadre" was making it very difficult to establish a permanent organization among the unemployed (Nelson, 1933:70-71).

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Table I Column 1: Historical accounts of the

structure of the Unemployed Councils

A. Controlled by the CP

Bakke, 1934; Baskin, 1972; Fisher, 1984; Hallgren, 1932d; Howe and Coser, 1954; Klehr, 1984; Leab, 1967; Naison, 1983; Prago, 1976; Rosenzweig, 1976; Seymour, 1934; Smith, 1987; Sylvers, 1989; Keeran, 1980; Lewy, 1990; Kahn, 1934; Nelson, 1933

B. No mention of control or an account of local autonomy

Gates, 1958; Kelley, 1990; Nelson, 1981

Column 2: Historical accounts of the political efficacy of the Councils

A. Concessions due to disruption

Baskin, 1972; Boyer and Morais, 1955*; Brown, 1940; Cross, 1934; Douglas, 1939*; Fisher, 1984; Folsom, 1991; Herndon, 1969; Karsh and Garman, 1957; Keeran, 1980; Klehr, 1984; Leuchtenberg, 1963; McIlvane, 1974; Naison, 1983; Nelson, 1981; Perkins, 1946*; Prago, 1976; Ross, 1933; Schlesinger, 1958; Shannon, 1960*; Smith, 1987; Benjamin, 1935

B. Accounts describing failures or concessions by other means (e.g., lobbying) Folsom, 1991; Hallgren, 1933; Kahn, 1934; Seymour, 1937

Obviously, the CP was closely involved in the activities of the Unem- ployed Councils. The journals of the Party during the 1930s, whose read- ership was Party leaders and organizers of the various organizations affiliated with the Party, reveal widespread concern for the Councils, par- ticularly in the 1930-1933 period. The Communist, which was devoted to highlighting the theoretical links between Marxism and the ideology and practice of the CP, reported 18 articles dealing with some aspect of organizing among the unemployed between 1930 and 1933 compared to only 2 articles in the 1934-1937 period. Similarly, The Party Organizer, which was devoted to improving the efficiency of the CP front organizers, reported 11 articles between 1930 and 1933 compared to only one article in the 1934-1937 period. Twenty of the 29 articles about the Unemployed Coun- cils in the Party press (69%) during the 1930-1933 period were about using the resources of the Party to mobilize more efficiently a mass movement of unemployed.4

Discussions of the Unemployed Councils or organizing among the unemployed declined significantly in the Party journals after 1933. These discussions were replaced with discussions of trade union organizing either by the TUUL or in conjunction with other organizations. In the 1930-1933 period, 25% of the articles in The Communist and The Party Organizer dealt with organizing the employed, and these articles usually emphasized the

4The content analyses of the CP press are available upon request from the author.

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joint organization of the unemployed and employed working class. In these journals for the 1934-1937 period, the percentage of articles dealing with organizing industrial workers exclusively stood at 50%. The strike wave of 1934 partially accounts for this shift in attention and resources (Healey and Isserman, 1990:41). Frustrated with their perceived failure to build permanent organizations among the unemployed and already involved in trade union organizing with the TUUL, the increased militancy of industrial workers in 1934 led the CP to take many of their organizers out of the neighborhoods and into the factories (Keeran, 1980:76).

This analysis supports the broad contention of resource mobilization theorists that social movements among the poor require access to external resources for sustainable collective action. When the CP withdraw its support to the Unemployed Councils, collective action among the unemployed declined significantly.

Proposition 3: Unemployed Councils, Disruption, and Political Concessions

The evidence from Party journals as well as historical and contemporary accounts of the Unemployed Councils seems to support the proposition that, during the 1930-1933 period, the Councils were fairly successful in getting concessions of one kind or another from local, state, and national elites. Although a large percentage of the reportage in The Communist and The Party Organizer bemoaned the inability of the Councils to operate as effective "transmission belts" for the Party (cf. Hathaway, 1930:786-794), 31% (9 out of 29) of the articles dealing with the Councils reported political successes due to mass protest.

These successes due to disruption were also noted outside of the Party press. Column 2 of Table I lists the 26 accounts of the movement that discuss the political efficacy of the Unemployed Councils. Twenty-two (85%) of these accounts spoke of the successes of the Councils explicitly due to a strategy of disruption. Pressure through demonstrations, rallies, and sit-ins at relief offices was successful in forcing local and state officials to "find the funds necessary to resolve the crisis" (Cross, 1934; Leuchten- berg, 1963; Naison, 1983; Ross, 1933). In St. Louis in 1930, a march by the Unemployed Council forced the passage of two relief bills. In Chicago that same year 5000 members of the Council forced the improvement of conditions of the jobless in municipal lodgings (Boyer and Morais, 1955:263). In New York City in 1930, a large demonstration of the unemployed demanded and subsequently received an increase in the monthly allowance from the state for the jobless (Naison, 1983:41). The Unem-

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ployed Councils in New York were also quite successful in helping the unemployed cut through "red tape" once the New York legislature passed an unemployment relief bill in 1932. These state and local successes were re- peated at the national level in 1933 when Congress as well as members of the new Roosevelt administration used the threat of disruption to gain support for the Federal Emergency Relief Act (Benjamin, 1935:528; Klehr, 1984:54; Perkins, 1946:ch. 15; Schlesinger, 1958:270-271; Shannon, 1960:113-119)

This evidence seems to support the contention from the resource mobilization approach that strategies designed to facilitate disruption were successful in wresting concessions from political elites. However, much more transpired between the CP and the leadership of the Unemployed Councils besides a simple and straightforward transfer of resources to mobilize protest. Contrary to the argument that efforts to build permanent organizations of the unemployed occurred after initial political victories consolidated gains and increased resources to the movement's leadership (cf. Piven and Cloward, 1977), organization building was a constant feature of the movement. Eighteen of the 22 accounts of success listed in column 2, row A, of Table I (the unasterisked references) mention some sort of organizational structure to the Unemployed Councils. Therefore, it was not a simple shift from "disruption to organization" that accounts for the decline of the movement. As argued below, however, it was the particular kind of organization building that accounts more accurately for the decline. This dynamic is glossed over in the resource mobilization approach but is crucial in understanding the brief life of the Unemployed Councils and their limited political impact after 1933.

Proposition 4: External Resources, Mobilizing Grievances, Building Member Commitment

Dependence of the vast majority of Unemployed Councils on the Party affected virtually all aspects of the Councils-the rhetoric they used to recruit members, their protest tactics, the stability of their leadership, and the relationship between the leaders and the mass base. This profound influence placed the concerns of the parent organization before the concerns of the cadre organization. However, in areas where the unemployed had other kinds of resources, such as ethnic or racial solidarities, a tradition of resistance to authority, or where lines of communication between the Councils and the CP were weak, Council leaders were more successful in mobilizing grievances and building member commitment.

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This influence is once again evident in the journals of the Party during the 1930s; 90% (26 out of 29) of the articles dealing with the Unemployed Councils from 1930 to 1935 reveal the Party's ongoing struggle to build stable organizations among the unemployed. Existing alongside prescrip- tions for organizing, however, were sectarian attacks on other efforts to organize the unemployed as well as pleas for doctrinal purity in the Party's organizing efforts. Israel Amter, national leader of the Unemployed Coun- cils, repeatedly stressed the need to develop a "united front' of the unemployed and employed working class, but attacked the organizations that already held the loyalty of large segments of the working class (Amter, 1933:115; 1931:12; cf. Browder, 1931; Foster, 1931).

Local organizers of the Unemployed Councils tell a similar story. Harry Haywood, unemployed organizer in Chicago, said that

the enemy was both fascism and social fascism, which stood for the maintenance and strengthening of capitalism. Only by directing the main flow against social democracy . . . will it be possible to strike at and defeat the chief class enemy of the proletariat-the bourgeoisie. (Haywood, 1978:382)

Al Richmond, organizer for the Unemployed Councils in New York City, recollected that "the principal focus was on the demands and the organization of the unemployed. However, this focus was placed in the context of the party's overall program, or political line, of that time" (Richmond, 1973:81).

This political line made it very difficult for organizers to be flexible and creative in their strategies to mobilize the unemployed around imme- diate grievances and, in the process, broaden the constituency and its political interests. Despite tireless organizing and early political successes, the Unemployed Councils "invariably frightened off the average worker" (Rosenzweig, 1976:43) and the unemployed movement as a whole "never enlisted even five percent of all the unemployed at any one time" (Rosen- zweig 1979:495).

There were important exceptions to this dominant pattern. In some communities that were either geographically removed from the CP headquarters, had decentralized Party locals, or had strong ethnic or racial solidarities, the local leadership groped toward a more dynamic and productive relationship between themselves and the grassroots. This was the case in Ohio (Gates 1958:32) and in Birmingham (Kelley, 1990:xiv, 25, 70; 1989:381).

One of the best examples of this ability to generate protest and build member commitment relatively free from the ideological and organizational ties of the Party existed in the coal fields of Lackawanna County, Pennsyl- vania. There, Steve Nelson recruited organizers from the close-knit Polish community. Nelson reports that "most of our initiatives had to come from

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the local level because we were relatively isolated from the national leadership" (Nelson et al., 1981:106). Nelson recounts his ability to wrench free from the ideology of the CP and to use a protest tactic not simply to meet a grievance but also to teach about power and politics: "It was from in- volvement in the daily struggles that we learned to shift away from a narrow dogmatic approach to what might be called a grievance approach" (Nelson et al., 1981:76). This grievance approach involved a familiarity with the power relations of the local relief machinery: "We learned the rules and where they might be bent; then we applied pressure" (Nelson et a., 1981:163). Political education through struggle was more important than party orthodoxy. Consequently, the Unemployed Councils of the coal fields had a larger membership base and lower levels of turnover than the Coun- cils in either Chicago or New York (Nelson et a., 1981).

Despite the flexibility attained by some of the local Councils, many of these local leaders sooner or later faced the organizational directives of the national headquarters of the CP (Lewy, 1990:25). This dual task frustrated and alienated local organizers of the Unemployed Councils. This tension was evident, for example, in the Harlem Unemployed Council. In terms of individual grievance work, relief sit-ins, and eviction strikes, the Harlem Council was very successful (Naison, 1983). Similar to the experi- ences of the local Councils in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, the successes of the Harlem Council stemmed from its ability "to incorporate the cooperative traditions of the Harlem population into its program of militant protest" (Naison, 1983:67; also see Kahn, 1934:78-79). The Unemployed Councils worked with the Socialist party, the black church, and community and self-help groups and, in so doing, downplayed the political rhetoric that had proved so divisive in other communities. They also concentrated more of their energies on advocacy work for individual members of the community than had Councils in other areas (Klehr, 1984:341). Initially, the CP objected to this "deviation from Comintern standards" (Naison, 1983:95), and in the summer of 1933 it replaced the leadership of both the Harlem party and the Harlem Unemployed Councils with "models of party orthodoxy." Soon, however, these new leaders realized that the key to success in Harlem was the effective use of community resources, and they too continued the previous "unorthodoxy." Throughout this period the CP chastised the Council leadership for not recruiting more of its members to the Party.

The problems caused by this close relationship between the CP and the Councils were widely recognized by the CP and the leaders of the Un- employed Councils. Nonetheless, the relationship continued for it seemed to solve a major problem of a social movement organization of the poor: the CP contributed the organizers, the ideology, finances, and organiza-

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tional infrastructure. This solution, however, created another problem: the close association of the Councils with the CP discouraged a flexible, grassroots, and local approach to building member commitment.

Proposition 5: Elite Conflicts and Political Opportunities

Political opportunity structures are another kind of external resource that can be used by social movements. Unlike the resources of the CP, which were extended directly to the Unemployed Councils, the resources of the political environment were less tangible, and it is unclear if and how they affected the strategic decisions and the internal life of the Councils. As suggested earlier in Proposition 1, part of the impetus to organizing came out of the organizational directives of the CP in 1929. Similar directives from the Party in the early 1920s, however, met with massive repres- sion and no political concessions (Draper, 1986:176; Leab, 1967:301). The onset of the Depression dramatically changed the political landscape and created a variety of elite vulnerabilities that a movement among the unemployed could exploit.

First, the fiscal crisis of the cities prevented local party organizations from fulfilling their traditional patronage functions in neighborhoods. These functions included the exchange of selected welfare benefits, public jobs, or contracts, in return for votes. The unwillingness of the Hoover administration to provide federal money to state and local government undercut many local political machines and created conflicts between local and state politicians and the Hoover administration (Patterson, 1969). This loss of patronage created a vacuum that other organizations promising benefits easily filled (Kahn, 1934:16). It also freed up mayors and governors to lend their symbolic support to the responsible activities of the unemployed in the hopes that these activities would direct Hoover's attention to the fiscal crisis of the cities (Brown, 1940).

Second, economic elites in the early years of the Depression also ex- hibited similar conflicts within their ranks. A liberal capitalist bloc inter- ested in national solutions to problems of labor representation, productivity, and social peace had been forming throughout the 1920s and, since 1928, contributed heavily to the Democratic party (Ferguson, 1989). The Depres- sion heightened the conflict between this bloc and one organized around firm-specific or local solutions to these above problems. When protest among the unemployed erupted, many members of Congress allied to this emerging business segment used this discontent to gain support for their "responsible" bills for relief and unemployment (Valocchi, 1990:199-200).

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This conflict was played out at the local level in disagreements about how to finance the increasing costs of poor relief (Hallgren, 1932a-c). These local conflicts frequently involved banking interests wanting federal loans to cities and states and industrial interests wanting increases in local property taxes. This economic conflict created a political crisis in many cities and states as mayors and governors found themselves without unified business support for policies to address Depression-era problems (Janick, 1975:40-42).

As the political opportunity structure shifted with the implementation of national relief and federal jobs for the unemployed in the spring and summer of 1933, protest activity among the unemployed declined (Klehr, 1984:95, 283; Schlesinger, 1958:272-273). By 1934, officials at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the government agency established in 1933 to implement emergency relief to the states, reported to their director, Harry Hopkins, that they were less worried about the "red menace" (Green, 1980:139). In an account of CP influence in the auto workers union of the 1930s, Keeran (1980:79) notes that by 1933 "unemployment activity in De- troit had begun to slump and by the fall of the year the [Communist] party reported that the city's Unemployed Councils were completely out of ex- istence." Kahn (1934:16), in an analysis of both Communist and Socialist unemployed organizations in New York, Chicago, Madison, and Seattle, makes a similar evaluation: "The ideological hold of the jobless leagues melted in the sun of the New Deal."

In addition, mayors, governors, and professional associations withdrew their support of the unemployed movement once it became clear that relief money and jobs while financed at the national level could still be admin- istered by state and local elites. Federal relief and jobs revived many of the old party machines in the cities and thus reestablished the patronage- based links between mainstream politicians and the unemployed (Patterson, 1969:50, 73).

Proposition 6: The Perception of Political Opportunities

Although these broad economic and political developments of the early 1930s created the opportunities in which a social movement could emerge, they were not considerations when the Communist International increased its commitment to organizing the jobless in December of 1929. Its directives flowed not from any analysis of the economic and political conditions in the United States nor from an attempt to profit from the recent stock market crash, but out of a reformulation of the policies of the Communist International (Stephanson, 1980:164).

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This reformulation-the theory of the "third period"-emerged out of internal factional conflicts between the revolutionary and reformist wings of the Party. Announced in 1928, this policy stated that capitalism had entered its third or final stage characterized by the internationalization of both capital and labor and hence worldwide class polarization. The Party's task, therefore, was to organize workers in united fronts and to prevent counterrevolutionary insurgency from reformists, social democrats, or other working class "(mis)leaders" (Klehr, 1984:11).

Only coincidentally did the prediction of crisis come close to the mark. As Howe and Coser (1957:180) suggest, "the Communists had been predicting crises with such unyielding regularity that, given the instability of the European economy after the First World War, one of these predic- tions had to prove correct." Dorothy Healey incorporated the third period rhetoric into her work with the unemployed in her belief "that the Bolshe- vik revolution had set the model for social transformation . . . and that was the main lesson we had to bring to the American working class" (Healey and Isserman, 1990:33). She regretted the amount of time spent attacking other leftist organizations while ignoring "bourgeois politics":

We ignored the tensions within the state, the ebb and flow of interests that made it possible to win a useful legislative victory here and a useful court decision there. We did not understand how to use the contradictions that were present within the system for the benefit of our cause, or how to use limited victories as stepping stones to winning greater victories. (Healey and Isserman, 1990:51)

With the advent of the Roosevelt administration and the welfare and labor legislation accompanying Roosevelt's first hundred days in office, the political landscape once again changed. Again, the leadership spent most of its time criticizing the New Deal for "trying to save finance capital" (Stephanson, 1980:164) while ignoring the impact of the New Deal on both employed and unemployed workers. When the relief legislation of 1933 mollified some of the unemployed and the labor legislation mobilized some of the employed, the CP altered its strategy: it left unemployed organizing and entered industrial organizing.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

The resource mobilization and political opportunity structure approaches to social movements emphasize the importance of external resources in the shape and development of collective action among the unemployed, and the evidence presented here supports this broad contention. The external resources of the CP were crucial to the rise and political success of the unemployed workers movement. The evidence for Proposi-

465


tions 1 and 2 suggests not only that the strictly organizational resources of the CP in the form of initiatives, leaders, and funding were crucial to the establishment and success of the Unemployed Councils, but also that the ideological resources of the CP in the form of leadership training and movement rhetoric were also crucial in understanding how grievances were mobilized and transformed.

The evidence for Propositions 3 and 4 suggests that the external resources of the CP were mixed blessings for the Unemployed Councils. The close relationship between the CP and the Unemployed Councils stifled the development of a local leadership and mass base thus preventing the Councils from developing agendas indigenous to the local community. This close relationship, however, also contributed a core of energetic, committed cadres that risked arrest, imprisonment, and violence, to mobilize the unemployed for mass disruption, and this disruption eventually delivered concessions from elites.

These findings point to the need for more explicit theorizing about the nature of social movement organizations among the poor and about the nature of the relationship between external resources and these organizations. The resource mobilization approach tells us that social movement organizations among the poor need to accomplish several things simulta- neously; they need to stabilize the flow of external resources while building member commitment and mobilizing grievances to accomplish tangible goals. What kind of relationship between external resources and social movement organization makes possible the simultaneous realization of these organizational imperatives? What types of relationships create conflict among these organizational imperatives? The resource mobilization approach has yet to address these questions.

Unlike other studies of collective action among the poor, this analysis also suggests that the pattern of external dominance described here is not inevitable or necessarily the most successful model of collective action among the poor; other patterns are possible . The evidence for Proposition 4 suggests that the Councils that received CP resources but managed or happened to distance themselves from CP directives, developed democratic structures, a fairly stable membership, an indigenous leadership, and protest strategies that were as successful if not more successful than those of the CP-controlled Councils.

Here again, these conclusions point to the need to explicate the conditions under which alternative relationships between external resources and social movement organization occur. Resource mobilization theorists need to go beyond the 'cadre model of organization' among the poor, and describe and explain the kinds of social movement organizations formed by these cadres. Based on this analysis, for example, the cadre model cannot

466 Valocchi


External Resources

assume that the poor have no resources. As argued in the evidence for Proposition 4, the indigenous resources of the poor allowed the leaders of some of the local Councils to gain some countervailing power to the power of the CP. Also and related to this issue, the cadre model cannot dismiss the relationship between leaders and followers. Those leaders who emerged from or listened to the unemployed were successful in performing the bal- ancing act of securing external resources and building member commitment.

This analysis also speaks, although less confidently, to the importance of political resources in the development of the unemployed workers movement. The evidence for Proposition 5 suggests that the conflicts among elites in the early years of the Depression opened up the political space in which a movement of the unemployed could emerge and find symbolic if temporary allies. When political opportunities changed with the coming of the New Deal, protest declined.

Related to and addressed indirectly in the evidence for Proposition 5 is the question of why protest declined: Was it because political opportunities changed or external resources dried up? The evidence suggests that both factors are correct. Faced with the relief of the New Deal and thus the need to rethink strategy and recast rhetoric, the leadership of the unemployed did neither. The New Deal created other political opportunities that industrial workers used to construct a new and powerful union movement. Whether these same opportunities could have been used to construct a broader movement of both the employed and unemployed was a question not seriously considered by the CP nor by leaders of the unemployed after 1933.

The thornier and still ultimately unresolved issue is whether the rap- idly changing political environment was an important factor in the decision-making processes of the Unemployed Councils. In the absence of written records or minutes, we can only rely on the memoirs and journalism of the leaders. Based on these accounts, the evidence for Proposition 6 suggests that, for the most part, leaders of the unemployed did not perceive the growing conflicts between political and economic elites, and thus could not use this knowledge to exploit those conflicts. Although the strategy and tactics of the early movement were successful in the sense of delivering some emergency relief from states and the federal government, they were motivated more from internal organizational concerns rather than conscious political concerns. When the local Councils were structured in a way that gave power to the unemployed, these Councils paid attention to local conditions, investigated power structures, and developed strategy and rhetoric to exploit the weaknesses of those structures. These Councils, however, were the exception, not the rule.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Michael Goldfield, Rhonda Levine, Kathleen Sauer, and the anonymous reviewers of Sociological Forum for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

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Article Contentsp. 451p. 452p. 453p. 454p. 455p. 456p. 457p. 458p. 459p. 460p. 461p. 462p. 463p. 464p. 465p. 466p. 467p. 468p. 469p. 470

Issue Table of ContentsSociological Forum, Vol. 8, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 337-522Front MatterA Note from the Editor [pp. 337 - 339]Socioenvironmental Factors and Development Policy: Understanding Opposition and Support for Offshore Oil [pp. 341 - 364]Professional Status at Midcareer: The Influence of Social and Academic Origins on Lawyers' Achievement [pp. 365 - 382]A Theoretical Framework for Comparisons of Social Movement Participation [pp. 383 - 402]Mediating Claims to Artistry: Social Stratification in a Local Visual Arts Community [pp. 403 - 431]Branch Plants and Poverty in the American South [pp. 433 - 450]External Resources and the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s: Evaluating Six Propositions from Social Movement Theory [pp. 451 - 470]The "Hurried Child": The Myth of Lost Childhood in Contemporary American Society [pp. 471 - 491]Review EssaysPreface [pp. 493 - 495]Blanding In [pp. 497 - 505]Ethnic Pluralism and the Disunited States of North America and Western Europe [pp. 507 - 516]

Back Matter [pp. 517 - 521]

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