Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.

#workingclass #LaborHistory #dustbowl #GreatDepression #JohnSteinbeck #GrapesOfWrath #refugees #poverty #fiction #books #author #writer #Oklahoma #texas @bookstadon

Make America ‘Great’ Again

The only thing Trump is doing is deliberately driving the economy into the dirt for a second ‘Great’ Depression.

After that there’s only a third world war.

Tired of winning yet, America?

I guess Reagan no longer matters to Republicans. Huh. Go figure.

Science Fiction in Dialogue with The Great Depression: Frank K. Kelly’s “Famine on Mars” (1934) https://sciencefictionruminations.com/2025/03/26/science-fiction-in-dialogue-with-the-great-depression-frank-k-kellys-famine-on-mars-1934/

Today in Labor History March 19, 1935: Harlem Uprising occurred, during the Great Depression, after rumors circulated that a black Puerto Rican teenage shoplifter was beaten by employees at an S. H. Kress "five and dime" store, and then killed by the police. Protests were quickly organized by the Young Liberators and the Young Communist League, which were promptly declared illegal by the police. Participants smashed windows of the store and began looting. The protest and looting spread, causing $200 million in damages. Police arrested 125 people and killed 3. Mayor LaGuardia set up a multi-racial Commission to investigate the causes of the riot, headed by African-American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and with members including labor leader A. Philip Randolph. The identified "injustices of discrimination in employment, the aggressions of the police, and the racial segregation" as conditions which led to the outbreak of rioting, and congratulated the Communist organizations as deserving "more credit than any other element in Harlem for preventing a physical conflict between whites and blacks".

@ManyRoads

“Herbert Hoover” Trump has gratuitously manufactured this economic downturn. Brace yourself for the #recession or #depression.

Heard of the Smoot-Hawley tariffs of 1930? They were one of the catalysts of the #GreatDepression.

#stocks #economy #tariffs #finance #maga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoot%E2%80%93Hawley_Tariff_Act?wprov=sfti1

Today in Labor History March 6, 1930: 100,000 people demonstrated for jobs in New York City. Demonstrations by unemployed workers, demanding unemployment insurance, occurred in virtually every major U.S. city. In New York, police attacked a crowd of 35,000. In Cleveland, 10,000 people battled police. In Detroit, the Communist Party organized an underemployment demonstration. Over 50,000 people showed up. Thousands took to the streets in Toledo, Flint and Pontiac. These demonstrations led to the creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), sponsored by Republican congressman Hamilton Fish, with the support of the American Federation of Labor, to investigate and quash radical activities.

The US tried high tariffs and ‘America first’ policies in the 1930s. Here's what happened next.
https://www.alternet.org/smoot-hawley-tariff-act/

Americans are taught #FDR was the hero of the #GreatDepression. For one historian, that’s erasure
Interview with historian Dana Frank

In a new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times, #DanaFrank tells stories of the people who ‘made history happen’ through organizing and mutual aid

from #TheGuardian #Guardian
Lauren Aratani in New York

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jan/05/dana-frank-great-depression?CMP=share_btn_url

#history #USPolitics #politics #LaborMovement #CollectiveAction
#press

Today in Labor History January 4, 1933: Angered by increasing farm foreclosures, members of Iowa's Farmers Holiday Association threatened to lynch banking representatives and law officials who instituted foreclosure proceedings for the duration of the Depression. In April, 600 farmers battled the sheriff and his deputies to prevent a foreclosure. A group of farmers dragged a district judge from his chair, put a rope around his neck, and threatened to hang him unless he promised not to issue any more eviction notices. They stripped him naked, beat him, smeared him with grease, and jerked from the ground by the noose until he lost consciousness. Once revived, they told him to pray, and raised him again from the ground by the noose. That same month, state officers in Crawford County were beaten, prompting the Iowa governor to declare martial law in three counties and send in the National Guard. During the farmers’ strike, the refused to sell their products. “We’ll eat our wheat and ham and eggs. Let them [the bankers] eat their gold.” They called their strike the “farmers holiday” and their movement the Farmers Holiday Association. One of the leaders, Milo Reno, said they were being “robbed by a legalized system of racketeering.” He also said that the farmers might have to “join hands with those who favor the overthrow of government. . . You have the power to take the great corporations. . . shake them into submission.”

This was just one of many violent movements rebelling against capital during the Great Depression. In 1934, there were General Strikes in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco, in which workers fought back against police, vigilantes, and National Guards with sticks, clubs, bottles and rocks. Police shot and killed 2 strikers each in the San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis General Strikes. There were bloody strike waves among textile workers all along the Eastern Seaboard, though the overwhelming majority of violence was perpetrated against them by cops and vigilante thugs, with at least 18 workers killed and over 160 injured. But this militancy, solidarity, and willingness of workers to confront the state’s legalized violence against them were major influences on the implementation of New Deal reforms by President Roosevelt, including the Wagner Act, which created the National Labor Relations Board.

Monopoly Menace: The Rise and Fall of Cartel Capitalism in Western Europe, 1918–1957

"I show how governments of all ideological stripes—from liberal Britain to New Deal America, social-democratic Belgium, Third Republic France, Peronist Argentina, fascist Italy and Japan, and Nazi Germany—all began mandating cartelization in hopes that business cooperation on prices and production could cure the Great Depression’s dislocations."

Hewitt, L. (2024) ‘Monopoly Menace: The Rise and Fall of Cartel Capitalism in Western Europe, 1918–1957’, Enterprise & Society, pp. 1–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2024.38.

#OpenAccess #OA #Article #DOI #History #Histodon #Histodons #Business #Cartels #Capitalism #Monopoly #WorldWarII #WorldWar2 #WW2 #GreatDepression #Europe #USA #US #UnitedStates #Academia #Academics @histodon @histodons

October 29, 1929

The Wall Street Crash of 1929, also known as the Great Crash, Crash of '29 or Black Thursday, when “investors traded some 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day.”

The crash marked the beginning of the #GreatDepression

“By 1933 the number of unemployed across the nation rose to 13 million people—one out of every four American workers.” HCR

Learn more
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-28-2024

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stock-market-crash-1929.asp

Historian #HeatherCoxRichardson with a typically timely, crucial, & interesting history lesson…
https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/october-28-2024
#1929StockMarketCrash #GreatDepression #HerbertHoover #FDR #NewDeal #SocialSafetyNet #WWII #fascism #DwightEisenhower