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RADICAL RESPONSES TO THE GREAT
DEPRESSION Unemployment, Hunger and Deprivation |
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The Unemployed, Spring 1931, No.
3 (top); No. 4, bottom. Much more handsome than its title would suggest, The Unemployed was published by the League for Industrial Democracy, affiliated with the Socialist Party. Its five issues (1930-32) mirrored the concern of an ever-growing number of prominent writers, artists, and men of affairs: Norman Thomas, Heywood Broun, Reinhold Niebuhr, Carl Sandberg, Morris Ernst, Zona Gale, Morris Hillquit, Fanny Hurst, Alexander Woollcott, Stuart Chase, A. J. Muste, Frank Murphy, Reginald Marsh, Otto Soglow, John Sloan, Thomas Hart Benton, and Boardman Robinson. The Labadie Collection’s set of The Unemployed was a gift of the I.W.W. organizer, poet, and artist, Ralph Chaplin. The stock market crash of October 1929 signaled the end of the apparently prosperous Twenties, an age in which credit expansion had masked economic insecurity, rural stagnation, and widespread disparity of income. Cheerful prognostications about the temporary nature of the recession were belied by ever-rising unemployment figures. Although New Deal programs significantly diminished the number of workers without jobs, unemployment remained the specter of the decade and did not fade until America’s involvement in World War II.
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