|
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.
|
Year
|
Unemployment in labor force
|
Percent
|
|
1929
|
1,550,000
|
3.2
|
|
1930
|
4,340,000
|
8.7
|
|
1931
|
8,020,000
|
15.9
|
|
1932
|
12,060,000
|
23.6
|
|
1933
|
12,830,000
|
24.9
|
|
1934
|
11,340,000
|
21.7
|
|
1935
|
10,610,000
|
20.1
|
|
1936
|
9,030,000
|
16.9
|
|
1937
|
7,700,000
|
14.3
|
|
1938
|
10,390,000
|
19.0
|
|
1939
|
9,480,000
|
17.2
|
|
1940
|
8,120,000
|
14.6
|
|
1941
|
5,560,000
|
9.9
|
|
(from Historical Statistics of the United
States, U.S. Department of the Census)
|
|
Introduction
