The US labour movement was so powerful during the great depression. It had been on the rise since the reconstruction era and really hit its stride during the 20s and 30s. Communist and anarchist oriented labour and political leaders were the driving force in popular politics at the time. So much so that a bunch of rich assholes (including a certain Prescott Bush and Smedley Butler) may have planned a fascist coup. The New Deal was FDR’s compromise between a reactionary congress and a revolutionary populace. It’s entirely possible that without the New Deal the US could have had a workers revolution, made possible by surprisingly similar conditions to the Russian Bolshevik revolution now that I think about it - working class crushing economic depression and imperialist war.
Instead the New Deal pacified labour just enough to take the revolutionary edge off. Many labour leaders got killed or imprisoned or simply socially outcast as communists as well.
Exactly, you answered it better than I could. Though in absolute fairness to General Smedley Butler, he was actually the one who blew the whistle on the coup. When the plot went public, the courts dramatically downplayed the danger, of course.
One thing people often don’t realize is how central communists and labor unions were to the civil rights movement during the 1930s. What Martin Luther King did in the 1960s really built on the heroic work that had been done thirty years earlier.
The US labour movement was so powerful during the great depression. It had been on the rise since the reconstruction era and really hit its stride during the 20s and 30s. Communist and anarchist oriented labour and political leaders were the driving force in popular politics at the time. So much so that a bunch of rich assholes (including a certain Prescott Bush and Smedley Butler) may have planned a fascist coup. The New Deal was FDR’s compromise between a reactionary congress and a revolutionary populace. It’s entirely possible that without the New Deal the US could have had a workers revolution, made possible by surprisingly similar conditions to the Russian Bolshevik revolution now that I think about it - working class crushing economic depression and imperialist war.
Instead the New Deal pacified labour just enough to take the revolutionary edge off. Many labour leaders got killed or imprisoned or simply socially outcast as communists as well.
Exactly, you answered it better than I could. Though in absolute fairness to General Smedley Butler, he was actually the one who blew the whistle on the coup. When the plot went public, the courts dramatically downplayed the danger, of course.
One thing people often don’t realize is how central communists and labor unions were to the civil rights movement during the 1930s. What Martin Luther King did in the 1960s really built on the heroic work that had been done thirty years earlier.