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.J.Muste sUnemployed League recruited unemployed workers to reinforce thepicket lines of the striking auto-parts workers in the Battle of Toledo.The concessions won by the movements were also intertwined.Inthe 1930s the protests by the poor and the unemployed won a compar-atively generous if temporary relief system, followed by a public jobsprogram, also temporary, and then the more long-lasting series of pro-grams authorized by the Social Security Act, including old age anddisability pensions, unemployment insurance, and the categorical aidprograms we now call welfare. These programs were obviouslyimportant to the poor and the unemployed.They were also importantto working people.Labor-market instabilities and the biological exi-gencies of illness, injury, or old age often forced workers to turn to pub-lic benefits.The availability of unemployment insurance, old ageassistance, welfare, or Social Security pensions also meant that somepeople were removed from the competition for work, thus tighteninglabor markets.Moreover, the very existence of public benefits tendedto create a floor beneath which wages could not sink.In other words, the 1930s movements forced the initiation of atleast a minimal American welfare state.The programs were limited anddistorted to be sure.Program eligibility and benefits tended to reflectlabor-market conditions; those at the bottom of the labor market werealso those who were less likely to be protected by the programs.Agricultural and domestic workers, for example, were largely exemptedfrom the protections of the Social Security Act, except for whateverbenefits they would be granted from the state-administered categoricalassistance programs.Even limited and conditional programs, however, contributed to theongoing transformation that the New Deal was effecting in AmericanTHE TIMES-IN-BETWEEN | 127political culture.The large role that the national government had triedto play in coping with the Great Depression, and especially its initiativesin extending assistance to the poor and working class, changed the waypeople thought about government, and changed the basis therefore oftheir political allegiance.In the New Deal Order,47 voter supportincreasingly depended less on the tribalist and clientelist appeals thathad mobilized participation in the nineteenth century, and more onassessments of whether the regime was contributing to popular eco-nomic well-being.This was no small achievement.till, after the protest movements of the unemployed, of strikingSworkers, and of the aged subsided in the 1930s, there were no largestrides made in the development of the American welfare state com-parable to the initiatives of the Depression years.The aged whodepended on Social Security benefits remained poor.Harry Truman sefforts to create a national health insurance system went nowhere.Thewelfare program created in the mid-1930s was administered by thestates to largely exclude the black Americans who were being forced offthe land in the rural south.It required a new period of protest in the1960s, spearheaded by African Americans animated by the civil rightsmovement, to force a considerable liberalization of these programs andprompt the creation of new programs that provided nutritional sup-plements, health care, and subsidized housing for the poor.But beforethat happened, the black insurgency achieved another large victory: therestoration of the main planks of Reconstruction-era racial reforms.The black freedom movement that emerged in the 1950s had com-plex roots in the new political resources that blacks gained as they movedfrom the southern agricultural economy to the cities of the South andthe North, and in the impact of that transformation on the New DealDemocratic electoral coalition.The forced removal of blacks from thefeudal plantation system caused enormous hardship, but it was also akind of liberation from the near-total social control exerted by theplanter, the lynch mob, and the sheriff.Moreover, the subsequent con-centration of blacks in the ghettoes of the cities, along with their move-ment into wage labor, afforded them the protection of sheer concentratednumbers, and in some cases, the political resources of unionization.128 | CHAPTER 6Once in the cities, particularly in the northern cities, they also gainedthe franchise.This turned out to be important because when civil rightsprotests arose in the south, black voters in northern cities helped todetermine Democratic responses.The New Deal majority coalition was not, of course, simply a coali-tion of the poor and working class groups who had responded to theprogressive initiatives of the 1930s.Rather, those groups had joined aDemocratic Party that still included the white South.The New DealOrder was actually a hybrid, formed in part out of the convulsions ofthe Great Depression, but also including the southern state partieswhose allegiance to the Democrats reflected the sectional conflict thatled to the Civil War, as well as the realignment of 1896 that had dividedthe nation into two one-party sections.This peculiar coalition ensuredDemocratic victories, and it also tempered New Deal initiatives
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