Dear Reader,
The end of the Winter of 1930 brought grave news for the British Empire in India as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi announced the beginning of civil disobedience. In the US and around the world, however, the Depression was beginning to be felt, sparking an unprecedented coordinated protest on March 6, International Unemployment Day.
It is perhaps fitting that Albert Shaw’s Lincoln biography and The infidel emperor and his struggles against the Pope: A Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century by Paul Wiegler were being remarked upon in journals and newspapers just as journalists were reckoning with what had happened in the first days of March. Both dealt with leaders during times of turmoil and deadly ideological conflict.
As of February 1930, the GOP was no longer content to keep silent, and President Hoover was coming under increased attack, especially after the shock defeat of the GOP candidate in Massachusetts’ second Congressional district, which was the old seat of the former Republican President Calvin Coolidge. The Republicans had held the seat for four decades, the loss of which was a sign of the Depression’s immediate political consequences. Then a real organized communist protest hit the streets. The Third International, the Communist International, aka Comintern, planned an international day of protest in the capitalist world. In the US, demonstrations occurred in at least 30 cities, including New York City, Detroit, Chicago, and Washington, D.C, and became the best known because of the USA's Achilles heel: race. (see note 1)
Tens of thousands gathered, many under the banners of the Communist Party USA, to protest mass unemployment and apparent government indifference. Not everyone was a communist; they did not need to be. The Depression was real enough, the unemployment crisis was punishing American workers and First World War veterans, folks who felt discarded by a system unaware of its coming collapse; they came out to ask for relief. The police were prepared to monitor it, but it all went wrong, and the marchers got the clubs put to them. Tear gas cleared them from the space in front of the White House. The size of the crowds, anxiety, and awareness of communist involvement were a risky mix.
At the beginning, President Hoover did not command the police with vigor; he instructed them to let the demonstrators protest as long as nothing disorderly happened, but such orders are too vague. Hoover did not want trouble. The crowd was provocative because it was integrated, with people commenting on the march for including White young women in proximity, side-by-side, with young African American men. White American racism was so ingrained in American culture that radical groups like the communists used it as their go-to when they wanted to push buttons. This was the 1930s. It was too easy to provoke authorities in a segregated city like Washington, DC. Likewise, while the real issue was unemployment, and the authorities should have been more concerned about the interracial group protesting unemployment, reporters and others could not help by comment on the marches being of both races and both sexes.
Federal employees did not join the protest, but they sure turned out to watch, after all, it started at noon, when many took their lunch breaks. This period, 1901-1930, has been argued for by scholars as the worst period in American race relations since the Civil War. To say that interracial protest was unusual is an understatement; as dark clouds descended on Germany in 1930, America was not the picture of sunshine. In the event, the police decided that it was in disorder, they moved to arrest the march leader, a local communist who decided to climb the White House fence to give a speech, not as provocative a move as it would be today as the White House grounds were far more open to the public back then. But the police decided in this case it was provocation enough, and then a young man, a teenager, grabbed a cop from behind to intervene against the arrest - a foolish, stupid, youthful move - and then it broke loose in the capital. Unemployment was almost 9%, and tensions were only going to rise. Some fought back with the notable example of the 19-year-old White young woman Edith Briscoe, a communist, wailing-on the back of the police officer about to beat a young Black man with a blackjack. She got a suspended sentence.
New York was something else, however; estimates range from 40,000 to 75,000 protestors who are thought to have packed Union Square. And then the police almost blew it by losing the sympathy of the press, not smart. The cops decided to disguise their officers as reporters, complete with press badges and civilian clothing, and then proceed to infiltrate the demonstration. Such a move was only going to make reporters angry at the police. A completely unnecessary provocation. But they got a lucky break. The police commissioner, Grover Aloysius Whalen, tried to reason with the ring leaders as his officers blocked their march on City Hall. Whalen offered a compromise to take the leaders to City Hall to meet the mayor, but communists, being communists, didn’t take the offer and tried to push their way to City Hall by force. What followed was what would be expected: a riot was declared, and the men with the clubs were sent in. Even so, Whalen’s men went beyond the need; tear gas, clubs, and firehoses shocked the senses.
In the 1930s, White supremacists were quick to accuse any racial complaint or protest of being a communist plot, no matter the issue’s reality or truth, and, being the 1930s, the complaints were all too real. But the communists always wanted that outcome because it made them look like morally upright ones and allowed them to attack the peaceful and democratic moderation of the vast majority of civil rights activists and organizations as sell-outs and weak. In the 1930s, the communists were not only a tiny minority, but civil rights activists were generally Christians and thus antithetical to the communist movement. The communists needed a sympathetic press, and they often got it by injecting themselves into questions of race, whether or not their presence was requested or desired, and normally, they were not wanted. Whalen was forced to resign a couple of months after the incidents of International Unemployment Day.
President Hoover did not remark on these events in the press conference the next day. Instead, he continued his upbeat prognosis on the economy:
All the facts indicate that the worst effects of the crash on employment will have been passed during the next 30 to 60 days. The resumption of employment throughout the seasonal trades, with the spring, the gradual strengthening of the various forces of recovery, and the successful and active work of the agencies that have been cooperating in restoration are all finding fine results, and I believe will remedy a very large portion of the existing hardship and distress.
—The President's News Conference March 07, 1930
Meanwhile, the Governor of New York, Franklin Roosevelt, was making headlines for fighting corruption and not turning a blind eye to trouble.