Unemployment, Class Consciousness, and Radical Politics: What Didn't Happen in the Thirties

Abstract

O NE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES between American political history and that of most European nations is the peripheral role played by class conflict. Although relations between management and labor have been often tense and sometimes violent, the American labor movement has not spawned a class-based or socialist party, and the American worker has not manifested the sense of class consciousness characteristic of European workers. Even during the depression of the thirties, when one might expect massive unemployment and sharp disagreement over governmental policy to have heightened working class consciousness and alienation, American workers remained allegiant to a capitalist economy and a democratic polity. They were mobilized to support New Deal reforms, not to support radical political or economic change. We know, both from the folklore of the great depression of the thirties as well as from scholarly accounts of that period, that the experience of being unemployed was a devastating one, both psychologically and economically. Why did such a massive disruption spawn reform, not revolution? In particular, why did those who