Lower Class Insurgency and the Political Process: The Response of the U.S. Unemployed, 1890-1940

Abstract

This paper examines the level of protest activity by the unemployed in the United States between 1890 and 1940 as a test of the value of a political process model for explaining social movement activity. Data on protest events and elite attitudes towards the unemployed were collected from newspaper articles. Voting behavior was used as an indicator of contested elections and unemployment levels were reflected by available indicators. Consistent with previous research on lower-and working-class mobilization, a change in the political environment was key to the extensive protest by the unemployed in the 1930s. Toward the end of the 1920s, and especially in the early 1930s, elites were no longer simply making public statements about the problem of unemployment, but were also discussing the need for aid programs. In the context of this new political environment, elections were once again contested in the 1930s, and extensive protest began in 1930, even before unemployment hit its high point in 1933. Thus, it was not simply deprivation, but the changed political environment which legitimized the issue of unemployment and created prospects for reform, which in turn helped produce the massive protest of the 1930s.The primary goal of the research reported in this paper is to further understanding of the development, and lack of development, of protest by the unemployed in the United States between 1890 and 1940. The focus is on resource mobilization, and more specifically, on a political process perspective on the development of social movements, and the interaction between political environment and deprivation in the mobilization of social movement activities.We examine a specific condition (unemployment) likely to produce hardship, presuming that unemployment creates hardship for the vast majority of the unemployed. It could, of course, be argued that the pain of unemployment is eased somewhat in agricultural settings, or through the provision of extensive welfare benefits. For the period 1890 to 1940, however, neither of these factors had much effect on the impact of unemployment. By the 1890s, most of the labor force was urban (U.S. Bureau of Census 1975), and the best historical descriptions of unemployment during this time period do not credit welfare support or food resources from private lands as significant factors in reducing the impact of unemployment (Feder 1936; Garraty 1978.) Our approach overcomes some limitations of past research which typically focused on all collective action events in a specified time period, often involving diverse issues and interest groups (Kerbo and Shaffer 1986; Snyder 1975:275; Tilly 1984). We examine a specific source of hardship affecting a segment of the population which can be followed over an extended time period in order to understand the changing parameters associated with collective action.' * Correspondence to: Kerbo, Social Sciences Department, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA 93407.1. In previous work we have argued for the use of "group an...

Was it Worth the Effort? The Outcomes and Consequences of Social Movements

“…In addition, other authors have addressed Piven and Cloward's argument, but focusing on the relief expansion of the thirties (e.g. Jenkins & Brents 1989, Kerbo & Shaffer 1992; see further Valocchi 1990). Again, although much of the disagreement with Piven and Cloward's thesis bears not so much on the results in themselves, but rather their interpretation, in the whole it is difficult out of this impressive amount of empirical work to provide a clear-cut answer to the question whether disruption can produce policy changes and, if so, what this means for the movements.…”

“Where do all the lovers go?” – The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950–2005)

“…but also columns and letters to editors which help gauge a social 'sentiment' longitudinally. As such, historical sociology is no stranger to historical, longitudinal analysis based on a single newspaper (for instance, see Kerbo & Shaffer, 1992;McAdam and Yang, 2002;Soule & Earl, 2005) provided that enough caution and care is taken in not overstating one's claims based on a single newspaper.…”

Micro-Dynamics of Protests: The Political and Cultural Conditions for Anti-U.S. Beef Protests in South Korea

“…Since the POS approach underscores the importance of political environment (Tarrow 1994:76), empirical research based on this theory has tended to examine the long-term trajectory of social movements in order to capture the changes of an institutional political environment (Almeida 2003;Jenkins, Jacobs, and Agnone 2003;Kerbo and Shaffer 1992;Kitschelt 1986;Noonan 1995;Olivier 1990;Rohlinger 2006;Santoro 2008), emphasizing the role of "specific configurations of resources, institutional arrangements and historical precedents for social mobilization" (Kitschelt 1986:58) in a given political system. For shorter term mobilization, the interactive features between more immediate aspects of the POS and protests are more pronounced because the political structure remains rather stable.…”