A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore available in Paperback, eBook
A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore
- ISBN-10:
- 0822353598
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822353591
- Pub. Date:
- 12/14/2012
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0822353598
- ISBN-13:
- 9780822353591
- Pub. Date:
- 12/14/2012
- Publisher:
- Duke University Press
A New Deal for All?: Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era Baltimore
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822353591 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/14/2012 |
| Series: | Radical Perspectives Series |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 394 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Andor Skotnes is Professor of History at The Sage Colleges.
Read an Excerpt
A New Deal for All?
Race and Class Struggles in Depression-Era BaltimoreBy ANDOR SKOTNES
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5347-8
Chapter One
Communities, Culture, and Traditions of Opposition
In its industrial development Baltimore is northern; in its social customs it is more southern than Virginia. —CHARLES JOHNSON, National Urban League
The social movements of the Baltimore metropolitan region during the era of the Great Depression emerged within a definite context and on particular historical foundations that had been constructed over a long period. To understand these movements, and to locate them within a national framework, this chapter will consider six features of the Baltimore region on the eve of the Great Crash; its location on the middle ground between North and South; structure and community of its metropolitan space; economic and political power in the region; the working class and its traditions; race and ethnicity; the African American community and its culture.
On the Middle Ground
Baltimore, situated fifty miles below the Mason-Dixon Line, was at the time of the Crash the pre-eminent border city of the pre-eminent border state. It remained, as it had long been, the proverbial "middle ground" between South and North, between historic territories of slavery and of free labor, between the subsequent homelands of Jim Crow ruralism and U.S. corporate capitalism. The region had a dual nature, an in-betweenness.
By the time of the Crash, Baltimore was a major industrialized metropolis of a type familiar in the North and on the West Coast but hardly known in the South. With a municipal population of 804,874 and a metropolitan population approaching 1 million in 1930, it was the seventh largest city in the country. By contrast, the two largest comparable southern cities, New Orleans and Houston, ranked far below in population, at sixteenth and twenty-third, respectively. Baltimore had a huge, diversified industrial sector; it was a center of food processing, iron and steel production, copper smelting and refining, fertilizer and chemical production, men's clothing fabrication, aircraft construction, and electronics and automobile manufacturing. It was also a major commercial center with road and railroad links to the rest of the country, and a harbor that connected the city to the nation and the world (see figure 2). By the end of the 1920s, its port was the third busiest in the United States; by 1937, it was second.
Baltimore was a very northern-like, working-class metropolitan region. By 1930, those holding working-class jobs represented a large majority of the total employed. Sharply divided by hierarchies of skill, race, ethnicity, and gender, the region's complex working class spread across the industrial, transport, and service-commercial sectors of its economy. A large fraction of the working class was composed of first-and second-generation European immigrants, who often lived in traditional or newly formed enclaves with others of the same national background. In addition, Baltimore's working class had long traditions of class struggle and organization comparable to those of workers in the older industrial regions of the country. In all of these ways, Baltimore was similar to northern and western urban centers; more than that, it was a constituent part of the emerging northeastern megalopolis, the largest urban system in the United States. It was a southern anchor of a chain of metropolitan regions that extended along the northern Atlantic seaboard from Baltimore and Washington, D.C., in the south, through the commercial-industrial port regions of Philadelphia and New York, to Boston in the north. Moreover, Baltimore's hinterland in northwestern Maryland—with its small Black population, Appalachian subsistence agriculture, commercial dairy farms, wheat fields, coalmines, railroads, local small industries, and occasional small cities with a few large industrial concerns—had deep historical ties to the Susquehanna River Valley and mountain regions of Pennsylvania; it was strongly oriented to the U.S. North.
However, Baltimore, in its in-betweenness, was also profoundly southern, and several of its socio-demographic features indicated this fact. While the proportion of immigrant White ethnics in its population (29.1 percent) placed it between the major northern cities, on the one hand, and southern cities, on the other, its "White American" population in 1930 was about 53 percent of its total—much closer to the southern than the northern pattern (see table 1). Moreover, much of Baltimore's White population had roots in and strong ties to the rural South. Baltimore's African American population of nearly 130,000, about 18 percent of the total, was proportionately larger than the Black populations of major northern urban areas. Although a few northern cities had bigger absolute numbers of Black residents because of explosive immigration during the Great Migration of the previous decade and a half, the large African American community in Baltimore, unlike the communities in the North and similar to those in the South, was not mainly the result of recent immigration. In fact, the proportional size of Baltimore's Black population had remained virtually the same for more than a century.
Baltimore's southern features were most readily apparent in its system of racial relations: it was a profoundly Jim Crow town. Its strict legal and customary system of segregation was comparable to those of cities in the Deep South, although not as severe and terroristic as some. Southern-style segregationist ideology was hegemonic in many sectors of the White population, where "Whiteness" was constructed in the most supremacist terms. Conversely, the region's large, long-established Black community had, over many decades, created on its side of the color line a rich array of social institutions and cultural traditions, including a durable freedom movement.
Finally, although Baltimore was embedded in the northeastern megalopolis, and its hinterlands in northwestern Maryland were northern in character, its overwhelming rural hinterlands in southern Maryland and on the Eastern Shore, with economies based on small-scale tenant farming and oyster and crab harvesting, were strongly oriented toward the U.S. South by commerce and culture. What little industry the region had was almost entirely limited to canneries along the shores of the Chesapeake Bay. "Native" Whites, with generations of forebears in the United States, predominated demographically over a tiny European immigrant population while holding the large Black population—about 30 percent of the total—in strict segregationist subjugation. Local White elites held much of the land, controlled the commerce, and ran the courthouse rings and county governments. Baltimore was the commercial and transportation hub, the main urban cultural center, and the chief emigrant destination for eastern and southern Marylanders and for those in the upper South beyond the Maryland border. The regions to the south of Baltimore could hardly have contrasted more with those of the north and west; Baltimore was a border city, not only in the national context, but also in the context of its own hinterlands.
Space, Neighborhood, and Community
In 1930, the "border city" of Baltimore radiated out from its harbors on the branches and bays of the Patapsco River a dozen miles from the Chesapeake Bay, and extended far to the north and west. This space—structured not only by geography, but also by economics, politics, and culture, as well as by race, ethnicity, and social class—was the stage on which the struggles of the Depression years played out.
The annexation of 1918 had tripled the size of the city within its formal municipal boundaries to nearly eighty square miles of land (see figure 3). Rail lines surrounded the port areas, with major terminals at Camden station to the west of the Inner Harbor; at Canton, to the east; at Locust Point, to the south, and at Fairfield and Curtis Bay farther south, with industry concentrated around the harbors and railways. The downtown area, directly north and west of the Inner Harbor, contained the city's main financial, commercial, cultural, and government locations. Moving to the north and west of the harbor complex, the number of industrial and commercial establishments progressively diminished, with the exception of an important group of textile mills several miles north on the Jones Falls waterway. Working-class residential areas clustered around the commercial and industrial concentrations, fanning out with population densities dropping (and class status rising) as the urban gave way to the suburban and then to the semi-rural.
The residential areas of Baltimore congealed from a number of autonomous towns and villages, including Oldtown and Fells Point (established in the early 1700s), the former cotton mill towns of Hampden and Woodberry on Jones Falls (1830s), and the company-organized industrial towns of Canton (1828) and Brooklyn (1880s). Many of these areas retained distinct identities as working-class neighborhoods through the 1920s and were still, to a large degree, "walking" communities, with residents working locally. Wealthy commuter villages of the late nineteenth century (Roland Park, Mount Washington, and West Arlington) and the early twentieth century (Guilford and Homeland) also continued to function as cohesive, semi-independent "suburbs" within the post-1918 city limits.
Ethnicity, race, and class frequently defined neighborhoods. The more recent European immigrant ethnicities—Jews, Poles, Russians, Italians, and Lithuanians—tended to concentrate in the poor, densely populated row houses of the working-class residential belts around the harbors. Sometimes they resided in relatively homogeneous communities such as Little Italy, in more mixed neighborhoods such as Locust Point, or in ethnically distinct sections of multiethnic communities such as Old Town or Highlandtown. By the late 1920s, however, many people in these poor White ethnic communities were migrating to areas formerly inhabited by more affluent "natives" and longer-resident nationalities. Eastern European Jews, for example, began to follow the earlier route of German Jews, moving to sections of northwestern Baltimore, where they established fairly homogeneous working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods. Others, such as the Italians, tended to disperse in several directions to less ethnically defined neighborhoods. As newer immigrant ethnics began to migrate away from the harbor area, they pushed longer-resident White ethnics farther to the north and west, often to the new "row house suburbs" of West Baltimore. Generally, geographic mobility within the city was the result of improvements in economic circumstances and resulted in a dilution of immigrant ethnic community and culture. Moreover, geographic mobility tended to weaken the vitality of residential community life, as work was ever more separated from neighborhood and home.
More affluent White groups also migrated out of the central city area during the 1920s, in part to escape class and racial/ethnic change. Upper-class residents from Mt. Vernon and Bolton Hill, wealthy neighborhoods to the north of downtown, settled in growing numbers in the more remote suburbs of Roland Park, Guilford, and Homeland. Increasing numbers of elite families moved beyond the city boundaries to the countryside at Green Spring, Worthington, and Dulaney Valley. The urban historian George H. Callcott sees this decade as a watershed, during which modern suburbanization was truly established and Baltimore County and Anne Arundel County were decisively pulled within the city's orbit.
African Americans, however, were all but excluded from this residential movement. At the turn of the century, Baltimore's Black population was concentrated in three areas of the city: west of the Inner Harbor near the Camden yards of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, in Old West Baltimore northwest of the downtown, and, to a lesser extent, in Oldtown. Over the next three decades, the African American population grew steadily, especially during the Great Migration after 1914; nonetheless, African Americans remained ringed in by White residential areas, where they were constrained by segregationist covenant, custom, and violence from breaking through. As a result, African American neighborhoods suffered from the greatest population densities, the worst poverty, the highest incidence of disease and crime, and the most oppressive social conditions in the city. Some changes, however, took place in the residential distribution of the city's Black population. Old West Baltimore grew the most rapidly, and by the 1920s it had become the demographic and cultural center of Black Baltimore, while new warehouse construction displaced much of Camden, the oldest of the three Black concentrations. In addition, with rising population densities, predominantly Black residential areas became more racially homogeneous, and African Americans resided on block fronts and thoroughfares, as well as on alleys and back streets, the traditional residential areas for African Americans in many U.S. cities. African Americans' residential experience was typical of the "ghettoization" of Black urban communities that occurred in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. True to its border-city character, Baltimore's ghetto formation occurred about a decade earlier than that of the major northern cities and perhaps two to three decades behind the process in major southern cities.
Finally, characteristic of the rapid post–Civil War industrialization of northern urban areas, Baltimore's growing industrial and commercial zones surged over their municipal boundaries. The land annexation of 1918 brought most of the region's industries back inside city lines, with one major exception: the steelworks at Sparrows Point. Located twelve miles southeast of the city center at the mouth of the Patapsco River, the giant Sparrows Point complex was founded in 1892 and purchased by Bethlehem Steel in 1916. It had its own company town, with planned residential segregation along lines of class, race, and skill level, and its own middle-class suburb in Dundalk.
Then, during the nationwide boom of the First World War and the 1920s, industry grew inside the city limits to the north, west, and south of the harbor areas. To the east, industry again leapt over the city lines, and major concerns such as Standard Sanitary Manufacturing, Crown Cork and Seal, Standard Oil, Western Electric, and Anchor Fence built new installations in the area between Sparrows Point and Baltimore proper. To the northeast at Middle River, Glenn Martin Aircraft, the showpiece of Baltimore's new aircraft industry, located its central production facilities on a huge, two-mile-square tract of land far beyond the city's borders. Bethlehem Steel invested another $1 million at Sparrows Point during these years, making it the largest tidewater steel mill in the world. Some working-class residential development followed the eastward extension of the industrial region, but the vast majority of the workers in the new industries commuted from the city by rail or bus, further weakening neighborhood-based community. The extramunicipal expansion of industry also weakened the city government's control over the region's industrial base while strengthening the hand of a number of the business-dominated boards and bureaus that operated across the city boundaries.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A New Deal for All? by ANDOR SKOTNES Copyright © 2013 by Duke University Press . Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
About the Series vii
Illustrations ix
Abbreviations xi
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 3
I The Context
1 Communities, Culture, and Traditions of Opposition 11
II Emergences, 1930-1934
2 Disrupting the Calm: The Communist Party in Baltimore, 1930-1933 45
3 The City-Wide Young People's Forum, 1931-1933 69
4 Garment Workers, Socialists, and the People's Unemployment League, 1932-1934 92
III Transitions, 1933-1936
5 The Lynching of George Armwood, 1933 119
6 Buy Where You Can Work, 1933-1934 140
7 The Baltimore Soviet, the ACW, and the PUL, 1933-1935 163
8 Seeking Directions, 1934-1936 187
IV Risings, 1936-1941
9 The CIO and the First Wave, 1936-1937 215
10 The CIO, the AFL, and the Baltimore Workers' Movement: The Second Wave, 1938-1941 245
11 The New Baltimore NAACP and the Metropolitan Region, 1936-1941 269
12 The New Baltimore NAACP, the State, and the Country, 1936-1941 290
Epilogue 313
Notes 319
Bibliography 353
Index 365