What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, out from Beacon Press in 2024, explores the ways in which ordinary working people, in the face of economic crisis and ferocious racism, turned to collective action from below during the Great Depression. It’s structured as a series of four long essays: One explores mutual aid and mass protests demanding relief. Another looks at the forced repatriation of a million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and the activism that accompanied it, contrasting its erasure from US history with the enshrinement of the plight of white “Dust Bowl Migrants.” A third tells the story of a sit-down strike by seven African American women who worked as wet nurses for the city of Chicago, and the powers that underlay their audacious militance. The final piece explores a powerful network of white supremacist fascists in the Upper Midwest, known as the Black Legion. With both inspiring and sobering stories, the book is designed to speak directly to working people’s challenges today while offering a nuanced understanding of the race and gender politics of what each group did and didn’t get from the New Deal.

Praise

“The most important book on the Great Depression in a generation. The United States lurched between democratic renewal and outright fascism in the 1930s with no clear outcome in sight as European nations capitulated one by one to tyranny. Dana Frank skillfully shows how working- class people experimented with new forms of organizing based on traditions of struggles against racism as well as class and gender oppression. Even as many of their aspirations for equal justice remained unfulfilled—and forgotten—Frank shows that African American service workers, Mexican migrant laborers, and women organizers heroically transformed their mutual aid societies, unemployed movements, and industrial unions into a New Deal for the nation. Our understanding of the Great Depression and its contested legacies will never be the same thanks to this brilliant and timely book.”

-Paul Ortiz, author of An African American and Latinx History of the United States

“Dana Frank is an inspired storyteller whose work serves inspired purpose. Here, she surfaces stories of folks who mostly have been invisibilized as agents of collective struggle against oppression, precarity, insecurity, and exclusion. In four seemingly disparate accounts of grassroots collective action during the Great Depression, Frank reveals much about how politically nimble regular people have been, to both heroic and rancid ends. Always situating the history of specific collective action in the larger system of racism and patriarchy in a capitalist state, Frank leaves us with much to cheer and much to fear. Enjoy this beautifully crafted book, then get to work democratizing the economy and society.”

-Gwendolyn Mink, coauthor of Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress

“How did ordinary Americans respond to the biggest economic crisis in the nation’s history during the Great Depression? They mobilized consumer cooperatives, mutual aid societies, eviction protests, rent and labor strikes, or demanded relief from the government. Some were Socialists, Communists, or adopted no labels for their exertions of survival. Some were multi-racial and left-oriented intent on social transformation, while others were fascist and white supremacist seeking to restore an exclusive vision of America for hardscrabble native-born Protestant white men. Dana Frank translates these rich archival discoveries of formidable historical episodes into lucid storytelling that offers inspiration and warnings for our own times. Do not sleep on the riveting chapter on wet nurses in Chicago who organized a novel strike to amplify the value of their domestic and reproductive labor in 1937. As Frank centers these Black women she imagines a movement in which the most inconsequential can be lifted so that all work and all workers can be treated with dignity and respect.”

-Tera W. Hunter, author of Bound in Wedlock: Slave and Free Black Marriage in the Nineteenth Century

“In our time of climate crisis and resurgent fascism, many Americans have turned to ‘great men’ to lead us back to a time of imaginary virtues and moral clarity. Dana Frank, instead, looks to the history of the Great Depression for guidance and cautionary tales. In this honest, often surprising book, Frank reframes the 1930s as a moment in which common individuals struggled to make sense of a world in collapse. She reminds us of the precarity and promise of democracy in a nation prone to racial logics and xenophobic outbursts. We need this reminder, now, more than ever.”

-Matt Garcia, author of Eli and the Octopus: The CEO Who Tried to Reform One of the World’s Most Notorious Corporations

“In this urgent and illuminating book, Dana Frank shares stories revealing the collective power of marginalized workers, the real threat of fascism and the racism that fuels it, and the capacity of ordinary people to find and care for each other despite these deep structural divisions. She is that rare scholar able to mobilize the lessons of history against our present catastrophe.”

-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Public Events

Busboys and Poets, in conversation with Bill Fletcher, Jr., 6:00 p.m., October 8, 2024, 450 K St. NW, Washington, DC, sponsored by the Institute for Policy Studies.

Red Emma’s Book Store, in conversation with Maximillian Álvarez, 7:00 p.m., October 12, 2024, 3128 Greenmount Ave., Baltimore, MD

Bookshop Santa Cruz, 7:00 p.m., October 17, 2024, 1520 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz, CA

Books Inc., 7:00 p.m., November 15, 2024, Mountain View, CA

City Lights Bookstore, November 13, 2024, 261 Columbus Ave., San Francisco, CA

Elliot Bay Book Company, 7:00 p.m., November 17, 2024, 1521 10th Ave., Seattle, WA

Excerpts and Articles

“Ohio’s Little-Known Fascist Member of Congress: How a local prosecutor protected white supremacists and went on to a career in Washington, DC.” History News Network, November 4, 2024.

“You Know About the KKK, but What the Black Legion?” The Jacobin, October 18, 2024.
Reprinted in Portuguese in Jacobin Brasil, “Voce conhece a KKK, mas e a Black Legion?“

“Trump Says He’ll Expel a Million Immigrants. Believe Him–It Happened Before,” Los Angeles Times, October 10, 2024.

“No Money, No Milk: Wet Nurses Made a Show of Militance in 1937,” Hammer & Hope Magazine, No. 4 (Summer 2024)

Media

KPFA Against the Grain, “Collective Action in the Great Depression,” October 21, 2024.

Labor Heritage Foundation Podcast, “What Can We Learn From the Great Depression?,” October 13, 2024