Unemployed Councils
Following his release on bail, Amter threw himself into unemployment work, launching a small newspaper called Jobless and agitating on street corners to crowds of passersby.
was advanced and an organizational agenda calling for unemployment relief, employment through public works, and the establishment of subsidized low-cost housing was cobbled together.
[9] The global crisis of capitalist economies remembered to history as the Great Depression which began in the 4th Quarter of 1929 accelerated the efforts of American Communists to organize unemployed workers.
[16] Under the slogan "Work or Wages" hundreds of thousands of often ill-organized protestors turned out across the United States to protest against unemployment and to demand government relief.
[17] The demonstrations and so-called "riots" associated with them served to publicize the existence and activities of the Unemployed Councils, as the March 6 events gained widespread attention in the press as the first large scale protests resulting from the recent economic downturn.
Foster, long time Unemployed Council activist Israel Amter, and editor of the Daily Worker Robert Minor.
[20] The gathering determined to call another convention, larger and more formal, to establish a new national organization which would exist in its own right, independent of Trade Union Unity League auspices.
[23] Minor, Amter, and Foster — all of whom had begun serving 6-month jail terms in connection with the International Unemployment Day riot in New York City, were named as honorary members of the organization.
[27] Protestors demanded the city provide unemployment relief, chanting the party slogan "We Want Work or Wages" and singing the revolutionary anthem "The Internationale.
"[27] The gathering of between 500 and 1,000 people was disbursed by mounted police, causing a melee to ensue in which plate glass windows of nearby businesses were shattered.
The young secretary of the New York Unemployed Councils, Sam Nessin, took to the floor to call the chair of the meeting, Mayor Jimmy Walker, "a grafting politician and a crook."
"[29] Despite its one-sided violence the Communist gambit was not wholly unsuccessful, however, as the next day the New York City Board of Estimate suddenly appropriated $1 million for unemployment relief—the first time that such an expenditure had been made.
[31] The January 1931 gathering decided to descend upon Washington, D.C., with a massive petition demanding Congressional passage of a Federal Unemployment Insurance bill.
[32] Another National Hunger March took place again in November of the following year, this time with a total of 3,000 delegates from across the country arriving in the capitol to present their demands for winter relief and unemployment insurance to individual congressmen and senators.
[34] On April 8, 1936, a unity convention was held in Washington, D.C. which formally merged the Communist-sponsored UC and the Muste-sponsored UL into the nominally Socialist WAA.
[35] The CPUSA was also forced to accept a minority of seats on the governing Executive Board of the organization, which retained Socialist David Lasser as President and Communist Herbert Benjamin as Organizational Secretary.
[35] Communist Party supporter Arnold Johnson would ultimately be elected to head the National Board of the new organization and headquarters were established in Washington, D.C.[34] In the estimation of anti-Communist historian Eugene Lyons, the Unemployed Councils were an agglomeration of "over 20,000 adherents—loosely organized, often [themselves] out of sympathy with their communist spokesmen, yet a sufficient force for demonstration, hunger marches, and sheer nuisance activities.
"[36] These individuals and the largely idealistic "earnest rank-and file communists" who led them are judged by Lyons to have been a "relative success" in moving issues affecting the unemployed to the national legislative agenda.
[36] Lyons contends that "top-shelf party bureaucrats" undermined the grass roots organization of the unemployed by foisting Third Period slogans upon them such as "Down with Yankee Imperialism!"
"[36] As their movement dissipated, "the Communists realized their salvation lay in a merger" with the Socialist-backed Workers Alliance, headed by David Lasser.
