WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION?

A sweeping history of minority self-help in the face of the Great Depression.

If UC Santa Cruz historian Frank’s book has a governing idea, it might be that, to quote Patti Smith, people have the power. In this instance, numerous people poleaxed by the Depression did not wait for the government to catch up, although Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal did help ease the suffering; instead, Frank’s subjects, primarily minority members, formed mutual aid societies, helping the most affected with “burial insurance, health care, ethnic solidarity, and cultural sustenance.” In some instances, she adds, these mutual-aid endeavors were long embedded in minority cultures excluded from such things as bank loans and mortgages. As Frank writes, Black communities across the country were hardest hit by the Depression, with more than 40 percent of men unemployed against slightly more than 27 percent of white men. Whites also formed mutual-aid societies, Frank adds, but these typically provided them “a way to draw a circle around themselves and keep out those who they identified as nonwhite.” Frank describes other actions, including a little-documented strike by Black wet nurses, whose own children were being monitored by the health department to make sure they were healthy and not being neglected. Not all popular actions were progressive or noble: one case study concerns the rise, mostly in the Midwest, of a KKK offshoot called the Black Legion, who terrorized nonwhite populations (which, in the eyes of Legion members, included Jews and Eastern and Southern Europeans). Frank suggests some level of cultural and social continuity in the fact that the Legion’s heartland is the heavily gerrymandered congressional district that Jim Jordan now represents.

A well-crafted work of social history that highlights little-known aspects of pre–World War II America.