Many delegates agreed on his proposal that a special committee _______ the accident._百度知道
Many delegates agreed on his proposal that a special committee _______ the accident.
Many delegates agreed on his proposal that a special committee _______ the accident.A. survey
B. would survey C. investigate
D. would investigate
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& 　京ICP备号-6　IN THE U.X.A.
The Self-Help Movement in California in
Depression
The Self-Help movement of the early 1930s attempted to overcome
the social effects of the Great Depression through barter
cooperatives of the unemployed. This article focuses on California,
where the movement had its greatest impact, and on the Unemployed
Exchange Association (UXA) of Oakland, probably the most highly
developed group in the country. Included are photos by Dorothea Lange
and Imogen Cunningham, quotes from a novelized history of the
movement by Upton Sinclair, and an interview fifty years later with a
former member of the UXA.
Dorothea Lange
July 1932. The economy stopped. Factories locked, money scarce.
One out of seven Californians unemployed. Almost no social welfare
programs. Large numbers homeless, destitute, hungry. All around
vacant buildings stand boarded up. The fields are rotting with tons
of unharvested fruit and vegetables. Small farmers have no cash to
pay harvesters, an many are losing their land.
Food prices are next to nothing, but many thousands in the cities and
towns have nothing at all. California highways and rails are crowded
with the homeless searching for survival, including thousands of
"wild children." While over the static of every radio station flows
the soothing voice of Franklin Roosevelt promising if elected to
bring a New Deal.
"Hoovervilles," shantytowns of the homeless, have sprung up around
the country over the past three years. The largest in the San
Francisco Bay Area is Pipe City, near the railroad tracks by the
Oakland waterfront, where hundreds live in sections of large sewer
pipe that have never been laid due to lack of funds.
Carl Rhodehamel, unemployed and down on his luck, walks through
Pipe City, talking to the inhabitants. Rhodehamel was once an
electrical engineer at GE, a cellist, an inventor of several key
technological developments in radio and early "talkies," an orchestra
conductor and composer whose "Little Symphony" had once been a
favorite with KGO fans. There is a streak of genius in him, that will
sweep him into the leadership of an organization that will stir
California and the country.
He and two others he met in Pipe City, find an abandoned grocery
store that can be used for meetings, and a group of six unemployed
begin to meet and discuss ways out of their problems. Rhodehamel
says, Since the money system isn't working, we should form our own
system, and not use money at all: we should aim at providing
ourselves with everything we need to live, by barter.
He is not the only one with that idea. Barter groups of the
unemployed are already operating in Seattle and L.A., and are forming
all around the country.
The other five, like Rhodehamel, are skilled and experienced
workers, but all realize it could be years, if ever, before they'd
find work in their fields again. They decide to try the idea. They
begin going door to door in the neighborhood, the Dimond-Allendale
district of East Oakland, offering to do home repairs in exchange for
"junk" from people's basements and garages. It works.
They decide to try to gather all the unemployed in the
neighborh they distribute fliers throughout the
area. On the evening of July 20, 1932, about twenty people meet at
the Hawthorne School and organize the U.X.A., the Unemployed Exchange
Association (or Universal Exchange Association, as they'll call it
later). The X stands not only for eXchange, but for the "unknown
factor" in an algebraic equation, a social algebraic equation.
Six months later the UXA will be the object of a series of five
articles in the San Francisco Chronicle. and another series of three
in the Examiner. It will be noticed in news media around the country
as the most highly developed group in the Self-Help cooperative
movement springing up everywhere in America. Two young photographers,
Dorothea Lange and Imogen Cunningham, will journey around the UXA
together snapping a series of now-classic shots. Upton Sinclair will
take the UXA as his model for the EPIC (End Poverty In California)
Plan that he will run for governor on, and will come close to
later he'll write a thinly fictionalized account of the UXA
and EPIC in Co-op, a Novel of Living Together. For a brief moment the
country's consciousness will turn to East Oakland. Even FDR will look
and listen.
To a nation of dispossessed people hungry for a new social
equation, it will seem that all that is required to get from the
U.S.A. to the U.X.A. is a daring leap into the unknown.
Dorothea Lange
GROWTH AND GROWING PAINS
Their first focus was the neighborhood itself, a depressed
workingclass area, then (but not today.) predominantly white. They
began organizing the residents to fix up each others' houses and to
recirculate every variety of article and item among themselves to
where it would be useful. There had been little work done in the
three years since the crash of 1929, so there was a great backlog of
home repairs to be done. The abandoned grocery became their first
storeroom and commissary, soon overflowing with household and
industrial articles. Broken items were repaired or rebuilt. The
neighborhood, previously choked with despair and immobility, was
suddenly bursting with activity and confidence. People poured into
the new organization.
They soon began sending scouts around Oakland and into the
surrounding farm areas, to search out salvageable things and make
deals with their owners for them. Labor teams followed. All work was
credited at one hundred points per hour. Members exchanged points
earned for their choice of items in the commissary. Each article
brought in was given a point value, which approximated the labor time
that went into it, with some adjustment for comparable money value.
They also offered many services for points, including complete
medical and dental, garage, nursery school, barber. They provided
some housing and all of their firewood needs. At their peak they
would distribute forty tons of food per week to their 1500 members.
They called it Reciprocal Economy. They made no distinction in
labor value between men and women, skilled and unskilled, lesser and
greater productivity. At first they functione it
was all done on the books, without a circulating scrip. Members could
write "orders" - like checks - against their account to other members
far services provided. Eventually they began making trades that
involved part payment in cash.
THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY
The General Assembly of members held final power, They selected an
Operating Committee in semi-annual elections, to coordinate
functioning. The UXA was divided into various "sections":
Manufacturing, Trading, Food, Farm, Construction, Gardening,
Homeworkers, Communication, Health, Transportation, Bookkeeping,
Maintenance, Fuel, Personal Services, Placement, Food Conservation,
Headquarters Staff, Saw Mill, Ranch. The workers in each section
decided issues relevant to their work, approved or disapproved
Committee and Assembly actions, and determined the admittance of new
members into their section. They kept the numbers in each section
down to about twenty-five, to make decision- when
numbers got much larger, the section split into two.
The Operating Committee met four nights a week at their
headquarters on East 14th Street at 40th Avenue. These were open
meetings at which plans and decisions were thrashed out in democratic
discussions. Sitting about a huge round table, the only rule was to
speak one at a time. Anybody with an idea, member or not, was welcome
to sit in and was heard after the current commitments of jobs that
individuals had agreed to had been dealt with. On Friday nights the
Coordinators of the sections met with the Operating Committee to form
the Coordinating Assembly, the basic ongoing decision-making body,
The section Coordinators were appointed by the Operating Committee,
with the workers of each section holding veto power. The Coordinators
had no authority over members, and could be recalled at any time.
Power was from the bottom up. Outsiders often expressed amazement at
how well they functioned with "no boss, no foreman, no manager."
THE RED SQUAD
Word of the new organization quickly reached certain vigilant
ears. Word was passed to the Oakland police department that the UXA
was a "revolutionary" group with "Communist" leaders. UXA meetings
were raided and shut down by the Red Squad. The commissary was closed
on the pretext that they were violating an ordinance prohibiting the
sale of food and clothing from the same store. Utilities were shut
The core group, in the fall of 1932 about thirty strong, met in
secret to decide what to do. In the early hours of the following dawn
they finally agreed on an unusual plan. Here becomes apparent for the
first time the particular genius of Rhodehamel who, as chairman,
would steer the UXA through its life cycle. The entire organization,
then about one hundred members, went around town spreading a rumor
that the police and fire departments had changed their mind, and were
now helping the UXA, They made sure that the story found its way into
the rank-and-file of the police. Then they began holding open
meetings again and, as they'd hoped, members of the police force
came, not on orders evidently, but out of curiosity. Some of them
wound up participating constructively in the meetings. The raids
stopped and relations between the local government and the UXA
actually became helpful. They had forced the Oakland police to open
their minds, no small order then or now.
By the beginning of 1933 the UXA had a labor force of six hundred.
Anyone over applicants were screened, but only a
small number with unconstructive motivations were rejected. There
were provisions for expelling people but these were almost never
used. Such matters were dealt with in a different way: when someone
was known to be stealing, for example, instead of making accusations,
"We make it easy for them," Rhodehamel said. Before long the
offender, becoming aware that others knew, would either stop stealing
or shamefully disappear.
Beyond organizing barter and labor exchange, they began producing
articles for trade and sale. They set up a foundry and machine shop,
a woodshop, garage, a soap factory, a print shop, a food conserving
project, nursery and adult school . They had eighteen trucks that
they'd rebuilt from junk. They branched outside of town, and
maintained a woodlot in Dixon, ranches near Modesto and Winters,
lumber mills near Oroville and in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Imogen Cunningham
THE COORDINATING ASSEMBLY
Twenty-five men and women crowd about the table, elbows touching.
Another twenty form a second circle around them. At the table's
center a foot-high lighthouse stands, its top constantly revolving,
with the letters UXA flashing. 8 PM: Rhodehamel ("Rhodie") calls the
meeting to order. Mary McCanna takes down the day's commitments,
detailed in an indexed looseleaf book and written on small yellow
slips of paper. They go through the commitments one by one. What has
been done and what not? What deals made? Which jobs progressed and
which finished? The different coordinators speak about their
sections. They quickly go through twenty or thirty items. Fields have
tr wheelbarrows have been
ca orders have c
carpenting and plast a deal has been made for
arms have been ma a contract to build a
bar a barge and tug have been leased to haul
a group of apartments have been rented for labor
a wrecking dea an idle planing
mill an order for office f
a gasoline t a potato chip slicer is being
converted for a sauerkraut project. Voorhies reports that a farmer
near Hayward will trade sixty percent of his apricot and plum crops
for harvesting labor. Can we do it? Rutzebeck of Personnel says labor
is available, Hill is made coordinator. Price of Manufacturing
reports that the swing saw bearings have been cast and are ready.
Hanson says they need a new motor for it, Llewellan knows of a motor
but the owner wants a piano. Pugh says the Trading Section has one
listed, and they can get it for digging
needs tuning. Is a piano tuner on the exchange list? Yes, three of
them. After all the items are finished, there is a general discussion
of ideas for new activities, how to get more labor power, and how to
build leadership. By that time it is eleven o'clock and, since all
have had their say, Rhodie calls the meeting to a close. But people
linger afterward, and far into the night the discussion continues, of
how to implement barter on a societal scale, so all who can find no
place in the capitalist economy might join a cooperative and create a
whole new American way of life.
THE MOVEMENT
The UXA was far from the only Self-Help group in California or in
the Bay Area. In the summer and fall of 1932, at the same time as the
UXA was forming, similar groups were organizing around the state and
across the country, over one hundred in California alone. They
appeared wherever conditions were ripe among the unemployed and
underemployed, particularly near farming areas, It was truly a
spontaneous mass movement, spread by the wind, an idea whose time
seemed to have come. By the spring of 1933, there were at least
100,000 members in about 175 groups in California, and another 50,000
in 100 groups around the nation. Over the next two years over half a
million people were involved in at least 29 states. A survey in
December 94 counted 310 different groups, Among the earliest was the
Seattle Unemployed Citizens League, which set up labor exchanges with
farmers in the summer of '31. By 93 California clearly assumed
national leadership, with about two-thirds of the groups. Although
not the largest in the country, the UXA was seen by almost all
observers to be the most highly developed of all the self-help co-ops
in America.
Numerically the largest concentration was in Los Angeles county,
vhere about 75,000 people in 107 groups participated in the harvest
of fall 1932, Among the earliest in the state were the LA Exchange,
started by Bessie Mays, the Compton Relief Association, begun by a
group of World War I veterans, and the Unemployed Association of
Santa Ana (in Orange county). Since farming areas were easily
accessible in the south, most of these groups organized large numbers
of people to harvest produce in exchange for a share of the crops.
Nearby Orange county was also an area of concentration.
Several forms of Self-Help were usually distinguished, although
most groups practiced them all to varying degrees: exchange among
members, exchange of labor for goods or services, cooperative
production for trade or sale. Exchange among members was the most
widespread, and commonly involved part-payment in cash. It was only
in the later stage of the movement that many groups turned to
production, and most never did to an appreciable extent.
Dorothea Lange
BAY AREA GROUPS
By March 93 there were 32 Self-Help groups ringing the Bay: 22 in
the East Bay, 9 in San Francisco and the Peninsula, one in San Jose.
All had begun the previous summer and fall. Besides the UXA there
were a number of other distinctive ones.
The Berkeley Unemployed Association, at 2110 Parker Street, had
sections that included sewing, quilting and weaving, shoe repair,
barber, conserving, wood yard, kitchen and dining room, commissary,
garage, machine shop, woodshop, and mattress factory. At their height
they involved several hundred people and had full medical and dental
coverage. A visitor to the wood shop in December 1934 reported them
working on office desks and furniture, as well as fruit lugs for the
farm exchange section. They later changed their name to the Berkeley
Self-Help Cooperative, typical of many groups who considered
themselves no longer unemployed.
A few blocks away, on Delaware Street, was the Pacific Cooperative
League (PCL), which operated a garage, flour mill, wood yard, store,
canning and weaving projects, and ran a newspaper, the Herald of
Cooperation, later called the Voice of the Self-Employed.. They laid
claim to having organized one of the earliest labor exchanges of the
Depression, when they traded an Atascadero rancher their harvesting
labor for part of his apricot crop in September 1930. The PCL was not
a new organization like almost all the rest, but dated back decades
to when it had been part of a consumer co-op store movement of the
same name, begun in 1913. The chain, based in San Francisco, had at
its peak fourteen stores in California and 33 more in seven other
western states. It was promoted at one point by Upton Sinclair. But
the old PCL collapsed in 1921, strangled by centralization and by a
feud with the Atlantic coast based Cooperative League. The East Bay
PCL group managed to survive the death of the parent organization,
and staggered along at a low level until sparked to rebirth by the
depression and by the other Self-Help groups nearby.
The San Jose Unemployed Relief Council (later called the SJ
Self-Help Co-op) was formed by a group of laid-off cannery workers.
They soon had a wood yard, a fruit-and-vegetable drying yard, a
store, laundry, farm, soap factory, barbershop, shoe shop,
commissary, sewing project and contracted for a wide variety of jobs
and services, At their height they were about 1200 strong. The
Peninsula Economic Exchange, in Palo Alto, was organized by a group
of unemployed white collar workers, professionals, and bankrupt
merchants. With about a hundred member families, they had a store on
Emerson Street, a farm, a cannery, woodyard, and fishing boat. Unlike
most of the other northern groups, they issued scrip, in-house
currency, to members for hours worked. "Scrip exchanges" were more
common at first in southern California, but were usually plagued with
UCRA and UCDA
The southern California co-ops, in general, developed a different
approach from those in the north. While the UXA and other northern
groups defined their goal as developing permanent production
facilities to create an independent survival system for their
members, the southern groups, with the early leadership of C.M.
Christofferson, saw their aim as getting food, clothing, and shelter
for their members by any means necessary. These means included direct
action and "chiseling." Most southern groups never developed from
simple "vegetable exchanges" into a production phase. They took to
direct action to put evicted members back into their homes, and to
turn disconnected utilities back on. They "chiseled" necessities out
of farmers, businesses, and local governments. Unlike the northern
groups, which distributed items to members according to work
performed, many southern groups distributed "according to need," in a
somewhat indiscriminate manner. In the late fall of 1932 many of the
southern groups came together and set up the Unemployed Cooperative
Relief Association (UCRA). Christofferson was first chairman, and
later "Pat" May of the Huntington Park unit. Under Ray's leadership,
UCRA changed from a loose federation to a highly centralized
organization claiming to speak for a combined membership of 200,000
state-wide.
The first form "chiseling" took was workers not showing up to
perform promised labor, although the items exchanged for had already
been taken. Soon they began to "chisel" the local government for
grants. Mass "hunger marches" and large demonstrations forced the LA
County Board of Supervisors and municipal government to grant them
gasoline, trucks, and food staples. UCRA took to supporting
candidates favorable to their goals in local elections, and packed
considerable clout. The focus of the southern groups shifted from
labor exchange as they became primarily distribution organizations.
"No more work! We've produced too much already," became a rallying
The worst tendencies of "chiseling" culminated in one southern
town in a "co-op" run by a sort of ward-boss using a goonsquad, who
used the elimination of UCRA "radicals" as a lever for his rise to
power, backed by the local business community.
The northern co-ops criticized "chiseling," scorned the idea of
trying to get "something for nothing," objected to getting involved
in electoral politics, and declined becoming relief organizations.
Nonetheless, when UCRA moved to become state-wide, many of the
northern groups, including the UXA, affiliated.
In January 1933, UCRA parented five units in San Francisco and
several others in the East Bay. San Francisco UCRA #1 was quartered
at 101 Webster Street, with Emily Martin as chairperson. By the next
month there were five units in the city with over 900 member
families. But the SF groups suffered from long distances to farming
areas, from intense political factionalization, and from
comparatively available government "relief". In July 1933 UCRA held
its quarterly convention in San Francisco and, in the midst of bitter
fighting, split into two. The local groups never recovered, and by
the end of the year four had totally collapsed.
Down in LA, UCRA was undercut by governmental agencies creating
and fostering parallel organizations, first the Area Conference, to
which most UCRA units became affiliated, and later the Unemployed
Cooperative Distribution Association (UCDA), fostered by the federal
government in the fall of 1933. May's group from UCRA took over the
administration of UCDA, while UCRA became functionally defunct. Over
the year, May managed to preside over the "chiseling" and
distribution of $120,000 in federal grants for staple foods and
With the New Deal came the Federal Emergency Relief Act (FERA).
Rhodehamel, H.S. Calvert of the Pacific Cooperative League, and other
California leaders were called by the congressional committees
drafting the bill to confer on provisions concerning grants to
cooperatives to purchase means of production. Due in part to "Rhodie"
and "Cal"s efforts, funds were suddenly available. Rhodehamel however
argued in vain that they should not be outright grants, but loans
repayable in labor exchange. Furthermore, the law stipulated that
production facilities set up with FERA funds could not be used in
money transactions, while the self-help groups usually tried to
include money in their exchange arrangements whenever possible. This
last provision seriously undercut the co-ops' ability to function.
Rhodehamel tried to prevent the UXA from applying for a FERA
grant, out of fear of the strings attached, but the membership
decided to anyway. It was written in the UXA books as a loan,
although the feds considered it a grant.
By the end of 1934, FERA had distributed $411,000 to 81 groups.
The UXA received grants for their sawmill, for printing equipment,
gardening, and canning. The Berkeley Self-Help Co-op received grants
for furniture, mattress, and shoe operations. The Pacific Cooperative
League received grants for housing, milling, and weaving. The San
Jose Self-Help Co-op for dehydrating and other equipment, and for
renting farm land.
In southern California, under a different program administrator,
in order to become eligible for a production grant a co-op was first
forced to "demonstrate its managerial ability" by running a
distribution program for government staples and gasoline. It was in
order to administer this program that the federal government set up
UCDA and got the co-ops to join, making the independent UCRA
functionally obsolescent. Large "blanket grants" for gas and staples
were issued to UCDA, to be passed on to the affiliated groups. There
was a double-bind however: acceptance of blanket grant money by a
unit made it ineligible to obtain an individual federal grant for
UCDA applied for a blanket million-dollar
production grant, but this was eventually denied. Later however,
after federal blanket grant money stopped, the southern co-ops became
individually eligible again. Some did get production grants and
turned in that direction, but with not as much success as in the
Federal money was used as a carrot to influence the internal
affairs of many co-ops. A typical case was the San Jose Co-op, whose
grant was held up due to the presence of a "radical faction" in the
organization. This touched off a bitter struggle in the group. The
"Reds" lost and the grant came through.
Thus FERA money was a double-edged sword for the Self-Help
movement. But the co-ops would have survived it. The real kiss of
death for the movement was the WPA. But before that kiss descended,
the co-ops sparked one of the great grassroots electoral uprisings in
American history, EPIC.
Dorothea Lange
In September 1933, Upton Sinclair, novelistic chronicler of
American social reality, long a leading member of the California
Socialist Party, suddenly changed registration and threw his hat into
the ring for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination with a program
he called EPIC: End Poverty In California.
With "Production For Use" as its rallying cry, the EPIC plan would
have created state agencies to take over idle farms and production
facilities and turn them over to the unemployed, to "establish State
land colonies whereby the unemployed may become self-sustaining, to
acquire factories and production plants whereby the unemployed may
produce the basic necessities required for themselves and for the
land colonies, and to operate these factories and house and feed and
care for the workers..., (to) maintain a distribution system of each
other's products..., thus constituting a complete industrial system,
a new and self-sustaining world for those our present system cannot
Public bodies titled California Authority for Land (CAL), for
Production (CAP), and for Barter (CAB) would reside respectively over
rural, urban, and exchange. Besides this central plan were provisions
for a series of social welfare programs (there were virtually no
state programs at the time), and for a general redistribution of the
wealth downward through changes in tax laws.
EPIC took its immediate inspiration from the Self-Help
cooperatives, with the UXA as the classical model. Here was living
proof that these were not idle utopian dreams, but could actually
work. They didn't shun the label Utopian as pejorative, but wore it
as a badge of pride.
EPIC clubs sprang up around the state like grass after rain,
ultimately 2000 of them. The EPIC News reached a circulation of 1.5
Most of the co-ops, considering themselves economic and not
political organizations, decided it was out of their sphere to
endorse electoral candidates directly. Sinclair declared this
position correct, even though much of his core support came from them
and from the unemployed who had created them. The support of local
candidates by UCRA in LA and by the Unemployed Citizens League up in
Seattle had led to betrayal in the first case and defeat in the
second. It was better left to members to participate individually.
And participate they did. As Sinclair said later, "Of course
(self-help) was 'production for use', and those people automatically
became EPICs." Hjalmar "Hans" Rutzebeck, personnel coordinator of the
UXA, took a leave of absence and became a key aide in the campaign.
Sinclair, who had garnered 50,000 votes running as a Socialist for
governor four years previously, now swept the 1934 Democratic primary
with 436,000 votes, more than the other six candidates combined. But
the California Right, entrenched for decades, had not yet begun to
Most of the Democratic Old Guard defected to the R the
state organization declined to be of any support. Newsmedia, which at
first had usually reported favorably on the Self-Help movement and on
Sinclair, now turned around and attacked without quarter. Almost
every newspaper and radio station came out against him. An anti-EPIC
newsreel was shown in every theater in the state. Gigantic sums of
money (for that era) were spent to defeat Sinclair, in possibly the
most vicious and libelous campaign in California history.
Sinclair countered by going to the New Deal for support.
Roosevelt, in office only a year and a half, had decided not to
single out any particular Democrats for special endorsement. Sinclair
noted that this did not exclude his endorsing any particular plan. He
conferred with Harry Hopkins, the Relief Administrator (later to set
up the WPA). Hopkins announced that he was ready to work with EPIC;
he presented it to FDR as a potential hothouse for a national plan.
Sinclair met with Roosevelt. Sinclair recounts the conversation:
"At the end he told me that he was coming out for production for
use. I said, 'If you do that, Mr. President, it will elect me.'
'Well,' he said, 'I am going to do it.'"
FDR indicated he would come out for the plan during a nationwide
radio address scheduled for the week before the election, and
Sinclair hinted publicly that this would happen. On the night of the
broadcast, the entire EPIC movement was glued to the radio. When
Roosevelt signed off, few could believe the speech was over and he'd
said nothing about production for use. A mood of doubt suddenly
permeated the organization, where joyous optimism had reigned.
Sinclair's main antagonist was the incumbent Frank Merriam,
seventy and somewhat senile, who'd saved himself from being dumped by
his own party by his violent suppression of the San Francisco
longshore strike and general strike, which took place shortly before.
THE GENERAL STRIKE
The unions and the Self-Help groups had mostly positive relations.
A good number of workers belonged to both a union and a co-op. Some
Self-Help co-ops, such as the San Jose Unemployed Relief Council,
were staffed by unionists. Others, such as the UXA, decided
specifically that they would not seek to take over any jobs already
being performed by steadily employed labor.
This friendship paid off in mutual solidarity during the San
Francisco General Strike. The co-ops of the Bay Area were able to
move about freely, while "normal" commerce was blockaded. Both the
unemployed and the strikers had fruit and vegetables "at a time when
money could not procure them."
Upton Sinclair gives a fictionalized account in Co-op:
The cutting of wages and discharge of union workers brought its
inevitable result... For a week the unions ran the town... They
issued a list of restaurants which were al the
hospitals and a few such institut everything
else was blockaded... The Self-Help Exchange was of course on the
white list. There were numbers of unemployed teamsters and
longshoremen who belonged to it, and all the trucks got permits and
went freely through the picket lines. They were hauling food for the
and you may be sure their contact men were out picking up
all the perishable stuff that was lying about... Everybody connected
with the strike had bananas for breakfast, lunch and supper for
several days. And just as they were beginning to tire of them, came
sauerkraut, barre and then crates of lettuce,
and sacks of sprouting onions and potatoes.
Can there be any doubt that those barrels came from the UXA kraut
The unions, like the co-ops, declined to get directly involved in
EPIC in any major way, though Sinclair did have the support of the
working as well as the "workless", and offered them the thirty-hour
THE ELECTION
For his repression of the General Strike Republican Governor Frank
Merriam suddenly became the darling of the reactionary right, who
threw all their forses behind his re-election campaign.
In the end, Sinclair got almost 900,000 votes, 37%, to Merriam's
49%, while a liberal third party candidate got the difference.
The EPIC uprising, even in electoral defeat, took much of the bite
out of the state's right wing for decades afterwards. The reflection
of many of EPIC's proposals can be seen in later New Deal programs.
Sinclair went on to offer a national version of EPIC, win a
Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and later be nominated for a Nobel Prize
by a group that included Mahatma Gandhi, George Bernard Shaw, and
Bertrand Russell.
Imogen Cunningham
CONSUMER CO-OPS
After the electoral defeat, EPIC leaders split on what to do next.
While Sinclair took off on a national speaking tour, a group led by
Frank Taylor set up a Production for Use Committee and worked to turn
the EPIC energy into a consumer co-op movement. The consolidation of
buying power would be a step to gaining control of the economy, they
A large number of EPIC groups planned buy by
the next fall there were 210 consumer co-ops in California, with
50,000 members, almost all the groups newly organized. Among the most
successful at first were New Day Co-op in Oakland, with 1000 members,
and Producers-Consumers Co-op at 668 Haight Street in San Francisco.
But these and the great majority of the others quickly collapsed.
Former members of New Day however became leaders in Pacific
Cooperative Services, organized in 1936. In January of the next year
they opened a tiny store, to which the Berkeley Co-op, with around
100,000 member families at its height, traced its central root.
WPA AND THE COLLAPSE OF SELF-HELP
The Works Progress Administration of 1935, promising a cash job at
a decent wage to every unemployed person able to work, undercut the
entire Self-Help movement. The government had cut off cash incomes
for cooperators using FERA-funded production facilities, and now
dropped the other shoe. Members could not be in two places at once,
and had to choose between the limitations of barter or an assured
cash income. The New Deal did not really want independent
cooperatives as a permanent Sinclair wound up
calling WPA "that arch-enemy of self-help." Rhodehamel tried to
prevent a mass exodus from the UXA by arguing that these government
programs would be temporary and, if they let the UXA collapse,
members would have no cooperative to come back to when WPA was shut
down. Nonetheless the exodus took place. Hundreds of groups around
the country collapsed. The UXA, like the rest, found a sudden labor
shortage, They now had difficulty delivering on work promised, and
fell deeper and deeper into a hole.
Sinclair pleaded with Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins to no avail to
let work in the cooperatives count as WPA hours. This would have
saved the co-ops. As a last-ditch effort, the UXA sent Rutzebeck,
their personnel director, to Washington to try to plead their case
directly to FDR. Rutzebeck describes the interview in a fictionalized
account of the movement he later wrote, Hell's Paradise, which covers
much of the same area as Sinclair's book Co-op. (Sinclair made
Rutzebeck the central character in Co-op, so Hjalmar wrote his own
version in part to set the record straight.)
Even though FDR showed interest and openness, Rutzebeck knew that
WPA director Hopkins was no longer favorable toward independent
co-ops. Hopkins was committed to the top-down centralized WPA
bureaucratic approach. Rutzebeck left the interview with Hopkins
knowing that "the Relief Administrator would see to it that the
papers on Reciprocal Economy were kept as far away as possible from
the occupant of the White House."
It is one of the little-known ironies of history that at the same
time as Adolph Hitler was destroying the German cooperative movement
with blood and fire (as Mussolini had done earlier), Roosevelt was
destroying the American movement with love.
The New Deal was far from the only problem of the Self-Help
movement. Besides the usual personality clashes and leadership
disputes that are a fact of life in all organizations, especially
democratic ones, the co-ops were beset by a number of particular
difficulties.
In production-oriented groups, such as the UXA, productivity was
an ongoing problem. When they decided that all work would be worth
the same on a time basis, they hoped that spirit and education would
make up for the inevitable unproductive attitudes in same members.
Despite weekly classes, the UXA School of Reciprocal Economy was
never able to overcome the "employee mentality" of some members, who
tried to put in as many hours as possible with no care for
productivity. The result was the piling up of more points on the
books than the organization had products to redeem them with. This
was a problem in all the groups that kept track of hours. The
southern co-ops which distributed "according to need" circumvented
this problem on paper but in reality had a similar affliction. The
scrip exchanges were hit with particular severity, as the groups
tended to issue too much and it quickly depreciated in value. They
were further hampered by a state law prohibiting scrip to be used in
the payment of wages.
The field of scavenging operations of the co-ops became slowly
diminished. Their work eventually decreased the surplus products in
their areas. This was a natural and unavoidable process, as the
depression was brought on in part by "over production," and time
depleted surpluses over a few years. High turnover rate of younger
members was a problem. These tended to move on when they found job
openings, while the older members, largely "unemployable," tended to
stay in the co-ops for the long run. The result in some instances was
a dearth of muscle power. The median age of the UXA was 48.
Many co-ops were "entered into" by members of radical groups who
had little interest in the actual day-to-day work, but were there
mainly in an attempt to turn the co-ops to political ends. Since by
their very nature co-ops have a radical aspect,
many co-ops were founded by social revolutionaries. Outsiders guilty
of disruptive "entrism" were usually isolated and soon gone. The
attitude of the Communist Party of the time (pre-Popular Front) was
that the co-ops and EPIC were not far enough "" they attacked
Sinclair continually during his campaign, while a short time later
they were supporting people far to his right.
&1983 By Michael Ghelerter
OSER PRICE
Oser Price was Coordinator of the Manufacturing section of the UXA
from late in 1932 until the organization started to collapse in
mid-1935, He joined the UXA after having been laid off from his job
as a tractor tool designer in June 1930. Born in northern California
in 1900, he was a Berkeley resident when I interviewed him in 1983, a
student of welding, and as vehement a proponent of cooperation and
self-help as he was fifty years before.
Here are some of his thoughts about the UXA fifty years later:
"The Coordinating Assembly had a big round table - nobody was at
the head. There we held weekly brainstorming sessions. We could solve
some of the most difficult problems by everybody tossing in their
ideas, no matter how wild they were, and we would come up with
answers that would work.
"We were too busy scratching around getting all the things we
needed to survive to have any sort of hassle.
"Initially the organization had no capital. Member production
generated most of it. The accumulated capital would have formed the
basis for ownership of natural resources had not member-created
inflation intervened. Timekilling caused fatal inflation. Production
was no longer the name of the game for many members.
"The thing that killed it was the cash flow from the WPA. It
drained off people who needed money - and everybody did need some.
People couldn't be in both the UXA and in WPA at the same time. Those
who had to have cash took WPA. Soon there weren't enough people
available to make the UXA work.
"Consider this: socialism as far as absolute necessity goes, and
free enterprise the rest of the way. All of us work a certain amount
of time or produce a certain amount, whatever it takes to produce a
minimal survival: one-and-a-half, two, four hours a day, whatever it
takes. Beyond that everybody's on his own, and can produce or make
all he can. That way you don't squelch creativity or initiative. To
reduce bureaucracy to zero, you have to have as much as possible of
what's done and how it's done in the hands of the people who are
"Worker ownership, that's the key. I don't care how big the
organization, if you have nothing but worker ownership, it'll work.
"Franklin Roosevelt was criticized bitterly by business for
instituting the relief programs, but he kept this country from going
into a revolution, and a bloody one... Maybe it would have been good:
we could have cleaned house on a lot of evils that were going on.
"As to the future, it can happen again i it's
all up to you."
THE PAST AND THE FUTURE
Although Roosevelt's programs alleviated some of the problems of
the depression, the "New" Deal turned out to be temporary, and
California, like the nation, slumped back into lethargy as the late
thirties progressed. WPA ended, but the Self-Help movement did not
revive, as the country and the world braced for war. Rhodehamel, like
many others, saw it coming, and felt that the movement would not
revive until after it was over. "But all wars end, and when this one
is ended... we or such as we shall proceed again." Finally World War
II snapped the country and the economy out of the depression, created
"full employment," and gave birth to the mighty industrial machine
that emerged at the war's end. By that time Rhodehamel and many of
the others who made the movement were no longer with us, and the
movement on which they pinned their hopes and dreams was but a faint
memory in America's mind.
If the government had not undercut the cooperatives, would they
have become a permanent part of the economy? What if EPIC had won:
could it have actually ended poverty and unemployment? Rather than
speculate about what might have been, let us instead note that around
us today is a situation in many ways reflecting that of 1932, and
consider what might yet be.
Rhodehamel stressed that a primary reason that cooperatives were
needed was that a growing body of people were being permanently
displaced by technological changes. The ranks of the unemployed in
the thirties, like today, were filled with highly trained and skilled
people who would never find a job in their fields again, particularly
middle-aged people. Today that pro we are being
told continually to prepare ourselves for a permanent situation of
high unemployment. As America changes from a production economy to a
"service economy" and production shifts to multinational firms with
factories in Asia, a "permanent" underclass of unemployed,
underemployed, and never-employed is being formed. Unemployed
associations and self-help cooperatives are the natural
organizational forms that spring from people in this situation, just
as labor unions are natural for the employed.
Will the unemployed settle for "permanent unemployment"? Or might
the unemployed rise again in a social movement? Could there be a new
version of EPIC and the UXA?
Perhaps the final curtain on the Self-help movement has not yet
been dropped.
Copyright &
By John Curl.
All Rights Reserved.
This article was originally published in the
East Bay Express.}