15: Self-help in Hard Times

Question 1

The General Strike in 1919 Seattle was particularly threatening because it was what?

Answer 1

Peaceful

Question 2

What did women get in 1920?

Answer 2

The right to vote

Question 3

Who primarily gained from the increasing prosperity in the 1920s?

Answer 3

The richest

Question 4

True or False: Unemployment decreased from 4,270,000 in 1921 to 2 million in 1927

Answer 4

True

Question 5

The great textile strike in the Carolinas and Tennessee (Spring 1929) was the beginning of what?

Answer 5

Textile mill unionism in the south

Question 6

This activity brought the stock market crash of 1929

Answer 6

Wild speculation

Question 7

What fraction of the labour force was out of work by 1933?

Answer 7

1/4 to 1/3 (around 15,000,000)

Question 8

What did WWI veterans do in the spring and summer of ‘32, leading to their forceful dispersal?

Answer 8

Occupy Washington

Question 9

Which President defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 Depression election?

Answer 9

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Question 10

“The unorganized public, along with members of the fledgling trade-union movement, had virtually nothing to say about the initial organization” of what Depression era government plan? (hint: early FDR legislation)

Answer 10

The National Recovery Administration

Question 11

What what the goal of the NRA (not national rifle association)

Answer 11

Take control of the economy through a series of codes agreed on by management, labour, and the government, fixing prices and wages, limiting competition.

Question 12

What did unemployed coal miner do in Pennsylvania during the Great Depression?

Answer 12

Dug small mines on company property, mined coal, trucked it into cities, and sold it below the commercial rate. 5 million tons of bootleg coal were produced by 20,000 men and 4,000 vehicles by 1934. Juries refused to convict.

Question 13

True or False: 421,000 textile workers were on strike throughout the country in September 1934, and that year saw 1.5 million workers strike in all

Answer 13

True

Question 14

What new form of strike took off in 1936-37?

Answer 14

The sit-down strike

Question 15

What made sit-down strikes especially dangerous to the system?

Answer 15

They were not controlled by regular union leadership

Question 16

According to Zinn, why was a National Labor Relations Board set up (Wagner Act of 1935)?

Answer 16

To stabilize the system in the face of labour unrest

Question 17

Name the two “sophisticated” ways of controlling direct labour action that developed in the mid-thirties

Answer 17

NLRB would give unions legal status and negotiate with them; the union would channel workers’ insurrectionary energy into contracts, negotiations, union meetings, and try to minimize strikes

Question 18

What is Frances Piven’s argument about Labour Victories in his book Poor People’s Movements?

Answer 18

That labour won more concessions before it was organized into bureaucratized unions

Question 19

The New Deal reduced unemployment from 13 million to what?

Answer 19

9 million

Question 20

What economic event brought jobs back after the Great Depression?

Answer 20

WWII

Question 21

The minimum wage act (25c/hr in year one) which also installed 40hr work week and banned child labour, was instituted in which year?

Answer 21

1938

Question 22

Which groups did the social security act exclude?

Answer 22

Farmers. domestic workers, elderly

Question 23

FDR did not push a bill against this southern practice?

Answer 23

Lynching