WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? | Busboys and Poets Books

Drawing on little-known stories of working people, WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? amplifies voices that have been long omitted from standard histories of the Depression era.

In four tales, Professor Dana Frank explores how ordinary working people in the US turned to collective action to meet the crisis of the Great Depression and what we can learn from them today. Readers are introduced to

• the 7 daring Black women who worked as wet nurses and staged a sit-down strike to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination
• the groups who used mutual aid, cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief to meet their basic needs
• the million Mexican and Mexican American repatriados who were erased from mainstream historical memory, while (often fictitious) white "Dust Bowl migrants" became enshrined
• the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist organization that saw racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and fascism as the cure to the Depression

While capitalism crashed during the Great Depression, racism did not and was, in fact, wielded by some to blame and oppress their neighbors. Patriarchy persisted, too, undermining the power of social movements and justifying women's marginalization within them. For other ordinary people, collective action gave them the means to survive and fight against such hostilities.

What resulted were powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity that allowed people to provide each other with the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life. The New Deal, when it arrived, provided vital resources to many, but others were cut off from its full benefits, especially if they were women or people of color.

This book shows us how we might look to the past to think about how we can shape the future of our own failed economy. These lessons can also help us imagine and build movements to challenge such an economy--and to transform the state as a whole--in service to the common good without replicating racism and patriarchy.

Dana Frank is joining us on the Busboys stage alongside former president of TransAfrica Forum and senior scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies Bill Fletcher Jr. to share more about how the Great Depression informs our present and future. Copies of the book will be available for purchase during and after the event, and Frank will be signing following the program.

This event is free and open to all. Our program begins at 6:00 pm, and will be followed by an audience Q&A. Copies of WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please note that this event is in person and will not be livestreamed. 

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Dana Frank is Professor of History Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her new book (released October 8 from Beacon Press), What Can We Learn From the Great Depression? Stories of Ordinary People and Collective Action in Hard Times, takes a new look at working-class activism during the 1930s from the perspective of our own time, examining mutual aid, eviction protests, the expulsion of a million Mexicans and their collective responses, a sit-down strike by African American women working as wet-nurses, and a white supremacist fascist organization in Ohio known as the Black Legion. Her previous books on the history of US labor, race, and gender include Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; Purchasing Power: Consumer Organizing, Gender, and the Seattle Labor Movement, 1919-29; and with Robin D.G. Kelley and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls, and the Fighting Spirit of Labor's Last Century. She is also a longtime expert and activist working on labor and grassroots activism and US policy in Honduras, and the author of The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup, and Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America.

Bill Fletcher Jr. is the former president of TransAfrica Forum; a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies; and in the leadership of several other projects. Fletcher is the co-author (with Peter Agard) of “The Indispensable Ally: Black Workers and the Formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, 1934-1941”; the co-author (with Dr. Fernando Gapasin) of “Solidarity Divided: The crisis in organized labor and a new path toward social justice“; and the author of “‘They’re Bankrupting Us’ – And Twenty other myths about unions.” Fletcher is a syndicated columnist and a regular media commentator on television, radio and the Web, and a member of The Nation's Editorial Board.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Busboys and Poets 450K, 450 K St NW, Washington, United States