Americans are taught FDR was the hero of the Great Depression. For one historian, that’s erasure

Historian Dana Frank treasures a photo from a 1937 edition of Life magazine. It shows a group of seven African American women, clustered close, sitting on chairs in a small space. Each wears a fashionable hat and is bundled in a coat appropriate for the late Chicago winter. At first glance, the photo appears to be a gathering of friends. All are smiling, and some appear to be laughing, as they talk with each other.

The women were actually on strike, occupying the city hall office of the president of the Chicago board of health. As wet nurses for a local hospital, they were paid $0.04 for each ounce of breast milk they produced. The women all knew that the white wet nurses at another hospital were getting paid $0.10 per ounce. “They shouldn’t make any difference between us,” Louise Clark, a wet nurse on strike, told reporters at the time.

When Frank came across the photo more than 60 years after it was taken, she put it up on her wall, where it has remained ever since. “Their picture was all over the world,” Frank said. “It’s this amazing story of militant empowerment, and also about what a labor movement is like.”

‘It’s this amazing story of militant empowerment, and also about what a labor movement is like,’ said Dana Frank. Photograph: William Vandivert/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The strike was over in about two weeks, with one newspaper reporting that the women “settled” for $0.04 – the same amount they were protesting against. But Frank doesn’t see the end of their strike as a lost fight, as she writes in her new book, What Can We Learn From the Great Depression: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times.

As a second Trump term looms, Frank says it is important to remember that progress is not linear.

“Labor history doesn’t move forward in a single line of progression in which a single group of workers wins, hangs on to those gains and then other workers struggle and win for themselves,” Frank writes. “Rather, workers challenge employers, draw in allies and make demands that they may or may not win immediately or be able to guarantee for the future.”

It’s a messy kind of history, but one that Frank argues shouldn’t be ignored.

Frank’s book is full of stories that paint a radical picture of the Great Depression, one that shows people coming together during hard times, helping their friends and family through collective action and finding empowerment through solidarity.

She writes of mutual-benefit societies that provided education and healthcare to its members, at a time when one in four Americans were out of work. Grocery co-ops saw groups of people, particularly in African American communities, creating their own food stores to feed their communities. And in cities across the country, neighbors banded together to conduct rent strikes and storm relief offices.

It’s different from the story of the Great Depression that most Americans learn in school.

Americans are taught that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the hero of the era, ushering in the New Deal, a slate of policies that got Americans jobs and government assistance. For Frank, that’s a one-sided telling of history – and a form of erasure.

“Most mainstream history is, over and over again, the story of this great man – or sometimes you get a woman – and how they made history happen,” Frank said. “And then these ordinary people and their power become invisible.”

“Because of the unemployed movement and the protests, people came to understand that it was not their fault, that the system had collapsed and that the government should take care of the people and address the situation,” Frank said.

Frank points out that much of the relief seen during the Great Depression was largely for men and white families. Though women and Americans of color came together to help each other, many were left out of the New Deal.

In one chapter, Frank describes the Mexicans in the US, including some US citizens, who were pushed out of the country during the Great Depression. When anyone of Mexican descent showed up to relief offices, they were told they needed to leave the country and were given free train tickets to Mexico.

Frank uses the stories of this so-called “repatriation” as an opportunity to draw parallels with the stories that have come to define the Great Depression, like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or images like Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother. Both are often taught in history classes as the definitive experiences of the Great Depression. But Frank argues that the history of the era is more complex and ultimately richer than what most Americans remember from their high school history classes.

“Collective memory can play tricks on official narratives,” Frank writes. “Memories can be resurrected, challenged, subverted or slip sideways, and they certainly don’t stop at borders.”

Drought victims collecting food and clothing from a warehouse set up by the American Red Cross, in Lonoke, Arkansas, circa 1930. Photograph: Granger/Historical Picture Archive/Alamy

“Caravans” of people going from California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas flowed down to Mexico. As they left their communities, they were often greeted with support from their neighbors, receiving donations in the form of goods like clothing or food for their journeys. One picture included in the book shows a group of Mexican Americans in Union Station in Los Angeles, waving goodbye to the “repatriados” – or those leaving the US for Mexico – in 1931. Ultimately, about a million “repatriados” would migrate out of the US during the Great Depression.

“It’s a different story of collective action,” Frank said. “It was very moving. People lined the streets to cheer them on, even though they couldn’t stop. They didn’t have the resources to offer people to stay, but people donated clothes and all kinds of wonderful household objects and tools.”

In Frank’s final chapter, she tells the story of another kind of collective action, one that centered itself on white supremacy.

After the Ku Klux Klan collapsed in the late 1920s, an offshoot started growing in prominence during the Great Depression. The Black Legion was even more explicitly xenophobic and anti-Catholic, carrying out vigilante attacks to intimidate immigrant communities.

Whereas Klansmen had openly paraded through streets, the Black Legion swore their members to secrecy, with lengthy initiation rituals that promised violence to any members who revealed its violent activities.

The group only received national attention after police investigators in Detroit, defying threats from the group, prosecuted 12 of its members for killing a white, Catholic union worker. Up until then, the Black Legion had been able to grow to what some estimate to be between 100,000 and 1 million members across the United States, particularly in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Illinois.

“People know about the Klan. They don’t necessarily know about the second Klan,” Frank said. “How do some stories drop out of knowledge, and how do some stories become foregrounded?”

At the heart of the book is a critique of the US’s idealization of individualism – the idea that men pulled up their bootstraps and navigated the throws of the Great Depression by themselves. It’s the “stories that tell us that you can’t do anything about it, that it’s up to the important men …

“It’s a white-centered narrative, so racism is a minor thing, immigration is a minor thing,” Frank said. “But most of us live different lives. Our lives are embedded with having to deal with the ravages of capitalism.”

For Frank, the through-lines from the Great Depression to today are very clear. The Depression reshaped the role that the American government plays in managing the economy and economic welfare of its citizens. Social security didn’t exist before 1935, and neither did federal unemployment insurance. Two key regulating bodies, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), which oversees the stock market and banking in the country, were created at the time. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was created to give structure to employees who wanted to form unions at their workplaces.

Though the second term of Donald Trump spells an uncertain future for these institution, Frank notes that collective action has grown in recent years.

Workers have formed new unions at major companies like Amazon and Starbucks. During the pandemic, many Americans were introduced to the concept of mutual aid, with communities coming together to share food and supplies, much like during the Depression. Climate activists pushed for a “Green New Deal”, advocating for a new social order that would address the effects of climate change.

“The labor movement wasn’t invented overnight. Fascism was not invented overnight. People are drawing on all kinds of ways that they see a path forward, and they do it collectively,” Frank said. “It’s not an individualistic story.”