Report from a Campfire of the Resistance, San Francisco 2024

The dust had not yet settled around the White House and the foul air had not yet cleared from above the nation’s capital, but the campfires of the resistance were already burning brightly. They were burning brightly on a recent night at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco’s North Beach, where UCSC Professor Emerita Dana Frank spelled out the lessons that might be learned from the Depression of the 1930s and applied to the present day.

In two words, her advice to the audience of wanna-be resisters was “collective action.” Or as many organizers, activists and protesters shouted in the 1930s, in the streets, on factory floors, in tenements and apartments where residents were threatened with eviction, “Solidarity” and even “Solidarity Forever.”

Frank explores the nature of collective action in a new book from Beacon Press titled What Can We Learn from the Great Depression in which she tells stories of ordinary people who did extraordinary things and against the odds.

The City Lights website that promoted Frank’s event explained that “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.” Sounds like the here and now, doesn’t it? What goes around comes around.

Frank writes that the big, timely message from the New Deal is that “recovery is a complex and painful process that requires the participation of many, not directives from a few. And that, ultimately, we’re all in this together.” Of course, some are “in this” more than others. The wealthy and the powerful have often argued that “we’re all in this together” to obscure inequalities and to blunt class warfare.

What We Can Learn from the Great Depression is both a work of deconstruction and reconstruction. It deconstructs many of the major icons, images, and stories of the 1930s: the white migrant woman, the white striking factory worker, and the white Dust Bowl Refugee from Oklahoma and Texas who flocked to California.

Omitted from the history books and the movies, Frank points out, were Mexicans who had worked in the US and who under pressure returned to Mexico, Black women who sold their breast milk and who went on strike for higher wages, plus the members of the Black Legion, a red-white-and blue fascist organization, and an off-shoot of the Ku Klux Klan that targeted the usual suspects: Blacks, immigrants, Catholics and Jews. Black Legion stalwarts believed in America First. They are the forerunner of the Proud Boys who stormed the nation’s capitol on January 6,  2021 and aimed to topple the US government. Black Legion Headquarters was located in Detroit, Michigan where they assassinated labor organizers. It could and it did happen here and it could happen here once again.

At City Lights, Frank was fired up. “We need an anti-racist, anti-imperialist working class movement,” she said. In response to a question from the audience about the mood of Americans during the Depression, Frank argued that “people were flipped out.” She added, “For a time, there was a lot of self-blame. Americans flawed themselves for their plight. They learned to place the blame on the government.”

She described John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as a flawed account of the Dust Bowl and the refugees from Oklahoma that offered readers “white supremacist stuff.” She noted that the best book about the 1930s is still Studs Terkel’s Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. When she segued to the present, she observed that “Marco Rubio is insane,” and added, “We’re gonna see a lot of China bashing in the days ahead; anti-Asian racism will sky rocket and fascism will be resurgent. ”

Not a pretty picture, but a picture that calls for more campfires of the resistance from San Francisco to New York, from blue states to red states, and everywhere that Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Billie Holiday sang to and for the American people and to and for folks around the world.

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