830 ★ CHAPTER 21 The New Deal
local economic activities. In June, by a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that New York
could not establish a minimum wage for women and children.
Having failed to end the Depression or win judicial approval, the First New
Deal ground to a halt. Meanwhile, pressures were mounting outside Washing-
ton that propelled the administration toward more radical departures in policy.
THE GRASSROOTS REVOLT
Labor’s Great Upheaval
The most striking development of the mid-1930s was the mobilization of mil-
lions of workers in mass-production industries that had successfully resisted
unionization. “Labor’s great upheaval,” as this era of unprecedented militancy
was called, came as a great surprise. Unlike in the past, however, the federal
government now seemed to be on the side of labor, a commitment embodied
in the National Industrial Recovery Act and in the Wagner Act (discussed later)
of 1935, which granted workers the legal right to form unions. With the severe
reduction of European immigration, ethnic differences among workers had
diminished in importance. American-born children of the new immigrants
now dominated the industrial labor force, and organizers no longer had to dis-
tribute materials in numerous languages as the IWW had done. And a cadre
of militant labor leaders, many of them socialists and communists with long
experience in organization, had survived the repression of the 1920s. They pro-
vided leadership to the labor upsurge.
American factories at the outset of the New Deal were miniature dicta-
torships in which unions were rare, workers could be beaten by supervisors
and fired at will, and management determined the length of the workday
and speed of the assembly line. In industrial communities scattered across
the country, local government firmly supported the companies. “Jesus Christ
couldn’t speak in Duquesne for the union,” declared the mayor of that Penn-
sylvania steel town. Workers’ demands during the 1930s went beyond better
wages. They included an end to employers’ arbitrary power in the workplace,
and basic civil liberties for workers, including the rights to picket, distribute
literature, and meet to discuss their grievances. All these goals required union
recognition.
Roosevelt’s election as president did much to rekindle hope among those
who called themselves, in the words of a worker writing to Secretary of Labor
Frances Perkins, “slaves of the depression.” His inauguration unleashed a flood
of poignant letters to the federal government describing what a Louisiana sugar
laborer called the “terrible and inhuman condition” of many workers. Labor