Home > News & Public Affairs > Interchange – Out in the Cold: The Political Imaginary of the Unhomed in the Great Depression
An eviction protest in New York City dated Jan. 11, 1933.

Interchange – Out in the Cold: The Political Imaginary of the Unhomed in the Great Depression

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Today, workers in the United States are out of work. After the market free fall this spring, crowded lines at food banks replace crowded sports arenas. All industries contracted. Businesses of all sizes floundered. More than 20 million people lost their jobs in April alone, and 6.6 million unemployment claims were filed. In three months, we lost all of the jobs added to the labor market since 2008. The anticipated second wave of coronavirus will determine whether we retain the unexpected addition of 2.5 million jobs in May. The threat of another Great Depression looms.

We know the coronavirus shutdown saved lives. According to one study, the quarantine measures prevented about 60 million infections in the United States. Another estimate states that, if we kept up social-distancing measures and economic shutdown until the peak infection rate, we could limit infections and prevent as many as 600,000 additional U.S. deaths. That said, all 50 states have begun easing quarantine restrictions. Emergency rooms are bracing for a spike in cases.

The economic shutdown was successful in blunting the spread of the coronavirus, but it brought along the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, a decade defined by the major global economic trauma of the 20th century and the benchmark against which all other recessions are measured. The unemployment rate remains historically high. A second stimulus bill may or may not pass. For many Americans, the New Deal, launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1939, is the gold standard for how the government should respond to a national emergency. The New Deal funded immediate relief and jobs, and constructed a social safety net, which included a national retirement system, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, minimum wages and maximum hours, public housing, mortgage protection, and the right to collective bargaining. These programs, though rife with limitations, were the direct results of political protest and agitation by those deprived of basic necessities by a contracted and fundamentally unequal economy.

We focus this week on the resistance movements of the underclass during the Great Depression, a historical era of economic crisis that increasingly resembles the present.

For today’s show, episode producer Bella Bravo speaks with GUEST Cody St. Clair, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Indiana University, about the political imaginary of the homeless and unemployed during the Great Depression. St. Clair recently completed their dissertation titled “Homeless Modernisms: Aesthetics and Politics of the Underclass.” Cody St. Clair has studied how those squeezed out of the labor market–and out of their homes–gathered collective strength and pushed back.

As protests over the killing of George Floyd have taken over the streets of every major city, have converted hotels to homeless shelters and best friends into bail fund organizers, we must consider how the lessons of the Great Depression apply to our own moment. We must learn from the political imagination of the underclass.

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MUSIC
“Rolling Log Blues” by Lottie Kimbrough
“Pick Poor Robin Clean” by Elvie Thomas & Geeshie Wiley
“Out in the Cold” by Memphis Minnie
“I Ain’t Givin’ Nobody None” performed by Mae Glover
“Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” performed by Sarah Martin & Fats Waller

CREDITS
Host: Bradi Heaberlin
Episode Producer: Bella Bravo
Editing and Mixing: Sean Milligan & Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young

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