Toward a New Deal in Baltimore

People and Government in the Great Depression

Jo Ann E. Argersinger

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807857243, 9780807817698
• eBook ISBN: 9781469639581
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Jo Ann Argersinger’s innovative analysis of the New Deal years in Baltimore establishes the significance of citizen participation and community organization in shaping the welfare programs of the Great Depression. Baltimore, a border city divided by race and openly hostile to unions, the unemployed, and working women, is a particularly valuable locus for gauging the impact of the New Deal.

This book examines the interaction of federal, state, and local policies, and documents the partial efforts of the New Deal to reach out to new constituencies. By unraveling the complex connections between government intervention and citizen action, Argersinger offers new insights into the real meaning of the Roosevelt record. She demonstrates how New Deal programs both encouraged and restricted the organized efforts of groups traditionally ignored by major party politics. With federal assistance, Baltimore’s blacks, women, unionizing workers, and homeless unemployed attempted to combat local conservatism and make the New Deal more responsive to their needs. Ultimately, citizen activism was as important as federal legislation in determining the contours of the New Deal in Baltimore.

Originally published in 1988.

A UNC Press Enduring Edition — UNC Press Enduring Editions use the latest in digital technology to make available again books from our distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These editions are published unaltered from the original, and are presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both historical and cultural value.

CHPATER 1 The Urban Setting

Baltimore between the Wars

The prospect of a decade of hard times seemed remote in Baltimore at the onset of 1930. Only minor reverberations from the stock market crash had been felt in the city’s business community. Although few businesses expected significant economic growth, still fewer anticipated a permanent decline. Reacting to what appeared to be a temporary slump, one city resident wryly observed in January 1930: “No man fears there will be actual starvation in America, but every man fears that he may have to smoke cheaper cigars and drink worse gin; and this prospect throws a pall of gloom over the whole business world.”¹

But the city’s business community, and especially those activist boosters who comprised the Baltimore Association of Commerce (BAC), rejected even that restrained vision of economic retrenchment. Their optimism grew out of their view of the city’s economic experience during the 1920s. Gently chided by H. L. Mencken as “boosters, boomers, go-getters and other such ballyhoo men,” BAC members rarely missed an opportunity to recite the industrial advantages of the nation’s seventh-largest city. Buoyed by the 1918 municipal annexation that had tripled the city’s size—from 30 to 92 square miles—the association boldly, if erroneously, predicted that the city’s 1920 population of 733,000 would reach the million mark in 1930. In its brochures, the BAC gave front-page billing to Baltimore’s reputation as a “low-wage” town and promised prospective businesses a tractable, nonunion, predominantly white, “100% American” work force. The association reminded its audience that truly “American workers, whether white or black, are rarely found among the ranks of the Communist” and added that if labor problems occurred there was also an “ample supply” of unskilled blacks to call on for strikebreaking services.²

The industrial growth of the 1920s further buoyed city spirits, offering fresh evidence of a city on the move. Baltimore added significantly to its highly diversified industrial base by attracting 103 new plants, including Western Electric, American Sugar, McCormick Spice, and the Lever Bros, and Proctor and Gamble soap factories. Bethlehem Steel, which drew many of its workers from within the city, spent $100 million to expand its plant in nearby Sparrows Point; and its president, Charles Schwab, provided the BAC with a memorable quotation when he exclaimed that “there is no place in the United States so susceptible of successful industrial development” as Baltimore. The volume of foreign trade handled at the city’s port facilities also grew; Baltimore jumped from a ranking as the nation’s seventh most active port in 1920 to third in 1926. The dust and noise of construction became constant companions to city residents in the 1920s. Modern skyscrapers altered both the city’s skyline and its image, and the construction of paved streets facilitated the flow of traffic. By 1930 Baltimore contained 929 miles of paved streets, nearly 50 percent more than at the end of the Great War. Houses were hurriedly built, filling in the newly annexed area. By the mid-1920s more than 6,000 houses were being constructed annually, and by the end of the decade the percentage of residents owning homes climbed to over fifty, representing an increase of about three percentage points from 1920. Municipal officials contributed to the building boom by authorizing the construction of larger, more spacious schools, new playgrounds, and recreational facilities. The city’s private entertainment industry also expanded, attending to the needs of a commercialized citizenry. It was an era of autos and radios, with nearly 50 percent of the city’s population owning a “pleasure box” and over 100,000 automobiles traveling across newly constructed viaducts, taking Sunday excursions, creating traffic jams, and increasing congestion and pollution.³

But there was another side to the changes occurring in Baltimore in the 1920s, one that suggested important limits to prosperity and underscored the unevenness of the city’s advancements. Rarely found among the booster pamphlets were accounts of industrial setbacks. For example, although Baltimore was known as a major center for the production of men’s garments, its clothing industry suffered a serious decline, dropping from third to fifth place in the nation. Large, modern factories, which had expanded only a few years earlier in order to meet the wartime demand for government uniforms, shut down entirely; medium-sized firms also closed their doors. Consequently, by the time of the Great Depression the city’s garment industry had already undergone a significant transformation, as petty entrepreneurs who sweated their workers in small, cramped, and dirty shops replaced the earlier, more modern manufacturers. The change largely affected the daughters of working-class immigrant families, who endured long hours, tyrannical bosses, and pitifully low wages. And at the city’s port installations, even with the hefty increase in foreign trade, the decline in the grain industry idled newly constructed elevators. In one year, 1921, wheat exports dropped from 29.7 to 21.7 million bushels, and by 1930 exports of all grains had declined to the lowest level since 1910. Moreover, despite the boosterism of the BAC, including the distribution of over 250,000 copies of a pamphlet entitled “197 Reasons Why You Should Enthuse over Baltimore,” municipal authorities failed in important bids to attract major businesses into the city. The Glenn L. Martin firm, for example, was offended by the hard-sell tactics of the city and instead accepted the generous arrangements offered by Baltimore county to locate its aircraft factory there. Finally, general economic slumps, particularly in 1927 and 1928, created problems of unemployment and relief well before the depression of the 1930s; the jobless rate had risen to nearly 10 percent by 1928 (it improved slightly in 1929). By the end of the decade, although Baltimore ranked seventh among the nation’s ten largest cities in the total value of its manufactured products, it ranked only ninth in wages paid its workers.⁴

The benefits of the “New era of prosperity,” as one BAC spokesman championed the 1920s, did not extend to all the city’s residents. For Baltimore’s blacks, representing nearly 18 percent of the total population, it was not a decade of either autos or radios. Concentrated in menial and service occupations, blacks lived in the oldest and most congested areas of the city where they suffered disproportionately from unemployment, crime, disease, and infant mortality. Aside from teachers in “colored schools,” blacks accounted for less than 2 percent of all municipal employees, and of that small number nearly 80 percent were classified as “common laborers.” There were no black librarians, streetcar drivers, firefighters, or police officers in the entire city. Moreover, even among school teachers—and in violation of state law—blacks received less pay; white teachers in elementary schools, for example, received about twice the salary of their black counterparts. Unlike white households, where only 17 percent of the women were part of the wage economy, over 50 percent of black women were in the paid work force; and among these wage-earning black women, about 87 percent were employed as domestics or personal servants, earning no more than $6 a week. Black men also worked in service jobs or as casual laborers, relying on irregular work opportunities. Depending on the area of the city, tuberculosis struck black residents six to eleven times more often than whites (and those unfortunate blacks who resided on the infamous “Lung Block” in old west Baltimore stood at even greater risk). The rate of infant mortality in black communities ranged from thirty to fifty percentage points higher than in white neighborhoods in the city. Problems associated with disease and sanitation were made worse, according to Urban League investigators, by the practice of boarding: to supplement meager incomes and to assist recent migrants to the city, over one-third of Baltimore’s black families took in boarders, compared to less than one-fourth for the population as a whole. Moreover, during the 1920s the practice increased among blacks, while it declined among white families. Finally, blacks were more likely than whites to be arrested; their arrest rate in the 1920s, for example, was about twice that for whites, and by 1934 the population of Baltimore’s City Jail was nearly 50 percent black.⁵

Although the advancements that occurred in Baltimore in the 1920s certainly improved the lives of a number of blacks, the overall record fell far short of providing a “separate but equal” urban environment for them. More schools for blacks were built, but resources were not divided equally. Throughout the postwar decades, for example, authorities continued to spend more on white students than on blacks—by the mid-1930s, nearly 40 percent more per pupil. The city also maintained a facility for “feebleminded” white children but provided no assistance at all to black children who were similarly diagnosed. The municipal building boom of the 1920s included the first public swimming pool for blacks, but the pool was not within walking distance of the nearest black residential community and was substantially smaller than the pool built nearby for white families. Blacks could not freely enter all the city’s department stores, and some of Baltimore’s finest stores refused to sell to blacks altogether. Movie houses in the city pursued a discriminatory policy: blacks either faced outright exclusion or were limited to seating in the balcony. The Catholic church adopted segregated seating for those few blacks who did not worship at the city’s four all-black parishes. And finally, the meager wages paid to black workers meant that they did not share in the prosperity of the 1920s. Whereas 59.2 percent of the native white residents in the city owned a radio, for example, only 15.6 percent of Baltimore’s blacks possessed one. Even more significantly, blacks did not share in the local reputation as a “city of homeowners”: over 50 percent of the city’s white residents owned their homes, but only 17 percent of the black population enjoyed that luxury.⁶

However, high rates of homeownership in white working-class neighborhoods often indicated more about the policies of industrialists and realtors than about the prosperity of the workers themselves. In the nineteenth century, New York capitalist Peter Cooper promoted homeownership to insure stability among the immigrant workers he had attracted to his east Baltimore industrial community of Canton. As a result of his efforts, workers rarely moved, even in the mobile late nineteenth century. By the 1920s, although many of the local companies attached to Cooper’s industrial community had been displaced by national or regional interests, the effects of his Canton Company could still be seen in the tightly-knit residential neighborhoods. Elsewhere, too, the local tradition of home-ownership encouraged working-class stability, as in the white communities of Hampden and Woodbury in west Baltimore. Strong ties within these neighborhoods, supported by the activities of the church and the tavern and bolstered by an intense pride in the local baseball clubs, promoted stable and usually inward-looking communities. The city’s diversified economy provided opportunities for varied, albeit low-paying, employment, enabling sons and daughters to supplement family incomes and thus to make homeownership possible. But the price was often high, and the appealing picture of strong, stable communities drawn by the city’s boosters tended to ignore the widespread practices of neighborhood bankers and realtors who, according to federal investigators in the 1930s, saddled working-class families with large mortgage payments for cheap, flimsy housing. The seemingly endless row homes that lined the city’s landscape and housed working-class families too often were poorly constructed and overpriced.⁷

Residential segregation characterized the spatial configuration of the city. In 1930, for example, nearly 40 percent of the total black population resided in but four of the city’s eighteen wards; in one ward, blacks accounted for 88 percent of the population—and in that same ward population densities ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 per square mile, compared to an average of 30,000 for the oldest part of the city and to a mere 3,000 in the newly annexed area. Over 30 percent of the people living in the city’s oldest section were black, but blacks made up only 3 percent of the residents of the area annexed in 1918. Many of the blacks who migrated to the city from the rural counties of Virginia and Maryland settled in “Pigtown”—an area infamous for its garbage-strewn streets and severe poverty.⁸

The city experienced division along lines of ethnicity as well. Although Baltimore never witnessed a major influx of newer immigrants, as late as 1930 about 30 percent of the population had at least one foreign-born parent. The emergence of ethnic neighborhoods in the nineteenth century, their persistence into the twentieth, and the proliferation of ethnically based political and fraternal clubs, all indicated the presence and significance of ethnicity in the social and political life of the city. There was a thriving Polish community in east Baltimore, where mutual benefit associations and savings banks encouraged Poles to buy their homes and support the local parish. In “Little Italy,” near the Fells Point area, political activities dominated the neighborhood clubs in the years between the wars. An enclave of Bohemians settled in southeast Baltimore at Locust Point in the nineteenth century. Bohemian men shoveled coal and pushed coal cars on the wharves of the Point; in the 1920s and 1930s their daughters worked in the garment factories and sweatshops of the clothing industry. Russian Jews, who in the twentieth century displaced Germans as the city’s most numerous immigrant group, settled in the inner city in a neighborhood called Oldtown; with their arrival, the older German Jews, some of whom owned the city’s garment factories and department stores, moved westward along Eutaw Place. The annexation of 1918 and the general migration to greener and less crowded suburban areas certainly affected the size and shape of the city’s ethnic communities—but as late as 1940, residential segregation among immigrants remained fairly high.⁹

Although Baltimore’s white ethnic groups never encountered the systematic discrimination faced daily by black residents, there were instances of anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism. The only Jewish resident in the exclusive Guilford neighborhood was refused home delivery by the milk, bread, and newspaper services. But far more threatening to both Jews and Catholics were the activities of the Ku Klux Klan, revitalized in the city in the 1920s. Beginning in the spring of 1921, local King Kleagle H. P. Moorehead conducted a mail campaign in Baltimore to increase membership, and in 1922 robed Klansmen staged a parade in the city. The strongly Protestant, working-class community of Hampden supported an active Klan local (#57); there the clergy cooperated with Klan members, performing group baptisms, even christening one local daughter Katerine Karlotta Knickmann—an indication of the importance of the Klan in family affairs. Led by Archbishop Michael Curley and his diocesan paper, The Catholic Review, Baltimore’s nearly 190,000 Catholics denounced Klan activities and relied on the support of not only Catholic city council members but also Governor Albert Ritchie, who twice denied the Klan permission to use the Baltimore armory. Moreover, under Curley’s aggressive leadership the Catholic community campaigned to extend the influence of the church by expanding and improving the city’s parochial schools. Curley urged new parishes to construct schools even before church buildings, explaining that “the hope of the harvest is in the seed.”¹⁰

Catholics were also active in local and state politics and policy making, sitting on the city’s public school board and managing one of the most active charitable organizations in both the city and state. Archbishop Curley’s preference for local prerogative and state sovereignty perfectly matched the sentiments of Governor Ritchie and Mayor Howard Jackson, who served the city for much of the period between the wars. Unlike the other private agencies, the Bureau of Catholic Charities persistently championed voluntarism in dealing with the problem of unemployment relief, opposed government intervention, and held firm to the primacy of the parish in “charitable service.” Politically, the most divisive rivalry within the city’s Democratic party was based in part on an ethnic-religious split symbolized by the leaders of the two factions themselves: the city’s mayor, the native Protestant Howard Jackson, on one side, and the city’s “boss,” the Irish Catholic William Curran, on the other. Although neither faction enthusiastically endorsed President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal after 1933, Catholic leaders more vigorously protested the radicalism that they believed propelled the labor movement.¹¹

The severe economic decline that began in Baltimore in late 1930 ultimately challenged the assumptions and attitudes of a number of groups in the city. That year the BAC conceded that the production of machinery had decreased by 20 percent, of men’s clothing by 30 percent, and of petroleum products by 30 to 40 percent—but, they added, Baltimore’s “industry as a whole is in good shape.” Only the 1932 findings of President Hoover’s Emergency Committee on Employment, placing the city’s unemployment rate at just over 19 percent, jarred them into altering their platitudinous pronouncements. Although they challenged the Emergency Committee’s estimate, the BAC admitted that while Baltimore had been slow in joining the national slump, it had “arrived at about the same place.”¹²

The effects of joblessness and hardship in the Great Depression, like the benefits of prosperity and urban progress in the “New Era,” were not shared evenly among the city’s 362,072 gainful workers. Particularly hard-hit were workers in textiles, steel, clothing, and construction. Compared to the mid-1920s, for example, when thousands of houses were constructed annually in Baltimore, in 1934 only 119 houses were built in the entire city. The black population also suffered disproportionately: representing 21.8 percent of the city’s work force, blacks experienced unemployment rates approaching 50 percent and, by 1934, constituted 42.2 percent of all families receiving relief in the city. Too often, the issue of race figured prominently in all areas of employment, from work-relief programs to private business. “My only problem,” solemnly observed one jobless black man, “is being colored.” Black women even lost the “security” of low-paying service jobs in the early years of the depression; one employment agency reported in 1934 that only 10 percent of its calls for nursemaids were filled by black women, compared to 65 percent in 1928. A survey of newspaper advertisements for d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. The Urban Setting: Baltimore between the Wars
• Chapter 2. Private Relief and Public Assistance: The Origins of Municipal Welfare
• Chapter 3. Policies and Programs: The New Deal in the City
• Chapter 4. Community Organization and Citizen Participation: Public Housing and the New Deal
• Chapter 5. Organizing the Unemployed: The Jobless and the New Deal
• Chapter 6. The Struggle to Unionize: Labor Organization and the New Deal
• Chapter 7. Democratic Division: The Politics of Roosevelt and the Party of Tradition
• Chapter 8. Baltimore, the Great Depression, and the New Deal
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index