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We’re now 18 months into the current economic recession:  That’s a year and half of steady economic decline.  More and more people are losing their jobs and collecting unemployment every month.  State and local governments are slashing budgets for public services.  Shelters and soup kitchens in many major cities are stretched to capacity. 

Sound familiar? 

In an interview we published a few weeks back with Alice O’Connor, O’Connor talked about some of the parallels, on a national scale, between the current economic decline and the Great Depression.  Prof. James Gregory, a history professor specializing in state labor and civil rights history at the University of Washington, sees parallels on a more local scale.

In December 2008, Gregory published an op-ed piece in the Seattle Times warning that, in their dogged commitment to balancing the State Budget, Gov. Chris Gregoire and the Legislature were “on track to repeat the mistakes [of the Washington legislature] of 1931.”  Last month, the State Legislature approved nearly $4 billion in cuts for public programs, with education and health care taking the biggest hits, in an attempt to balance the budget.

Recently, Prof. Gregory began a new project looking at the history of the Great Depression on the local level.  I spoke with him about the project andwhat the Democrats in Olympia today, as well as the citizens of the Evergreen State, could learn from the Depression of the 1930s to prevent us from sinking further into economic quicksand. 

Could you describe what happened in Washington during the Depression?  How does this compare to today?

The Obama administration is doing as much as it can to do the opposite of what the Herbert Hoover administration did in 1931, when Hoover thought he had to balance the budget and tighten up on the money supply by cutting jobs right when the government needed to produce them.  But the Gregoire administration has just repeated the mistakes of 1931, when Gov. Roland Hartley figured he had to make an all-cuts budget and succeeded in damaging employment and the economy more than it needed to be. 

In 1931, our State Legislature met about 18 months into the serious recession and knew what they had to do ­— they needed to produce jobs ­— so they voted for a big public spending bill called the Public Works Project, where they were going to put 10,000 more people to work building infrastructure, and to pay for it they passed an income tax.  But conservative Republican Gov. Hartley didn’t believe in income taxes and thought a balanced budget was the way to go.  Hartley vetoed the Public Works Project and the income tax.  That meant Olympia was cutting jobs, and Seattle started following its lead.  So instead of putting people to work, local and state governments were putting people out of work.  By the end of 1931, unemployment was close to 20 percent, and by the end of 1932 it was probably closer to 30 percent, and there was massive homelessness and big Hoovervilles ­— big homeless, shack towns ­— all across the mudflats of Seattle and other places. 

What Hartley should have done is what the governor of New York did in 1931 and ‘32: Franklin Delano Roosevelt understood what was important was that something has to produce jobs, so he rammed through a big public works bill and put about 80,000 New Yorkers to work.  He paid for that by doubling the tax rate on upper income families.  This is precisely what should have been done here but wasn’t.

In the Seattle Times op-ed piece on the legislative budget cuts that you co-authored with Prof. Dick Startz you mention that governments have what you call a “countercyclical” responsibility to step in when the private sector stalls. That’s clearly not what happened this last legislative session.  Why not?  Why are we repeating the mistakes made in 1931?

I think this last legislative session demonstrated that we live in what’s called a “failed state.”  We usually use that term for countries like Somalia that have no central government or have a central government that’s incapable of doing what central governments do.  I think we should use that term for thinking about our state right now, because while we do have a government, it has shown its incapacity to serve its basic function, which is to preserve the welfare of the citizens, to look out for the economic health of the citizens and to provide basic education services. And I think it’s not primarily a failure of leadership: The biggest problem is institutional failure.

The structures of governance have been impaired through a generation of anti-government lawmaking and anti-government activism.  Even well-meaning, thoughtful and pretty creative people elected to office in this state just didn’t have the power to do the right things in this last legislative session.

An economy should be set up like a hybrid engine in a car.  You have the big, private engine and the smaller public engine, and the private engine turns along and does most of the driving, and it works most of the time.  But in certain times, you need that hybrid engine to kick in and take over as the private engine falters.  That’s key.  That’s bottom line economic understanding.  And here we are at a time when jobs are being lost in the private sector.  The state should be making jobs; public works should fill in those jobs.  But our state has gone into reverse.  It’s not only not making jobs, but this budget is going to maybe result in 20-30,000 jobs being lost, about half of them in actual state and local employees and another half in people whose work depends on the money that’s coming in through state contracts.  We have a state government that is seriously not only not helping, it’s accelerating the decline in jobs and spending. 

If the state government’s power to respond to crisis is so handicapped, what could they have done differently?

The law says that the governor must propose a balanced budget, which she did, though the Legislature isn’t required to pass it.  But within 12 months, all of the revenues must match the spending. So the one thing the Legislature and Gregoire could have done would be to finish off this budget year out of balance provided they had some plan to get more revenues in the next year.  Which would have been a device — it would have been a very politically risky device — but it would have been a device that could have been used to put a ballot measure together to get the voters to increase revenue. 

It would have taken real courage on the part of the governor and the Democrats in the Legislature to break out of their handcuffs.  By law, they would have had to go to the voters for any major kind of tax increase.  And in the end they didn’t have the confidence to do that.  The Governor promised in her election campaign not to raise taxes, and has stubbornly stuck to that rhetoric all the way through this disaster, and I think that’s just really sad.  It’s just not the kind of flexibility that we need from leaders right now.  In a time of crisis, you have to readjust and she just didn’t.

Tell me about your new project on the history of the Great Depression in Washington state.  What impact do you hope to make? 

In a class I’m teaching right now, all my students are doing some little piece of research on Washington state in the 1930s, either about the economic crisis itself, or about the politics or about radical movements ­— the unemployed organizing in that decade, the WPA projects and the arts.  I’ve submitted a grant proposal to do something that will be even more elaborate, partly with the School of Drama.  If it works out okay, we’ll put a website together by next fall, and then in winter of next year the School of Drama is going to stage a number of Depression-era plays. 

There are wonderful lessons to be learned by looking at the experience of this state during the Great Depression.  There were mistakes that were made that should not be repeated, and we’re sadly repeating some of them. But there are also much more positive things.

One of the wonderful things that happened in the 1930s is something called the Unemployed Citizen’s League.  The UCL was formed in 1931 by a group of unemployed activists, and it proved to be an organization that was very powerful, very effective and helped change the lives of many of the people in Seattle. We could use something like that again. 

The UCL started in a home in West Seattle as a bunch of neighbors meeting and saying we’re going to create an organization that will advocate for real jobs for unemployed people, and we will find ways to help ourselves at the same time.  And then it just spread, like wildfire, out of West Seattle.  Within a year there were hundreds of branches throughout the greater Seattle area, meeting weekly in people’s homes, and they campaigned and lobbied very effectively for public works projects, the kind of thing the Legislature had tried and failed to pass.  At the same time they set up self-help cooperatives and barter clubs, and by early 1932 there was an infrastructure of activity: people sharing work, people out of work coming together, and they had cooperative sewing enterprises and farming enterprises and dentists would treat patients in exchange for carpentry work in their homes. And it was all formalized into a network that included thousands and thousands of people. 

And out of that the politics of the place changed.  The mayor was recalled in an election that the UCL was partly involved in.  The new mayor, John Door, was elected because he had support.  They called it the Unemployed Citizen’s League very deliberately, with an emphasis on ‘citizen.’  The UCL mostly wanted to engage everyday Americans, unemployed residents, and to emphasize — to these men and women and to the political establishment — that these are citizens, they vote and they will be very, very active in all the political arenas.  They’ll also be very, very active in trying to help themselves through these cooperatives.  So it was a transformative organization and experience. 

It seems kind of cyclical, that citizen solidarity strengthens and citizen groups like this become really active during times of depression and struggle.  Then that’s forgotten, you have these antigovernment laws passed over the last generation and we’re making the same mistakes again.  Is there a way to preserve some of these lessons from one generation to the next without having to relearn them the hard way?

I don’t know [laughs]. Yes, this is sad.  Maybe having learned the lesson once, and then learned it twice, we would have it in a fairly solid place going forward.  I certainly hope so.

But certainly there’s still a ton of work to do.  It’s not just changing minds.  I mean we all seem to agree that you should not cut education, that you should not cut health services, that this is the wrong thing to do.  Probably three-quarters of the population of the state would agree.  But there wasn’t anything really to do, because of the way the institutions of government have been degraded.  First you have to get a very active citizenry, and then have to find a way to get in and fix the structures of government, so that these institutions can work again. 

What I don’t understand — and I really, genuinely do not understand — is why the biggest group finding its way to Olympia during this legislative session was the Republican “Tea Bag” demonstration.  Five thousand Tea Bag, anti-tax nuts managed to go and yell and scream and impress the Legislature, while the tens of thousands of people who are losing health care, the tens of thousands of teachers whose jobs are at stake, the hundreds of thousands of students whose education is at stake didn’t do that. 

I think that’s very disturbing, the passivity.  The people who were losing so much out of this budget were very silent.  The unions were very silent.  Why the major unions didn’t hold major demonstrations — maybe in the streets of Seattle if they couldn’t get to Olympia — saying, “Don’t cut the budget this way.”  It seems like a no-brainer, but it didn’t happen. 

What the UCL did was they made citizens into political actors, they taught the citizen part, as well as the cooperative part.  And I think that’s what we really need.

Do you see a flagship group in Seattle that could be the UCL?

Well, maybe Real Change, actually [laughs]. The UCL came out of a newspaper.  The newspaper was the Vanguard, which was published by a group of former socialists.  And they also had something called the Seattle Labor College.  It was a small-scale institution where people came and learned about labor and other issues.  So the newspaper is there and publishing away for about a year when the editors basically said, “We need an organization,” and they started it and used the newspaper to promote it.  The Vanguard then changed its name to the Unemployed Citizen and it was a critical vehicle for getting the ball going.  So Real Change has a role to play.  I’m glad we’ve got it.  And we’ve got to find a way to rescue this failed state. 

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