Red Emma’s

Drawing on little-known stories of working people, _What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? _amplifies voices that have been long omitted from standard histories of the Depression era.

In four tales, Professor Dana Frank explores how ordinary working people in the US turned to collective action to meet the crisis of the Great Depression and what we can learn from them today. Readers are introduced to

• the 7 daring Black women who worked as wet nurses and staged a sit-down strike to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination
• the groups who used mutual aid, cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief to meet their basic needs
• the million Mexican and Mexican American repatriados who were erased from mainstream historical memory, while (often fictitious) white “Dust Bowl migrants” became enshrined
• the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist organization that saw racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and fascism as the cure to the Depression

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. For other ordinary people, collective action gave them the means to survive and fight against such hostilities.

What resulted were powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity that allowed people to provide each other with the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life. The New Deal, when it arrived, provided vital resources to many, but others were cut off from its full benefits, especially if they were women or people of color.

_What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? _shows us how we might look to the past to think about how we can shape the future of our own failed economy. These lessons can also help us imagine and build movements to challenge such an economy—and to transform the state as a whole—in service to the common good without replicating racism and patriarchy.

Dana Frank is Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A well-regarded senior historian, she is the author of many books on labor, women, and social justice in the US and Honduras. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times,_ Washington Post, Guardian, The Nation, Foreign Affairs, _and many other publications, and she has testified before both the US Congress and Canadian Parliament.

Maximillian Alvarez is the Editor-in-Chief of The Real News Network and the host of Working People, “a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today.” Prior to joining The Real News, he was an Associate Editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education and graduated with a dual-PhD in History and Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in a range of outlets, including The Nation, In These Times, Boston Review, Truthout, and The Baffler. He has a book of interviews with OR Books titled The Work of Living: Working People Talk About Their Lives and the Year the World Broke.