Workers Alliance of America

A 1937 membership button of the Workers Alliance of America.

The Workers Alliance of America (WAA) was actually a venture of the Socialist Party of America in its earliest incarnation.[2] An inaugural convention was held early in March 1935, chaired by Socialist David Lasser, head of the New York Workers Committee on Unemployment.[2] Lasser had in previous years rebuffed unity overtures of the Communist Party, but delegates to the WAA's founding convention received Communist Party Unemployed Councils leader Herbert Benjamin warmly, responding to his plea for organizational unity with an ovation.[2] Following Benjamin's speech a formal resolution of the convention criticizing the Unemployed Councils of the USA as pawns of the Communist party was withdrawn.[2] Growing sentiment for unity was apparent.

The resolutions of the founding convention of the Workers Alliance were presented at the White House by Lasser on March 4, 1935.[3] Chief among these were a call for adoption of a 30-hour work week without reduction of wages and universal unemployment insurance, to be paid for with taxes on gifts and incomes greater than $5,000 per year as well as worker representation on all committees established for the purpose of administering social insurance.[3]

Headquarters of the WAA was initially established in the Socialist Party bastion of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[4] Immediately after the group's formation clearly inflated membership figures began to appear in the press, including an absurd and grandiose March 1935 claim that the fledgling organization was backed by a membership of 450,000 people in 28 states.[4] David Lesser was named President of the organization, with Paul Rasmussen of Milwaukee in charge of day-to-day operations as the group's National Secretary.

Despite such patently obvious misstatements of membership size, the WAA did immediately begin constructive work with top officials of the American Federation of Labor (AF of L) with respect to standards and practices relating to Depression-related unemployment relief. In April 1935 WAA Chairman Lasser announced that agreement had been reached with AF of L President William Green relating to the organization of workers employed through the government's $4.8 billion work relief program with a view to the unionization of those so employed.[5] The joint program of the WAA and AF of L was said to include payment of union scale for all skilled workers, a minimum payment of $30 per week for all workers on relief, and provision for collective bargaining for all workers on work-relief projects.[6]

Existing local and state workers' relief organizations began to change their names to match that of the new national organization during the rest of 1935, exemplified by the Wisconsin Workers Committee changing its name to the Wisconsin Workers Alliance in becoming the state affiliate of the WAA.[7] State groups retained autonomy of action in pushing state and local governments towards unemployment relief, with the Illinois Workers Association issuing a call for a Hunger March at the state capitol in Springfield to its 226 local affiliated groups for May 21–22, 1935 — a call endorsed after the fact by National Secretary Rasmussen on behalf of the national Workers Alliance organization.[8]

Together with officials of organized labor, the WAA was also active in the summer of 1935 in coordinating strikes of workers in New York and Pennsylvania employed by the federal government's Works Progress Administration (WPA) over what were deemed to be inadequate wages for employees engaged in WPA work-relief projects.[9]

Poster for a Chicago march and demonstration sponsored by the local unit of the Workers Alliance of America, July 18, 1936.

Unity negotiations between the three parties — the Workers Alliance of the Socialists, the Unemployed Councils of the Communists, and the National Unemployed Leagues of the Musteite movement — began in April 1935.[2] A full year of negotiations would follow, with no merger achieved between the Workers Alliance and the Unemployed Councils until April 1936.[10] As a condition of unification, the Communists were forced to surrender their old organizational name and to accept the Workers Alliance's title.[11] The CPUSA was also force to accept a minority of seats on the governing Executive Board of the organization, which retained Socialist Lasser as National Chairman and Communist Benjamin as Organizational Secretary.[11]

The Communist Party's Unemployed Councils organization shared the WAA's propensity for public assertion of inflated membership rolls, claiming a membership of 300,000 in 1935 and 600,000 in 1936 just prior to the Unity convention.[12] These farcical totals were belied by a more sober estimate which Herbert Benjamin privately provided to the Politburo of the CPUSA at the time of the 1936 merger, at which he state the membership of the Unemployed Councils as 8,500 and estimated the dues paying membership of the Workers Alliance in the range of 15,000 to 20,000.[12]

The day after the Unity Convention some 500 members and sympathizers of the WAA marched to the White House, their line of march watched by 100 police officers.[13] The marchers, parading under red banners, called for launch of a new $6 billion work-relief program, with David Lasser and four other members of the national committee granted a 30-minute audience with Presidential secretary Marvin McIntryre.[13] Following the meeting Lasser declared to the press his growing dissatisfaction with President Roosevelt, who he felt was sacrificing the interests of the unemployed to the expediencies of his 1936 reelection campaign.[13] "We told [McIntyre] that we were tired of Mr. Roosevelt's promissory notes, always being renewed and renewed again, with indefinite dates," Lasser declared.[13]

Historian Harvey Klehr indicates that membership of the WAA did exhibit growth after unification, however, in large measure as a result of growth of the WPA jobs program and the ability of now employed WPA workers to pay the relatively nominal dues of the WAA.[12] Despite misgivings about painting itself into a corner as a de facto trade union for WPA employees, it seems that in practice the WAA became exactly that, with WPA employees constituting some 75 percent of the organization's dues paying membership by 1939.[12] The survival of the WAA was thus intimately linked with the fate of the WPA program, with periodic layoffs of WPA workers due to budgetary constraints playing havoc with the WAA's membership rolls.[14]

The WAA unsurprisingly dedicated a great deal of its political effort to pushing Congress and the Roosevelt Administration to reverse cuts to the WPA budget and to renew financial commitment to relief efforts on behalf of the unemployed.[14] A National Jobs March was called by the WAA during the summer of 1937, but the response was tepid, with only 2,500 people joining the temporary city constructed in WPA-supplied tents near the Lincoln Memorial.[14] Steady rain further demoralized the strikers, who quietly demonstrated outside the White House and Capitol before fading away.[15]

The WAA published an official organ in the form of a newspaper published in Milwaukee called The Workers Alliance.[16] At least 18 issues were produced from the publication's launch on August 15, 1935 and September 1936.[16]

A second publication, Work, was launched in Washington, DC on April 9, 1938, with publication continuing at least through November 1940.[16]

The disintegration of the size and strength of the Socialist Party of America as a result of factional warfare stood in marked contrast to the expansion in size of the Communist Party in connection with its nominally patriotic and democratic political line expounded in its slogan "Communism is 20th Century Americanism," and the relative influence of the two organizations waned and waxed accordingly. By 1938 the WAA was thoroughly dominated by the Communist Party, effectively becoming an appendage of that organization.[17]

In its final years the WAA evolved into something resembling a typical political pressure group, publicly pushing the WPA's agenda for greater levels of funding.[18] Communist Party General Secretary Earl Browder would later romanticize the WAA's place in the political process, declaring

"Whenever the WPA had an appropriation up, Congress would shave it down to half. Then we would put on demonstrations in six cities; Congress would bring it up to two-thirds. We'd put on another series of demonstrations and they'd get their appropriation."[19]

Both the Communist Party and the Roosevelt administration had new and more important agendas as the 1930s came to a close, with the Communists and the administration thoroughly alienated from one another with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in the summer of 1939 and the subsequent eruption of World War II in Europe. While the WPA would nominally continue until 1943, the Workers Alliance of America would be terminated in 1941.

The archives of the Workers Alliance of America are housed at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[20] Included in the collection are the papers of David Lasser as well as copious files on the organization assembled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States Justice Department.[20]