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133
CHAPTERS
Disrupting the Calm: the Communist Party in Baltimore
1930-1933
Everyday, representatives of the neighborhood relief councils
escorted dozens of people up to the relief agencies, demanding immediate
relief. Sometimes a small parade of some 100 or more from the
neighborhood was formed. They marched up to City Hall or the building
housing the relief agencies. Routinely the marchers circled around the
speaker who mounted a chair. Then, true to form, they denounced the
whole system of relief to the needy; denounced those in charge of
administering the relief as bureaucrats and lackeys of the capitalists and
imperialists running the country. Someone from the neighborhood ranks
was introduced, climbed on the chair and explained how in their tenement
they had to fight the rats in a hand to hand battle for the last few scraps of
bread. Of course all this rhetoric was never directed at the marchers or
demonstrators, but at those on the sidelines who paused long enough to
listen or observe.
Bill Bailey on the Communist Party-led Unemployed
Councils in Baltimore in the early 1930s1
Economically, the Great Depression settled more slowly into Baltimore than
into other urban industrial regions. About six months after the Crash,
unemployment was officially measured to be 9.8% in Boston, 9.6% in New Orleans,
9.5% in Philadelphia, 9.4% in Pittsburgh, 8.3% in New York, but only 5.7% in
Baltimore. The particular mix in Baltimore's diversified industrial sector, plus its
strategic trading position internationally and vis-a-vis the South and West of the
U.S., initially cushioned the blow. Nonetheless, increasing economic dislocation
f\
was widely, if unevenly, felt throughout of the city and the region by mid-1930.
Socially, a tense calm prevailed. Historian Jo Anne Argersinger has shown,
in her fine work on public welfare policy in Baltimore during the Depression, that
the initial response of the economic and political establishment of the region to
increasing misery was a mixture of denial and malign neglect, mixed with
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