272

government and industry institute a mandatory 30-hour work week — were
extremist in the days when the first phase of the New Deal was just emerging. And
these demands were particularly radical in Baltimore and in Maryland, where the
authorities, especially the Democrats, worked overtime to sabotage and limit New
Deal programs. Over the years the PUL kept well ahead of the New Deal by
demanding more at every stage than the New Deal was prepared to offer, and by
attempting to hold the New Deal to its promises. The PUL leadership continued its
running public critique of the New Deal throughout the 1930s, declaring in 1939
that the "New Deal has tried and failed."64

Thirdly, the self-help projects of PUL would be misunderstood if we simply
consider them to be additional examples of liberal welfare programs. Frank Trager
later remarked that "self-help" was itself a misleading label: "We didn't go around
collecting old clothes" like the Salvation Army. Rather the PUL's self help projects
represented, as PUL chairman Clarence Whitmore wrote, means "for the exchange
of services between the members, through the formation of unemployed workers*
cooperatives." The distribution of food, the refurbishing of the houses, and
eventually, in 1938, the opening of a cooperative store was all accomplished by
means of the self-organized collective labor of the unemployed. In the distribution
of houses and some donated items, the PUL even developed a method of labor
accounting, although much of the labor performed and goods distributed was based
more on need than hours worked. (PUL's original plan to develop its own script
ran afoul of a Maryland law forbidding the private issuance of money.) This
cooperative impulse was inherited from many different socialist traditions, and in
PUL it was a powerful expression of socialist values, whether it was identified as
such or not. Indeed, if the self-managed cooperative labor of the unemployed in
PUL and PUL's radical form of centralized grassroots democracy are viewed as two
aspects of a whole, PUL can be seen as an experiment in radical workers*