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changing, and the thrust toward nationally-coordinated unemployed work
predominated increasingly over interest in building broader and broader coalitions
between social movements locally, and in finding a political form to encompass the
radical elements among the leaderships of these social movements. By the end of
1935 the PUL was responding more and more to the national agenda of the WAA,
as its work turned more and more toward organizing Works Progress
Administration (WPA) workers. In the fall of 1936, WPA administrator Aubrey
Williams recognized the Workers' Alliance as the collective bargaining agent for
WPA workers throughout the country, significantly strengthening the national
structure of the organization. Jo Anne Argersinger has written that "Federal
recognition of the alliance enhanced the local power of the PUL." That is
undoubtedly true, but it was also true that by fall 1936 the PUL was more than ever
before openly defining itself as a chapter of the WAA.*9
Roy Rosenzweig, following Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, has
argued that the increasing nationalization of the SP-led unemployed movement led
to a reduction of its locally-based mass activism.
The defuse and diverse locally-based, unemployed movement built by
Socialist activists between 1932 and 1935 lost much of its early vitality as it
trod a path from local insurgency to national responsibility. ... Why this
transformation? ... In part, the explanation is internal: the process of
nationalization and centralization of the unemployed movement led to a loss
of the earlier spontaneous insurgency.
Moreover, Rosenzwieg argues, the expansion of the New Deal relief apparatus and
the growing dominance of Popular Front ideology in the mass movements acted as
dampers on local activism.^"
Jo Anne Argersinger has raised some disagreements with Rosenzwieg and
with Fox and Piven ("scholars focusing on the national level," as she refers to them)
on these points, at least as far as the PUL in Baltimore is concerned. Argersinger
argues that The league never lost sight of itself as a community organization;
certainly it never made the transition from a social action group to a social planning
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