THE WOLF AT THE DOOR

The opening months of 1932 were dark, with the economic situation going from bad to worse. Between November 1931 and February 1932, national unemployment increased a full third to over 8.3 million able-bodied men and women, according to AFL surveys.[1] From within their tiny two-man office, Reub and Vic gave voice in their weekly newsletters to those hardest hit. In a passage almost certainly written by Reub, the ISFL painted a vivid picture of a family ravaged by the throes of the Great Depression:

Hunger and want stalk abroad in Illinois as the storm clouds of the approaching winter herald the bitter cold days to come. Despairing fathers search vainly for the means to keep the wolf from the door during these long winter months. Anxious mothers pray that somehow the frost may be kept out of the home, that somehow food may be made available and that help—sorely needed help—will come from somewhere—somehow—and not too late. Children move about less buoyantly than usual, their spirits depressed by something they see in the eyes of their parents but do not fully comprehend. The grim specter of unemployment is reaping its ugly toll.[2]

Over the past year Reub had done all he could as newly elected ISFL president to keep the “grim specter” at bay. He pushed for pro-labor legislation on the House floor, fighting fiercely when he could and shrewdly negotiating what he must. He traveled across the state nourishing the spirits of his labor brothers; while he often spoke, he found his most valuable contribution now was to listen. His constituents were suffering mightily.

LEGISLATURE IN CRISIS

Labor Legislation Under Attack

In Springfield, it wasn’t long before Reub’s signature accomplishment from the 1931 legislative session—the Prevailing Rate of Wage Act—came under attack. To Reuben, the Prevailing Wage law was “the most important feature of the legislative achievements of the Illinois State Federation of Labor in the last regular session of the Illinois Legislature.”[3] With Soderstrom’s defeat of injunctions in 1926, the most devastating tool employers now used against labor was “regional outsourcing,” the shipping in of cheap labor from outside a city or county when workers went on strike. This practice not only depressed local wages but increased racial and ethnic tensions, since most of the outsourced labor came from poorer minority communities. By requiring state contractors to pay their workers the wage that prevailed in the local community, Reuben hoped to stop sliding wages and prevent racial violence.

But push-back began immediately. First, the Department of Public Works and Buildings failed to include this new requirement in its call for bids, forcing the organization to reject all bids and requiring contractors to resubmit. Then, the department unilaterally set the “prevailing wage” at a ridiculously low 35 cents per hour across the board, including in Chicago’s Cook County. Reub fought at every turn, filing an official protest and compelling the governor to form an appeal board which produced a wage schedule that increased wages by 28% in Cook County and 14% in surrounding areas.[4] In spite, some contractors filed a suit against the new schedule, declaring it unconstitutional. To Reub’s stunned surprise, the courts agreed, with the Illinois Supreme Court declaring the law at odds with the requirement that state agencies accept the lowest bid.[5] Heartbroken and angry, Reuben swore to revise and restore the act.[6]

Special Session Called

The Supreme Court’s ruling not only undid Reuben’s wage law; it also invalidated all state contracts for building projects. This meant delaying the creation of much-needed jobs and ultimately drained the Illinois treasury. The state was officially in a state of financial crisis, and as a result Governor Emmerson was forced to call the General Assembly into an emergency session at the end of 1931. To close the funding gap, Emmerson called for the creation of a state income tax, a move that Reuben and labor strongly supported. Such a progressive tax would allow Illinois to meet its obligations by asking the most from those best able to meet the need. While he objected on some points (including the small size of single person and head of family exemptions), Victor Olander urged the General Assembly to pass the bill. Speaking before the House as a member of the executive committee of the Governor’s Tax Conference, he also called on legislators to tie the new funding to unemployment relief. He specifically cited the Tax Conference’s recommendation to authorize a $10,000,000 bond, using $3,000,000 for public charitable relief and $7,000,000 to create jobs for unemployed workers.[7]

The Illinois Manufacturers’ Association, of course, opposed such measures. The IMA’s James L. Donnelly predictably attacked the idea of an income tax as “social legislation” that would “drive industry from the state of Illinois.”[8] The state’s financial worries, in the IMA’s view, could be easily remedied by reforming “wasteful government extravagance,” and it called on the special session to take up only bills intended to reform the accounting and bookkeeping systems of local and state financial officials.[9] Donnelly also took the opportunity to attack public relief programs. As much as they detested the idea of an income tax, manufacturers despised the prospect of giving aid to the unemployed even more. Such government assistance, they warned, would “stifle individual initiative.” They wanted less government spending, not more, and Donnelly, alongside IMA President Samuel Hastings, led the opposition’s efforts to sway the Assembly.[10]

As the special session extended into the early months of 1932, Reuben and Victor fought the IMA tooth and nail. Addressing the Illinois Senate, Olander slammed the idea that Illinois had been extravagant in its spending. He cited national reports and census data clearly showing Illinois took in less per capita and had less debt per capita than nearly all similar states.[11] While he praised Illinois as an “example for the nation” for its private charity efforts, he took the IMA to task:

Now let me ask these questions: Is the entire relief burden to fall on private citizens? What of the state itself? Has it no duty to perform except to call upon private citizens to assist each other? Is it not the plain duty of the state government itself to at least match the contributions of and relief activities of private groups? Is it possible that the state will do nothing except to aggravate the difficulty by ‘economizing,’ by laying off state and city employees and thus make a bad situation worse? I think the State of Illinois has a duty to perform in providing funds for unemployment relief. The passage of this appropriation bill to furnish additional funds for Mothers’ Pensions seems only part of this duty.[12]

Reuben, meanwhile, worked behind the scenes to gather the votes necessary to secure the relief his constituents so badly needed. As a member of the Governor’s Commission on Unemployment and Relief, Soderstrom crafted two bills: one proposing a two cent per gallon tax on gasoline for one year, and another appropriating $20,000,000 of that revenue for unemployment relief work.[13] To counter the voices of Donnelly’s manufacturers, Reuben directly appealed to the public:

The army of unemployed is steadily growing larger, destitution, hunger and want is increasing on every side, and the general situation has become desperate. Under such circumstances the people of Illinois have the right to expect that their representatives in the legislature will take steps to provide relief measures……The citizens in every section of Illinois should inform their representatives in the state legislature regarding local needs without delay. The legislature, it should be remembered, is a representative body whose members are accustomed to act under the pressure of public opinion as reflected in their home communities.[14]

The tactic worked. Flooded with letters, state senators and representatives began to respond to the desperate circumstance of their constituents, their fear of the manufacturers outweighed by the sense of duty to those they served. As the months passed and the fight raged on, Reuben built a successful coalition in the Senate and House. Even early skeptics of relief legislation like Representative John Devine were flipped in early February 1932, directly attributing their change of heart to Reuben’s efforts. “Devine, who earlier had been a strong opponent of the program, changed his position near the end of the debate,” the Murphysboro Daily Independent reported at the time. “He declared that the change was due to a statement by Representative R.G. Soderstrom, Rep., Streator, and president of the Illinois State Federation of Labor that there were a million unemployed persons in Illinois in need of relief.”[15]

Soderstrom’s statements carried such weight in part because, unlike the IMA, his numbers came from a credible source. In the 1931 session Reuben had pushed for the creation of a Division of Statistics and Research within the Department of Labor to provide impartial, reliable numbers that all legislators could accept. Contrary to the IMA’s fancifully mild estimates, the statistics division revealed a dire situation: over 640,000 unemployed able-bodied men and women in Chicago—19% of the city’s total population—were unemployed, and roughly 425,000 were out of work downstate.[16] Reuben used this data to drive home the sheer enormity of the problem at hand, and it worked. He was shrewdly winning the public relations war as the IMA’s reports on unemployment were dismissed as inauthentic and out-of-touch.

By early 1932 Reub had the votes he needed and the General Assembly passed the state’s first ever income tax and a $20,000,000 emergency relief fund.[17] It was a remarkable achievement. Donnelly, shocked and frustrated, vowed revenge to his IMA membership. He immediately instructed their attorney, David Clarke, to sue the income tax portion of the law in court.[18] He also called for outside help, holding a meeting that March for all Midwest manufacturers at the Union League Club in Chicago. Together they designed a campaign “sounding the alarm” and sending out thousands of bulletins and pamphlets claiming that the Soderstrom initiative and other “public expenditures” threatened to become a “national menace.” For the rest of the year, Donnelly and the IMA waged war to undo Reuben’s work.[19]

In the thrust and parry between Soderstrom and Donnelly, it was the latter who then claimed victory when the income tax was soon declared unconstitutional. Reinvigorated, Donnelly and his machine launched an all-out war in the press, crafting a narrative that pointed at government spending, not unemployment, as the root cause of the crisis. Mounting pressures soon forced Gov. Emmerson to call yet another special meeting of the General Assembly. All throughout 1932, the Illinois Assembly—typically only in session for six months in odd-numbered years—was called into action, creating a “perpetual assembly.” The longer they stayed in session, however, the less they seemed to accomplish, and as the 1932 elections drew nearer, statesmanship in Springfield ground to a halt.

CONVENTIONS AND ELECTIONS

Keeping it All Together

This continual call of the legislature was particularly difficult for Reuben, who was double-booked as ISFL president. Still, he persevered, spending night after night on the road, making his way to events throughout the state and beyond. He spoke to the Springfield Order of Eagles, the People’s Church of Chicago for the Sunday Afternoon Forum, and the UMWA. In May, Reuben embarked on a speaking tour throughout the state, ginning up support. It was on that trip that he was reunited with a special friend.

John Walker had been determined to be the rightful leader of UMWA District 12 by Judge Edwards of Dixon. As such the wreckage of the UMWA fissure had been solved by two lawsuits: John L. Lewis was the national president while John Walker could lead District 12. Reuben gladly embraced his old friend Walker, and they jointly addressed coal miners at a well-attended mass meeting on the fairgrounds in Duquoin, IL on May 22, and on the following day they traveled together to talk to the miners of Centralia[20]. At the gatherings, Reuben stressed the need for unity, reminding all in attendance of the power they possessed when they spoke with one voice. Finally, the largest union in Illinois was returning to the ISFL fold, as was Reuben’s mentor and friend. Despite all odds, Reuben pulled off a neat trick by significantly expanding the membership of the Illinois Federation, healing old wounds and bringing union brothers back together. It was a message he would take with him to the convention.

The Fiftieth Convention

The fiftieth “Golden Anniversary” convention of the ISFL almost didn’t happen. Illinois was in the throes of a worsening depression and an inconceivable fourth special session of the legislature was convened less than a week before the opening of the convention, diverting much of Reuben’s attention. Despite these pressures, Reuben, Victor, and the rest of the Federation’s Executive Committee successfully carried out the convention at the Armory in Decatur on September 12, 1932.[21] The minutes are an extraordinary and inspiring read; Reuben adopted an ambitious agenda, tackling everything from his philosophy of economy to bank failures to the “gangster menace.”[22] Still, he stuck to two overarching and intersecting themes: the fight to relieve unemployment, and the need to hang together, both as a union and more broadly as a society.

Reuben sounded these themes loudly in his convention speech. He congratulated those assembled for holding strong as one union. Clearly proud of bringing Walker’s men back into the ISFL and more than doubling the ISFL membership, Reuben encouraged his audience to view themselves not as an organization under assault but as an institution on the rise.

To watch the Illinois State Federation of Labor organize this Golden Anniversary convention is in itself an impressive drama…[it] fills my whole being with tender emotions, a tender happiness hard for me to describe….For the second time in my experience as a labor official it becomes my pleasant duty to deliver a presidential address to a convention of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, and I regard it as a wondrous honor to be permitted to do so; to stand here with this gavel, the emblem of impartial authority in my hand. I am proud of the labor movement of this state. I am proud of its ideals and its accomplishments. I am proud of every member of organized labor in Illinois…We still have, counting organized railroad workers, something like 500,000 trade unionists in this state. The Illinois State Federation of Labor itself is a great organization. We are still the strongest state federation of labor in point of numbers in these United States.[23]

As Reuben continued, he excoriated the existing state of affairs, artfully tackling greed while simultaneously embracing capitalism and dismissing communism:

Friends, we are not suffering at this time from a famine, we are suffering because we produce too much. I heard a great leader in the miners’ union say some time ago that the human being is the only part of the animal kingdom that has intelligence enough to starve in the midst of plenty….Sometimes I think that this whole economic structure, this whole economic system is on trial. Sometimes I think this whole capitalistic system is on trial. If I was a communist I would certainly rejoice, with 1,250,000 people without jobs in this great state of Illinois at this moment. If I were a socialist I think I would exclaim to the whole world, ‘‘I told you so.’ But I am neither a communist nor a socialist, but a trade unionist who prefers the present economic system if it can be made to work.[24]

In a powerful and prescient stand that would last his whole life, Soderstrom asserted that labor was rooting for American capitalism to succeed. It is remarkable that even in dire economic times, he rejected the pull of the communist creed that was so attractive to other intellectuals of his time. He was a laborer who believed in the power of capital. Tearing into his opponents, Reub ridiculed the IMA and their ilk for their “principled” opposition to state assistance for the unemployed while demanding bailouts for themselves:

I don’t believe the working people of our state ought to apologize for asking for government aid. The bankers of our country didn’t hesitate to ask for governmental aid to tide them over a hard depression period. They went to Washington and asked for two billion dollars, and got it…I know a bank president, who masquerades as a school man, who stood on the floor of the Illinois Senate and said it was a disgraceful thing for labor to ask for governmental aid. The bankers went to Washington and cloaked their request with reason and eloquence and Americanism and patriotism, and yet this banker stood on the floor of the Illinois Senate and said that it was a disgraceful thing for labor to ask for aid, that it was the dole system, that it was unpatriotic and un-American. It was governmental aid in both cases. The only difference was that the rich and powerful secured eighty times as much as the poor and needy.[25]

Governmental aid wasn’t too much, Reuben declared—it was just the start. Despite IMA claims to the contrary, this economic crisis was, in Soderstrom’s estimation, not ending anytime soon; dire circumstances required bold action, and Reub was unafraid. The way forward, he stated, was clear: in terms of policy, it was a six-hour day for hard labor and a five-day week, what he referred to as “the brilliant sun of hope shining behind the darkest cloud America has ever known.”[26] These policies made good economic and moral sense, allowing more to participate in the economy, increasing demand while also enabling all Americans to share in the dream that had forged the nation. Most importantly, labor had to remember their duty to love one another. Their humanity and faith, above all else, would see them through the current crisis:

The spirit of fellowship and the brotherhood of man are the life of the labor movement. If this life be not nourished, the whole will become a dead thing…While food, clothing and shelter may be rapidly diminishing, we are still fighters, we still represent the fighting spirit of America, we still have our ancient fangs and claws, and wage earners, both organized and un-organized, are looking to the labor movement to give the command to march forward, to marshal our strength, to concentrate our thought, to face East as it were, to face the rising sun of a new day.[27]

As the 43-year-old Reuben accepted his second gavel before the cheering crowd, he almost certainly was fighting back the pangs of exhaustion. It had been a year of fighting, surviving and growing in the chaos of economic depression, which was certainly reflected in his darker, more aggressive tone. Behind the applause and energy of the moment sat a fear threatening to wither everything it touched—that this was not merely a crisis but the new way of things. As Reub had written in the weeks leading up to the convention, “The word depression brings a mental picture of either a lane or road with a low stretch that we should pass over soon, but we are beginning to realize that this is something more.”[28] The thought that this was the “new normal”—perpetually struggling to stave off collapse—had to wear on the minds of all men, and on Reub more than most. He was a leader now, responsible for these people; how can you navigate when you can’t possibly know what the route ahead even looks like?

Despite the weariness and uncertainty—perhaps even because of it—Reuben put full faith in the course he’d first charted over a decade ago in Streator. Reuben concluded the annual report of the ISFL Executive Board with the following poem:

Ships sail east and ships sail west, While the self-same breezes blow; It’s the set of sails and not the gales That determine the way they go.[29]

The 1932 Election

In the middle of all this activity, Soderstrom needed to campaign for re-election to his seat in the legislature. Soon after the close of the convention, Reuben turned his attention to the 1932 election. Fortunately, his seat was under little threat; he easily won the April primary and faced only token resistance in the fall. The national presidential race, on the other hand, easily captured everyone’s interest. July 1932 put the national spotlight on a presidential candidate who embraced a pro-labor attitude: New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When Reuben and FDR met in Mendota, Illinois in 1920, FDR already had a history of supporting worker-friendly legislation, a record that was augmented when he was governor of New York. A tireless advocate for those left weakened by the cruelness of life’s misfortunes (an empathy likely strengthened after a bout with polio left him crippled), Roosevelt promised a new, personal approach to the problems of the people. When nominated for President by the Democratic Party, he became the first nominee to deliver his acceptance speech in person. There is no doubt that Reuben and Vic sat close to a radio to listen to the speech as it was broadcast from Chicago to the nation, where FDR first spoke of a “New Deal”:

My program, of which I can only touch on these points, is based upon this simple moral principle, the welfare and soundness of a nation depend first upon what the great mass of people wish and need; and second, whether or not they are getting it. What do people of America want more than anything else? To my mind they want two things: work, with all the moral and spiritual values that goes with it, and with work, a reasonable measure of security, security for themselves and for their wives and children. Work and security, these are more than words. They are more than facts. They are the spiritual values, the true goal toward which our efforts of reconstruction should lead. I pledge you, I pledge myself, to a new deal for the American people.[30]

As the elections of November of 1932 bought both Soderstrom and Roosevelt into office, Reuben must have for the first time seen at least a small break in the storm. After years of push-back and resistance, the country was turning to leaders who embraced the idea of governmental activism. Roosevelt was a leader who believed that Americans had an ethical responsibility to take care of one another, and that governments, as representatives of the people and stewards of the common good, had a moral duty to provide for the general welfare. It may have been a small ray of sunshine, but it likely filled Reub with a feeling he’d sorely missed in the darkest days of ’32: hope.

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