MAP 23.3 Popular Protest in the Great Depression, 1933–1939
The depression forced Americans to look closely at their society, and many of them did not like what they saw. Some citizens expressed their discontent through popular movements, and this map suggests the geography of discontent. The industrial Midwest witnessed union movements, strikes, and Radio Priest Charles Coughlin’s demands for social reform. Simultaneously, farmers’ movements — tenants in the South, smallholders in the agricultural Midwest — engaged in strikes and dumping campaigns and rallied behind the ideas of progressives in Wisconsin and Huey Long in the South. Protests took diverse forms in California, which was home to strikes by farmworkers, women, and — in San Francisco — all wageworkers. The West was also the seedbed of two important reform proposals: Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California (EPIC) movement and Francis Townsend’s Old Age Revolving Pension clubs.