Occupy and History: Part I

In two previous posts, I scoured American history to talk about earlier social protest movements against poverty: Coxey’s Army of unemployed men looking for work in 1894, and the Bonus Marchers of impoverished World War I veterans in 1932.

Despite their numbers, organization, and commitment, neither group was able to achieve its immediate goal.  Congress did not create a public works job program as Coxey requested, nor did it award early payment of cash bonuses promised to war veterans as the Bonus Marchers requested.  In both cases, the press and political opponents smeared peaceful and patriotic protestors as criminals and revolutionaries.  And after arriving in Washington, D.C., both groups suffered state violence from police and even the military.

As we now witness what seems to be the decline of the Occupy movement, in the face of similar smears and violence, it is worth considering the following questions:

How do Historians measure the political significance of Coxey’s Army and the Bonus Marchers, and what might that portend for the way History eventually comes to view the Occupy movement?  For starters, when times get tough, many Americans reasonably expect their elected officials to do something about it.  These two movements took place during the nation’s two worst economic crises, the Panic of 1893 and the Great Depression.  Amid massive unemployment, many Americans understandably asked: Isn’t there something the government can do to help fix a broken economy?  Or more crassly: Many of us can’t get a job, so maybe it’s time the politicians started earning their paychecks.

Even during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the laissez-faire doctrines so popular among many economists and politicians rang hollow with people mired in poverty and lacking any means to change it.  While prominent experts and powerful politicos believed the free market economy would just fix itself, many Americans rightly began to suspect otherwise.  And in each case, the people turned out to be right.  In the end, wars eventually led to federal deficit spending that stimulated the economy out of depression: The Spanish-American War in 1898, and World War II.

Looking at the situation today, once again there are many who oppose having the federal government stimulate a recessed economy.  Whether such critiques are born of free-market dogma or petty politics aimed at winning elections on the backs of angry, struggling workers is almost besides the point.  Either way, politics at the highest level have precluded serious economic stimulus; the Obama stimulus package of 2009 was too small by the standards of any serious Keynesian, and little else has been put forth since.

What will eventually force the federal government to pool its resources and drive this economy out of recession?  Only time will tell.  But for now, it’s important to remember that the “market” is only a metaphor.  The economy is actually a complex social machine, and it can break.

Another historical lesson is that social protest movements against poverty have often met with repression and even violence.  Why?  Because beyond the abstract details of economic philosophy are the hardscrabble realities of class divisions, both economic and social.  And while the United States is the world’s wealthiest nation, it has always had a wide gap between rich and poor, and far more poor people than its aggregate wealth would lead one to suspect.

During good times, class divisions are easy to ameliorate.  When things are going well, working people and even many poor ones can easily buy into the fantasy of becoming rich.  Almost none of them ever will, of course, but faith is powerful.  However, when the economy breaks, people begin to lose faith.  Poor and working people shoulder the brunt of a broken economy, and so many of them are apt to demand a fundamental change in the system.

At the other end, it’s not as simple as rich people wanting to keep their money.  Of course rich people want to keep their money.  Everyone wants to keep their money.  And rich people having “too much” money isn’t the reason the economy’s broken; it just exacerbates matters and makes a broken economy much more difficult to stomach.

Some middle class people begin to slide. Others are able to hold on but are insecure as others around them decline. Amid all of this instability, there is of course much anger and fear, which manifests itself in different ways. Some people question the system and advocate change.   Others come to see change as a threat and cling tightly to the status quo. Generally speaking, most people are naturally risk averse during tough times and are often in tune with the message: Be cautious, hold tight to what you have, and don’t take any chances because change can make this even worse. Thus it becomes easy to convince them that the real threat isn’t the broken economy, but rather the rabble who want to create even more instability by demanding fundamental changes to the system.

In some ways then, social class is as important as economic class.  The system is holistic.  In a democracy, people have the power to prevent or reverse such abuses and appropriations of wealth.  But they allow it or even defend it because they buy into a set of social values and belief systems.  The economic landscape, as well as the political system’s support of it, are only possible because of the social systems and cultural attitudes that support it.

So at the end of the day, Coxey’s Army and the Bonus Marchers didn’t fail simply because a small elite stood in their way, though of course that didn’t help matters.  The real issue is that a significant portion of the middle class bought into smear campaigns that labeled them as criminals or communists or anarchists or just some ill-defined, dirty mob that betrayed American values and threatened everyone’s security and way of life.

The same thing has happened to the Occupy movement.  They’ve been smeared as hippies, as yuppies, as rich kids as lazy, as delusional and clueless, as hypocrites, as unAmerican, and even as dangerous.  And when a lot of people bought into that, it became much more difficult for Occupy to succeed.  All three of these movements were big, but they weren’t truly massive.  They weren’t Arab Spring or the fall of the Eastern Bloc.  They didn’t have the widespread support of the masses because, to a large degree, because many people bought into the smear campaigns against them.

In the next post, I’ll talk about what Coxey’s Army, the Bonus Marchers, and now Occupy actually achieved, how historians think about Coxey and Bonus, and how they may come to think about Occupy in the years to come.