What Can We Learn from the Great Depression?: Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times

by Dana Frank

Four stories of resilience, mutual aid, and radical rebellion that will transform how we understand the Great Depression

Drawing on little-known stories of working people, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? amplifies voices that have been long omitted from standard histories of the Depression era.

In four tales, Professor Dana Frank explores how ordinary working people in the US turned to collective action to meet the crisis of the Great Depression and what we can learn from them today. Readers are introduced to

* the 7 daring Black women who worked as wet nurses and staged a sit-down strike to demand better pay and an end to racial discrimination
* the groups who used mutual aid, cooperatives, eviction protests, and demands for government relief to meet their basic needs
* the million Mexican and Mexican American repatriados who were erased from mainstream historical memory, while (often fictitious) white “Dust Bowl migrants” became enshrined
* the Black Legion, a white supremacist fascist organization that saw racism, antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and fascism as the cure to the Depression

While capitalism crashed during the Great Depression, racism did not and was, in fact, wielded by some to blame and oppress their neighbors. Patriarchy persisted, too, undermining the power of social movements and justifying women’s marginalization within them. For other ordinary people, collective action gave them the means to survive and fight against such hostilities.

What resulted were powerful new forms of horizontal reciprocity and solidarity that allowed people to provide each other with the bread, beans, and comradeship of daily life. The New Deal, when it arrived, provided vital resources to many, but others were cut off from its full benefits, especially if they were women or people of color.

What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? shows us how we might look to the past to think about how we can shape the future of our own failed economy. These lessons can also help us imagine and build movements to challenge such an economy—and to transform the state as a whole—in service to the common good without replicating racism and patriarchy.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

336 pages, Paperback

Published August 26, 2025

Reviews

[Shelley Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There were thousands of cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and collectives in the US during the Great Depression. This book looks at how ordinary people organized and fought back. The amount of labor organizing that went on was astonishing. Sit-down strikes occured all across the country, including a sit-down strike of seven African-American wet nurses in Chicago.

Frank takes an intersectional approach in this work, and never fails to point out the racism and sexism so many of the organizers, whether nonpartisan, Communist or socialist, faced.

One case in point: between 1925 and 1935, over one million Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were forced to leave the US for Mexico. Sixty percent of them were children. The story of these repatriados is largely forgotten, while the case of Dustbowl migrants, a smaller, but whiter group, is valorized and remembered.

This book is both timely and inspiring. But Frank also looks squarely at another common response to difficult times--scapegoating and violence towards any group seen as "other." Her case study for this response is an anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic, racist group called the Black Legion, a home grown fascist group that originated in Lima, Ohio and spread rapidly--but collapsed just as quickly when crack down began.

While well-researched, this was not written in academic language. The lessons in this book of how people came together to protect and provide for each other and encouraging and important. It is the kind of history we need right now.

[Susan Keller · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting read that brings out many new things I had not known about before including threats to the US that seem to foreshadow some of todays happenings.

[Joy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book. Can you send your Amazon link to my email to drop a more detailed review.

selezaclassic@gmail.com

[Karl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dana Frank's vital new book, “What Can We Learn From the Great Depression?” — a collection of stories about collective actions nearly a century ago that helped set the labor standards enjoyed by most Americans today. Her essay of the Chicago wet-nurses strike of 1937 highlights labor actions during the Great Depression that even galvanized unorganized workers to sit down for fair compensation. Other readable and incisive essays examine how Seattle’s Hooverville used cooperative buying and self-policing to keep order among the job-seeking unemployed, even embracing multiracial efforts. Dana Frank, professor of history emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz, also examines how the Depression-era migration of Southwesterners from the Dust Bowl largely replaced a Mexican work force encouraged or forced to return home by the thousands when farms went bust in the late 1920s and early 1930s. And an examination of the lawless and chilling Black Legion, a violently racist and murderous group that terrorized Blacks, Jews, Catholics and others deemed insufficiently American during the depth of the depression after the Ku Klux Klan began to weaken. I’m an American history buff, but I learned a lot from this book.