[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.25 As David Plotke says of the National Labor Relations Act, [I]t was sharply discontinuous with prior practices, though elementsof its approach were prefigured in Woodrow Wilson s administrationand in the NRA. 26 In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act establishednational minimum wages and maximum hours.These provisions werethe basis for the development of a culture of rights among unionizedworkers that made possible huge advances in their circumstances overthe next three decades.27In 1964, at the peak of the civil rights movement, the Twenty-FourthAmendment to the Constitution was passed, striking down the use ofthe poll tax in federal elections.This, together with the Civil Rights Actof 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, overrode the state and countyrestrictions on the franchise that had been put in place by southern statesafter Reconstruction.And once the electoral system of the South wasopened to blacks, the system of southern apartheid collapsed, with far-reaching consequences that virtually toppled southern caste arrange-ments.In other words, the black movement of the 1960s finally won, acentury later, the reforms first announced in the Fourteenth andFifteenth Amendments.Meanwhile, the Equal Opportunity Act of 1964(the antipoverty program) even fostered the use of federal funds by poorcommunities, especially by minority communities, to organize to press88 | CHAPTER 5municipal government for more services and patronage.Many AfricanAmerican mayors and congressional representatives got their start inthe antipoverty community action programs.So, why these big bangs in policy development? The clustering ofmajor policy initiatives coincided exactly with the clustering of episodesof mass disruption, with the mobilization of interdependent powerfrom below, and in a range of institutional arenas.The economic down-turn of the 1930s and the hardships that ensued rapidly brought themob, or  the people out-of-doors, to life.Bands of people descended onmarkets and delivery trucks to demand or commandeer food.IrvingBernstein concludes that in the early years of the Depression,  orga-nized looting of food was a nation-wide phenomenon. 28 Rent strikesspread, and crowds formed to block evictions for nonpayment of rent.The actions began to take a more explicitly political form too, with thespread of unemployed demonstrations and marches demanding reliefin the early 1930s.Veterans marched on Washington with a similardemand for early payment of the bonus due them for service in WorldWar I.Farmers spilled their milk and formed crowds that threatenedsheriffs to prevent foreclosure sales.29The first response of the federal government after the election of1932 was the creation of a system of emergency relief, but then reliefcenters became the target of protesters, demanding immediate attentionto their grievances.30 Then, in 1934, industrial strikes began.The first bigaction was the  Battle of Toledo, in which the unemployed joined insupport of striking workers.Worker protests escalated with the generalstrikes that followed in Minneapolis and San Francisco and in the south-ern textile industry.Strikes became larger; there were 17 strikes of 10,000or more in 1933, 18 in 1934, and 26 in 1937 when 1,860,000 workerswalked out.31 Fifteen strikers were known to have been killed in 1933,and forty more in 1934.In a period of eighteen months, troops werecalled out to cope with strikers in sixteen states.32 Strikes continued toincrease in 1935 and 1936; and in 1937, when the Supreme Court ruledon the constitutionality of the National Labor Relations Act, strikesreached their highest level in the twentieth century.33Disruptive protest, this time by African Americans on the one sideand the white southern  movement of massive resistance on the otherMOVEMENTS AND REFORM | 89side, came to a head again in the mid-1960s.During the spring of 1963,the civil disobedience campaigns in Birmingham, Alabama, used thefull panoply of civil rights tactics, from sit-ins to boycotts to demon-strations that launched thousands of children into the streets to facemass arrests and police who unleashed teeth-snapping guard dogs andrib-crushing high-pressure water hoses against the demonstrators.ByMay, organized protests were giving way to rioting, forcing local busi-ness leaders to call for a truce, and the federal government to intervene.That summer, a march  for jobs and freedom sponsored by the maincivil rights organizations attracted the largest number of demonstra-tors that had come to Washington up to that time.But the march onlysignified the nationalization of the movement, as in its aftermath, riot-ing spread to virtually every major city in the country between 1964and 1968.In short, the surge and ebbing of disruptive protest events definedthe beginning and ending of social policy bangs.Of course, correlationsdo not establish causes.We need to know about the political processthat leads to new policy initiatives, and whether disruptive protest playsa consequential role in that process.In fact, the major policy interpre-tations that attempt to explain the big bangs of the 1930s and 1960savoid this question, choosing to ignore or marginalize protest in favorof other explanations, with the consequence that there remains a blackhole in their causal logic [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]