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Robert Cassanello, James J. Lorence. The Unemployed People's Movement: Leftists, Liberals, and Labor in Georgia, 1929–1941. (Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South.) Athens: University of Georgia Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 307. $44.95, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Pages 855–856, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.855-a
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James J. Lorence's book adds to the growing body of scholarship that fleshes out working-class grass-roots organizing during the early twentieth century. As a social history of the New Deal in Georgia, it addresses the ways in which various groups on the Left such as unions, socialists, communists, and the underclass joined forces for nearly a decade to force the government to respond to their needs. This text situates itself between histories of Progressive-Era social protests and studies of post–World War II grassroots activism that are devoted to civil rights and other issues. When paired with books like Shelton Stromquist's Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (2006) and Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (1988), Lorence's study helps one piece together a century-long narrative of grass-roots social protests that emphasized government as a solution to the problems of everyday Americans.
