As neoliberalism’s grip on the liberal-left imagination tightened during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, a new generation of students of race and inequality took the bifurcation of the New Deal and postwar welfare states as evidence of the inherent limitations of universal programs. Historians Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, for example, posit what political scientist Cedric Johnson has termed the “constraint of race” thesis. Arguing that New Deal liberalism was restrained by racist Southern Democrats, Cowie and Salvatore ultimately contend that racism has perpetually hobbled broad, class-based redistributive reforms.5
Public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has made much the same case. Drawing from the work of political scientist Ira Katznelson, Coates takes FHA mortgage discrimination and the SSA’s exemptions for agricultural workers and domestic and personal servants as partial bases for his case for racial reparations—a redistributive agenda from which only African Americans might benefit. Specifically, Coates contends that, since the late colonial period, working-class whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege has not only precluded interracial political alliances based on mutual economic interest, but ontological race/racism ensures that universal redistributive programs are incapable of redressing racial disparities.6
As I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4, the constraint of race thesis downplays capitalists’ sway over New Deal labor and housing policies. What is no less problematic, however, is that the framework looks past the New Deal’s much-studied, transformative effect on African American life and politics.
To be sure, New Deal programs, which were generally administered at the local level, were marred by discrimination. Nevertheless, millions of African Americans benefited from New Deal initiatives—sometimes in greater proportion than their share of the general population, even if they were underrepresented in relation to their need. Blacks were just 10 percent of the total population, for example, but accounted for 20 percent of all individuals on welfare rolls. Several hundred thousand African Americans, likewise, acquired work through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA), while quotas, intended to ensure proportional representation, gave many African Americans access to newly constructed public housing projects in the era before public housing was a vehicle for warehousing poor people.7 Yes, the 23 percent of agricultural and domestic workers who happened to be black were, like their white counterparts, excluded from coverage under the NLRA, the FLSA, and the SSA. But African American industrial workers—such as the 500,000 blacks who comprised 8 percent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) membership in 19458—were covered by each of these pieces of legislation.
There is no question that African Americans did not receive their fair share of New Deal programs—particularly in housing. But the now commonplace tendency to dismiss the Roosevelt administration’s crucial role in improving the material lives of millions of African Americans has obscured both the importance of the New Deal’s redistributive policies to blacks—who demonstrated their support for the administration with their votes—and the influence of New Deal liberalism over the scope of black political activism from the 1930s through the civil rights movement.
New Deal Industrial Democracy and Black Civil Rights
In 1978, historian Harvard Sitkoff’s A New Deal for Blacks laid the foundation on which a generation of civil rights scholarship would rest. Sitkoff’s ambitious study of Depression-era race relations and politics traced the origins of the modern civil rights movement to the 1930s and early 1940s. While Sitkoff was clear that African American civil rights advanced little during the New Deal, he convincingly argued that the so-called Depression decade was fertile ground for several political, social and intellectual developments that would eventually blossom into the insurgent black political activism of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Roosevelt administration’s emphasis on redistributive economic policies and the presence of civil rights advocates in key positions in New Deal agencies set the stage for the era of black Democratic interest-group politics. The left-labor militancy advanced by the Communist Party’s (CP) Popular Front and the CIO engendered racial liberalism among a stratum of white activists and rank-and-file unionists, opening access to good blue-collar jobs while providing African Americans useful political allies. Finally, the antifascist impulses influencing both left activism and America’s support for the European Allies strengthened the hand of social scientists and liberals who challenged notions of racial hierarchy rooted in eugenics or other biological metaphors. Each of the above, according to Sitkoff, not only informed the activist sensibilities of African Americans during the Depression and World War II, they also shaped the scope of the modern civil rights movement.9
While A New Deal for Blacks offered a compelling overview of the relationship between New Deal policy and the struggle for black equality, it did not explore the complex issues shaping civil rights institutions and their leaders during the 1930s. Thus, a great many scholars have since written books on each of the various themes Sitkoff first examined in 1978. The relationship between New Deal industrial democracy and civil rights activism during the 1930s and early 1940s has been of particular interest.
The New Deal’s efforts to redress the problem of under-consumption through unionization—best exemplified by the NLRA—transformed not just the workplace but American democracy. Aware of the contradictions between the Jeffersonian democratic ideal still celebrated by most Americans in the 1930s and the realities of industrial society, New Dealers sought to use government, as President Roosevelt stated, to “assist in the development of an economic declaration of rights, an economic constitutional order.”10 The right to unionize was at the center of this agenda.
Though today’s neoliberals generally disparage unions as “special interests,” New Dealers understood collective agitation in the workplace as a public good. Unionization enhanced consumer purchasing power and, along with entitlements, afforded dignity and security to the nation’s producer classes. This industrial democratic turn in political culture and the related rights discourse would, as I will discuss, shift the focus of African American civil rights away from narrow calls for racial equality—which basically took economic inequality as a given—toward broader demands for economic justice. New Deal industrial democracy would also encourage political militancy among black activists, who came to identify mass protest as a responsibility of citizenship.
New Deal labor law had a profound impact on the scope of African American activism during the 1930s and 1940s. Black unionists were the obvious beneficiaries of the Roosevelt administration’s efforts to enhance consumer purchasing power and workers’ rights. In 1937, for example, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) became the first African American labor union to successfully negotiate a contract with a major employer. As historian Beth Bates has argued, the BSCP’s success stemmed at least partly from the political acumen of the union’s leadership. Facing stiff opposition from a black elite dogmatically committed to clientage/petition politics, BSCP president A. Philip Randolph and his organizers framed the porters’ quest for recognition as a matter of African American civil rights. Thus, between 1925 and the start of the New Deal, the porters’ union not only established a deep base of support among blacks, but the BSCP itself helped legitimate African American protest politics.11 Still, the organizing genius of