Fear Itself (26 page)

On the eve of the 1935 Wagner Act, which provided a supportive legal framework for labor organizing, 12 percent of nonagricultural workers had belonged to trade unions. By 1939, the proportion more than doubled, reaching 29 percent, thus making it increasingly likely that labor might come to play a central role in national politics in a manner similar to that it had come to perform in Scandinavia, France, and Great Britain. Most telling, because most militant, was the remarkable growth of the CIO. As an excited account of “labor on the march” by a union activist recorded at the time, “by the end of 1937 the affiliated international unions of the CIO had grown from the founding ten to thirty-two; its membership from less than a million in December 1935 to 1,296,500 in July 1936; to 1,460,000 in December; to 1,804,000 in March, 1937; and by September of 1937 to 3,718,000.” The American Federation of Labor (AFL) also expanded, if in a more measured way, growing from 3,218,000 members in 1935 to 3,878,000 by 1939.
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Both labor federations swiftly made clear that their policy concerns transcended workplace agreements. In November 1939, the AFL announced a comprehensive program for “Next Steps in Social Insurance”; five months later, the CIO issued its far-reaching plans to achieve “Security for the People.”
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In Congress, the southern wing of the party observed how the interests of “labor” appeared to supplant those of the “farmer” in the Democratic Party’s “farmer-labor” coalition. The new unions that “added to the base of social reformism,” and “gave the later New Deal a social democratic tinge that had never before been present in American reform movements,”
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began to organize black as well as white southern workers in the late 1930s. Some unions also worked closely with advocates of racial change within the South. Already in 1934, some two in three mostly white southern textile workers had joined a strike called by AFL’s United Textile Workers of America; it was repressed by authorities, who called out the National Guard, used physical force, and set up internment facilities for strikers. Seen as an exception that was handled effectively, this labor conflict did not raise the alarm bells rung by the activities of the CIO’s industrial unions in the region.
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Between 1936 and 1938, there was a successful sit-down strike in Atlanta by the United Automobile Workers at the Fisher Body and Chevrolet plants of General Motors; violent clashes with United Rubber Workers organizers in Gadsden, Alabama; a Tennessee Coal and Iron contract with the United Steelworkers of America; success by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the United Garment workers in scattered clothing plants; gains by the United Textile Workers; and triumphant organizing by the Oil Workers International Union in Oklahoma and Texas. By one careful estimate, there were 627,000 union members across the South by 1939, with some 60 percent in building trade, railroad, printing, tobacco, and other AFL unions, about 15 percent in the independent United Mine Workers, and the remaining 25 percent in the new industrial CIO unions.
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Relationships between unions and African-Americans were often fraught. A survey in the early 1940s noted how fully thirteen AFL affiliates excluded black members by provisions in their constitutions or by the tacit consent of their members, and how seven more gave black members only segregated auxiliary status. “In most instances the exclusionist and discriminatory practices have been in effect for many years, and there is no doubt but that they have the support of the majority of the membership of the unions.” Despite the persistence of such racial discrimination in many unions, and despite the practice of segregation by numerous southern locals, labor groups pioneered racial integration in American life. This role included some AFL unions, such as those of the bricklayers, masons, plasterers, and cement finishers, as well as the hod carriers’ union, the longshoremen’s union, and various garment workers’ unions that offered equal treatment across the racial divide; some even fined members who discriminated on the basis of race.
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Most striking, though, was how the new CIO unions cultivated African-American membership and played a key role in forging links “between urban liberals and the black struggle.” They quickly became the most racially integrated institutions in American life. In all, these unions were the most important force in making it difficult for across-the-board southern support for the New Deal to persist. The developing labor movement added backing for legislation to punish lynching and eliminate the poll tax, thus helping to emplace civil rights on the agenda of Congress in a serious way for the first time in nearly five decades.
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Southerners had additional reasons to become anxious about the vulnerability of their racial order. The color line was coming under increasing pressure. Black voices were growing louder and more assertive. The mounting ideological contrast between democracy and totalitarianism drew attention to parallels between the patterns of exclusion that characterized the lives of African-Americans and German Jews. Further, white southerners could observe the first signs of change in national white opinion, notice the president’s Court-packing plan, and watch the 1939 creation of a Civil Liberties Unit in the Department of Justice, whose remit included race-related litigation.
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President Roosevelt himself seemed less reliable, especially after he had attempted an unsuccessful purge in 1938 of southern members of Congress who had begun to resist his legislative agenda.
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To be sure, he “seemed ready enough to leave well enough alone in questions that involved white supremacy,” yet he also did not want to forgo northern support, black as well as white, especially after African-Americans had begun to vote for the Democratic Party. In 1932, two in three African-Americans voted for Hoover. The midterm elections two years later witnessed a dramatic shift, as many blacks soberly recognized that no other available arrangements were better than those offered by the New Deal. By 1936, the slope of electoral change had grown steeper. Days after the president opened a new chemistry building at Howard University, the nation’s leading black institution, declaring that “among American citizens there shall be no forgotten men and no forgotten races,” support by black voters topped his national share of 60 percent.
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The
Baltimore Sun
’s columnist Frank Kent announced that “nothing of more far-reaching significance has happened in politics for a good many years.”
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This electoral swing underscores the dire circumstances black Americans faced at the time. They were attracted to the New Deal by its economic program, which, however discriminatory, offered real material benefits to a desperate population. Blacks who had been entirely shut out before 1933 could draw on some public programs, especially federal relief, public works, and housing assistance.
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“They say Roosevelt saved them from starvation, gave them aid when they were in distress,” a South Carolina voter registrar reported.
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The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) segregated whites and blacks, but it put to work some 200,000 young African-Americans.
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Blacks also drew comfort from the government’s limited and halting racial appeals, and appreciated unprecedented access to the White House and federal agencies and the creation of a “black cabinet.” They were thankful for how some federal orders slowed racial discrimination, such as the 1935 directive by the president to the Works Progress Administration, in which he stated that qualified persons should not be “discriminated against on any grounds whatsoever.”
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They noticed Eleanor Roosevelt’s outspoken support for greater racial equity, how she promoted education for black Americans as the ultimate civil right, and how she spoke out against the crime of lynching and advocated federal legislation to curb it.
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They also took note of how Harold Ickes, a key Roosevelt confidant who served as secretary of the interior from 1933 to 1946, had been president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP; that some administration figures, such as Aubrey Williams, the National Youth Administration’s leader, spent about one-third of his budget on black students; how the New Deal brought tens of talented African-Americans to Washington, including Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, and William Hastie; and even how a black minister was selected to open a session of the Democratic Party’s 1936 national convention.
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Southern Democrats noticed, as well. They understood that no president had been elected in recent decades without carrying Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, states with 135 electoral votes, a quarter of the national total. Commanding between 4 and 5 percent of the electorate in these states with closely divided white participants, black voters had become potentially pivotal.
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More broadly, southerners understood that they faced an increasingly unappealing electoral dilemma. From the end of Reconstruction to the New Deal, Democrats lost national elections most of the time because their only sure base was in the South, and Republicans had consolidated a voting advantage in the rest of the country. Only by becoming competitive outside the South, while holding on to their base in the region, had the Democratic Party put together the winning coalition that propelled southern members of Congress into prominent, indeed central, legislative positions.

The South also observed growing black aspirations and outmigration, demands for better education, the heightened activism of an assortment of liberals, union organizers, Communists, and socialists, and a general unsettling of race relations.
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They took in how some national unions in major industries like steel, rubber, automobile, oil, and mining included a growing multiracial membership, and how northern politicians had begun to cultivate black votes.
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They worried that efforts to create a national minimum wage would undermine the racial order. “There is a racial question here,” Martin Dies, the Texas Democrat, told the House in 1937. “And you cannot prescribe the same wage for the black man as for the white man.”
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At issue was not whether segregation would collapse, at least not in the near term, but whether these developments portended more fundamental change in the future.
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Such worries helped revive talk of states’ rights, and exacerbated tensions within the Democratic Party’s caucuses in the House and Senate. Long-dormant questions were transformed into accusatory challenges. These concerns made even those southern members most inclined toward the New Deal become wary about the strong national powers they had done so much to fashion. James Byrnes, soon to be a Supreme Court justice, then the country’s secretary of state, and long “the President’s favorite senator,” ripped into the New Deal in 1938 for how its decisions about unions and wages undermined southern racial patterns. The Democratic Party, he argued, had fallen under the sway of “the Negroes of the North.” He lamented how the South, by contrast, “has been deserted by the Democrats.”
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Many other southern political leaders and journalists also began to realize that New Deal initiatives, ranging from agriculture to industry, threatened to destabilize Jim Crow. It was the first intimation of the possibility that later would cause many southern Democrats to abandon their party entirely.

With the increasing importance of labor union members and northern urban voters, including African-Americans, to the party’s electoral base, some even put into question the long-standing affiliation between the South and the Democratic Party.
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“Southern states,” Mississippi’s
Fayette Chronicle
editorialized in September 1937, “which for so long have given absolute loyalty to the Democratic party . . . have been actuated by one consideration—the preservation of white supremacy in the south,” which it believed had been called into question by the party’s cultivation of black constituents. Thus, it counseled that the New Deal had “absolved southerners from any further obligation to a party that has betrayed its most loyal adherents.”
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In January 1940, Mississippi’s John Rankin rose in the House to caution his nonsouthern party colleagues not to test the South’s sufferance by supporting civil rights initiatives. “Remember,” he warned, “southern Democrats now have the balance of power in both Houses of Congress. By your conduct you may make it impossible for us to support many of you for important committee assignments, and other positions to which you aspire.” In attacking the southern system, he asserted, “you Democrats . . . are destroying your usefulness here.”
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The increasingly tenuous coalition of strange bedfellows that composed the Democratic Party had already become manifest when Congress took up two contentious proposals in the first part of 1937. In February, Roosevelt proposed a judiciary organization bill, which would have allowed the president to appoint a new Supreme Court justice, and, more broadly, a new federal judge each time a sitting member over the age of seventy, with ten years of service, did not retire. The goal was to overcome the decisions against key New Deal legislation that had begun in May 1935 when the Supreme Court had ruled the NIRA to be unconstitutional, later followed by judgments that invalidated the tax provisions of the AAA, and the price-setting provisions of the Bituminous Coal Conservation Act of 1935. Some southerners, especially the minority who long had opposed the New Deal, sought to mobilize their fellow regional representatives by arguing that a transformation of race relations was part of the agenda of enlargement. Referring to the plan, Josiah Bailey claimed that Roosevelt “is determined to get the Negro vote, and I do not have to tell you what
this
means.” Carter Glass maintained that the bill offered evidence that FDR was courting and helping African-Americans more “than any President except Lincoln.” To them, the ill-fated court proposal “was the first step toward the destruction of white supremacy.” This appeal persuaded key Senate figures like Champ Clark of Missouri and Tom Connally of Texas, who had backed administration legislation in the past, to break with Roosevelt.
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