[Marxism] How New Deal liberalism strengthened white privilege

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Review, Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005
By George M. Fredrickson

When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality 
in Twentieth-Century America
by Ira Katznelson
Norton, 238 pp., $25.95

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Ira Katznelson has made a major contribution to the affirmative action 
debate in his book When Affirmative Action Was White. He accepts Justice 
Powell's criteria and uses them to justify a much more ambitious 
governmental attack on racial inequality than currently exists. He presents 
a new version of the argument that affirmative action is justified as 
compensation for historical wrongs against black people. Instead of going 
back to slavery, he maintains that people who are still alive (or have 
living children or grandchildren) and have been the victims of specific 
historical injustices can provide strong claims for restitution from the 
United States government, the direct source of these injustices.

Most of Katznelson's book is devoted to showing how the economic and social 
legislation of the 1930s and 1940s favored whites over blacks. Katznelson 
is not the first historian to argue that the New Deal and Fair Deal widened 
the gulf between whites and blacks in the United States, but he is the 
first to consider such discrimination as the principal justification for an 
ambitious affirmative action program that would include reparations for 
blacks.[4]

The undeniable fact is that, by comparison with whites, blacks became 
relatively worse off during this period. But this relative failure has been 
obscured by the equally undeniable fact that the material circumstances of 
African-Americans improved and were, on average, significantly better in 
1950 than they had been in 1930. What Katznelson shows is that the 
Democratic social and economic policies of the Thirties and Forties were 
rigged so that whites got much more than a fair share of the benefits.

The primary cause of this inequity, Katznelson contends, was the influence 
of Southern segregationists within the Democratic Party. In the 1930s, when 
the first New Deal policies were being enacted, white Southern congressmen 
provided necessary votes for liberal measures that strengthened the labor 
movement, set minimum wages, and gave relief or temporary work to the 
unemployed. But they did so only on the condition that the Southern racial 
order remain insulated against federal actions that might threaten it. The 
cooperation of New Dealers and segregationists broke down in the 1940s, 
when a strengthened labor movement began to look south and consider 
organizing blacks as well as whites. At that point, a new coalition of 
Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats succeeded in stopping the 
advance of organized labor, especially by passing the Taft-Hartley Act of 
1947, which put heavy restrictions on union organizing.

In 1948 the Democratic Party, with labor support, took up the cause of 
civil rights for the first time, and Harry Truman was elected president 
despite the defection of much of the South to the States' Rights or 
"Dixiecrat" Party. But this change of heart by the Democrats was, 
Katznelson points out, less than a complete conversion to the cause of 
racial justice. He reminds us that the Democrats of the 1950s, trying to 
keep the South's electoral votes, backtracked on civil rights and made 
renewed overtures to Southern white supremacists. In support of his 
argument, Katznelson might have noted that Adlai Stevenson's first running 
mate was a solid segregationist and former Dixiecrat?Senator John J. 
Sparkman of Alabama.

The New Deal policies that worsened the situation of blacks were not 
overtly discriminatory. The primary device used by Southern white 
supremacists was to exclude agricultural laborers and domestic servants 
from coverage under the Social Security Act and National Labor Relations 
Act of 1935 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. Since these were the 
occupations of most Southern blacks and of much smaller proportions of 
Southern whites, such exclusions meant that most blacks were being left out 
of the new welfare state and denied the same chance to escape from poverty 
that was available to many relatively poor whites. In the South, therefore, 
the New Deal actually had the effect of strengthening the economic basis of 
white privilege. It is true that at the height of the Depression 
African-Americans received some help from the WPA and other emergency 
measures to provide relief and work, but since Southern white supremacists 
locally administered these programs, racial discrimination continued.

Service in the military during World War II provided blacks with some 
opportunities for education and for developing valuable skills. But as 
Katznelson points out, smaller proportions of blacks than whites actually 
served in the armed forces (more were considered physically or mentally 
unfit for military service) and the separate but unequal segregation of the 
armed forces meant that blacks had relatively fewer chances to acquire new 
skills and advance to higher ranks. Although he mentions it, Katznelson 
pays little attention to one bright spot in the World War II experience for 
African-Americans?the increased access to industrial jobs, especially in 
the North, resulting mainly from the tight wartime labor market.

The federal government made a modest contribution to diversifying jobs 
through the activities of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) 
established in 1941 as the result of protests led by the African-American 
labor leader E. Philip Randolph. The FEPC, by hearing complaints from 
blacks and demanding explanations from businesses, allowed more blacks to 
benefit from the new welfare state and narrowed the difference between the 
average white and black incomes. Here for the first time since 
Reconstruction the federal government was acting against ra-cial 
discrimination rather than facilitating it. The federal FEPC did not 
survive the war but it established an important precedent for later civil 
rights campaigns.

In the immediate postwar period, Katznelson convincingly argues, the GI 
Bill widened further the economic and social differences between the races. 
Southern segregation meant that educational opportunities available to 
whites were withheld from blacks, who were forced to compete for a very 
limited number of places in all-black institutions. Even in the North many 
colleges and universities either excluded blacks or admitted only a 
handful. GI loans for buying houses or financing small businesses were very 
difficult for blacks to obtain because of the discriminatory policies of 
banks and other lending agencies. Katznelson concludes that most government 
social policies during the 1930s and 1940s were, in effect, part of a vast 
affirmative action program for whites that left blacks further behind than 
they had been at the beginning of the period. He makes a chilling case.

full: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18450

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