Writing Assignment for Moreno paper

1. What does Moreno mean when he says "Hagiography characterized the first generation to interpret the New Deal"?

2. How is the term "political economy" used in this paper?

3. What does Moreno mean when he says "New Deal agricultural policies amounted to an American enclosure movement"?

4. How did the farm programs of the 1920s have racially disparate impacts?

5. Why were the early 1920s particularly hard years to break into northern industrial employment?

6. How does Moreno see government encouragement of labor unions impacting black employment in the 1930s?

7. What impact does he think the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had on black employment?

514 + PAUL MORENO conceding that the New Deal "enhanced the power of interest groups who claimed to An Ambivalent Legacy speak for the millions, but sometimes represented only a small minority," William Leuchtenberg concluded, "Negro intellectuals might fret at the inequities of the New Deal, but the masses of Negroes began to break party lines in gratitude for govern- Black Americans and the ment bounties and nondiscriminatory treatment" (1963, 347, 186). In short, most hagiographers pointed to black inclusion in an off-handed way; they conceded some shortcomings, but without much sustained analysis. The New Political Economy of the New Deal Left critique of the New Deal that began in the 1960s took for granted black exclus sion without shedding any new light on the matter. Paul Conkin quickly noted, 'Negroes, politically purchased by relief or by the occasional concern of bureaucrats or Mrs. Roosevelt, remained a submerged and neglected caste" (1967, 73). Barton PAUL MORENO Bernstein similarly noted that the New Deal "failed to extend equality and generally countenanced racial discrimination and segregation"(1968, 263). Pondering the great shift of blacks to the Democratic Party, Jerold Auerbach identified a funda- mental weakness in the New Left critique. "Unless one assumes, as Bernstein, Conkin, and others elsewhere assume, that the New Deal was so diabolically clever that it won the support of those whom it did not help, one must conclude that most N o group in America votes Democratic more than black Americans, who black (and white) Americans found much in the New Deal to command their alle- from Reconstruction until the Great Depression had clung just as tena- giance" (1969, 22). ciously to the Republican Party. Historians usually regard the New Deal as In the next decade, several new works dealt specifically with New Deal racial pol- the turning point in this political realignment, but they remain uncertain as to why icy and the impact of New Deal policies on blacks. The first were markedly even- blacks flocked to the Democratic Party in the 1930s. The racial impact of New Deal handed and mildly critical (Kirby 1980; Weiss 1983; Wolters 1970).2 At the same policies also evokes controversy. time, a new wave of ideologically leftist scholars found much of appeal in the New Hagiography characterized the first generation to interpret the New Deal, as a Deal. Unlike the 1960s New Left critics who condemned the shortcomings of New left-liberal consensus dominated the scholarly community. The hagiographers had lit- Deal liberalism, these writers pointed out continuity between New Deal liberalism le to say about the racial impact of New Deal policies.! James MacGregor Burns and New Left radicalism (Sitkoff 1978; Sullivan 1996). argued that Roosevelt was slow to see the potential of a voting bloc of minority At present, discussion of the issue is locked into a left-liberal/left-radical dia- groups and that blacks liked FDR's personality more than they approved of his poli- logue that is typical of twentieth-century U.S. history (Hamby 1990, 10). In this arti- cies (1956, 198, 339). Carl Degler depicted the New Deal as a "third American rev- cle, I attempt to bring in the perspective of recent scholarship informed by a classical olution" that included blacks. Though it produced no specific legislative benefits for liberal (or conservative) perspective. Instead of lamenting that the New Deal did not blacks as such, "The Roosevelt administration did much for the Negro. . . . When produce full-blown socialism, I consider the possibility that it went too far. The New low-cost housing went up, Negroes got their share; Negro youths were welcome in Deal may not have been "diabolically clever," but its combination of economic failure the CCC and NYA just as whites were, though in the former the races were segre- and political success can be explained in terms of the public-choice theory of political gated. . . . Even-handedly distributed federal relief funds were a gift from heaven to economy that few historians have employed. the black man, who was traditionally 'hired last and fired first'" (1959, 397). Many One labor historian, trying to bridge the left-liberal/left-radical gap, notes that blacks cast their first votes in Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and radical historians who "emphasize only the organized labor movement's institutional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections (Degler 1959, 397). Although racism run the risk of obscuring key aspects of black workers' activism, as well as their distinct ideological perspectives." On the other hand, this historian points out, left- liberal historians tend to "romanticize their subjects' thinking and behavior, and Paul Moreno is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College. 1. Nor did the unusual anti-New Deal work by Edgar Eugene Robinson (1955). The Independent Review, v.VI, n.4, Spring 2002, ISSN 1086-1653, Copyright @ 2002, pp. 513-539. 2. In this vein, Francis Allen Kifer's dissertation, "The Negro under the New Deal, 1932-41," was written a decade earlier (1961) at the University of Wisconsin, but it remained unpublished. 513 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMEIVALENT LEGACY 515 implicitly deny the consequences of white unionists' snatees\" (Arnesen 1993, 56). This observation is true, but, in addition, both radicals and liberals on die left ignore some fundamental points about the larger political, legal, and constitutional order as well as the economics of discriminationiie complex known as \"\"3 In this article, I examine the racial impact of New Deal agricultural, industrial (especially labor), and other policies. I conclude that the criticism of New Deal poli7 cies is largely valid. The harm that New Deal policies did to blacks increased the per, ceived need for remedies such as airmative action in 19605, and in several respects such policies were adumbrated in the New Deal itself. Finally, I consider why an ecoi nonlic recovery program that was such a failure had such political success, in particu- lar in the black partisan realignment of the 1930s. New Deal Agricultural Policy Because most blacks lived in the rural South, New Deal agricultural policy had the gruth and most immediate impact on them. Half of blad( Americans were farmers in 1932, but only 20 percent of them owned their own land. Because New Dali agrie cultural policy was shaped to benet landowners, most blacks were at the bottom of a system that funneled benets to tenants and sharecroppers through those landowners (Wolters 1970, part I). The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) attempted to raise the prices farmers received liar their crops by reducing the amounts they produced. Farmers and the federal government would agree to reduce acreage in selected crops, and farmers would get federal benet payments, secured by an excise tax on commodity proceSe sors (Hosen I992, 61). sharecroppers were supposed to receive one-half of such pay- ment, share tenants twothirds, and cash tenants all of it. This program, involving one million contracts between owners and the government, ms impossible to police, and it provided an invitationoften acceptedto fraud. In 1934, Congress replaced ploweup payments with \"rental\" and \"parity\" pay? ments, and gave sharecroppers oneeninth of die latter. After the Supreme Court struck down the rst AAA in 1936, that law's successor, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, raised the sharecropper's share to oneefourth.'1 Although sharecropper income did rise under the revised law, \"The nature of the landlordrtenant relationship presented the landlord wia great opportunities for fraud, and under the circumstances it is not surprising that many landlords took unfair advantage\" (Walters 1970, 24). landowners would maximize their benet from acreageereduction payments if they did not have an] tenants or sharecroppers at all, so the New Deal's agricultural 3. David Bernstein (2001) does deal with political economy in this sense in his analysis ofthe effecr ofNew Deal labnr swam-ls on black. 4.11m disparate racial impact arm: 1936 as: may make it the as: case nfwl-lat would later be lled \"ml ronmenral racism." VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 516 PAUL MORENO policy actually displaced large numbers of farmers. Clearly, \"Saving the farmer meant saving some farmers at the expense of others\" (Weiss 1983, 54), and it was often white farmers who were saved at the expense of blacks. The number of black tenants fell by onerthird, black sharecroppers by oneeiurth, and white sharecroppers by 37 percent, wherras the number of white tenants rose. Yet Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, intensely fearil of alienating southern white support for the Roof sevelt administration, worried that the New Deal might be doing tlm mud) to help blacks (Sitkoff'l978, 44; Weiss 1933, 54). Scholars generally ayee that New Deal farm policy had a disastrous etct on blacks, despite the bureaucrats' claims of sensitivity to black hardships. By responding to the politically powerful interests of large landowners, the New Deal political coalii tion contributed to the \"downvimrd mobility\" of less welleconnected southern blacks (Couch and Shugart 199B, 214; Valocchi 1994, 352.). As one economic historian has put it, \"The South was planter's heaven by the late 19305\" (Wright 1986, 233). New Deal agricultural policies amounted to an \"American enclosure movement,\" pushing blacks off the land in a period when the pull of northern industrial employment was slack. \"If orthodox market economists want to nd examples of welleintentioned lib, eral interventions leading to hardships for the poor and vulnerable, they can readily nd them in these chapters of southern history\" (Mandle 1992, 81). The farm programs ofae 1920s had anticipated the racially disparate impact of New Deal agricultural measures. Robert C. Weaver noted \"the abuses of the Federal feed, seed, and fertilizer laws in 1928729. These abuses were of the same nature as those which confront the AAA in its dealings with Negro tenants\" ([1935] 1968, 327). Like so much of the New Deal, its agricultural policies were really just an expan7 sion or acceleration of the \"progressive\" policies of the 19205. Some historians have argued that the effect of such a push may have been \"pro- gressive\" in the long run, and some have claimed that its ill effects have been exage gerated. Although detractors often dte the gure of one million displaced blacks, the number of black farmers declined less in the 1930s than it bad in the previous two decades. Still, Regardless ofdie facts, the claim of Negroes that die AAA drove hune dreds of thousands of blacks born the land persisted in the 1930s. It gained currency because so much of the rst New Dal was in fact discriminatory against blacks\" (Sitkoi? 1978, 53; see also Mandle 1992). Industrial and Labor Policy Aunciarianalr'a Precursors New Deal agricultural policies pushed black Farmworkers into industrial cities where little employment was available. Indeed, black workers had already faced an inhosi pitable labor market in the 19205. Whatever advantages they might have gained by the curtailment of immigrant competition in that decade (one of the incentives in due THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW AN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 519 520 + PAUL MORENO 137-42). It was "predictably counterproductive. . . . Far from directing resources Why did black workers oppose unionism? Historians have often repeated the claim toward new and dynamic market opportunities that would expand output and that employers pitted ethnic groups against one another as a "divide-and-conquer" tac- employment, inefficiency was rewarded. There is reason to believe that the codes tic (Asher and Stephenson 1990, 5-8; W. Harris 1982, 36; Valocchi 1994). South- actually hindered recovery" (Couch and Shugart 1998, 77). But its ill effects would ern planters and northern manufacturers are said to have used "racial divisions in continue because after it was struck down, the federal government continued its poli- their own work force to undercut the organizing power of labor and to lower the cies in a piecemeal fashion, allowing individual industries to organize themselves in overall price of that labor" (Valocchi 1994, 347). Other economists have explained ways that squeezed out black labor (Hawley 1966, 166, 188, 192, 198, 233, 241-46, interethnic conflict in terms of a "split labor market," as the result of competition 268, 277; Wolters 1970, 214). Most of all, the New Deal continued and expanded among workers with different skill and wage levels (Bonacich 1972). Employers were the NIRA's labor policy. likely to take account of the disruptive effects of mixing hostile ethnic groups in their workforces, responding to "employee discrimination" (Cohen 1990, 36). A study of Unionism the problem in 1939 concluded that however racist employers might be, they "have The New Deal's greatest impact on the American political economy came from its use been willing and often anxious to overlook their emotional aversion and to give of the power of the federal government to promote the unionization of labor. That Negroes employment in order to expand the labor market." White employee preju- policy was also among the most significant for blacks. Just as saving the farmer meant dice made "divide-and-rule" possible (Cayton and Mitchell 1939, x). Nor does it saving some farmers at the expense of others, saving the workers meant saving some appear that northern industrial employers engaged in wage discrimination against workers at the expense of others (B. Bernstein 1968, 81; Weiss 1983, 54). black workers. A 1938 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the iron and steel indus- In the nineteenth century, black interest in organized labor peaked in the 1880s try concluded that although blacks earned less than whites, the difference did not and then declined. In 1871, Frederick Douglass wrote an article entitled "The Tyranny, result from racial wage discrimination by employers. Within the system of occupa- Folly, and Wickedness of Labor Unions" (Foner and Lewis 1978-84, 2: 178). Booker tional segregation and hierarchy, blacks and whites usually earned the same wage for T. Washington also generally opposed organized labor, although toward the end of the same work (Higgs 1989, 18). his life he came to believe that unions might recognize that it was in their interest to However common employers' divide-and-conquer tactics might have been, stop discriminating against blacks and to play a positive role in black economic life.5 more important is the basic economic fact that strikebreaking was an indication of the W. E. B. Du Bois likewise condemned white employers and white unions in his 1899 advantage that black workers brought to the market: their ability and willingness to book The Philadelphia Negro, but he soon switched his allegiance to a union-based work at lower wage rates than incumbent whites. The "reserve army" of black labor system of interracial socialism (Meier and Rudwick 1968, 27-48, 37, 40; Washington threatened any premium being paid to white labor. One of the goals of organized 1913). Even in the age of Booker T. Washington, black opinion had begun to grow labor was to eliminate such competition so that whites could charge a premium for more skeptical of free-market capitalism and had tried to make overtures-usually their labor-what economists call a "monopoly rent."6 unrequited-to organized labor. W. E. B. Du Bois's embrace of interracial socialism The power to coerce labor was the essence of slavery; many late-nineteenth- before World War I was the wave of the future (Karson and Radosh 1968; Meier century black leaders regarded the power of labor organizations to coerce employ- 1963, 46, 203) ers and nonmember workers as not essentially different. As Booker T. Washington The National Urban League, begun as part of the entrepreneurial self-help effort put it, Negroes "are engaged in a struggle to maintain their right to labor as free that Washington embodied, had come to support black unionization by 1919. men, which, with the right to own property is, in my opinion, the most important Although fifty-two editors in the National Negro Press Association in 1924 con- privilege that was granted to black men as a result of the Civil War." It was a strug demned "all forms of unionism and economic radicalism" and advised blacks "to gle that he believed blacks could win and that would diminish interracial conflict. stand squarely behind capital" (Sitkoff 1978, 170), most national black organizations "The effect of this competition is not to increase but to lessen racial prejudice," he had come to look more favorably on unions by the mid-1920s (Harris, 1982, 4). said (1913, 758). When the federal government began to promote collective bargaining, black organi- zations were suspicious that the government might increase the power of white unions to exclude blacks (Wolters 1969, 142). 6. David Roediger argues that the "wages of whiteness" were not real, but a kind of psychocultural com pensation for lower wages. "Status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienat- ing and exploitative class relationships." The white working class actually earned less as a result of its racism 5. Washington might also have been seeking new allies in response to the loss of federal patronage that (1991, chap. 1, 137, 169). came with the Democratic takeover of the federal executive branch in 1913 (Factor 1970, 348). VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 531 532 + PAUL MORENO labor or mainstream civil rights organizations, but from A. Philip Randolph's black- tion into white society" (Eisenstadt 1999, 52). Despite his emphasis on industrial only March on Washington Movement. President Roosevelt's initial idea was to use education, Booker T. Washington's ideology has been described as "peasant conser- racial quotas to ensure racial equality. "There is evidence that on May 26, 1941, he vatism" (Harlan 1983, 437). He evinced "a deep suspicion of the marketplace and wrote a memorandum to William S. Knudsen, the director-general of the Office of market forces as a tool for positively reconstructing black life" (Eisenstadt 1999, 72). Production Management, which contained a rather naive plan for dealing with the At a time when many Americans were disillusioned about "business civilization," problem. The cryptic memo dictated to a secretary read: 'Knudsen-Hillman OPM. To blacks were especially so. The 1930s completed the rejection of Washington's creed order taking Negroes up to a certain % in factory order work" (qtd. in Morrison 1969, of bourgeois self-help. Among black intellectuals, scorn of enterprise and capitalism 68, and Goodwin 1994, 249). Robert Weaver, who constructed the PWA quota sys was the rule. Economist Abram Harris (1936) and sociologist E. Franklin Frazier tem, warned against its use in a period of job expansion. "Fortunately," he wrote of the 1957) dismissed black entrepreneurship as a destructive "myth" (see also Kenzer FEPC quota proposal, "the proposals to apply minimum percentage clauses in such a 1997, 4). period were not heeded, and other more realistic devices were adopted" (1946, 14). Republicans made a vain effort to point out the discriminatory effects of New The FEPC consciously rejected racial proportions as either proof of or a remedy Deal agencies and argued that blacks would be better off in a full-employment econ- for discrimination (Garfinkel 1969; Moreno 1997, 66-73; Reed 1991; Ruchames omy. Republicans 1952). The FEPC did not last beyond the war, and Congress failed to create a per- manent peacetime agency. Several states, beginning with New York in 1945, enacted argued that New Deal policies were based on the assumption of a perma- fair-employment laws that continued the color-blind, equal-treatment, individual-rights ment and large reservoir of the unemployed, which would include most standards of the FEPC. Although the alternative, color-conscious, equal-outcomes, blacks; that, as a result of New Deal programs, blacks would be perma- group-rights model was submerged in the immediate postwar years, its return in the nently excluded from productive gainful employment; and that the New late 1960s can be seen as both the fruit of New Deal political economy and a return Deal relief rolls functioned as modern reservations to which blacks would to some race-specific New Deal programs. be confined as wards of the federal government. It was a sophisticated argu- ment, but there was no way it could appeal successfully to the majority of The Black Political Realignment blacks in the 1930s. . . . [Ijt was nearly impossible to expect a beneficiary of the New Deal to step back in 1936 and take the long view of the Republic Economic historians have found no gain, and perhaps some loss, for blacks in the can argument. (Weiss 1983, 197) 1930s in terms of per capita income (Higgs 1989, 13-14).14 If the New Deal was so detrimental to black interests, why did blacks begin to turn to the Democratic It is also important to note that the great move of blacks into the Democratic Party in Party? the 1930s was not complete or permanent. Wendell Willkie may have won as much as An important part of the explanation is the almost complete lack of alternatives half of the black vote in the 1940 presidential election, and as late as 1960 Richard in the 1930s. The debate then (and among historians since) was between left liberals Nixon received about one-third of the black vote (Kenneally 1993, 134, 139).16 Not and left radicals; there were virtually no libertarian spokesmen of any influence (and until the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the black electoral none of them concerned primarily with racial issues). The Republican Party had in transformation complete. large part accepted progressive principles in the 1920s; thus, the New Deal continued The crisis of the New Deal coalition that resulted from that embrace was already many of Hoover's policies. Even less was there any libertarian sentiment among present in the New Deal years. Roosevelt's unwillingness to antagonize his southern blacks. 15 white supporters was the chief limitation on New Deal racial policy. Southern segre- Black "conservatism" was of a traditional rather than a classical liberal bent. gationists were suspicious of the political following that federal relief had built up "Southern black conservatism emphasized collective rather than individual rights, and among blacks, and they were ready to believe that Roosevelt's 1937 Court-packing saw progress for blacks taking place within black institutions, rather than by integra- plan was designed "to cement this growing Negro allegiance by appointing judges who would upset southern racial patterns. . . . To southern irreconcilables . . . the court plan sought not only to destroy the last bulwark against the New Deal but it was 14. A recent analysis (Darity, Dietrich, and Guilkey forthcoming) found slippage also in black occupational status from 1920 to 1940. 15. Some black newspapers, benefiting from segregated audiences and labor markets, embraced a right-to- work editorial policy. Because white unions excluded black workers, the black newspapers were able to pay 16. Weiss says that the Democrats won 67 percent of the black vote in 1940, a decline from 71 percent in those workers less. 1936 (Weiss 1983, 294). VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY . 515 implicitly deny the consequences ofwhite unionists' strategies\" (Arnesen 1993, 56). This observation is true, but, in addition, both radicals and liberals on die left ignore some fundamental points about the larger political, legal, and constitutional order as well as the economics of discriminationidie complex known as \"political economy.\"3 In this article, I examine the racial impact of New Deal agricultural, industrial (especially labor), and other policies. I conclude that the criticism of New Deal poli- cies is largely valid. The harm that New Deal policies did to blacks increased the per? ceived need for remedies such as airmative action in 19605, and in several respects such policies were admnbrated in the New Deal itself. Finally, I consider why an eco- nomic recovery program that was such a failure had such political succem, in particue lar in the black partisan realignment of the 1930s. New Deal Agricultural Policy Because most blacks lived in the rural South, New Deal agricultural policy had the greatest and most immediate impact on them. Half of black Americans were rmers in 1932, but only 20 percent of them owned their own land. Because New Deal agrie cultural policy was shaped to benet landowners, most blacks were at the bottom of a system that funneled benets to tenants and sharecroppers through those landowners (Wolters 1970, part 1). The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) attempted to raise the prices farmers received liar their crops by reducing the amounts they produced. Farmers and the federal government would agree to reduce acreage in selected crops, and Farmers would get federal benet payments, secured by an excise tax on commodity proceSe sors (Hosen 1992, 61). sharecroppers were supposed to receive onerhalf of such pay, ment, share tenants two-thirds, and cash tenants all of it. This program, involving one million contracts between owners and the government, ms impossible to police, and it provided an iniritationwften acceptedito fraud. In 1934, Congress replaced plowup payments with \"rental\" and \"parity\" pay? merits, and gave sharecroppers oneeninth of die latter. After the Supreme Court struck down the rst AAA in 1936, that law's successor, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, raised the sharecropper's share to oneefoui'th.4 Although sharecropper income did rise under the revised law, \"The nature of the landlordrtenant relationship presented the landlord wida great opportunities for fraud, and under the circumstances it is not surprising that many landlords took unfair advantage\" (Walters 1970, 24). Landowners would maximize their benet from acreageereduction payment: if they did not have any tenants or sharecroppers at all, so the New Deal's agricultural 3. David 3m (2001) does deal with political economy in this sense in his analysis thh: effect '3er Deal labor regulations on black. 4. The disparate racial impacroflhe 1936 act maymake it the rst case ofwhat would later be called \"envi- mental racism." VOLUME V1, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 516 PAUL MORENO policy actually displaced large numbers of rmers. Clearly, \"Saving the farmer meant saving some farmers at the expense of others\" (Weiss 1983, 54), and it was often white farmers who were saved at the expense of blacks. The number of black tenants fell by onerthird, black sharecroppers by oneefourth, and white sharecroppers by 37 percent, whereas the number of white tenants rose. Yet Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, intensely fearful of alienating southern white support for the R00- sevelt administration, worried that the New Deal might be doing too much to help b1aclrs(5itkofi'1978, 44; Weiss 1983, 54). Scholars generally agree that New Deal farm policy had a disastrous eect on blacks, despite the bureaucrats' claims of sensitivity to black hardships. By responding to the politically powerful interests of large landowners, the New Deal political coali- tion contributed to the \"downvimrd mobility\" of less welleconnected southern blacks (Couch and Shugart 1998, 214; Valocchi 1994, 352). As one economic historian has put it, \"The South was planter's heaven by the late 19305\" (Wright 1986, 233). - _n \"American enclosure movement,\" pushing blacks off the land in a period when the pull of northern industrial employment was slack. \"If orthodox market economists want to find examples of welleintenlioned libe eral interventions leading to hardships for the poor and vulnerable, they can readily nd them in these chapters of southern history\" (Mandle 1992, 81). The [arm programs of die 19205 had anticipated the racially disparate impact of New Deal agricultural measures. Robert C. Weaver noted \"the abuses of the Federal feed, seed, and fertilizer laws in 1928729. These abuses were of the same nature as those which confront the AAA in its dealings with Negro tenants\" ([1935] 1968, 327). Like so much of the New Deal, its agricultural policies were really just an expan- sion or acceleration of the \"progressive\" policies of the 19205. Some historians have argued that the effect of such a push may have been \"pro, gressive\" in the long run, and some have claimed that its ill effects have been exage gerated. Although detractors often cite the gure of one million displaced blacks, le number of black farmers declined less in the 19305 than it had in the previous two decades. Still, \"Regardless ofdre facts, the claim of Negroes that die AAA drove hune dreds of thousands of blacks rom the land persisted in the 19305. It gained currency because so much of the rst New Deal was in fact discriminatory against blacks\" (Sitko'1978, 53; see also Mandle 1992). Industrial and Labor Policy Anaciurionalia: Premwsors New Deal agricultural policies pushed black Farmworkers into industrial cities where little employment was available. Indeed, black workers had already Eaced an inhos- pitable labor market in the 19205. Whatever advantages they might have gained by the curtailment of immigrant competition in that decade (one of the incentives in the THE INDEPENDENT REVLEW AN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 515 516 + PAUL MORENO implicitly deny the consequences of white unionists' strategies" (Arnesen 1993, 56). policy actually displaced large numbers of farmers. Clearly, "Saving the farmer meant This observation is true, but, in addition, both radicals and liberals on the left ignore saving some farmers at the expense of others" (Weiss 1983, 54), and it was often some fundamental points about the larger political, legal, and constitutional order as white farmers who were saved at the expense of blacks. The number of black tenants well as the economics of discrimination-the complex known as "political economy."3 fell by one-third, black sharecroppers by one-fourth, and white sharecroppers by 37 In this article, I examine the racial impact of New Deal agricultural, industrial percent, whereas the number of white tenants rose. Yet Secretary of Agriculture (especially labor), and other policies. I conclude that the criticism of New Deal poli- Henry Wallace, intensely fearful of alienating southern white support for the Roo- cies is largely valid. The harm that New Deal policies did to blacks increased the per- sevelt administration, worried that the New Deal might be doing too much to help ceived need for remedies such as affirmative action in 1960s, and in several respects blacks (Sitkoff 1978, 44; Weiss 1983, 54). such policies were adumbrated in the New Deal itself. Finally, I consider why an eco- Scholars generally agree that New Deal farm policy had a disastrous effect on nomic recovery program that was such a failure had such political success, in particu- blacks, despite the bureaucrats' claims of sensitivity to black hardships. By responding lar in the black partisan realignment of the 1930s. to the politically powerful interests of large landowners, the New Deal political coali- ion contributed to the "downward mobility" of less well-connected southern blacks New Deal Agricultural Policy Couch and Shugart 1998, 214; Valocchi 1994, 352). As one economic historian has Because most blacks lived in the rural South, New Deal agricultural policy had the put it, "The South was planter's heaven by the late 1930s" (Wright 1986, 233). New greatest and most immediate impact on them. Half of black Americans were farmers Deal agricultural policies amounted to an "American enclosure movement," pushing n 1932, but only 20 percent of them owned their own land. Because New Deal agri- blacks off the land in a period when the pull of northern industrial employment was cultural policy was shaped to benefit landowners, most blacks were at the bottom of a slack. "If orthodox market economists want to find examples of well-intentioned lib- system that funneled benefits to tenants and sharecroppers through those landowners eral interventions leading to hardships for the poor and vulnerable, they can readily (Wolters 1970, part 1). find them in these chapters of southern history" (Mandle 1992, 81). The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) attempted to raise the prices The farm programs of the 1920s had anticipated the racially disparate impact of farmers received for their crops by reducing the amounts they produced. Farmers and New Deal agricultural measures. Robert C. Weaver noted "the abuses of the Federal the federal government would agree to reduce acreage in selected crops, and farmers feed, seed, and fertilizer laws in 1928-29. These abuses were of the same nature as would get federal benefit payments, secured by an excise tax on commodity proces- those which confront the AAA in its dealings with Negro tenants" ([1935] 1968, sors (Hosen 1992, 61). Sharecroppers were supposed to receive one-half of such pay- 327). Like so much of the New Deal, its agricultural policies were really just an expan- ment, share tenants two-thirds, and cash tenants all of it. This program, involving one sion or acceleration of the "progressive" policies of the 1920s. million contracts between owners and the government, was impossible to police, and Some historians have argued that the effect of such a push may have been "pro- it provided an invitation-often accepted-to fraud. gressive" in the long run, and some have claimed that its ill effects have been exag- In 1934, Congress replaced plow-up payments with "rental" and "parity" pay- gerated. Although detractors often cite the figure of one million displaced blacks, the ments, and gave sharecroppers one-ninth of the latter. After the Supreme Court number of black farmers declined less in the 1930s than it had in the previous two struck down the first AAA in 1936, that law's successor, the Soil Conservation and decades. Still, "Regardless of the facts, the claim of Negroes that the AAA drove hun Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, raised the sharecropper's share to one-fourth.4 dreds of thousands of blacks from the land persisted in the 1930s. It gained currency Although sharecropper income did rise under the revised law, "The nature of the because so much of the first New Deal was in fact discriminatory against blacks" landlord-tenant relationship presented the landlord with great opportunities for (Sitkoff 1978, 53; see also Mandle 1992). fraud, and under the circumstances it is not surprising that many landlords took unfair advantage" (Wolters 1970, 24). Industrial and Labor Policy Landowners would maximize their benefit from acreage-reduction payments if they did not have any tenants or sharecroppers at all, so the New Deal's agricultural Associationalist Precursors New Deal agricultural policies pushed black farmworkers into industrial cities where 3. David Bernstein (2001) does deal with political economy in this sense in his analysis of the effect of New Deal labor regulations on blacks. little employment was available. Indeed, black workers had already faced an inhos 4. The disparate racial impact of the 1936 act may make it the first case of what would later be called "envi- pitable labor market in the 1920s. Whatever advantages they might have gained by ronmental racism." the curtailment of immigrant competition in that decade (one of the incentives in the VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 517 518 + PAUL MORENO northward "great migration" of blacks during the World War I era), other corporatist to "an enabling act in a formal constitutional dictatorship." The act gave trade asso or "associationalist" tendencies disadvantaged them. The 1920s were not easy years ciations "what they had long sought: the power of industrial self-government under for breaking into northern industrial employment. Mechanization, productivity gains, federal sanction and with practically no strings attached" (Kelly, Harbison, and Belz and industrial concentration produced higher wages for those employed but did not 1993, 486) produce a rapidly expanding number of jobs. Northern employers became more qual- It soon became apparent that this code-making power could encourage discrim ity conscious and accustomed to high-wage employment, "a culmination of long- ination against black Americans. The minimum-wage provision led many employers term trends in business thought and social policy that paralleled the slow maturation to reduce the employment of black workers or to replace them with whites. of an experienced industrial labor force with lasting attachment to their jobs and com- Southern manufacturers sought a regional or a racial wage differential in order munities" (Wright 1986, 206; see also Cohen 1990, 161-70, 184). This difficult to maintain the low-cost labor advantage they had over higher-wage northern opera- environment for industrial labor's newcomers continued through the Depression tors. The lower productivity of black labor, combined with white prejudice, meant decade. "The depression had a differential impact on various sectors of the working that black workers faced the choice of low-wage employment in an unregulated mar- class. . . . [After the depths of the depression in 1931-33, long-term unemployment ket or unemployment under a minimum-wage law, and some black organizations seri- was concentrated among workers without skills or education who were either just ously considered the benefit of a race-based minimum wage. Robert Moton, the prin- entering the labor force or were above age forty-five" (Zieger 1995, 114). cipal of the Tuskegee Institute, advocated it, but groups such as the long-established Well into the 1960s, civil rights organizations believed that fair employment and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Joint full employment went together; they pursued a "dual agenda" in which the equality Committee on National Recovery, formed to protect black interests in NIRA code claims of blacks would be pursued within a color-blind strategy of class justice (Hamil- making, opposed it, for fear of the stigma that such a differential would impose on ton and Hamilton 1997). But the New Deal imposed burdens on private-sector black labor (D. Hamilton 1994, 491; Wolters 1970, 103). employment, frustrating full employment in ways that made fair employment more The NIRA expanded southern discriminatory practices and widened the eco- difficult to achieve. In large part, it continued Hoover's associational policy, main- nomic gulf between black and white workers (Valocchi 1994, 355). The NIRA mini- taining wages and prices while reducing production and employment. Hoover's mum wage did displace blacks, as did the discriminatory application of occupational Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the centerpiece of his effort to combat the categorization-blacks doing the same work as whites would be classified in a lower- Depression-and a strategy that was continued by the New Deal-was "dedicated to paying category. Blacks had often been employed by less-efficient, low-technology the effort to maintain the existing corporate structure of American business without producers who were driven out of business by the codes. Liberals were glad to see major changes or reforms, [and] may actually have retarded recovery" (Ekirch 1969, such "chiselers" and "sweatshops" go, but many black workers went with them 45; see also Braeman 1999, 7). Liberal historian Richard Hofstadter noted, "To the (Wolters 1970, 119). Black consumers faced the higher prices the NIRA caused more commonsense mind the policy seemed to have solved the paradox of hunger in the often than they benefited from the higher wages meant to accompany those higher midst of plenty by doing away with plenty" (1948, 434). prices (Sitkoff 1978, 54). But the limits of the NIRA's effect on black employment should be acknowl National Industrial Recovery Act edged. The act did not affect domestic service employment, the most common non- agricultural labor among blacks. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was The Roosevelt administration's first attempt to restore the American economy was notoriously unable to enforce code provisions, and the Supreme Court declared the the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), a scheme of government-promoted NIRA unconstitutional in 1935. Some black leaders, although acknowledging the cartelization. The NIRA authorized trade or industrial associations to formulate NIRA's short-term harm, believed that it would benefit blacks in the long run by codes of fair competition and to place them before the president, subject only to the establishing centralized governmental control of the labor market. Clark Foreman requirement that they not promote monopoly or eliminate or oppress small business. noted that "black integration into the national industrial system through a uniform The act provided for minimum wages and promoted collective bargaining in its most federal labor policy would be of ultimate 'revolutionary' import to the 'Negro prob- memorable section, 7(a), which required every code of fair competition to state lem'" (Kirby 1980, 40-42; Wolters 1970, 254). Still, the act probably does deserve "that employees shall have the right to organize and bargain collectively through the popular sobriquets "Negro Removal Act" and "Negro Run-Around" because it representatives of their own choosing." Associations operating under these codes failed to raise overall employment (Couch and Shugart 1998, xiv; see also Best 1991). were exempt from federal antitrust laws (Hosen 1992, 198). The act represented a Economists generally agree that the NIRA retarded recovery (B. Bernstein tremendous push beyond the voluntarist schemes of the Hoover years; it amounted 1968, 269; Braeman 1999, 7; Smiley 1994, 134-36; Vedder and Gallaway 1993, VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 515 516 + PAUL MORENO implicitly deny the consequences of white unionists' strategies" (Arnesen 1993, 56). policy actually displaced large numbers of farmers. Clearly, "Saving the farmer meant This observation is true, but, in addition, both radicals and liberals on the left ignore saving some farmers at the expense of others" (Weiss 1983, 54), and it was often some fundamental points about the larger political, legal, and constitutional order as white farmers who were saved at the expense of blacks. The number of black tenants well as the economics of discrimination-the complex known as "political economy."3 fell by one-third, black sharecroppers by one-fourth, and white sharecroppers by 37 In this article, I examine the racial impact of New Deal agricultural, industrial percent, whereas the number of white tenants rose. Yet Secretary of Agriculture (especially labor), and other policies. I conclude that the criticism of New Deal poli- Henry Wallace, intensely fearful of alienating southern white support for the Roo cies is largely valid. The harm that New Deal policies did to blacks increased the per- sevelt administration, worried that the New Deal might be doing too much to help ceived need for remedies such as affirmative action in 1960s, and in several respects blacks (Sitkoff 1978, 44; Weiss 1983, 54). such policies were adumbrated in the New Deal itself. Finally, I consider why an eco- Scholars generally agree that New Deal farm policy had a disastrous effect on nomic recovery program that was such a failure had such political success, in particu- blacks, despite the bureaucrats' claims of sensitivity to black hardships. By responding lar in the black partisan realignment of the 1930s. to the politically powerful interests of large landowners, the New Deal political coali- tion contributed to the "downward mobility" of less well-connected southern blacks New Deal Agricultural Policy Couch and Shugart 1998, 214; Valocchi 1994, 352). As one economic historian has Because most blacks lived in the rural South, New Deal agricultural policy had the put it, "The South was planter's heaven by the late 1930s" (Wright 1986, 233). New greatest and most immediate impact on them. Half of black Americans were farmers Deal agricultural policies amounted to an "American enclosure movement," pushing in 1932, but only 20 percent of them owned their own land. Because New Deal agri- blacks off the land in a period when the pull of northern industrial employment was cultural policy was shaped to benefit landowners, most blacks were at the bottom of a slack. "If orthodox market economists want to find examples of well-intentioned lib system that funneled benefits to tenants and sharecroppers through those landowners eral interventions leading to hardships for the poor and vulnerable, they can readily (Wolters 1970, part 1). find them in these chapters of southern history" (Mandle 1992, 81). The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) attempted to raise the prices The farm programs of the 1920s had anticipated the racially disparate impact of farmers received for their crops by reducing the amounts they produced. Farmers and New Deal agricultural measures. Robert C. Weaver noted "the abuses of the Federal the federal government would agree to reduce acreage in selected crops, and farmers feed, seed, and fertilizer laws in 1928-29. These abuses were of the same nature as would get federal benefit payments, secured by an excise tax on commodity proces- those which confront the AAA in its dealings with Negro tenants" ([1935] 1968, sors (Hosen 1992, 61). Sharecroppers were supposed to receive one-half of such pay- 327). Like so much of the New Deal, its agricultural policies were really just an expan- ment, share tenants two-thirds, and cash tenants all of it. This program, involving one sion or acceleration of the "progressive" policies of the 1920s. million contracts between owners and the government, was impossible to police, and Some historians have argued that the effect of such a push may have been "pro- it provided an invitation-often accepted-to fraud. gressive" in the long run, and some have claimed that its ill effects have been exag In 1934, Congress replaced plow-up payments with "rental" and "parity" pay- gerated. Although detractors often cite the figure of one million displaced blacks, the ments, and gave sharecroppers one-ninth of the latter. After the Supreme Court number of black farmers declined less in the 1930s than it had in the previous two struck down the first AAA in 1936, that law's successor, the Soil Conservation and decades. Still, "Regardless of the facts, the claim of Negroes that the AAA drove hun- Domestic Allotment Act of 1936, raised the sharecropper's share to one-fourth. dreds of thousands of blacks from the land persisted in the 1930s. It gained currency Although sharecropper income did rise under the revised law, "The nature of the because so much of the first New Deal was in fact discriminatory against blacks" landlord-tenant relationship presented the landlord with great opportunities for (Sitkoff 1978, 53; see also Mandle 1992). fraud, and under the circumstances it is not surprising that many landlords took unfair advantage" (Wolters 1970, 24). Industrial and Labor Policy Landowners would maximize their benefit from acreage-reduction payments if they did not have any tenants or sharecroppers at all, so the New Deal's agricultural Associationalist Precursors New Deal agricultural policies pushed black farmworkers into industrial cities where 3. David Bernstein (2001) does deal with political economy in this sense in his analysis of the effect of New Deal labor regulations on blacks. little employment was available. Indeed, black workers had already faced an inhos- 4. The disparate racial impact of the 1936 act may make it the first case of what would later be called "envi- pitable labor market in the 1920s. Whatever advantages they might have gained by ronmental racism." the curtailment of immigrant competition in that decade (one of the incentives in the VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 519 520 + PAUL MORENO 137-42). It was "predictably counterproductive. . . . Far from directing resources Why did black workers oppose unionism? Historians have often repeated the claim toward new and dynamic market opportunities that would expand output and that employers pitted ethnic groups against one another as a "divide-and-conquer" tac- employment, inefficiency was rewarded. There is reason to believe that the codes tic (Asher and Stephenson 1990, 5-8; W. Harris 1982, 36; Valocchi 1994). South- actually hindered recovery" (Couch and Shugart 1998, 77). But its ill effects would ern planters and northern manufacturers are said to have used "racial divisions in continue because after it was struck down, the federal government continued its poli- their own work force to undercut the organizing power of labor and to lower the cies in a piecemeal fashion, allowing individual industries to organize themselves in overall price of that labor" (Valocchi 1994, 347). Other economists have explained ways that squeezed out black labor (Hawley 1966, 166, 188, 192, 198, 233, 241-46, interethnic conflict in terms of a "split labor market," as the result of competition 268, 277; Wolters 1970, 214). Most of all, the New Deal continued and expanded among workers with different skill and wage levels (Bonacich 1972). Employers were the NIRA's labor policy. likely to take account of the disruptive effects of mixing hostile ethnic groups in their workforces, responding to "employee discrimination" (Cohen 1990, 36). A study of Unionism the problem in 1939 concluded that however racist employers might be, they "have The New Deal's greatest impact on the American political economy came from its use been willing and often anxious to overlook their emotional aversion and to give of the power of the federal government to promote the unionization of labor. That Negroes employment in order to expand the labor market." White employee preju- policy was also among the most significant for blacks. Just as saving the farmer meant dice made "divide-and-rule" possible (Cayton and Mitchell 1939, x). Nor does it saving some farmers at the expense of others, saving the workers meant saving some appear that northern industrial employers engaged in wage discrimination against workers at the expense of others (B. Bernstein 1968, 81; Weiss 1983, 54). black workers. A 1938 Bureau of Labor Statistics report on the iron and steel indus- In the nineteenth century, black interest in organized labor peaked in the 1880s try concluded that although blacks earned less than whites, the difference did not and then declined. In 1871, Frederick Douglass wrote an article entitled "The Tyranny, result from racial wage discrimination by employers. Within the system of occupa- Folly, and Wickedness of Labor Unions" (Foner and Lewis 1978-84, 2: 178). Booker tional segregation and hierarchy, blacks and whites usually earned the same wage for T. Washington also generally opposed organized labor, although toward the end of the same work (Higgs 1989, 18). his life he came to believe that unions might recognize that it was in their interest to However common employers' divide-and-conquer tactics might have been, stop discriminating against blacks and to play a positive role in black economic life.5 more important is the basic economic fact that strikebreaking was an indication of the W. E. B. Du Bois likewise condemned white employers and white unions in his 1899 advantage that black workers brought to the market: their ability and willingness to book The Philadelphia Negro, but he soon switched his allegiance to a union-based work at lower wage rates than incumbent whites. The "reserve army" of black labor system of interracial socialism (Meier and Rudwick 1968, 27-48, 37, 40; Washington threatened any premium being paid to white labor. One of the goals of organized 1913). Even in the age of Booker T. Washington, black opinion had begun to grow labor was to eliminate such competition so that whites could charge a premium for more skeptical of free-market capitalism and had tried to make overtures-usually their labor-what economists call a "monopoly rent."6 unrequited-to organized labor. W. E. B. Du Bois's embrace of interracial socialism The power to coerce labor was the essence of slavery; many late-nineteenth- before World War I was the wave of the future (Karson and Radosh 1968; Meier century black leaders regarded the power of labor organizations to coerce employ- 1963, 46, 203). ers and nonmember workers as not essentially different. As Booker T. Washington The National Urban League, begun as part of the entrepreneurial self-help effort put it, Negroes "are engaged in a struggle to maintain their right to labor as free that Washington embodied, had come to support black unionization by 1919. men, which, with the right to own property is, in my opinion, the most important Although fifty-two editors in the National Negro Press Association in 1924 con- privilege that was granted to black men as a result of the Civil War." It was a strug- demned "all forms of unionism and economic radicalism" and advised blacks "to gle that he believed blacks could win and that would diminish interracial conflict stand squarely behind capital" (Sitkoff 1978, 170), most national black organizations "The effect of this competition is not to increase but to lessen racial prejudice," he had come to look more favorably on unions by the mid-1920s (Harris, 1982, 4). said (1913, 758). When the federal government began to promote collective bargaining, black organi- zations were suspicious that the government might increase the power of white unions to exclude blacks (Wolters 1969, 142). 6. David Roediger argues that the "wages of whiteness" were not real, but a kind of psychocultural com- pensation for lower wages. "Status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienat ing and exploitative class relationships." The white working class actually earned less as a result of its racism 5. Washington might also have been seeking new allies in response to the loss of federal patronage that (1991, chap. 1, 137, 169). came with the Democratic takeover of the federal executive branch in 1913 (Factor 1970, 348). VOLUME VI, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 THE INDEPENDENT REVIEWAN AMBIVALENT LEGACY c 521 Blacks had endured exclusion by white labor organizations for decades (Karson and Radosh 1968). Many observers believed that white unionists were largely respone sible for the alleged decline in the number of blacks in slcilled tmdes from 1380 to 1930. The racial strategy of white unionists, Lorenzo Greene and Carter G. Woodson said succinctly, \"was to get rid ofNegro competition\" ([1930] 1970, 23, see also 33, 138, 168, 186, 191, 319, 346', and see Meier 1963,21). BookerT. Washington noted, \"It is natural enough, under such conditions, that union men should be disposed to take advantage of race prejudice to shut out others from the advantages which they enjoy\" (1913, 763; see also Meier 1963, 104). Others regard labor discrimination as having been a minor factor, concluding that \"even in the absence of unions, it is doubt- ful that Negroes could have competed with whites" (Marshall 1965, 10).7 Around 1900, blacks had a commonsense and empirical understanding of what would later be called \"the economics ofdiscrimination\" (Becker 1971). This was the essential principle that lay behind Washington's idea that black economic self improvement would lead to social elevationithat market forces would undermine discrimination and prejudice. Washington's chief institutional legacy, the National Negro Business League, was dedicated to this belief, declaring its \"faith in the power of business enterprise and money to wipe out racial prejudice\" (Frazier 1957, 132). Howard University dean Kelly Miller quipped, \"Logic aligns the Negro with labor but good sense arrays him with capital,\" but in fact both logic and good sense did so before die New Deal (qtd. in Sidtoffl978, 170). The chief defect in Washington's theory was that it could not work within the sys tem of segregation, which used state power to take away \"the opportunity for African American business to compete in a truly open market. . _ . [A]lthough the dollar might have been colorblind, market participation was based on race. Thus, segregation as a program took away both political rights and the right to compete in the marketplace" (Butler 1991, 76). Washington prolfered a classic \"middleman minority\" strategy, but he did not realize that the economic success of middlemen groups was often the source of hostility against them (Butler 1991, 68776; Butler 1997, 1: 182). Moreover, minor ity groups lose more than they gain in segregated markets (Bedcer 1971, 24, 32). But if Washington's version of black capitalism did not make sense, his hostility to did. Herbert Northrup has ably explained the economics of union dis, crimination in 1943. In view of the wellrknown work scarcity consciousness of most craft unionr ists, it seems more likely that economic self-interest or, as Spero and Harris so well put it, \"the desire to restrict competition so as to safeguard job 7. Gavin Wright and Robert ngg discount the effect of union exclusion in the late-nineteenth-centuty South, but Higgs argues that it had some effect in the North (Higgs 1977, 3536; Higgs 1939, 23, Wyst 1986, 17s). VOLUME V1, NUMBER 4, SPRING 2002 52.2 PAUL MORENO monopoly,\" is the major contributing Factor. To exclude Negroes, these craft unionists have discovered, is a convenient and effective method of lime iting the number of sellers of a particular type of labor or slcill, and that, in turn, enables the white mftsmen to obtain a larger share of the available work for themselves and/ or to command a higher wage. (1969, 131)\" Nor, he noted, vims this action extraordinary. \"A great many barriers against economic opportunity are sought by a wide variety of organized groupsifarmers, business and professional men, and consumers, as well as labor organizationsand this is only one ofseveral" (1969, 131). As with agricultural and industrial policy, the racial impact of New Deal labor policy might have been anticipated from the experience of die 19205. Though the decade was in large part a difth one for organized labor, railroad unions advanced under federal auspices. Racially exclusive railroad brotherhoods used monopoly power to eliminate black labor in many railroad occupations. Despite repeated efforts by white unionists to oust them, blacks had held a considerable number of skilled and semiskilled jobs on souiern railroads before World War 1. An equalepay order by die U.S. Railroad Administration (which had seized the railroads during the war) meant that blacks could not obtain umrk by agreeing to work for a lower wage than whites. Though the railroads were returned to private hands after the war, the Railway Labor Act of 1926 gave die brotherhoods die legal power that they needed to exclude blacks. As a National Urban League oicial noted in 1934, \"During recent years considerable new federal legislation has been enacted to improve the railroads and to promote the welfare of employees working on them. Concurrently with this legislation, the condition of Negroes engaged in train and yard service has grown steadily worse\" (qtd. in D. Bernstein 2000, 242). Despite the hope that New Deal railroad labor legislation would correct it, the abuses of the Railway labor Act were exacerbated under 1934- amendments. Similarly, in 1932 Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Act, prohibiting the federal courts from issuing injunctions in labor disputes~court actions that had helped black workers resist white union exclue sion in the 19205. Even more explicit was the racial animus behind the DavisrBacon Act, enacted in 1931. With the onset of the Great Depression, construction workers in cities faced an inundation of unemployed workers who threatened to drive down wage rates. Con- gress responded with the Davis-Bacon Act, which required the payment of \"prevail- ing wage rates\" to labor in federal construction projects in order to reduce the incen- tive for builders to employ nonunion labor. New York representative Robert Bacon introduced the bill in 1927 to stop contractors who won federal construction cone tracts in northern states by bringing in lowwvage black labor. Congressmen some? times referred explicitly to die racial composition of these construction crews, but 5. Northmp's reference is m Spem and Han-is 1951. THE INDEPENDENT REVLEW AN AMBIVALENT LEGACY + 523 524 + PAUL MORENO more often used euphemisms such as "cheap," "imported," or "bootleg" (D. Bern- Black leaders lobbied for a nondiscrimination provision in the NLRA. Senator stein 1994; Epstein 1992, 46; Sundstrom 1992; Thieblot 1975, 6-10). Northern Robert Wagner of New York, having unsuccessfully sought such an amendment in the politicians wanted to preserve high-wage jobs for their constituents. The politicians NIRA, also failed to secure one for his own bill. Quite simply, civil rights organiza claimed that they sought to prevent the "exploitation" of the migrant workers, tions had less influence than the AFL in Congress. "The NAACP viewed the passage although the effect was to keep those migrants in lower-paying jobs in the South. of the NLRA without any prohibition of discrimination as a serious blow to black Davis-Bacon was the latest in a long series of state attempts to prevent black workers workers. The AFL's gain in control over employment opportunities resulted in from migrating away from southern farm labor (D. Bernstein 1998). increased unemployment among black workers, who were pushed out of or denied Rather than reduce the discriminatory power of labor unions, the New Deal jobs requiring union membership" (D. Hamilton 1994, 493)." enhanced union power. The NIRA's section 7(a) was the first New Deal labor policy, The breakaway of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) from the guaranteeing the right of workers to form unions and bargain collectively. The Amer- AFL in 1935 gave many people hope that the "new unions" would be more recep- ican Federation of Labor (AFL) took advantage of the act's provisions to increase its tive to black workers. In order to keep