Kristoffer Smemo Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara Paper Prepared for the Colloquium in Work, Labor and Political Economy
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Kristoffer Smemo Department of History University of California, Santa Barbara Paper prepared for the Colloquium in Work, Labor and Political Economy The Human Problem: Black Voting Power, Industrial Peace, and the Republican Civil Rights Agenda During World War Two Introduction By late 1943, the unrivaled productive capacities of Detroit’s “arsenal of democracy” prompted much gloating among the auto industry’s corporate managers. George Romney of the Automobile Manufacturers Association boasted, “the war has reached the point where the supe- riority of free men over Nazi, Fascist, or any other type of planned economy robots is fully dem- onstrated.” Nevertheless, the “unbelievable heights” of production achieved by the U.S. war economy remained beset by one staggering dilemma. “We have met all of our production prob- lems,” a puzzled Romney complained, “except the human one.”1 The human problem tightly intertwined immediate shop floor concerns over productivity with larger fears about social insta- bility. The human problem therefore blended corporate managers’ desire for industrial peace with the desires of government war planners and elected officials for social harmony. The human problem proved especially explosive that year as demand for military mate- riel reached its wartime peak. Rank-and-file workers pushed back hard against punishing pro- duction schedules with a massive wave of unauthorized protests, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes. In addition, that rank-and-file looked increasingly diverse. According to Robert C. Weaver of the Negro Manpower Commission, the pull of “economic necessity”—not the organizationally anemic President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice—finally brought workers of color into war industry en mass.2 The labor migrants who came to Detroit and other northern and western industrial cities immediately faced rigidly defined forms of local apartheid, and met with Smemo, 2 the vicious hostility of police and other white workers. Hate strikes—such as the walkout of some 25,000 whites at Packard Motors over the promotion of three black workers—only ampli- fied racial tensions in the neighborhoods, streetcars, and parks of densely overcrowded war pro- duction centers. By summer these daily frictions exploded into bloody race riots in the Motor City, Los Angeles, Harlem, and elsewhere across the country. In an article published that June on American “race pogroms,” the Afro-Trinidadian Trotskyist C.L.R. James, declared, “Even if the government dislikes race riots, it cannot take vigorous steps to repress them because that will tear down the prejudice on which so much depends.”3 For a growing and assertive movement of labor and civil rights activists, the human problem so blithely described by Romney exposed the very contradictions at the heart of the Democrats’ federally directed war effort. Faced with white riots, unrelenting discrimination, and the southern stranglehold over Democratic policymaking, black voters by the mid-1940s appeared to be seriously questioning their newfound loyalty to Roosevelt and the New Deal. During the war, labor and civil rights activists channeled James’ critique into an ambitious electoral strategy for winning racial equal- ity. Henry Lee Moon captured this idea in his influential 1948 book Balance of Power: The Ne- gro Vote. Moon reiterated the argument of wartime activists who contended the “greatest hope for continued and accelerated progress lies in independent political action subject to the political domination and control of no political party.”4 In presidential elections, the very “size, strategic distribution, and flexibility of the Negro vote” made it more important than that of the Solid South.5 Indeed, despite a strong preference for Franklin Roosevelt, it is important to remember that black party identification remained almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans throughout the 1930s and 1940s.6 Furthermore, labor migration made the urbanized and prole- tarianized black vote decisive in close races for governorships, senate seats, and in congressional Smemo, 3 and state legislative districts across the North.7 Moon’s “balance of power” thesis found expres- sion during the war in the mélange of unions, civil rights groups, churches, radical sects, and newspapers that comprised the Black Popular Front.8 The strategy proceeded from the insight that white politicians of either major party could only be prodded into action by a disciplined, independent, and race and class conscious black electorate. In the pages of the Chicago De- fender, a vital organ of the Black Popular Front, Alfred Edgar Smith ended each of his im- mensely popular “National Grapevine” columns with the call to arms, “Keep ‘em squirming!”9 This strategy held the potential to realign mid-century politics, but not in ways typically appreciated by contemporary scholarship. According to the prevailing narrative, the growing wartime movement for racial equality—and the often-violent white reaction against it— sharpened partisan polarization over race, labor, and institutional capacity. For Democrats, the war years witnessed intensified pressure from the party’s northern coalitional allies in the Con- gress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights movements against the dominance of the segregationist South, setting in motion the “Second Reconstruction” of the postwar years.10 Similarly, a growing scholarly consensus also identifies the war years as the critical period when the modern GOP consolidated itself as the party of both business and racial conservatism. Rightwing Republicans, business advocacy groups, and a mass of “ordinary rural and suburban whites” mobilized against what they perceived as the deepening bonds between the Democratic “Negro-labor” alliance and federal administrative agencies.11 Thus, as political scientist Eric Schickler states, “for Republicans to make civil rights their issue, they would have to overcome the deep skepticism of their own economically conservative core partisans.”12 This narrative, however, largely ignores the influential bloc of moderate and liberal Re- publicans who competed with conservatives to set the party’s agenda during the mid-1940s. Un- Smemo, 4 like party rivals safely ensconced in solidly conservative and gerrymandering districts, Republi- cans eyeing statewide office in major industrial states confronted an urban political landscape defined by an organized, assertive, and evermore-diverse working-class electorate. This national cohort of liberal Republicans contended that crafting a winning formula for the beleaguered GOP required accommodating the institutions, discourses, and coalitions of the New Deal.13 Doing so delivered big gains for liberal Republican at the polls. Despite the GOP’s status as a minority party in national politics some twenty-six states covering seventy percent of the country’s popu- lation claimed a Republican governor just before the 1944 elections.14 Winning those elections demanded that liberal Republicans also come to terms with the growing importance of the north- ern black vote. The largely working-class character of black voters in turn made access to war work, and the preservation of industrial and social peace, key policy questions for Republicans. Thus, liberal-inclined Republicans recognized and grappled with what historian Thomas Sugrue calls the “proletarian turn” in the mid-century struggle for racial equality.15 By casting the New Deal coalition as an unholy, and unstable alliance of CIO leftists, corrupt big city ma- chines, and, above all, rabid segregationists, Republicans attempted to convince working peo- ple—especially black workers—that only the GOP could lay an authentic claim to the mantel of modern liberalism. Liberal Republican governors in New York, Illinois, and California pledged to support—and frequently established—commissions to investigate job discrimination, substan- dard housing, and poor to nonexistent social services in rigidly segregated cities. In the Empire State, Thomas Dewey signed the country’s first state-level fair employment practices commis- sion (FEPC) into law over fierce objections from much of his own party. Above all, liberal Re- publicans made access to war work the key to industrial peace and social stability. This agenda, however, remained limited and riddled with its own inconsistencies and contradictions. Liberal Smemo, 5 Republican civil rights rested on the hoary shibboleth that government simply could not “legis- late tolerance.” As a result, most of the party’s liberals shared with their conservative rivals a powerful opposition to any agencies empowered to undermine managerial prerogatives. Whatever its limitations, the liberal Republican civil rights agenda took shape in direct relation to the balance of power thesis so central to the Black Popular Front. The discourses and institutions of the New Deal offered unprecedented opportunities for an insurgent labor-based civil rights movement to put racial egalitarianism at the center of national politics. But so long as segregationists locked Democratic policymaking, especially the CIO bloc, in a “southern cage,” the party of FDR could not become the sole vehicle for challenging white supremacy.16 Nor could liberals in the old Party of Lincoln be expected to break totally with the GOP’s his- toric base in the white rural “Old Guard” and among business conservatives. But the deep ideo- logical and coalitional divisions within both parties appeared to reinforce the conditions needed