Constructing Affirmative Action: Federal Contract Compliance and the Building Construction Trades, 1956-1973

CONSTRUCTING AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: FEDERAL CONTRACT COMPLIANCE AND THE BUILDING CONSTRUCTION TRADES, 1956-1973 by DAVID HAMILTON GOLLAND M.Phil., City University of New York, 2006 M.A., University of Virginia, 2002 B.A., City University of New York, 2000 A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2008 2 “Who the hell appointed you as the guardian of all the Negro members in America?” —AFL-CIO President George Meany, responding to A. Philip Randolph’s request that discriminatory unions be suspended from the federation, September 24, 1959 “The Meany record over the past half-dozen years has been one of consistent, strong leadership in the struggle to eliminate racial discrimination in the labor movement.” —Lester B. Granger, Executive Director, National Urban League, October 2, 1959 “I am informed that full scale hiring by the electrical contractor on the Southwest Project will begin [in] October. I would like to impress upon you the urgency for taking affirmative action in this matter (the Local 26 impasse) at the earliest possible date.” —Vice President Richard M. Nixon, writing to the president of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, September 29, 1958 CHAPTER ONE Fighting Bureaucratic Inertia: 1956-1960 3 Thomas Bailey was a skilled brick mason living in Beacon, New York, a sleepy little town in the Hudson Valley between Peekskill and Poughkeepsie. In June 1958, when he applied for membership in the Bricklayers, Masons, and Plasterers Local #44, he was told by the union’s business agent, Andrew Gallante, that he could only become a member of the union if he was actively working in the trade. Unfortunately for Bailey, whenever he applied for work—at job sites like the new Mattawan State Hospital—he was repeatedly told by construction foremen that he could not be employed without union membership. Not that there was a shortage of jobs in Dutchess County; there were in fact “a number of jobs that had been started but where work had been discontinued…due to the shortage of skilled craftsmen in the area.” Yet Thomas Bailey still could not secure steady employment.1 Why couldn’t Bailey get a job or join the union? Perhaps it was because he happened to be African-American. Observers from the National Urban League (NUL) had noted “the absence of Negro craftsmen on the job” at construction sites in Dutchess County. Although one local contractor, Mr. Eugene Ninnie, had hired Bailey “from time to time” and found him to be “well qualified,” he could never employ Bailey for long: “[t]he Union…had forced stoppages because the Negro masons were on the job,” and “had refused [the contractor’s] request to admit Negro masons into membership.”2 As a result of pressure from civil rights organizations, the New York State Commission Against Discrimination, and the International Office of the Bricklayers Union, Bailey was finally made a member of the Local through an unusual procedure: he received a visit from a representative of the International, who told Bailey to “consider 1 J. Carlton Yeldell to Julius Thomas, August 8, 1958 (Papers of the National Urban League [NUL], Series I, Box A52, Trade Union Advisory Council, 1958, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress). 2 Ibid. 4 himself a member of the Union” and sent him to a union job starting the next day, Monday, July 28, 1958. Bailey reported for work as requested, but he was immediately “subjected to the most vicious kind of pressure during the entire week,” and “had been the victim of the worse kind of intimidation.” He strongly considered “throwing in the sponge,” but instead stuck it out, and on Saturday, August 1, he attended his first union meeting, paid his initiation fee and membership dues, “and was promised his membership book within two weeks.” As the NUL’s J. Carlton Yeldell put it, This part of the fight has been won [but this] office has received similar complaints from Negro building craftsmen facing the same problem of securing work…the experience in Dutchess County, N.Y. suggests a pattern of union utilization which is discriminatory against Negro workers in violation of the State Law Against Discrimination. These practices should be thoroughly studied and analyzed. If corrective action is indicated, this matter should be called to the attention of all New York agencies concerned.3 Thomas Bailey’s problems were symptomatic of a much larger pattern of racial exclusion in the craft unions, especially (and most visibly) in the building trades. These obstacles were not statutory: by 1958, all unions affiliated with the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) were officially egalitarian, accepting workers into membership without regard to race, creed, or color. Nor were they the result of racist leadership, as the delegates to annual AFL-CIO conventions consistently affirmed their commitment to the ideal of merit employment and union membership. For the most part, labor leaders blamed these problems on entrenched practices and attitudes at the level of the rank-and-file, which created an inertia that organizations like the NUL found themselves fighting—one worker, one local, and one city at a time. 3 Ibid. 5 At the level of public policy, the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower had its own solution to these problems: the non-discrimination clause in government contracts. Since the Great Depression, the federally-funded sector of the economy had grown exponentially, aided by wartime (and Cold War) production. For Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon, discrimination was largely a propaganda issue: the Soviets pointed to it as evidence of American degradation when trying to convert newly- independent developing nations—especially in Africa—to Marxism. Building on similar attempts by the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, Eisenhower issued an executive order prohibiting discrimination in federal contracts and establishing the President’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC) to enforce it. But like the union leadership, which had difficulty implementing its egalitarian policy among the rank-and-file membership, the Eisenhower administration often found itself largely stymied by the bureaucratic inertia of the federal civil service. Two other constituencies played a role in this struggle: management (i.e. federal contractors) and the federal legislature. For the most part, management saw equality of opportunity as a business policy—rather than a human rights—issue. Most businessmen looked forward to the profits that would come when all potential workers were fully utilized, but at the same time, many feared the internal white backlash—usually in the form of strikes—that often followed initial integration of a firm.4 The federal legislature, meanwhile, through a Southern-dominated Senate and liberal use of the filibuster, did not contribute to the effort during the 1950s (notwithstanding the importance of the 1957 Voting Rights Act), but would play a more important role in the 1960s. 4 See, for instance, Elmo Roper, “Discrimination in Industry: Extravagant Injustice,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July 1952; and J.J. Morrow, “American Negroes—A Wasted Resource,” Harvard Business Review, January 1957. 6 A union umbrella organization too weak to enforce its own anti-discrimination ideals; a moderate presidential administration unwilling to take on the federal bureaucracy; and a civil rights leadership fighting token battles. Taken separately, these three constituencies seemed unable to effect the necessary changes to achieve real equality of opportunity in employment. Working in tandem they would make a difference. Background: African-Americans and Organized Labor, 1860-1955 Racial discrimination in the trade unions, especially in building construction, dated back to nearly a century of segregation and exclusion. During the colonial era, many African captives arriving in what would become the United States possessed a variety of skills useful in pursuits other than farming, and the most intrepid (and lucky, if such a term is appropriate within a discussion of slavery) were given additional training by their white owners. A generation of scholarship has demonstrated that slaves under the plantation system were skilled in such varied fields as ironwork, salt mining—and building construction. Slaves built Monticello, the stately home of Thomas Jefferson outside Charlottesville, Virginia, and slaves were employed in the construction of Southern cities as well as New York City during the Revolutionary era. As the nation grew, Southern slave artisans’ skills were nurtured and protected by slaveowners who earned profits from their slaves’ toil and maintained control over any potential competition from non-elite whites. 5 In the antebellum North, freedmen and their descendants engaged in various 5 See, for instance, Charles B. Dew, Ironmaker to the Confederacy: Joseph R. Anderson and the Tredegar Iron Works (New Haven: Yale, 1966) and Bond of Iron: Master and Slave at Buffalo Forge (NY: Norton, 1994); Claudia Dale Goldin, Urban Slavery in the Antebellum South, 1820-1860: A Quantitative History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976); Ronald L. Lewis, Coal, Iron, and Slaves: Industrial Slavery in 7 entrepreneurial pursuits, parlaying an acquired skill in at least one case, in Philadelphia, into an extremely profitable sail-making business.6 With the coming of

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