FACED WITH IMPOSSIBLE CHOICES, how could black Americans be anything but ambivalent about the New Deal? W. E. B. Du Bois, for one, while allowing that “the organized race hatred and segregation practices of the South are still powerful and prominent in the Democratic Party,” nonetheless endorsed Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1944. “I feel without the slightest doubt that Franklin Roosevelt has done more for the uplift and progress of the Negro than any president since Abraham Lincoln.” In listing the administration’s “notable accomplishments,” Du Bois included advances in economic status that had been offered by its programs for economic recovery. He underscored the help for small farmers, mortgage assistance through the Federal Housing Authority (“under which I myself have been able to build a home at a reasonable rate of mortgage interest”), and “the recognition of the right of labor to bargain for better wages and better conditions of work.” He also acknowledged anti-discrimination efforts in wartime industries, “the appointment of a high class of colored advisers to administrative officials,” and “the courteous social recognition given to colored presidents of Haiti and Liberia and to colored guests in general at the White House.”
By contrast, Republicans in the first three decades of the century had offered only abstract solace and reminders of their role in Emancipation and Reconstruction. In fact, the party had withdrawn from southern competition and, by leaving the field, had accommodated to its distinct racial order.1 Thus, only the Democrats seemed to offer resources coupled to a genuine concern for the well-being of even the most vulnerable Americans.
Realist that he was, Du Bois also recognized that political arithmetic would block efforts by the president to advance black circumstances, even if he were to care deeply about their plight. “Franklin Roosevelt has been hindered by the necessity of not going so far as to lose entirely the support of the South.”2 Du Bois returned to this theme during Harry Truman’s presidency, urging the Democrats to “put out of business . . . the Southern oligarchy” and to “work upon the liberal wing of the Democratic party and impress upon them the fact that the reactionary remnant of their party in the South has got to be displaced.”3
This, of course, proved impossible, at least at the time. Inescapably, as the New Deal’s rewards were tightly and inextricably tied to the special advantages and blocking capacity of the southern delegation, black America was deeply torn. Support for the New Deal could not be separated from an implicit willingness to accede to the southern system. Opposition promised the loss of only recently secured gains. As reflected by the vibrant black press during the 1930s and 1940s, the recurring debate in black America oscillated, not surprisingly, between expressions of profound appreciation and equally intense articulations of disenchantment.4 Reacting to the history of New Deal public policy during President Roosevelt’s first two terms,the Pittsburgh Courier,which had supported Roosevelt both in 1932 and 1936, endorsed Wendell Willkie. Justifying its support of the Republican candidate in 1940, the paper asserted: “With perhaps the best intentions of the world and with a Northern president in the White House, Washington has become overrun with Southerners and from the time of the NRA to the present we have seen ample evidence of their attitude and handiwork where colored people are concerned.” In this climate, the paper observed, “the Southern-dominated administration has worked assiduously to establish color discrimination and segregation as a policy of the Federal government, and to a distressing extent it has succeeded.”5 In the run-up to the election, the Kansas City Plain Dealer counseled the administration that it should not take the black vote for granted. If it wished to hold on to their support, the Democrats “must admit the Negroes to the Democratic Primaries in the South and give them an equal opportunity to exercise their franchise free from terrorism just as other Americans.” They would also have to usher blacks into local and state government, and stop “giving them patronage in the North and allowing lynchers, Ku Klux, segregation, injustice in the courts, unequal facilities in educational systems, the existence of poll taxes, and the denial of the right to vote in the South.”6
None of this agenda stood the remotest chance of adoption. Like the Courier, other supporters of the New Deal in the first two Roosevelt elections defected. In Baltimore, the Afro American explained that the political power of the South made further support impossible. Southern power had rendered the president silent about an anti-lynching bill. He permitted “the navy to exclude us and the army to close every unit but seven,” and “we are only assigned to Jim Crow units” led by white officers. The Civilian Conservation Corps’s supervisors and managers likewise were all white. And it focused on how large numbers of blacks were excluded from key social policies. Roosevelt, the paper accurately observed, “hasn’t brought social security to domestics or farm workers, and over half the colored people are in those two classes.” Further, these categories had been intentionally excluded from wage and hours protections. Referring to maids at the spa Roosevelt frequented, the editorial asked: “If he believes in a ceiling for hours and a floor for wages, why does he permit the Georgia Warm Springs . . . pay colored women workers $4.50 a week for long hours?”7
Yet there was a more favorable side of the ledger. Writing in the Chicago Bee on the eve of the 1940 presidential election, an Ohio black minister summarized how much “Roosevelt has done for us,” stressing economic gains from relief, public employment, the right to join unions, and “a minimum wage and a maximum hour law.”8 “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you,” the Black Dispatch of Oklahoma City cautioned readers in its own pro-FDR editorial, literally counting the construction funds that had been allocated to black colleges ($11 million), the monies earned by black youngsters in Civilian Conservation Corps camps ($19 million in clothing; $20 million in food; $21 million to send home to impoverished parents), and the cash paid to black college students by the National Youth Administration ($2.3 million).9 Four years later, the Kansas City Plain Dealer justified black support for President Roosevelt despite Jim Crow by rehearsing yet another list of substantial benefits that had been bestowed on a desperate group.10
Others emphasized the recognition blacks had received from the New Deal, ranging from social receptions at the White House to the appointment of advisers on race matters in the administration and a visible role at the Democratic Party Convention of 1940. This included a public address by South Side Chicago congressman Arthur Mitchell, a prayer led by an African American Methodist minister where “hundreds of Negroes . . . sat indiscriminately and unsegregated all over the vast Chicago Stadium,” and the presence of “27 delegates and alternates on the floor of the convention. Anybody with half a grain of sense could see that the black man is being rapidly integrated into the Democratic party.” All in all, the Oklahoma City Black Dispatch concluded, Negroes have been given fairer and more impartial treatment by governmental agencies in recent years than ever before in the history of the Republic.”11
There was no right choice. Both sides scored winning points. The New Deal, beholden to southern votes, did not, indeed could not, undercut segregation and the ancillary denial of civil and political rights. There would be no anti-lynching law on President Roosevelt’s watch; nor would racial hierarchies in the armed forces or federal agencies be disturbed in any basic way. The administration was trapped, just as black voters were, by the pervasive legacy of Jim Crow. Any crusade to break out of its power restraints would have been doomed to fail, even if the president had been willing. Such a campaign would have risked undercutting the wide array of social and economic programs the New Deal advanced. So a trade-off seemed on offer to black America: abjure too strident a claim for civil and political inclusion in exchange for assured and concrete material benefits.
It makes no sense to write a retrospective morality tale condemning politicians and citizens who were imprisoned by Jim Crow. We should not imagine a freedom of action they did not have. During the New Deal, most liberals put other priorities well ahead of civil rights. The commitment to this cause among non-southern New Dealers was very uneven, in part because they lacked the means to lighten the burdens of anti-black discrimination. Even the most committed advocates for black rights, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Senator Robert Wagner, and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, were not disposed, as Ickes wrote North Carolina senator Josiah Bailey, to dissipate “my strength against the particular stone wall of segregation.”12
Yet we also should not minimize the ugly and lasting consequences of this Faustian bargain. The Democratic Party’s moratorium on confronting its own southern members extended beyond such civil rights measures as attempts to repeal the poll tax or the use of federal power to combat lynching. In essence, the compromise reached to the core of New Deal. By not including the occupations in which African Americans worked, and by organizing racist patterns of administration, New Deal policies for Social Security, social welfare, and labor market programs restricted black prospects while providing positive economic reinforcement for the great majority of white citizens.
I
“THE ECONOMIC SITUATION of Negroes in America,” Gunnar Myrdal’s hard-bitten summary of 1944 declared, “is pathological.” His landmark study, An American Dilemma, concluded that “except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the masses of American Negroes, in the rural South and in the segregated slum quarters in Southern and Northern cities, are destitute. They own little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and dilapidated. Their incomes are not only low but irregular. They thus live from day to day and have scant security for the future.”13
In this period, most blacks, some three in four, lived in the South. As a whole, the region was poor, often desperately so, for whites as well as blacks. On the eve of the Great Depression, southerners in all pursuits earned average incomes less than half those received by Americans in the rest of the country. Most, nearly 16 million, worked the land in the 1930s and early 1940s. Farm labor dominated the economy of the South as in no other region of the country. Of all people engaged in agricultural labor nationwide, 53 percent worked in the South in 1930, and 50 percent in 1940. Of this massive southern agricultural labor force, 40 percent of those classified by the U.S. Bureau of the Census as “laborers” were black in 1940, as were 55 percent of the region’s sharecroppers.14
From today’s vantage, it is difficult to convey the extent of black deprivation. Despite the large number of black agricultural workers, just 8 percent of southern farm land was operated by black owners, tenants, and sharecroppers; and only a small proportion of black farmers, about one in ten, owned their own land. Short of capital, limited in their access to banks, and often taxed disproportionately on their holdings, these proprietors, less insulated from adversity, had a tenuous hold on their property. In the 1920s, many barely held on during the epidemic of boll weevil. Overall, black, as well as white, ownership declined. In the 1930s, buttressed by federal agricultural assistance, white ownership trends reversed, increasing sharply, but black ownership again declined. The holdings of black farmers, furthermore, were much smaller than white holdings—63 acres in 1935, compared to 145 on average for whites—and their acreage was worth 20 percent less. Thus the average value of a black farm that year was $1,864 compared to $5,239 for whites.15
The vast majority of black farmers were even more marginalized, working in the main on white farms as terribly compensated workers of one kind or another. They were in the greater part tenants or sharecroppers. Of the tenants, a small percentage, not more than 10 percent, rented land and thus, in effect, were independent farmers but not owners. Most tenants were supervised workers, often in work groups, whose “wages, however, are not determined according to supply and demand in a free labor market” because the supply was overwhelming and mobility almost entirely absent. They faced a good deal of intimidation, including beatings and sexual coercion.16 Sharecroppers were even more dependent and ordinarily immobile. Debt tied them to a particular planter who provided the loans for rent, food, seed, and farm implements without which these farmers could not subsist. Rather than being paid in wages, they received a share of the product, and thus were vulnerable to drops in price for the commodities they farmed. When the year closed with the cropper in debt to the farmer (a calculation based on accounting the cropper had little knowledge of and even less control), he and his family faced long months of acute destitution. Black tenants lived on the edge. The availability of food varied by the season, peaking in the fall when they were paid for their cotton and other crops and in the spring when they were extended credit by their landlords. “During the other four to six months of the year,” Allison Davis reported in his classic study, Deep South (1941), “most tenant families . . . between 1933 and 1935, lived in semistarvation,” subsisting mainly on bread and milk.17
In 1937, the average per capita income in the South was $314, contrasting with $604 in the other states; farm income in the South was lower, and out of these earnings expenses had to be paid. Tenants and sharecroppers fared less well. On cotton plantations that year, “the average tenant family received an income of only $73 per person for a year’s work. Earnings of sharecroppers ranged from $38 to $87 per person; an income of $38 annually means only a little more than 10 cents a day.”18 Even the highest paid farmworkers, earning an average of $53 each month, brought home one third less than their counterparts elsewhere; while those at the bottom were earning less than 50 percent of what non-boarded agricultural laborers were paid in the rest of the country.19 The depression proved infernally harsh. Cash receipts for cotton, the region’s leading crop, plummeted from $1.4 billion to $550 million in the decade between 1929 and 1939, destroying the livelihoods of many black families.20
Belying the national norm that women, especially women with children, stayed out of the wage labor force, two in five black women were officially recorded to be working outside the home, while an uncertain number of others did so but were missed in official records. Although some secured clerical or factory jobs, during the 1930s about 85 percent of black women in the labor force worked either in agriculture or in domestic service, mainly in private households. Of these, nearly 700,000, or seven in ten, were maids. In the South, this job, characterized by a complex and demeaning etiquette of inequality, was nearly exclusively black. In no southern state were more than 15 percent of servants white; in most, only one in twenty. Having hired black household help was nearly universal among middle-class and upper-class whites in the region. Even some one in five relatively poor whites, with family incomes under $1,000 per year, employed black maids during the depression. Working some seventy hours and rarely earning more than $5 per week (“there are even localities where the usual wage is scarcely $2 per week”), this was the most exploited group of workers in the country.21
“The most abject of America’s rural people . . . were the African Americans who farmed in the South; they lived in the poorest region of the United States and were the poorest people living there,” writes the historian James McGovern.22 In the rural South, where most blacks worked and resided, their average family income was only $565 per year (fully half took home less than $480); poor whites earned nearly three times that much, an average of $1,535.23 Urban blacks fared better, but not by much. In southern cities, most black incomes reached $635 per family per year, compared to white average earnings of $2,019. In bigger cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, Columbia, and Richmond, blacks earned more, but just an average of $760. In Atlanta, the wealthiest metropolis, only 3 percent earned over $2,000. By contrast, an emergency budget—spending at a very low, subsistence level and assuming a restricted diet and a house (usually an unpainted wood frame structure) without an indoor bathroom—required $903 a year for each family. “The so-called maintenance level ($1,261) appears at present to be completely beyond the means of the general Negro population, particularly in the South,” another analyst concluded in the 1940s.24
Living conditions were wretched. Not even one in a hundred black farm families had cold or hot water piped into their homes, and only some three in a hundred had hand pumps indoors (compared to about 20 percent of white families who could retrieve water inside). Whereas approximately one in three whites possessed an icebox or mechanical refrigerator, fewer than one in ten blacks did. White homes averaged five rooms, black homes just three. Often, these consisted of one or two poorly ventilated rooms that proved stifling in the heat of summer, and overcrowded and unhygienic all year round. In 1940, 97 percent of black rural dwellings lacked electricity. Urban housing was not much better. A national health survey discovered that just 10 percent of white families in cities lacked an indoor water supply, but 60 percent of blacks did not have water in their kitchens; 75 percent in their bathrooms. In Birmingham, Charleston, and Jackson, more than 90 percent had no facilities of this kind at all. And whereas urban whites in the South cooked with gas or electricity 90 percent of the time, the comparable black figures varied from a low of 1 percent in Jackson to a high of 49 percent in Dallas.25
Black health, not surprisingly, reflected a dire state of poverty. The cost of a doctor’s visit, usually $3 in the early 1930s, was out of reach for most maids and farmworkers. So, too, was medicine. Most southern hospitals refused to admit African American patients; they were treated in black hospitals, which, in the late 1940s, had about twenty thousand beds. In the South, black patients had access only to a limited number of teaching hospitals and segregated wings of voluntary hospitals. At the time, the national standard stipulated 4.5 beds for each 1,000 people; for blacks, the number hovered between 1.5 and 2.5 in the region’s largest, best-equipped cities. In Atlanta, where blacks had access to fewer than four hundred of the city’s nearly two thousand beds, some three hundred were in a horribly substandard city hospital for the indigent. The South badly lagged behind the national standard specifying there should be no less than one doctor for every 800–1,000 individuals: Virginia and Louisiana had the best ratios, at 1 for every 1,200; Mississippi the worst, at 1 per 1,800. Nationally, there was only 1 black physician for 3,100 people. But the southern ratio of black doctors to black residents was vastly worse than these averages: 1 to 7,100 in Georgia; 1 to 8,600 in Louisiana; 1 to 12,000 in South Carolina; and an astonishing 1 to 18,000 in Mississippi.
Only a small number of black doctors secured hospital affiliations. Despite a higher birth rate than whites, the size of African American families lagged, the result of often astronomically disproportionate infant and maternal mortality rates. Death rates for blacks remained high across the age range. The records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had insured more than 2 million blacks between 1911 and 1935, revealed an excess mortality as compared to whites of more than 40 percent for men and 70 percent for women. Comparing white and black policyholders, the firm discovered that “the death rates are two or more times as high among the colored . . . policyholders in influenza, tuberculosis, syphilis, cerebral hemorrhage, pneumonia, chronic nephritis, and homicide.” At birth, the federal government reported, life expectancy for blacks lagged that of whites by ten years in the period between 1939 and 1941. By 1947, the gap had grown to eleven years.26
Between the First and the Second World Wars, schooling was widely extended beyond the eight primary grades to kindergartens for five year olds and high schools. The secondary school population quadrupled in this period, from 1.5 to 6 million. In 1944, the American Council on Education ranked the states, based on information from 1939 and 1940, by the amount of additional expenditure that would be required to educate all children between the ages of five and seventeen at the national median level. Of the ten most needy states, nine were southern (Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana). Of the fifteen states that spent the least in support for each classroom, fourteen were in the South. In the thirty-one states that did not maintain separate schools for black and white children, the median classroom received just over $2,100 each year; in the seventeen southern states that practiced racial segregation, the sum was under $1,100. In the South, some 1.56 million children were schooled in classrooms whose budget was less than $600. Of these, fully 80 percent were black. Measured differently, the value of school plant equipment for each southern white child in 1940 was $162; for each black $34.27 Most black schools, a comprehensive study reported, “are usually without comfort, equipment, proper lighting, or sanitation. Most are of the one- or two-teacher type. Here are found the poorest trained and lowest salaried teachers, the shortest terms, the poorest attendance, the crudest buildings, and the most meager equipment and teaching materials.”28 Further, many black children, 16 percent according to the 1930 Census, were in the labor force, compared to 3 percent for whites. In the rural South, farmwork by black children was so customary and “officially countenanced that the public schools as a matter of course expect children of tenants to attend only when they are not required in the fields.” Not surprisingly, black achievement was relatively low and illiteracy high. While just over 1 percent of whites were rejected from the military in 1942 for educational deficiencies, 10 percent of blacks were deemed inadequate. In Mississippi, 150 of every 1,000 potential African American inductees were rejected; in Georgia, an astounding 256 of every 1,000. In these two states, one in four registrants signed their Selective Service cards with a mark.29
II
UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES, the opportunity for blacks to obtain relief payments and secure other sources of public benefits from the New Deal, limited though they were, could seem miraculous. At a time of little hope that disfranchisement, intimidation, discriminatory justice, job ceilings, wage differentials, or segregation could be remedied, the dramatic growth in federal spending promised feasible assistance. National programs were particularly important when naked discrimination prevailed across the spectrum of public services within the South. Under the misleading rubric of “separate but equal,” one in seven public libraries in the South served blacks. Even some roads were segregated. Most black neighborhoods lacked paving and lighting. Public employment and access to local and state programs of relief offered whites and blacks starkly different levels of opportunity and support. With a rising share of such expenditures originating in federal programs during the New Deal, destitute blacks could come into contact for the first time with fairer access than they had experienced before.30 The federal government offered a panoply of initiatives, including unemployment insurance, public assistance, and work relief. These programs injected funds and prospects where there had been little to none.
As the New Deal unfolded, black and white differences persisted, but they diminished somewhat with the federal government now in play. In all, as Myrdal noted, “Negroes get fewer benefits, in relation to their needs, than do whites. Nevertheless, since they are so much poorer than whites, their representation on the relief rolls usually exceeds their proportion in the population.”31 Before the passage of the Social Security Act in 1935—a multifaceted law providing for old age pensions, benefits for survivors (mostly widows), unemployment compensation, and assistance for the poor and for survivors (mostly widows)—the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) coordinated virtually all the New Deal’s national programs that mitigated the harshest results of the depression. This injection of money made survival possible when, during the depression, many states lost their ability to tax and spend.
Though costs were shared with the states, some 70 percent of FERA grants came from the federal treasury. This proportion climbed to over 90 percent in the South, the nation’s most stricken region. Because they were poorer than other Americans, a higher proportion of the black population (18 percent) received FERA payments in 1933 than whites (10 percent). FERA’s rolls crested in the spring of 1935. By then, 22 percent of black families had obtained relief grants, while the total for whites had climbed to 14 percent. In the urban North, blacks did gain access as determined by need. There, they consistently qualified more often than whites, often by wide margins. In New York, blacks composed 22 percent of the caseload; in Chicago, 24 percent; in Detroit, 32 percent; in Philadelphia, 40 percent. These numbers were in far excess of their share of the population (6 percent in New York; 8 in Chicago; 9 in Detroit; 13 in Philadelphia).32 Unlike their brethren in the South, this client group of African Americans composed a voting bloc, one that shifted decisively in this period toward the Democratic Party.
Despite efforts by some Washington administrators, neither the size of benefits nor the pattern of distribution was standardized across the country. Although the Emergency Relief Act of 1933 furnished considerable powers to Harry Hopkins, the administrator of FERA, he soon discovered that “he had to tailor relief . . . to accommodate the demands of southern plantation owners for cheap farm labor by curtailing [the level of] relief payments to agricultural laborers and sharecroppers.”33 Black relief rates were high in the South, as in the North, but far less consistently. Here, they ranged “from 10 to 47 percent for Negroes in the different states and from 6 to 19 percent for whites. State variations were even more pronounced in southern rural areas, ranging from 2 to 27 percent for both Negroes and whites.” By 1935, ten southern states had lower relief rates for rural blacks than whites, representing not actual need “but discrepancies in administrative practices and standards” in situations where there was wide local discretion. In some Georgia counties, for example, federal relief monies excluded all blacks; in Mississippi, relief was limited to under 1 percent. “The lack of uniformity cannot be explained,” an early 1940s report found, “by differences in financial resources of the communities as the financial burden was largely carried by the federal government.” Where landlords customarily had a paternalistic relationship with their tenants, particularly with sharecroppers, they possessed a strong impulse to prevent “their” black farmers from forging a direct relationship with federal relief.34
This combination of unprecedented access to governmental support and powerful discrimination generated by local administration produced racial differences in the size of grants to families in need. To get help, blacks had to be in more distress than whites. Clearly, if uniform treatment had been established, black relief grants would have been higher than white allowances, but just the opposite prevailed. Overall, the South offered its residents comparatively low levels of help. In contrast, New York State, in 1933, proffered an average monthly relief grant of $30.59; by 1935, the sum had increased to $49.06. The national average in these years moved from $15.51 to $29.64. In Virginia, one of the more generous southern states, the 1933 figure was $6.94, rising to $17.65 in 1935. A summary, giving an account of a Works Progress Administration (WPA) review, reported that “the low general averages for the South are due in part to the small benefits given to rural and Negro relief cases.” In cotton areas, black relief cases “received from $2 to $6 less than the white families on relief.” Further, as blacks were less likely than whites to be offered work relief, “this reduced the average size of all Negro benefits in comparison with those received by whites.”35
These unequal patterns reflected two powerful features in the southern scene. The first was the low earning power of blacks. Relief payments were calibrated not to undercut the labor market. Recipients were not to receive more money on the dole than they would be earning if they had a job.36 Because the South remained so poor and its rural and urban workers were paid so little by national standards, relief rates were deliberately kept low.
The second, even more important mechanism was the discretionary power available to state and local officials, virtually all white, to maintain this differentiated system of payments. Though many executive decisions about broad rules and spending decisions lay in Washington, their execution was local, placing federal relief initiatives in the hands of the various states. These, in turn, usually assigned responsibility to the smallest, most local unit of government.37 By decentralizing authority and fragmenting decision making, national policies could be administered to suit white southern preferences.
Before the New Deal, most of the country’s social welfare spending had been in private charitable hands. In 1931, only twelve states made provision for pensions for the elderly. Public responsibility was meager, in the main restricted to individuals in extreme personal duress, such as the orphaned, insane, and blind, who often were placed in institutional care. Though there had been some gains in the 1920s in mothers’ pensions, in the public sphere, and community chests, in the private sector, it was only with the New Deal that the public realm extended its reach to welfare broadly conceived. It was this extension, of course, that appealed to many African Americans, who otherwise could find very few sources of support in exceptionally difficult conditions. But this extension never was direct or unmediated by state and local officials, who were left almost totally free to manage programs and dispense largesse as they saw fit.
Southern members of Congress often took the lead in demanding the expansion of federal aid. This campaign began in the Hoover years when Congressman George Huddleson of Alabama insisted on the appropriation of $50 million in federal aid to the unemployed, in part as an effort to stem radical agitation by left-wing unions.38 During Franklin Roosevelt’s first term, this drive for funds proved successful as southern states paid for relief with a higher proportion of national funds than any other region. Whereas federal transfers paid 53 percent of the relief bill in Connecticut and 55 percent in New York, they covered 87 percent of the cost in Virginia, 95 percent in Alabama and Georgia, 98 percent in North Carolina, and nearly 100 percent in Florida.39 The lowest federal contribution in the South was in Texas, at 73 percent, while it was over 80 percent everywhere else, and over 90 percent in eight southern states.40 Overall, during the 1930s, the various New Deal relief programs, including the FERA, CWA, and WPA, injected some $2 billion into this very needy section of the country.41
The South’s political leaders thus had to find a tolerable balance between two sources of tension. The region’s poverty impelled them to pursue fresh and significant sources of federal help, especially because their states were unable to add much on their own. But they had to keep payments low and racially differentiated so as not to upset their low-wage economy, anger employers, or unsettle race relations.42 The key decision was an agreement by the southern supporters of the New Deal not to pay relief at a level higher than prevailing local standards. They also secured such accommodations as excluding agricultural workers from relief rolls at planting and harvesting times. Furthermore, they had to manage the strain that potentially might be placed on local practices by investing authority in federal bureaucracies. “With our local policies dictated by Washington,” the Charleston News and Courier editorialized in 1934, “we shall not long have the civilization to which we are accustomed.”43 To guard against this outcome, the key mechanism deployed was a separation of the source of funding from decisions about how to spend the new monies.
Southern congressional power ensured that all the various New Deal programs possessed this segmented character. “Once a state had received a grant, it controlled expenditure; state law defined the authority of relief agencies, executive orders were issued by the governor or by the relief director he appointed; the legislature decided what money should be appropriated from state resources.”44 This situation introduced a new set of institutional tensions and potential hostility between the levels of government in the federal system. But the federal government did not exercise its powers by enforcing equal treatment. To the contrary, it franchised authority to the states and their localities, which then were free to administer federal policy as they saw fit. Because the need was so urgent and the funds so national, southern members of Congress had anticipated the potential dangers to Jim Crow and thus the administrative need to forestall them. They would risk receiving federal monies, the legislative record shows, “provided that control of grants remained with the state authorities and no conditions requiring state actions were attached.”45 Their goal was to maximize the flow of federal funds while maintaining local responsibility to ensure the continuing viability of the southern racial order.
This strategy worked. Southern racial patterns were guarded by the individuals who managed the programs. In Virginia, the capable administrator of relief, William Smith, had “the characteristic attitude of the Southern person toward the negro,” a federal field representative reported.46 In Georgia, all federal grants were directly channeled through Governor Eugene Talmadge’s office, where relief was administered by Dr. Herman De La Perriere, “the archetype of the rotund, southern politician who had absolutely no knowledge or ability in the fields of either relief or administration.”47
By keeping temporary relief offered by the federal government in the first phase of the New Deal in local hands, the South’s heritage of bigotry was both reflected and reinforced in patterns of spending and administration. When FERA’s black director of Negro Affairs in Atlanta, Forrester Washington, reviewed his experience after resigning in 1934, he noted that “the way colored people have suffered under the New Deal . . . is a disgrace that stinks to heaven.” The Atlanta Daily World, the city’s African American newspaper, concluded in 1935 that “Under the FERA the Negro was shown the same place assigned to him at the close of the Civil War, which had for seventy years . . . sealed his illiteracy and poverty.”48
Nevertheless, these programs did make life a bit easier for those stuck at the bottom, both black and white. However unevenly administered, African Americans were offered some governmental protection against wretched conditions for the first time since Reconstruction. So, while tinged with irony, it was also quite accurate for Gunnar Myrdal to have observed that “the institution of large-scale public relief during the ’thirties [was] the one bright spot in the recent economic history of the Negro.”49 As one black tenant noted, despite the absence of any threat to white supremacy, “the government was helping the poor colored people more than anybody else.”50 The New Deal did indeed stem some of the tides of adversity, but at the cost of accommodation with racial oppression.
III
BEFORE 1935, THE NEW DEAL’s mixed record, which combined unprecedented assistance with racist policies, was closely tied to short-term help. There was no lasting set of laws and structures for social welfare. All this changed with the Social Security Act of 1935. In the history of American social policy, no legislative enactment has been more significant, influential, or enduring. Even at the start, when it still was relatively diminutive in scale and started slowly, by the standards of the time it quickly made use of significant managerial and economic resources. After 1935, with FERA disbanded, a new American welfare state with national backing and the potential for real permanence was established. The law’s encompassing scope had enormous potential for African Americans. It provided security against the economic hazards of old age at a time when more than one half of all black men, compared with one third of white men, remained in the labor market after the age of seventy-five.51 It insured against unemployment when 26 percent of black men and 32 percent of black women were out of work—compared to 18 and 24 percent for whites—and it ameliorated poverty by providing old age assistance to the indigent poor and aid to impoverished and dependent children when blacks were less well off in both categories than other potential recipients.
Precisely because they worked longer into old age, were more prone to job layoffs, and disproportionately located at the bottom of the social structure, African Americans who proved eligible did, in fact, gain a great deal from the Social Security Act. In 1940, the year Social Security payments for the elderly began after a sufficient fund had been received, the Social Security Board identified nearly 2.3 million black workers as eligible for old age insurance.52 To be sure, as with earlier patterns of relief, their benefits tended to be on the low end. The scale of Social Security payments hinged in part on prior wages, which, for blacks, often had been derisory. Still, nothing like this scale of assistance previously had been available to the elderly, white or black. A married couple without children who had earned under $50 a month qualified for a grant of $31.50 each month.53
Unfortunately, the great majority of blacks still were left out. Most African Americans, we have seen, were farmworkers or domestics, and people in these categories did not qualify. This feature of the new landmark law contradicted the strongly stated recommendation by President Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security, whose report became the basis for congressional action. That report explicitly had stated that “We are opposed to exclusions of any specific industries within the Federal act,” and it recommended the mandatory inclusion of all workers earning under $250 per month. Further, it explained that “agricultural workers, domestic servants, home workers, and the many self-employed people constitute large groups in the population who have received little attention. In these groups are many who are at the very bottom of the economic scale.”54
This recommendation did not survive the congressional process. Social Security, as passed and signed by President Roosevelt in August 1935, produced a stark outcome. Across the nation, fully 65 percent of African Americans fell outside the reach of the new program; between 70 and 80 percent in different parts of the South.55 Of course, this excision also left out many whites; indeed, some 40 percent in a country that still was substantially agrarian. Not until 1954, when Republicans controlled the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, and southern Democrats finally lost their ability to mold legislation, were the occupational exclusions that had kept the large majority of blacks out of the Social Security system eliminated. And even then, African Americans were not able to catch up, since the program required at least five years of contributions before benefits could be received. Thus, for the first quarter century of its existence, Social Security was characterized by a form of policy apartheid, something neither Roosevelt nor his study commission had advocated.
How could this have happened? Why was it that African Americans were attached to this legislation in such harmful, even dismissive fashion? Some leading scholars believe racism had nothing to do with this outcome despite its racial implications. After all, they argue, about half the globe’s countries at the time left farmworkers outside the framework of social insurance for the elderly. Further, they contend, some administration officials, including Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, thought it would be very difficult to administer the program for these workers and for maids.56
This argument is unpersuasive. In the political context defined by the strange bedfellows alliance of the Democratic Party, these exclusions comprised what the political scientist Robert Lieberman aptly has called “discrimination by design” by means of “race-laden” provisions with the capacity and intent “to divide the population along racial lines without saying so in so many words.”57 Unless occupational disabilities were inserted in the legislation, the program’s inclusive and national structure would have powerfully undermined the racialized, low-wage economy on which the region still depended and on whose shoulders Jim Crow stood.
As Congress’s gatekeepers in control of the key committees, southern members brought their controlling influence to bear on each of the components of the Social Security Act. The bill was mainly considered in the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Of the thirty-three Democrats serving on those committees, seventeen were southerners (nine in the Senate; eight in the House), including the two chairs, Senator Pat Harrison of Mississippi and Robert “Muley” Doughton of North Carolina. These southerners who dominated committee considerations broadly supported Social Security as a source of badly needed help for their poverty-stricken region, but they even more emphatically did not want the federal government to threaten the South’s “way of life.” At the hearings in the Senate, Harry Byrd, the leader of Virginia’s powerful Democratic machine, cautioned that unless adequate protections were introduced, Social Security could become an instrument by which the federal government would interfere with the way white southerners dealt with “the Negro question.”58 At issue was both who would be included in the provisions of the act, especially for old age and unemployment insurance, and how much discretion would be offered the states as they administered the non-social insurance parts of the bill. Accordingly, as Lieberman has observed, southern representatives had two choices when confronted with the administration’s recommendation for a largely inclusive and nationally oriented bill: “make it either less inclusive or less national.”59
They chose both strategies. By fashioning legislation that kept farmworkers and maids out, they made old age insurance—the part of the bill that would be managed by a national bureaucracy—less all-encompassing than what the administration had proposed. In contrast, in the social assistance parts of the bill that created aid to dependent children (ADC) and help for elderly poor people, the primary categorical forms of assistance offered by the Social Security Act, they made the legislation less national. These were federal programs whose costs were to be shared between the federal government and the states; even more important, these policies would be decisively shaped and administered by the individual states, which were granted a great deal of discretion in setting benefit levels.60 Southern members successfully resisted pressures to nationalize responsibility for ADC. Rather, by eliminating federal “decency and health” clauses in committee hearings, and by guarding against more than a minimal federal role on the floor of the House and Senate, they succeeded in keeping ADC’s key contours, organization, and supervision in the hands of state governors, legislators, and bureaucrats. Though they failed to get Congress to agree to pick up the whole bill for the poorest states, the bulk of which were southern, they did manage to pass a program of assistance to poor families that left all its key elements in local hands.61
ADC offered grants to families with minor children raised in circumstances where one parent—usually the father—was absent from the home. Because families were more likely to be headed by women and the prevalence of need was more extensive amongst African Americans, ADC was disproportionately black from the start, but not uniformly so. Across the United States, 14 percent of children in the program were black. In the South, however, state governments used their discretion, including provisions that an ADC home be “suitable,” to reduce their numbers. In Louisiana, 37 percent of the state’s children were black, but 26 percent of ADC clients. In North Carolina, the comparable figures were 30 and 22; in South Carolina, 48 and 29; in Alabama 39 and 24; in Arkansas, 24 and 15. Texas, Kentucky, and Mississippi, in the 1940s, did not choose to participate in ADC, so their states’ children did entirely without this source of help.62
We should note that ADC overall was less generous than the FERA programs it had replaced, which, despite all their shortcomings, had injected more monies into poor black communities. Consider the situation in Georgia. Of the nearly 24,000 white and 23,000 black children eligible for aid in 1935, the state offered funds to only a small fraction. There was a huge disparity by race. Drawing on both a Social Security survey and an account by the State Department of Public Welfare, Swedish demographer Richard Sterner found that “14.4 per cent of white eligibles but only 1.5 per cent of the Negro eligibles” were funded. Further, more than half of the black cases, as opposed to just 18 percent of the white, could be found in counties with cities of at least 10,000 people. He thus concluded that “while the situation is slightly better in cities, the fact remains that Negro children in Georgia have scarcely benefited from aid to dependent children and have suffered more than white children from the inadequacies of the existing program.”63
The other main form of categorical help created by the Social Security Act was assistance to the elderly poor, individuals, as most states defined the need, who earned “insufficient income to provide reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health.” Because most blacks were not eligible for old age insurance, this aspect of the new law was vital to their well-being. Here, as with ADC, the states, not the federal government, set benefit levels, ascertained eligibility, and administered the program. Here, too, the staff making these decisions in the South were entirely white. The degree of black need and the exclusion of most African Americans from other benefits put a significant amount of pressure on this program. In the main, southern states managed to contain it, forcing a finding, albeit toothless, by the Social Security Board in Washington in 1940 that in the prior two years, “the number of Negroes to whom aid was granted . . . was low in proportion to the number who needed assistance.”64
In the North, blacks were, in fact, represented in higher proportions than their numbers in the population of those over sixty-five, but the rate of acceptance in the South was much lower. So, too, were the monthly benefits. In Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and California, blacks, who were less well off, received slightly higher grants than whites, ranging from $19 to $34 a month. By contrast, in North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, West Virginia, Virginia, Oklahoma, Delaware, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas, white benefits were higher than those paid to blacks. Here, benefits often were very low. In five of these states, benefits to blacks averaged under $8 per month; five more made payments averaging under $10. And yet, in the face of terrible, extreme need, it was not unreasonable for a contemporary observer to conclude that “the old age assistance program has brought about a very considerable improvement in the economic position of the aged Negro.”65
Unemployment insurance, which composed the third key element of the bill, combined both strategies.66 Here, the administration plan was rather more to the liking of southern members of Congress than the main alternative, a bill advanced by Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota and sent to the floor by the non-southern-dominated House Labor Committee. Whereas that option would have paid all unemployed workers’ benefits drawn from federal funds, Roosevelt’s design was considerably more limited. It offered compensation only to unemployed workers whose employers had already made payments on their behalf into an unemployment insurance fund. As a result, unemployment insurance required access to continual and secure work before getting laid off. Further, once shaped by the committees on Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate, the bill excluded domestic and farmworkers from its protective reach, and it located control over eligibility and benefit levels in the hands of the states.67
Black workers were big losers. With other maids and farmworkers, but in larger proportions, they had no access to this benefit. Where they worked in industrial and commercial pursuits that were covered, they often were left out because they lacked a history of regular, stable employment. With the defeat of national standards, even when they gained a way in, the benefits tended to be comparatively meager.
Not surprisingly, the leading social welfare initiative of the New Deal was resisted by the country’s principal black organizations. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) testified against the bill, arguing quite correctly that it was “like a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” The National Urban League strongly advocated the alternative bill proposed by Congressman Lundeen because it included “farmers and domestic workers and personal service workers.”68
In short, each of the old age, social assistance, and unemployment provisions advanced by the Social Security Act was shaped to racist contours. As in the instance of earlier New Deal relief, blacks gained tangible assets in hard times that they otherwise would not have secured. The improvements provided to many blacks living in wretched circumstances under conditions of widespread desolation should not be gainsaid, of course. Neither, however, should the recognition that the political coalition that had produced these vast initiatives slanted them to offer far more of a boost to whites.
Once the range of New Deal social policies and welfare state spending were put in place, moreover, southern members of Congress continued to hold them hostage to Jim Crow. Federal agencies, including the Social Security Board, even when led by staunch anti-racist administrators, relegated the South’s practices of implementation to the second tier of their concern. Taking advantage of the anomalous coalition that held the Democratic Party together, many Republicans persistently raised racial issues to embarrass liberal Democrats, court black votes, and peel away southern votes for progressive legislation by offering anti-discrimination amendments to New Deal, and Fair Deal, proposals. The first of these was an addition to a 1943 bill authorizing $200 million in federal aid to schools stipulating that black and white schools would share equally in the their distribution.
With Republicans wielding this “race card,” non-southern Democrats found it impossible simultaneously to fight for an enhanced federal role and against Jim Crow. Even when anti-discrimination amendments were offered by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the black Democrat who represented Harlem, liberal whites understood they had to choose. And they regularly made the first of these aims their top priority. When Powell proposed the first of the many riders he would advance to the School Lunch Act of 1946, which would have banned discrimination and forbidden distribution to segregated schools, “northern liberals convinced him to reword the amendment to avoid mention of schools or separate school systems. The amendment passed in the House, only to be replaced in the Senate by a nondiscrimination provision that would have killed it. The legislation was ‘saved’ when southern Democrats, with northern votes, changed the nondiscrimination amendment into one that provided school lunch funds even to states that maintained separate school systems as long as they distributed the money equally. ‘Separate but equal,’ after all, was the law of the land.”69
Over and over, the southern wing of the Democratic Party took advantage of what its members correctly discerned as the order of concerns held by their party colleagues. Well into the 1950s, non-southern Democrats proved willing to trade local control and the segregated utilization of federal funds in order to win southern support to overcome Republican opposition to liberal welfare state spending and services. Under the terms of this “deal,” even federal Veterans’ Hospitals in the South remained segregated.
To be sure, in the late 1940s, some liberal and moderate Democrats, embarrassed by southern practices that continued long after blacks had participated in the victories against fascism and Nazism, spoke out for black rights. President Truman broke with the long silence about black rights by his predecessor to become a public advocate for fair employment and anti–poll tax legislation. The 1948 Democratic Convention adopted a civil rights plank passionately introduced by the mayor of Minneapolis, Hubert Humphrey, which fractured the party and produced Strom Thurmond’s segregationist States’ Rights Party challenge that carried five southern states. But at no time did the liberal wing abandon its social policy alliance with the South or the conditions it imposed on African Americans.
Indeed, after 1948, confronted by a climate of red-baiting that had seized the country, non-southern Democrats in Congress, politicians in the party organization, and leaders of the main liberal pressure groups such as Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) grew more timid. Not only did they weaken the party’s commitment to civil rights legislation in the 1952 and 1956 platforms (Adlai Stevenson, their presidential candidate, was far more circumspect about segregation than Truman had been), they sought, almost at any cost after Truman’s surprise electoral success, to prevent the party from fracturing anew. Perhaps emblematic of this turn back to the South was the letter sent by Hubert Humphrey, Minnesota’s new junior senator, to twenty southern newspaper editors in November 1951, which underscored his “deep affection” for their region. While not retracting his support for civil rights, he reassured them that he did not favor an aggressive federal effort. “I know that we frequently place too much trust in the power of the federal government. . . . My program for civil rights places its main emphasis on community activity, including individual responsibility, education, and moral values, supported by legislative standards.”70 Not long after, Walter White of the NAACP condemned Humphrey for his “abject surrender” when, in the Senate, he joined Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson to convince northern Democrats to call off the attempt to reduce the number of votes it would take to end a filibuster.71
IV
WHEN THE NEW DEAL BEGAN, the large majority of black Americans living in the South lacked the civil and political rights of citizens. Ironically, they achieved some starkly limited social rights to relief and welfare even before the battle against Jim Crow had made significant gains. But it was the absence of citizenship rights that radically curtailed these improvements. Barred from the South’s political system by a wide array of exclusionary rules and practices, they could secure no effectual political presence either at home or in Washington. Without black political participation, southern representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate were utterly free not just to impede but veto the full and fair participation of African Americans in the most important welfare-oriented advances of the 1930s. Black and white southerners stood across a great political divide. Blacks could not achieve civic and political inclusion. They lacked recognition as citizens. They had no standing within the polity. Even their physical presence in the public sphere was limited to specific racially designated zones.
By contrast, southern whites were accorded a privileged access to the political order. Since blacks counted in the numbers reported by the census, their large presence combined with their frequent inability to vote allowed white citizens to gain representation in higher proportions than their population in the House of Representatives. The Senate, with its distribution of two seats for each state, conferred on its seventeen racially segregated states a veto on all legislative enactments they did not like. When this power was deployed, as it was in matters of relief and social insurance, it seriously widened the racial gap. Federal social welfare policy operated, in short, not just as an instrument of racial discrimination but as a perverse formula for affirmative action.
Writing about slavery and its legacies, the political theorist Judith Shklar has taken note of how often its neglect in general histories subsequently helped erase its impact on the consciousness of most white Americans. Europeans, she observed, might use the language of having been enslaved, but Americans have lived with the consequences of “the real thing . . . in pain, guilt, fear, and hatred.”72 This experience has been so profound that we should not be surprised that racism and Jim Crow imposed themselves on the key social policies of the New Deal. But if not surprised, we owe it to ourselves not to forget.