SA

If there’s a kernel of truth to the “racist New Deal” myth, it comes from the fact that the New Deal took place just after the most racist period in US history post-slavery. The first two or three decades of the century were the historical “nadir” of the black experience in the United States — it wasn’t just Jim Crow in the South, there was a monolithic consensus in white society, including the North, about the inferiority and unsuitability of black Americans to exercise equal rights.

The vestiges of a kind of abolitionist tradition that had once existed in certain parts of the country had been almost completely stamped out, and intellectual and political culture were suffused with social-Darwinist, eugenicist ideas. So you’re starting from the absolute low point of racism in the United States, which means all these ideas are firmly embedded in almost all American institutions. Then, when Roosevelt came in, his mandate was not to do anything in particular in respect to racial equality, but to address the economic emergency — a situation that affected blacks more than anybody else, actually. The unemployment rate was 25–30 percent, and among blacks it was probably twice that.

So inevitably it’s very easy to find points of contact between these preexisting racist institutions and the New Deal. But if you’re trying to defend the idea that the New Deal was particularly a vector of racism, you have a stubborn set of facts that you have to explain away. Maybe the most important one is that African Americans at the time did not agree with that notion. In 1936, for the first time in the history of black voting, blacks switched en masse to the Democratic Party and have remained overwhelmingly Democratic ever since. Blacks had voted overwhelmingly Republican in all previous national elections; even in 1932 blacks had been the only group that remained loyal to Herbert Hoover after three years of depression. But by a wide margin they defected in 1936, and that happened because of Roosevelt and the New Deal. It’s hard to explain how, if the New Deal was particularly racist, that escaped the notice of the black people who actually lived through it. The trade unionist A. Philip Randolph, for example, one of the few black leaders who actually had a mass working-class black constituency, said in 1938 that Roosevelt had done more for the race than any president in history.

FDR’s was the first presidential administration since Reconstruction in which some actively antiracist figures used the machinery of the federal government to promote racial equality. It wasn’t all, or even most of officials, but a critical mass of them. Roosevelt himself was neither particularly racist nor particularly antiracist by the standards of the time, but there were figures within the administration who in their previous careers had gone out of their way to combat racial inequality. People like Aubrey Williams of the National Youth Administration, or Harry Hopkins, who was one of Roosevelt’s closest advisors and had been a president of the local NAACP chapter. And, of course, Eleanor Roosevelt had an intense commitment to the issue of black equality.

But more importantly, the origins of the modern Civil Rights Movement in this country stem from the New Deal period. That was when CIO industrial unions, in contrast to the racially exclusionary AFL craft unions, were first organized. The CIO organized black workers in all-encompassing unions that had the mass to shut down whole industries in strikes — the United Auto Workers (UAW) in Detroit, for example. The organizers of those unions were often radicals who had a prior political commitment to racial equality, but more importantly, they were forced to go to the black community — often to churches or local NAACPs — and say “we want and need you, we need a partnership with you.” That partnership between the labor movement and the early civil rights groups — both the respectable civil rights groups like the NAACP and the more scrappy and aggressive Communist-aligned organizations — became the institutional backbone of the Civil Rights Movement lasting right through the 1960s.