RW

To fairly evaluate the New Deal, you have to go back to 1930s and ask: where was America at the time? This was a white supremacist country, as it always had been. Racism was the rule of the day. Jim Crow laws were widespread not only in the South but in the North. Think of what we had done up to that point: the long-term genocide and suppression of native peoples, black slavery, repression and exclusion of Chinese, Mexicans, Filipinos, and so on. White people were very begrudging of giving anything to people of color, and not just African Americans.

That’s the world the New Deal inherited. The Civil Rights Movement and its fundamental challenge to white supremacy hadn’t happened yet — that came a generation later. The New Deal didn’t challenge the racial order head on and failed on that front in a number of ways.

But that’s not the same as saying it was simply racist. In fact, most of the leading New Dealers — such as Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins — were outspoken antiracists and made a systematic effort to include people of color in New Deal programs.

As a result, most New Deal programs were reached out to native peoples, black people, Latinos, and Asians in an unprecedented way. People of color worked in all the big relief programs, and there were specific investment, education, and health projects aimed at oppressed peoples. For example, the New Deal’s Indian policy was the best deal Native Americans had seen from the federal government up to that time. We would do it differently now, but the New Deal made a genuine effort to allow native sovereignty, employed tens of thousands of natives in work programs, improved reservation lands, built schools and provided for native education, and so on.

On the other hand, President Roosevelt compromised with the Southern Democrats in Congress, who were a big part of the New Deal coalition and a mixed bag of populists and power-brokers in the Jim Crow South — not to mention big growers in California and Texas. Those compromises led to farm workers and domestic workers being left out of two major pieces of legislation: Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act. Most of those labor forces were African American and Mexican American, plus some Asian Americans.

It’s a mixed record. Yet even though the New Deal fell far short of ending racism, it helped set in motion the forces that would overthrow Jim Crow in the postwar era. Its modernization programs brought most of rural America into the mainstream, its employment programs brought jobs, better wages, and dignity to workers of color, and its services programs provided better health, education, and skills to many underprivileged Americans. In addition, the employment of African Americans in federal line agencies tripled during the New Deal era.

On top of that, Roosevelt appointed an unprecedented number of African Americans to high positions in the federal government, including the first federal judge. Many such people, such as Mary McLeod Bethune, Lawrence Oxley, and Robert Weaver, went on to be civil rights leaders.

In sum, simply stating that “the New Deal was racist” is not helpful, underestimates the New Deal’s impact on racism in America, and undermines the idea that anything as ambitious and progressive as the New Deal can be done in this country today.