An ambivalent legacy: black Americans and the political economy of the New Deal.
Independent Review › Vol. 6 Nbr. 4, March 2002
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An ambivalent legacy: black Americans and the political economy of the New Deal.
No group in America votes Democratic more than black Americans, who from Reconstruction until the Great Depression had clung just as tenaciously to the Republican Party. Historians usually regard the New Deal as the turning point in this political realignment, but they remain uncertain as to why blacks flocked to the Democratic Party in the 1930s. The racial impact of New Deal policies also evokes controversy.
Hagiography characterized the first generation to interpret the New Deal, as a left-liberal consensus dominated the scholarly community. The hagiographers had little to say about the racial impact of New Deal policies. (1) James MacGregor Burns argued that Roosevelt was slow to see the potential of a voting bloc of minority groups and that blacks liked FDR's personality more than they approved of his policies (1956, 198, 339). Carl Degler depicted the New Deal as a "third American revolution" that included blacks. Though it produced no specific legislative benefits for blacks as such, "The Roosevelt administration did much for the Negro.... When low-cost housing went up, Negroes got their share; Negro youths were welcome in the CCC and NYA just as whites were, though in the former the races were segregated.... Even-handedly distributed federal relief funds were a gift from heaven to the black man, who was traditionally `hired last and fired first'" (1959, 397). Many blacks cast their first votes in Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections (Degler 1959, 397). Although conceding that the New Deal "enhanced the power of interest groups who claimed to speak for the millions, but sometimes represented only a small minority," William Leuchtenberg concluded, "Negro intellectuals might fret at the inequities of the New Deal, but the masses of Negroes began to break party lines in gratitude for government bounties and nondiscriminatory treatment" (1963, 347, 186). In short, most hagiographers pointed to black inclusion in an off-handed way; they conceded some shortcomings, but without much sustained analysis. The New Left critique of the New Deal that began in the 1960s took for granted black exclusion without shedding any new light on the matter. Paul Conkin quickly noted, "Negroes, politically purchased by relief or by the occasional concern of bureaucrats or Mrs. Roosevelt, remained a submerged and neglected caste" (1967, 73). Barton Bernstein similarly noted that the New Deal "failed to extend equality and generally countenanced racial discrimination and segregation"(1968, 263). Pondering the great shift of blacks to the Democratic Party, Jerold Auerbach identified a fundamental weakness in the New Left critique. "Unless one assumes, as Bernstein, Conkin, and others elsewhere assume, that the New Deal was so diabolically clever that it won the support of those whom it did not help, one must conclude that most black (and white) Americans found much in the New Deal to command their allegiance" (1969, 22). In the next decade, several new works dealt specifically with New Deal racial policy and the impact of New Deal policies on blacks. The first were markedly evenhanded and mildly critical (Kirby 1980; Weiss 1983; Wolters 1970). (2) At the same time, a new wave of ideologically leftist scholars found much of appeal in the New Deal. Unlike the 1960s New Left critics who condemned the shortcomings of New Deal liberalism, these writers pointed out continuity between New Deal liberalism and New Left radicalism (Sitkoff 1978; Sullivan 1996). At present, discussion of the issue is locked into a left-liberal/left-radical dialogue that is typical of twentieth-century U.S. history (Hamby 1990, 10). In this article, I attempt to bring in the perspective of recent scholarship informed by a classical liberal (or conservative) perspective. Instead of lamenting that the New Deal did not produce full-blown socialism, I consider the possibili...See the full content of this document
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