Before the Eeoc: How Management Integrated the Workplace

Summary

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This article examines how the human-relations managerial techniques of the 1950s prepared large companies for the mandated racial integration required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after 1964. Drawing from management's "how-to" publications, as well as archival materials from the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation, the article expands on recent work that has emphasized the importance of internal labor markets, training programs, and managerial policies in determining the shape and pace of integration.

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Before the Eeoc: How Management Integrated the Workplace

Historians of employment discrimination tend to focus on the im pediments and resistance to workplace integration. Their main question is, Why did it take so long? Given over three hundred years of white supremacy and the near total economic marginalization of African Americans, however, we might also ask, Why didn't it take longer? That is, the remarkable thing about workplace integration when it finally happened in the 1960s was not that it took so long, but that it happened so quickly. In the past forty years, American businesses have discarded exclusionary and discriminatory policies and have adopted aggressive policies of integration, most recently under the rubric of "diversity." At first, employers resented new legislation requiring them to prove they did not discriminate. Many resisted it. But enough companies complied with the new antidiscrimination laws to produce real economic progress in black incomes, employment, and advancement.1 Economic historians have attributed the relative success of integrationto a combination of tight labor markets, economic development, federal pressure, educational improvements, consumer boycotts, and assertive black job seekers, especially after passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.2 But none of these factors quite accounts for the relative and unexpected calm that accompanied the process of integration.3

This article explores the proposition that post-World War II management policies and the internal structures of American business were particularly suited to accommodating new antidiscrimination laws. Like recent scholarship by Thomas Maloney and sociologists Frank Dobbin and John Sutton, it emphasizes the centrality of management structure and practice in understanding the response of businesses to integration and social change in the postwar years.4 An examination of American companies' integration processes in the decades following World War II suggests that, on balance, the much maligned and unevenly applied managerial techniques of the 1950s facilitated and eased the course of integration in American companies-once legislation and boycotts forced companies to integrate. This argument is supported by an examination of American companies' integration processes that draws from managements' "how-to" publications, as well as from archival materials at the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation.

Midcentury Management's Integrative Vision

Enlightened management practices during the 1950s emphasized manipulation over coercion, integration over conflict, and public responsibility over private pursuits. Underwritten by experts in industrial sociology and human relations, these trends were the culmination of years of research into the problem of stabilizing and rationalizing American workplaces.5 The idea that harmonious employer-employee relations might yield more productive workplaces first gained popularity in the Progressive Era as an alternative to Taylorism on the one hand and socialism on the other. Figures like Ordway Tead, Mary Parker Follett, and Elton Mayo further developed the idea in the 1920s and 1930s, implori...

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