time bound racial animus to economic anxiety in a narrative intended to nurture antistatist sensibilities among working-class and middle-class white Americans, whose prosperity was itself the product of the American welfare state.
As Reaganism became bipartisan consensus in the 1990s, scholars such as Michael K. Brown, Michael B. Katz, Jill Quadagno and Adolph L. Reed Jr. responded to neoliberalism’s racialized attacks on welfare by drawing attention to the uneven distribution of the American welfare state’s rewards. Specifically, they not only challenged the culturalist interpretations of poverty that informed the “welfare queen” and “crack baby” tropes, they also demonstrated the welfare state’s crucial role—in the form of New Deal labor and housing policy, entitlements and state stewardship of postwar economic growth—in the creation of the white American middle class. Indeed, Brown, Katz, Quadagno and Reed made clear that the white middle class reaped the lion’s share of the American welfare state’s benefits via the NLRA, the FHA’s mortgage policies, the GI Bill, the Federal-Aid Highway Act, entitlements and an elaborate private welfare system—including pensions and employer-sponsored health insurance—which most blacks had been denied access to thanks to discriminatory housing policies and employer and union discrimination (particularly in the elite building trades).3
Brown’s, Katz’s, Quadagno’s and Reed’s respective defenses of affirmative action and means-tested programs did not stop with the observation that state intervention in capitalist labor and housing markets had been crucially important to the expansion of the postwar white American middle class. To be sure, these left scholars were highly critical of New Democratic social scientists like Theda Skocpol, William Julius Wilson and Paul Starr, whose calls for universalism complemented the neoliberal assault on affirmative action and means-tested programs.4 Nevertheless, Brown, Katz, Quadagno and Reed were clear that—given the disproportionate impact of deindustrialization, the decline of the union movement and public sector retrenchment on blacks—truly universal redistributive programs, implemented equitably with the aid of the Voting Rights Act and antidiscrimination policy, were the only effective means of ending economic and racial inequality. In other words, their historically grounded defenses of the types of programs that benefited blacks disproportionately were wed to a broader case for a return to the public-interest model of government that had fueled the postwar expansion of America’s disproportionately white middle class.
As neoliberalism’s grip on the liberal-left imagination tightened during the first two decades of the twenty-first century, however, a new generation of students of race and inequality took the bifurcation of the New Deal and postwar welfare states as evidence of the inherent limitations of universal programs. Historians Jefferson Cowie and Nick Salvatore, for example, posit what political scientist Cedric Johnson has termed the “constraint of race” thesis. Arguing that New Deal liberalism was restrained by racist Southern Democrats, Cowie and Salvatore ultimately contend that racism has perpetually hobbled broad, class-based redistributive reforms.5
Public intellectual Ta-Nehisi Coates has made much the same case. Drawing from the work of political scientist Ira Katznelson, Coates takes FHA mortgage discrimination and the SSA’s exemptions for agricultural workers and domestic and personal servants as partial bases for his case for racial reparations—a redistributive agenda from which only African Americans might benefit. Specifically, Coates contends that, since the late colonial period, working-class whites’ pathological commitment to white-skin privilege has not only precluded interracial political alliances based on mutual economic interest, but ontological race/racism ensures that universal redistributive programs are incapable of redressing racial disparities.6
As I will discuss in detail in Chapter 4, the constraint of race thesis downplays capitalists’ sway over New Deal labor and housing policies. What is no less problematic, however, is that the framework looks past the New Deal’s much-studied, transformative effect on African American life and politics.
To be sure, New Deal programs, which were generally administered at the local level, were marred by discrimination. Nevertheless, millions of African Americans benefited from New Deal initiatives—sometimes in greater proportion than their share of the general population, even if they were underrepresented in relation to their need. Blacks were just 10 percent of the total population, for example, but accounted for 20 percent of all individuals on welfare rolls. Several hundred thousand African Americans, likewise, acquired work through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), the Public Works Administration (PWA) and Works Progress Administration (WPA), while quotas, intended to ensure proportional representation, gave many African Americans access to newly constructed public housing projects in the era before public housing was a vehicle for warehousing poor people.7 Yes, the 23 percent of agricultural and domestic workers who happened to be black were, like their white counterparts, excluded from coverage under the NLRA, the FLSA, and the SSA. But African American industrial workers—such as the 500,000 blacks who comprised 8 percent of the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) membership in 19458—were covered by each of these pieces of legislation.
There is no question that African Americans did not receive their fair share of New Deal programs—particularly in housing. But the now commonplace tendency to dismiss the Roosevelt administration’s crucial role in improving the material lives of millions of African Americans has obscured both the importance of the New Deal’s redistributive policies to blacks—who demonstrated their support for the administration with their votes—and the influence of New Deal liberalism over the scope of black political activism from the 1930s through the civil rights movement.
New Deal Industrial Democracy and Black Civil Rights
In 1978, historian Harvard Sitkoff’s A New Deal for Blacks laid the foundation on which a generation of civil rights scholarship would rest. Sitkoff’s ambitious study of Depression-era race relations and politics traced the origins of the modern civil rights movement to the 1930s and early 1940s. While Sitkoff was clear that African American civil rights advanced little during the New Deal, he convincingly argued that the so-called Depression decade was fertile ground for several political, social and intellectual developments that would eventually blossom into the insurgent black political activism of the 1950s and 1960s.
The Roosevelt administration’s emphasis on redistributive economic policies and the presence of civil rights advocates in key positions in New Deal agencies set the stage for the era of black Democratic interest-group politics. The left-labor militancy advanced by the Communist Party’s (CP) Popular Front and the CIO engendered racial liberalism among a stratum of white activists and rank-and-file unionists, opening access to good blue-collar jobs while providing African Americans useful political allies. Finally, the antifascist impulses influencing both left activism and America’s support for the European Allies strengthened the hand of social scientists and liberals who challenged notions of racial hierarchy rooted in eugenics or other biological metaphors. Each of the above, according to Sitkoff, not only informed the activist sensibilities of African Americans during the Depression and World War II, they also shaped the scope of the modern civil rights movement.9
While A New Deal for Blacks offered a compelling overview of the relationship between New Deal policy and the struggle for black equality, it did not explore the complex issues shaping civil rights institutions and their leaders during the 1930s. Thus, a great many scholars have since written books on each of the various themes Sitkoff first examined in 1978. The relationship between New Deal industrial democracy and civil rights activism during the 1930s and early 1940s has been of particular interest.
The New Deal’s efforts to redress the problem of under-consumption through unionization—best exemplified by the NLRA—transformed not just the workplace but American democracy. Aware of the contradictions between the Jeffersonian democratic ideal still celebrated by most Americans in the 1930s and the realities of industrial
