Good Morning POU!
White liberals love to tout The New Deal under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and indeed it was powerful, economic changing legislation that very well saved this country. However, lost in the nostalgia for a “New” New Deal, is how FDR worked with Southern Democrats (later “Dixiecrats”) to purposefully keep African Americans from benefiting any of the fruits of this legislation. It would take protests, further changes to the legislation and lawsuits before African Americans could even began to reap their earned benefits from the New Deal.
Roosevelt’s need to accommodate Southern racists often complicated the implementation of his programs, according to Digital History. Distribution of relief in the South, for example, slowed to a trickle because Southern relief administrators didn’t want to distribute money to Blacks. One Georgia relief agent told Roosevelt’s emissary Lorena Hickok that “any N*gger who gets over $8 a week is a spoiled N*gger, that’s all … The Negroes regard the President as the Messiah, and they think that … they’ll all be getting $12 a week for the rest of their lives.”
Ira Katznelson, a political science and history professor at Columbia University, in his book, ”When Affirmative Action Was White,” contends that Roosevelt’s programs not only discriminated against Blacks, but actually contributed to widening the gap between white and Black Americans — judged in terms of educational achievement, quality of jobs and housing, and attainment of higher income. Arguing for the necessity of affirmative action today, Katznelson contends that policymakers and the judiciary previously failed to consider just how unfairly Blacks had been treated by the federal government in the 30 years before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.
There were a number of major pieces of new deal legislation that were substantially modified to conform to the demands of southern racists. These included:
- The National Industrial Recovery Act
- The Agricultural Adjustment Act
- The Social Security Act
- The National Labor Relations Act (Wagner Act)
- The G.I. Bill
- The Federal Housing Act
The flagship of the New Deal was The National Industrial Recovery Act, passed in June 1933. It authorized the president to issue executive orders establishing some 700 industrial cartels, which restricted output and forced wages and prices above market levels. The minimum wage regulations made it illegal for employers to hire people who weren’t worth the minimum because they lacked skills. As a result, some 500,000 blacks, particularly in the South, were estimated to have lost their jobs.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act established the system of agricultural subsidies and price supports that is still with us today. One of the major economic problems of the depression was serious deflation. This had caused the prices of goods to fall below the cost of production. The approach taken by the AAA was to provide incentive payments to farmers to take land out of production. Reducing the supply of agricultural products would raise prices. Taking large amounts of land out of production meant that agricultural labor would be out of work. This had a devastating impact on wage workers and share croppers. The southern congressional bloc supported the idea of payments to land owners. However, they opposed the efforts of liberals in the administration to see to it that a portion of the payments would go directly to the displaced workers and share croppers. Jim Crow won the fight and the displaced workers helped to fuel the great migration.
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