krebscycle

There is popular but catastrophically false “left/progressive” narrative of post WWII history in the US that ignores or minimizes the role of racism and race privilege.  The New Deal fell apart in the  1940s when Jim Crow Democrats in Congress crossed the aisle to work in common cause with right wing Republicans – especially to hamstring labor unions. Among other early results of this alliance, Roosevelt’s veto of the Smith-Connally Act in 1943 and Truman’s veto of Taft-Hartley in 1947 were both overridden.  Jim Crow Democrats were enthusiastic and essential backers of the core New Deal legislation in the 1930s – bolstered  by the power of seniority in Congress and the total control of elections in their one party terrorist state election systems.  But by  the 1940s, the CIO was moving to organize black workers in Jim Crow states, the Federal government was threatening to step into voter registration (for soldiers),  the new working class in the North grew to include too many black voters – and to inspire escape from too many Black southerners.   None of that was acceptable to the Jim Crow Democrats. The story told by people like Thomas Frank, that the Democratic Party broke the New Deal by abandoning economic populism is not just false – it is upside down.  Economic issues were driven by  racial politics and not the other way around.

“New York Jew kikes are fraternizing and socializing with Negroes”.  – Senator Theodore Bilbo from Mississippi, key New Deal architect.

In the early, 1930s, midwestern rural and southern segregationists were deeply antagonistic to  the Northeastern capitalism of the Republican party and were desperate for Federal aid for their impoverished states. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi was not unusual in being an  enthusiastic supporter of  FDR and the New Deal,  a self proclaimed champion of “the common people”,  an enemy of  east coast financial oligarchs and plutocrats and a racist monster who defended terrorism and lynching (to protect white women, of course) and screamed and cursed on the Senate floor against Black people (not in those words).  Part of Bilbo’s antagonism to the banking oligarchs was that he identified them with Jews, who he didn’t like either. Bilbo was particularly worried about “mongrelization”  and contamination of pure “Anglo-Saxon” blood and referred to mixed race children as “a motley melee of misceginated mongrels”. And he had enormous clout in the Senate.

From the election of Franklin Roosevelt until the mid 1940s, the New Deal winning coalition  advanced economic populism while making special provision for racism.  The TVA brought electricity and industry to a huge part of the South, but blocked black workers from all but menial and laboring work. Unemployment insurance, social security, federal housing aid – the whole apparatus of social welfare was for white people. States controlled unemployment insurance, voting, administration of food stamps and welfare, etc. etc. precisely so that Jim Crow states, and Jim Crow sympathizers in the North,  could funnel most of that government money to white constituents.  By the time John Kennedy forbade (on paper) racial discrimination in Federal Housing programs in 1962, the structure of the white suburbs and the real-estate wealth escalator which have been the foundation of right wing electoral power since the 1960s were in place (98% of Federal aid for housing before 1962 went exclusively to white people)..

The heyday of white populism ended when the Jim Crow powers became alarmed enough to switch sides, make common cause with the East Coast Oligarchs and cut the unions out of the deal.

The South made this happen. The country’s profound change in law and attitude toward the circumstances of organized labor was the direct result of shifts in southern legislative behavior during the 1940s. Faced with the surprising rise of labor in their region, and with the union movement’s increasing command of resources and issues in the Democratic Party, southern members of Congress came to believe that they no longer could afford to treat labor as an issue that should command party loyalty. Labor organizing, they saw, stimulated civil rights activism. A powerful labor movement that pressed against employment discrimination threatened to level wages across racial lines and directly challenge Jim Crow. It also encouraged blacks to leave the South, and diminished the southern establishment’s control over those who stayed. Even the 1930s arrangements excluding the occupations in which the majority of southern blacks worked from federal social welfare and labor laws had become precarious. Agricultural workers had been included in the FEPC, and some were incorporated within Senator Wagner’s proposed changes to unemployment compensation.

Distressed by these developments and keenly aware of the dangers that threatened the South’s racial order, southern members closed ranks in Congress to reshape the framework within which unions and the labor market could operate. For their Republican partners, labor remained an issue of party and ideology. For southern legislators, labor had become race.  [Katznelson]

The quote above (and much of the supporting material further up) is from  “Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of our time” by Ira Katznelson. The effects of this mid 40s transformation could be seen nearly at once.  Here’s Senator John F. Kennedy’s first Senate floor speech – in 1952 – decrying the destruction of high paying union industrial labor in the north by migration of capital to the Jim Crow protected low wage Southern states [cite].

But the final reason for migration, with which I am particularly concerned, is the cost differential resulting from practices or conditions permitted or provided by Federal law which are unfair or substandard by any criterion. Massachusetts manufacturing industries in May of 1953 paid an average hourly wage of $1.64; but because the Federal minimum is only an outdated 75 cents an hour, many industries migrating to the rural communities of Mississippi pay workers only that less-than-subsistence wage, and those employees under “learners permits” even less. Practically all New England woolen textile mills pay a wage of at least $1.20 an hour; but because of the recent Fulbright Amendment to the Walsh-Healey Act, which has held up the establishment of this wage as the new Federal minimum for that industry, the New England mills must bid for government contracts against southern mills paying only $1.05 an hour. Labor organizations in highly unionized New England have achieved not only better wages but pension and fringe benefits as well. In the South, however, unionization of competing plants has been virtually halted since enactment of the Taft-Hartley Law.

Without adequate Federal standards for social security or unemployment compensation, many employers who move south support a level of benefits far below those paid by New England industry. Federal tax amortization benefits have not only been disproportionately granted to southern plants, but have also been granted to promote expansion in the South without regard to available facilities and manpower in New England. Federally regulated shipping rates by rail, truck, or sea discriminate unduly against New England and are a confused, shapeless mass of regulation. One of the most obviously unfair inducements offered to those considering migration is the tax-free plant built by a southern community with the proceeds of Federally tax-exempt municipal bonds.

The elements of the post war Jim Crow New New  Deal are all described in JFKs speech. Federal  purchasing, regulation, and aid flow (often tied to military bases and contracting), served the alliance of Northern Capital – looking for low cost labor – and Southern Aristocracy – seeking to grow an economy based on low wages and racial oppression.

The story that we are often told  by “left/liberal” intellectuals, from Thomas Frank to David Harvey and even Thomas Piketty, and by politicians like Bernie Sanders, however, minimizes the importance of racism in this history and  instead blames “establishment” Democratic politicians for abandoning populism.  Obviously, Democratic politicians often are a long way from perfect, but this argument is garbage.   Thomas Frank wrote a highly influential book called “What’s the matter with Kansas”  where he argued that  white workers turned away from the Democrats when the Democrats abandoned economic populism  and embraced what the left  and right calls “identity politics” ( in other words, civil rights)in the 1960s and 1970s.  However, the  only time Kansas has voted for a Democrat in a Presidential election since 1940 was when the Republicans nominated someone with a Jewish name (Goldwater) – they spurned FDR( at his most populist), Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Kennedy, Walter Mondale alike.  And yet, Thomas Frank’s thesis remains gospel on the left. The Democrats have not won a majority of the white vote since the Civil Rights bills were passed under President Johnson. The absolute refusal of much of the white left and liberal pundits to admit that this giant iceberg is floating right there in front of the boat is  a recipe for failure.  There is no future for progressive economic reform in the USA without understanding and confronting the driving role of race privilege. In America.  Racism is not caused by  economic inequality:  economic inequality is protected  by racism.