Lifting the Chains by William H. Chafe

Author:William H. Chafe [Chafe, William H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

The New Deal

By most accounts, the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt to the presidency in 1932—and the liberal policies of his New Deal—started the process by which the federal government became an instrument for change in race relations in America. But in the beginning, Roosevelt faced a political conundrum. A Northerner with a bachelor’s degree from Harvard and a law degree from Columbia, he had risen to political prominence in New York understanding the need to listen to his urban constituencies, including the powerful Black community in Harlem. On the other hand, FDR was dependent throughout his presidency on support from Southern Democrats who constituted a majority of his Democratic support and were committed to racism and segregation. Democrats from the South also controlled most of the key committees of Congress.

FDR determined that the only way he could promote his legislative agenda was through trying to appease those Southern Democrats. When it came to most issues related to race, FDR chose to chart a course that would not personally alienate those committee chairs. Even on a subject as morally indefensible as hanging Black men and women from trees, FDR refused to support a federal anti-lynching law. He might denounce lynching as a “vile form of collective murder,” as he did in 1933, but he never endorsed national legislation outlawing the practice. “If I come out for the anti-lynching bill,” he observed, “[Southern legislators] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.” Especially in Roosevelt’s first term, most New Deal legislation on minimum wages, agriculture, and industrial recovery contained measures that minimized benefits for Black Southerners, often excluding them from becoming beneficiaries of programs designed to help people in agriculture and industry.17

Nevertheless, Franklin Roosevelt’s new administration brought more positive news on federal government policies toward Blacks than had been seen since 1867. To be sure, the New Deal put into place a series of government regulations that spelled disaster for hundreds of thousands of Black sharecroppers. But in the end, the good outweighed the bad, especially for the long-range future of federal intervention in support of Black citizenship rights.

The bad news came early. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was one of the biggest initiatives undertaken by the New Deal. Farmers throughout the South were plunging into bankruptcy. The price of cotton per pound had fallen to one-eighth of what it had been just a dozen years earlier. Struggling to come up with an answer, the Roosevelt administration, as was its wont, pieced together proposals from various groups lobbying for specific solutions. But its central point was clear: the New Deal would save farmers in the nation, especially in the South, by reimbursing them for taking land out of production. Indeed, under the AAA, the acreage devoted to cotton production plummeted by 40 percent.

The legislation accomplished two things. First, it put money directly into farmers’ pockets through paying them to stop working the land. Second, and equally important, by

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