Fear Itself (60 page)

Truman’s administrative decision set off a heated congressional debate (the April 1946
Congressional Digest
“controversy of the month”) that focused on whether the federal government or the states should take responsibility for employment policy. The competing visions crystallized in a competition between two versions of how the Wagner-Peyser Act of 1933 should be amended. An administration bill, stoutly supported by President Truman, continued the full federal status of USES through June 1947. Crucially, it also authorized the strict oversight of state and local employment offices by the Department of Labor after their return to the states.
⁶¹

An alternative to this administration bill proposed by Congressman Everett Dirksen, the Illinois Republican, favored full and unsupervised decentralization. It mandated a return of USES offices to the states a year earlier, by the close of June 1946. The House debated these options in January 1946. The arguments broke along clear party and sectional lines. Southern Democrats apprehensive about the implications of federal government control of labor policy for race relations joined the Republicans to favor the Dirksen option. Every Democrat who spoke against the administration bill was southern; every southerner but one who spoke in this debate opposed his party’s position.
⁶²

Like their Republican allies, they feared that an additional year might lead to a decision to keep USES offices permanently in federal hands. Dirksen forcefully argued that if the federal government were allowed to retain control until June 30, 1947, “the effort will be unrelenting to Federalize this system. You can bet all the tea in China on the fact that there is a definite effort to keep this in federal hands.”
⁶³
Southern speakers echoed this argument.
⁶⁴
They were concerned that the creation of new federal powers for the secretary of labor, which looked “mighty funny for anybody who wants to close out Federal activities,” as Hatton Sumners of Texas put the point, might serve as an excuse for prolonged federal control. Arguing that “this proposed legislation . . . is one of the most important items of legislation that has come before this Congress in a long time,” he cautioned,“Wait until this overload of federal power is turned loose, wait until this outfit turns loose its power and you will wait until doomsday.”
⁶⁵

What most worried southern members was that new federal powers after the return of employment offices to the states would change the racial situation. Again and again, they insisted that both job placement and the supervision of unemployment claims must lie with state government, and thus opposed, as Ezekiel Gathings of Arkansas insisted, “legislation in which the Secretary of Labor and the Federal Government would maintain absolute control and domination over all phases of employment practices. . . . We only ask that we be permitted in the several States to solve our own employment problems.”
⁶⁶

This plea for self-determination was explicitly grounded in qualms about the impact of federal control of labor markets for the South’s economy, especially agriculture, for race, and for the growing power of organized labor. A truly national labor system threatened to erode the ability of plantations to hold on to low-paid field-workers. Making this point, Gathings put in the record an advertisement the USES had run in a local Arkansas newspaper in 1944 that read:

Unskilled labor: Work for one of the largest steel companies in Pennsylvania. Transportation paid by employer. Available housing. Forty-eight-hour workweek. Time and one-half after 40 hours. Representative will hire at United States Employment Service. Helena, Ark. September 21, 22, 23.

Lamenting that “one-fourth to one-third of the cotton produced in 1945 in Arkansas remains in the field unpicked,” he announced how “we have not forgotten that our labor has been taken away from the agricultural sections of the country and transplanted in the metropolitan areas, leaving farm houses empty and an inadequate supply of labor to harvest the crops.”
⁶⁷
Gathings further suggested that federal control of the employment services had caused unemployment compensation to be paid in a way that was continuing to diminish the incentive for poor workers who remained in the South to participate in agricultural labor. He stated, “What little labor we have in the South available for farm work has stopped working and are drawing allotment checks, unemployment compensation or other Federal benefits.”
⁶⁸

Setting what became a recurring theme, Gathings also attacked the bill for the authority it conferred on the secretary of labor to compel states to treat applicants equally, thus prohibiting racial discrimination. “Why this bill,” he exclaimed, “goes so far as giving the Secretary of Labor the power to set all of the standards from Washington,” and “to assure equal referral opportunities for equally qualified applicants and at wages and working conditions which are not less favorable to the individual than those prevailing on similar work in the locality.”
⁶⁹
In this objection, he echoed Robert Doughton of North Carolina, who, recalling the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee, objected that the proposed law threatened to “establish at the whim of the Secretary of Labor a modified but nevertheless effective FEPC.”
⁷⁰
By contrast, the decentralization of employment offices would permit the maintenance of separate offices for black and white workers, a pattern that indeed did come to exist “at least through the 1960s.”
⁷¹

The South identified the burgeoning union movement as the force most central to the effort to maintain and enhance federal control over local labor markets. Recalling how both the president of the AFL, William Green, and the secretary-treasurer of the CIO, James Carey, had testified positively during the hearings conducted by the Committee on Labor on which he served, Randolph reported how “organized labor strongly urged that only a unified national system of offices could guide and place a mobile labor force without being restricted by state boundaries. . . .”
⁷²
Paul Stewart of Oklahoma interpreted this with respect to “a bill that makes labor laws by labor union directives” as a result of labor’s preferences and growing influence. The consequence, he complained, is that the USES acts as “a clearance house for the unions.”
⁷³

Despite overwhelming support by nonsouthern Democrats, the votes of three-quarters of their southern colleagues, and a nearly unanimous Republican Party ensured the success of the Dirksen alternative.
⁷⁴
Once more, a crucial decision about national power was shaped decisively by southern roll-call behavior. By this decision, the USES was reduced to becoming a funnel for funds for the states to use as they wished, which, for southern states, included the capacity to reinforce racial discrimination in employment.
⁷⁵

The success of their representatives in thwarting a federal USES was matched by their ability to prevent unemployment insurance from being administered from Washington, and especially by their skill in working with Republicans to alter essential features of national labor law. Both are stories of southern power.

Federal control over unemployment compensation was regarded by southern representatives as even a greater threat to their social system than federal control over employment services. In 1935, the Social Security Act had placed control over eligibility and benefit levels for unemployed workers in the hands of the states; southern benefits tended to be especially miserly. A decade later, as Congress considered the War Mobilization and Reconversion Act in September 1945, Senator Robert Wagner of New York led an attempt to create uniform national standards for unemployment insurance during the period of transition from a wartime to peacetime economy.
⁷⁶
The legislation that was considered by the Finance Committee would have extended the duration and added federal payments to state benefit levels, and it stipulated that “Federal machinery” administer payments in order to overcome the country’s widely divergent standards. This bill further alarmed the South because it would have extended unemployment insurance coverage for the first time to the primarily black labor force in agricultural processing.
⁷⁷
While this was a temporary bill to deal with economic reconversion, Wagner made clear that this was to be a first step in implementing a federal system of unemployment insurance on a permanent basis that would replace the individual state systems.
⁷⁸

The Finance Committee was dominated by southern senators. Five of the six most senior members of the committee’s Democratic majority were southern, including its chair, Georgia’s Walter George. Joined by Maryland’s more junior George Radcliffe, half of the twelve Democrats were southern. With the party possessing only a 12–9 committee majority, these southerners, who effectively controlled the committee, proceeded to gut the idea of national standards. Their committee rejected all the provisions Wagner had sponsored, including the coverage for agricultural-processing employees.
⁷⁹
When an attempt was made on the Senate floor to reverse the committee’s decisions by supplementing state payments with federal funds to bring them up to a uniform twenty-five dollars per week and extend the maximum period of eligibility to twenty-six weeks under all state systems, southern senators overwhelmingly joined the Republicans on September 19 to defeat the amendment.
⁸⁰

Despite such aggressive efforts, the issue simply would not disappear. As the Senate again debated a plan to transfer the administration of unemployment compensation to the Department of Labor in March 1948, the Texas Manufacturers Association and the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce vehemently lobbied to oppose the bill as an assault on the South’s ability to discriminate on the basis of race. Titled “News and Views on Legislation: Action Required if FEPC by Default is to be Avoided—This Tells How,” the letter, entered into the
Congressional Record,
argued that “permanent supervisory control over the unemployment compensation and employment service functions of the 48 states” by the Department of Labor “will mean the subjection of the State systems to carrying out, indirectly but nevertheless effectively, FEPC policies through the rule-making and purse-string-control powers of the Secretary of Labor.”
⁸¹
Yet again, southern Democrats, voting with Republicans, succeeded in scuttling the change.
⁸²

III.

D
URING
W
ORLD
War II, USES offices in many southern cities ran segregated, sometimes entirely separate, offices to serve whites and blacks. They routinely made referrals in accordance with employer requests for “whites only” skilled and clerical positions, and “blacks only” positions for laborers, janitors, and maids. They regularly did not refer skilled African-American workers to available and suitable skilled jobs in war industries. Further, following the war, some southern USES offices began working in conjunction with state unemployment compensation offices to deny benefits to skilled blacks if they refused to accept referrals to unskilled jobs.
⁸³

These and other discriminatory practices brought southern USES administrators into conflict with the FEPC. In June 1941, President Roosevelt had created the Fair Employment Practices Committee as a wartime agency by an executive order prohibiting the federal government from discriminating in its hiring practices on the basis of race, color, creed, or national origin, and further requiring federal agencies to negotiate contracts with private employers certifying they would abjure bias on any of those grounds. The FEPC was charged to probe and find remedies for complaints of hiring prejudice. Shortly after its inception, it began investigating defense industries in the South, holding hearings in Birmingham in May 1942 to make its findings of discrimination public. Moreover, in response to numerous complaints about the discriminatory practices of southern USES offices, it investigated and successfully pressured southern offices to cease advertising in “jobs for whites” and “jobs for colored” sections of local newspapers and to provide identical job listings for both whites and blacks searching for work.
⁸⁴

Nine months after Congress acted at the start of 1946 to decentralize the USES, Secretary of Labor Schwellenbach sought to ban such discrimination. On September 6, rules sent to USES field offices explicitly stated that it was the “policy of the USES to service all orders by referring workers on the basis of occupational qualifications, without regard to discriminatory qualifications concerning race, creed, color, national origin or citizenship (unless citizenship is a legal requirement) when such workers are available.” This stipulation was short-lived. After the southern states strenuously objected later that month, on the twentieth, at a meeting held at the Department of Labor, the regulation was rescinded, but not before underscoring for the white South how labor market issues might undermine the economic underpinnings of the region’s racial order.
⁸⁵

The link between labor market and civil rights questions quickly centered on unions. As a leading economist, Orme Phelps, observed in 1947, “no domestic issue exceeds in importance and no issue, domestic or foreign, has received more attention since World War II than that of the proper policy to be observed in labor disputes.”
⁸⁶
We have already seen how during World War II successful labor organization in the South and its implications for race relations had shocked southerners.
⁸⁷
George Gallup discovered in 1943 that national labor policy, particularly the growth of unions under Wagner Act auspices, and thus “what they consider the poor handling of labor or the ‘coddling of unions’ ” was “the chief complaint” in southern mass opinion about the New Deal.
⁸⁸
During and just after the war, the coalition that southern members had begun to fashion with Republicans on labor union issues in 1939 grew to near-unanimous solidarity as southern legislators moved vigorously in Congress to alter the institutional rules within which unions could operate. Three such efforts stand out: the War Labor Disputes Act (WLDA, or the Smith-Connally Act) of 1943, which passed despite President Roosevelt’s veto; the Case Bill of 1946, which passed both houses but was successfully vetoed by President Truman; and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, passed by Congress by overriding President Truman’s veto.