The New Deal in American history

¶ … New Deal is often studied as a set of policies targeted towards welfare relief and economic development. However, the New Deal had a very important social justice component as well, particularly with regards to racial justice. Eleanor Roosevelt was leading crusader for human rights and racial equality, while President Roosevelt had an informal network of African-American appointees who were known as the "Black Cabinet." Part of the goals of the New Deal was thus to promote racial equality by creating federal agencies to help ease discrimination against African-Americans and creating economic opportunities for the advancement of black citizens.

This paper examines two scholarly articles examining the New Deal's effects on discrimination against black people. The first article, written by Robert C. Weaver in 1935, reveals a cautious support and optimism regarding the New Deal's relief efforts for black factory workers and black farmers in the South. By 1992, however, Dona Cooper Hamilton and Charles V. Hamilton make it clear that the New Deal fell far short of its goals, and that economic and social discrimination persist to this day.

As FDR's brilliant and charismatic Adviser on Negro Affairs, Weaver was in a good position to articulate the economic needs of the black community, both in the rural and urban areas. Also, while Eleanor Roosevelt spoke eloquently and frequently regarding the "Negro problem," Weaver provided the FDR administration an invaluable opportunity to raise support for the Democratic Party among the black Americans.

It should be noted that unlike today, many black Americans were not Democrats. After all, it was President Lincoln's Republican government that passed the 13th Amendment, which dealt the death blow to slavery and extended citizenship to black Americans. Towards the beginning of the 20th century, the Republicans had also pushed for legislation extending the concept of civil and voting rights for African-American citizens.

Thus, in the article The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts, Weaver strives to paint a rosy picture of how black Americans would benefit from this Democratic Party initiative. Weaver focuses on how the New Deal would stimulate industry and farming, the two industries in which most black citizens were employed. In Weaver's analysis, the New Deal allows the federal government to help black Americans by creating more employment opportunities. He also stresses that while the economic depression has caused many black families to suffer from unemployment, relief programs are in place to helps alleviate the needs of those who were "greatly victimized by the economic developments."

Weaver's article was written in 1935, at the advent of the Second New Deal. Roosevelt was breaking up monopoly companies and was creating federal agencies to monitor labor standards. The National Labor Relations Board, for example, was given the mandate to compel employers to conduct talks with legitimate workers unions. Based on this climate, Weaver thus had reason to believe that Roosevelt's concessions for labor in general would extend to black laborers as well, both in urban factories as well as farms in the Southern states.

Weaver's article, however, conspicuously omits any mention of social programs needed to combat the discrimination that continued to prevail against black Americans. Indeed, despite his wife's efforts, President Roosevelt did little to create social and educational programs to address other issues pertaining to the African-American community. Most notable among President Roosevelt's failures was his refusal to sign the federal Anti-Lynching Bill into law, for fear of alienating the Southern Democrats. Weaver also does not address the poll tax issue, which many in the South use wielded successfully to keep black citizens from voting.

Thus, though Weaver presents a detailed and optimistic view regarding the economic effects of the New Deal on the country's black population, his analysis is sorely incomplete. By neglecting to see the intersections of race, social discrimination and economic opportunity, Weaver thus does not address how the lack of economic advancement is itself a product of race, and not merely a result of the crisis spawned by the Great Depression.

In their article The Dual Agenda of African-American Organizations since the New Deal, Hamilton and Hamilton explore how the "hidden agenda" of race politics undermined any potential gains that could have been achieved for the African-American community during and since the New Deal.

The authors believe that much of the problem lies in the approach espoused by people like Weaver, that addressing the problems of "all Americans" would invariably address the problems of black Americans as well.

Thus, even for people in authority who sympathized with civil rights groups, the problems of African-Americans were subsumed under the problem all "every citizen in this country." This led the Roosevelt administration to focus on finding economic solutions to problems that had a sizeable social justice component. With the benefit of hindsight, Hamilton and Hamilton show the limitations of this economic approach. The leadership of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL) understood the problem, and thus chose to focus on achieving civil rights as well as social welfare.

For Hamilton and Hamilton, black intellectuals like Weaver and Ralph Bunche would fall in the period they dub the "consensual stage," which lasted from the New Deal years into immediately after World War II. During these years, many activists for African-American rights tended to subordinate their civil rights agendas to the need for economic policies such as social welfare. Weaver clearly demonstrates the prevalence of this idea when he tries to rally black citizens' support for the New Deal, based on the plan's economic components.