The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972 available in Paperback
The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972
- ISBN-10:
- 0691139539
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691139531
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691139539
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691139531
- Pub. Date:
- 06/15/2009
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972
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Overview
Decades before affirmative action began making headlines, millions of Americans across the country debated whether government could and should regulate job discrimination. On one side was an interfaith and interracial bloc of liberals, who demanded FEP legislation that would establish a centralized system for enforcing equal treatment in the labor market. On the other side was a bloc of business-friendly, small-government conservatives, who felt that it was unwise to "legislate tolerance" and who made common cause with the conservative wing of the Republican party. Conservatives ultimately prevailed, but their obstruction of FEP legislation unintentionally facilitated the rise of affirmative action, a policy their ideological heirs would find even more abhorrent.
Broadly interdisciplinary, The Fifth Freedom sheds new light on the role of parties, elites, and institutions in the policymaking process; the impact of racial politics on electoral realignment; the history of civil rights; the decline of New Deal liberalism; and the rise of the New Right.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691139531 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/15/2009 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in American Politics , #106 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE FIFTH FREEDOM
JOBS, POLITICS, AND CIVIL RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES, 1941-1972By Anthony S. Chen
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Princeton University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13953-1
Chapter One
On the Origins of Affirmative Action: Puzzles and Perspectives
The years after the Second World War were a time of optimism and confidence for most Americans. Before the breakout of armed hostilities, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had characterized America's growing involvement in the conflict overseas as a valiant defense of "four essential human freedoms"-freedom of speech and freedom of religion, freedom from fear and freedom from want. Now the war had come and gone, and the Allies had prevailed. Democracy had triumphed over fascism, freedom over fear. To be sure, success had come at a terrible cost. Over a million military personnel died or sustained injury during the war. Many more sacrifices remained quietly untold, never making it into the official record. But the country had rallied together as never before, and it finally pulled through the darkness. Better days were ahead. Millions of servicemen were returning home from their assignments abroad, ready to resume their lives as civilians with the generous assistance of the G.I. Bill. Old couples reunited. New romances began. There was a baby boom. A steady flow of defense dollars had righted the once-listing economy, and jobs were growing plentiful. For men without a college degree, some of the best jobs belonged to workers at big companies in the manufacturing and industrial sector-companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel. There, strong unions won collective bargaining agreements that meant steady employment, high wages, and generous fringe benefits such as retirement pensions and private health care insurance. Hundreds of thousands of Americans suddenly had the financial wherewithal to become homeowners for the first time, often with the help of federally backed mortgage guarantees. Flush with cash and credit, they went on a buying spree to fill their new homes with washers and dryers, couches and sofas, television sets and every other conceivable sort of household and consumer good. Shiny new cars practically rolled off assembly lines in Detroit and right into the driveways and garages of new homeowners. Life was good, and there was a widespread sense that it would only get better. As the historian James T. Patterson would later write, many Americans were developing "grand expectations" about the road ahead.
Everyone understood that jobs were the key to unlocking America's newfound prosperity. "Never underestimate the value of a job," wrote one typical observer. "It may mean the difference between security and insecurity." But not all Americans with hopes for the future were able to find jobs so easily. Jobs and the security they conferred proved painfully elusive. In 1947, a resident of Richmond, Calif., wrote to Republican Governor Earl Warren to tell him about her frustrating experience on the job market. For some time now, Mrs. F. L. Osborne had been trying without success to find work as a secretary or retail clerk in northern California. It should not have been so hard. Her credentials seemed impressive enough. A high school graduate, she had excelled at San Francisco Junior College and won a coveted transfer to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley. Finding employment, though, had been strangely and impossibly difficult. Although she was perfectly qualified for the positions to which she had applied, one company had flatly turned her down in San Francisco, and two others in Berkeley had "coldly and abruptly" rejected her. Osborne could hardly hide her disappointment. Her husband had served overseas in the war against fascism and totalitarianism. Things were supposed to get better for them afterward. The whole experience led her to question the sacrifices that they had made for their country. Did the United States not fight the Axis menace so that all Americans might speak and worship freely, so that all Americans might live their lives free from fear and want? If she and her husband could not fully partake of the "four freedoms" for which America went to war, then "why have our men died and for what cause?" Osborne and her husband were black.
Thousands of other African Americans would have listened to Osborne's story with a sense of knowing familiarity. The same question surely stood out in their minds as well. But it was less a debilitating doubt than a spur to further action. After the Second World War, growing numbers of African Americans refused to bury quietly their hopes and dreams. Instead, they fought back, staging acts of resistance-big and small, quiet and noisy-all across the country. The most visible and gripping stories emerged in the South, which furnished the plotline, setting, and dramatis personae for the now-celebrated campaign of direct action against Jim Crow segregation. A quarter century later, African Americans and their allies could look back with some satisfaction at the accomplishments of what Americans had begun to call the civil rights movement-particularly its southern-led, church-based branch. There was a vibrant movement for civil rights in the North as well, but it was the southern branch that garnered the lion's share of the attention from the press and the public. Personified by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., it had succeeded in toppling the legal edifice of segregation and won federal legislation that proclaimed formal equality in public accommodations, education, voting, employment, and housing. The scope of freedom had grown ineluctably wider.
Yet the politics of civil rights had also become more complicated. The political shifts that took place over the course of the 1960s are easy to exaggerate with the luxury of hindsight, and some authors have made the point in the extreme, arguing that a categorical discontinuity divides the decade. Such claims seem overstated. Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that a change of some sort had begun to occur by the mid-1960s. By all appearances, the fire next time had come. A riot had consumed Watts, and then Detroit and Newark. The most charismatic leader of the civil rights movement was viciously gunned down on the balcony of his Memphis hotel room. A profusion of younger leaders rose in his stead, and their militant rhetoric and revolutionary pronouncements made for sensational headlines and garnered easy publicity. Equally puzzlingly, political discourse was rapidly becoming polarized around a new, unfamiliar policy that required or encouraged employers and contractors to develop written "goals and timetables" for the racial integration of their work force. The policy had attracted precious little attention before it gained the force of law. It had certainly inspired no one to march in the streets. But it quickly touched off a fire storm of controversy. Critics castigated it as nothing less than racial quotas and preferential treatment, while proponents viewed the policy as a clear and necessary extension of the egalitarian ideals that had motivated the civil rights movement. Nobody had foreseen it in the early years after the war, no matter how grand their expectations for the future. Yet a policy called affirmative action had somehow managed to become a major focal point of the national conflict over civil rights. This book represents a new effort to rethink how and why such a policy emerged.
Affirmative action remains one of the most politically and ideologically freighted issues in American politics. Even though it first surfaced more than forty years ago, few policies continue to inspire as much soul-searching about the content of our national character. Still fewer have provoked such harsh bromides or forceful defenses. Where did affirmative action come from? How did something so controversial ever come into existence?
Not so long ago it was difficult to find a book or study that offered more than polemic, but now serious answers are plentiful. The most important accounts focus on the tumultuous period of American history that spanned the Kennedy and Nixon presidencies. The central actors and institutions are familiar by now. According to one influential perspective, identified with Hugh Davis Graham, affirmative action was essentially the handiwork of a radicalized civil rights lobby, which "captured" federal executive agencies and courts and led them to subvert the color-blind intent of the Civil Rights Act. In the view of Jill S. Quadagno, Thomas J. Sugrue, Nancy MacLean, and Martha Biondi, civil rights activism played the most crucial role. The intransigent exclusion of African Americans from the most desirable sectors of employment in the postwar economy, along with the manifest inadequacy of state and federal laws against discrimination, led to a burst of grass-roots protests that all but necessitated federal adoption of affirmative action programs. A third view, advanced by John D. Skrentny, Robin Stryker, and Nicholas Pedriana, focuses on shifts in political culture and partisan politics. At a time when the riots of the late 1960s conferred a new, if momentary, legitimacy to color-conscious policies, affirmative action emerged as a politically opportunistic gambit by the Nixon administration to drive a racial wedge between working-class whites and African Americans. The work of Paul Frymer, Robert Lieberman, and Paul D. Moreno represents a final line of research, one that strongly highlights the critical role of American political and legal institutions. The decentralized and fragmented policy-making institutions in the United States-including the federal courts-presented political opportunities that made the emergence of affirmative action possible.
There is clearly no consensus on the origins of affirmative action, but recent scholarship has identified many of the key actors and storylines. With only a few exceptions, however, existing accounts do not acknowledge the full dimensions of earlier struggles and miss the numerous ways in which they contributed to the emergence of affirmative action. Long before affirmative action became a target of ideological contention and a badge of partisan loyalty, there had been a vital campaign to make it the responsibility of the government to protect Americans from the ravages of job discrimination. The campaign unfolded over the entire federal system, not just the national government, and it drew in a far wider spectrum of social and political actors than generally appreciated. Nor does recent scholarship properly specify the actual set of alternatives over which policymakers repeatedly and fiercely clashed throughout the postwar period. The court-based regulatory system in place today-of which affirmative action forms a small but controversial part-was never the sole historical possibility. Years ago, key numbers of policymakers sought statutory authority for a very different form of government involvement in which the equal treatment of individuals in the labor market-and nothing more than equal treatment-would be enforced through an administrative process based in the executive branch, with the courts playing only a supporting rather than primary role. Yet no major account seriously grapples with these critical developments. What is missing from current debates is a sufficiently broad perspective on history and politics. What is missing is a sense of the road not taken.
This book sets out to fill in the gaps; it looks farther back in time and casts a wider gaze over history, politics, and society than do previous accounts. The story I tell does not begin in the 1960s with the Kennedy administration. In fact, it begins two full decades earlier. In line with a recent turn in historical scholarship on civil rights, exemplified in the work of Risa Goluboff, Martha Biondi, Ira Katznelson, Denton Watson, Robert Korstad, Nelson Lichtenstein, and others, I begin with the 1940s, a period that Richard Dalfiume has rightly called the "forgotten years" of the black freedom struggle. Nor does the book focus, as others have, on intrigue in the federal bureaucracy or activism in the federal courts. Rather, it shifts the focus from the executive and judicial branches to the legislative branch, and it devotes special attention to tracing the interplay of state and national politics. Lastly, it does not rehearse the familiar struggles that have essentially become set pieces in the standard history of civil rights. The stories in the following pages are not staged primarily in the South. Few pages are devoted to the dramatic and critical confrontations that took place in Birmingham, Little Rock, Greensboro, or Selma, and the characters driving the plot are not Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fannie Lou Hamer-or Orval Faubus, "Bull" Connor, and George Wallace for that matter. This book instead chronicles less-known events and developments that unfolded in northern states and cities. Its main characters include northerners such as A. Philip Randolph, Will Maslow, Irving M. Ives, Frieda S. Miller, Helen G. Douglas, and Augustus F. Hawkins-but also Robert A. Taft, Otto Christenson, and thousands of rural and suburban whites. Many of these events and characters are not closely associated with the standard history of civil rights in the United States, but examining their struggles is absolutely crucial to clarifying the precise origins of affirmative action policies in employment.
When a sufficiently broad perspective is taken, it becomes possible to see in full something that has been forgotten or only glimpsed in part: From the 1940s to the 1970s, there was a vibrant campaign for job equality in the United States. Decades before the phrases "affirmative action" or "equal employment opportunity" entered legal parlance, tens of thousands of Americans-mostly liberal in their political persuasion-made common cause under a different banner, that of "fair employment practices" (FEP). The storied March on Washington took place in 1963, but some Americans during the 1940s and 1950s were already staging marches on Albany and Sacramento, all in the name of winning "fair employment practices" legislation. Theirs was far more than a pet cause of a vocal minority. It was certainly more than the eschatological fantasy of a tiny vanguard. The campaign for FEP enjoyed wide support throughout the populous, industrial cities of the North, Midwest, and West. It drew in the involvement of not only the high and mighty of American politics-elected officials, party strategists, and professional lobbyists-but also ordinary voters hailing from all walks of life and representing every racial, ethnic, and religious background. Everyone had his or her own personal motives for participating, but what most of them had in common was a commitment to the idea that the government should take serious steps to make sure that jobs-and the measure of economic security that they conferred-were not denied to anyone on account of race, religion, or national orientation. The history of FEP has not been entirely absent from accounts of the civil rights movement, but it has yet to receive the serious attention it deserves. When the fierce, protracted battle over FEP is placed at the center of the story, it becomes the missing link between the "forgotten years" of the civil rights movement and the puzzling rise of affirmative action years later.
The campaign for FEP pressed for legislation wherever legislation could be made, including northern statehouses and city halls. Its highest hopes, however, centered on Capitol Hill, where advocates sought a federal law that would have mandated nondiscrimination in most phases of public and private employment. Central to their vision was a regulatory model in which the authority to enforce equal treatment would be lodged primarily in the hands of a federal agency with administrative powers in the mold of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), whose design epitomized the regulatory ambitions of the early New Deal. The antidiscrimination agency would have two specific types of authority to enforce equal treatment. First, it could order offending employers and unions to cease and desist from their discriminatory behavior. Equally significantly, it could order offenders to take "affirmative action" to compensate victims of discrimination for the economic harms that they had suffered as individuals. The passage of FEP legislation would not have outright eliminated the pervasive pattern of racial and ethnic inequality in the labor market, but it would have undoubtedly made "fair employment practices" more than a slogan for millions of Americans.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE FIFTH FREEDOM by Anthony S. Chen Copyright © 2009 by Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Tables xi
Preface and Acknowledgments xiii
Abbreviations xxi
Chapter 1: On the Origins of Affirmative Action: Puzzles and Perspectives 1
Chapter 2: The Strange Career of Fair Employment Practices in National Politics and Policy, 1941-1960 32
Chapter 3: Experimenting with Civil Rights: The Politics of Ives-Quinn in New York State, 1941-1945 88
Chapter 4: Laboratories of Democracy? The Unsteady March of Fair Employment in the States, 1945-1964 115
Chapter 5: I Have a Dream Deferred: The Fall of Fair Employment and the Rise of Affirmative Action 170
Chapter 6: Conclusions and Implications 230
Appendix 255
Abbreviations in the Notes 287
Notes 291
Index 377
What People are Saying About This
The Fifth Freedom is an important achievement of historical reconstruction, substantially revising our understanding of the civil rights revolution and the politics behind it. I have tremendous admiration for this book.
— Robert C. Lieberman, author of "Shaping Race Policy"
Chen offers a distinctive and pathbreaking reinterpretation of civil rights law, from the perspective of the states and localities that were the crucibles of policy innovation. Methodologically sophisticated and deeply researched, The Fifth Freedom represents the best of interdisciplinary social science.
— Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania
"The Fifth Freedom is a masterpiece—a brilliant new take on the history of equal opportunity in America. Chen combines the best traditions of history, sociology, and political science to explain the decades-long effort to bring equal protection to the workplace. This gripping account not only charts the long struggle against workplace discrimination, it explains the origins of our ineffectual system of enforcement."—Frank Dobbin, Harvard University"Chen offers a distinctive and pathbreaking reinterpretation of civil rights law, from the perspective of the states and localities that were the crucibles of policy innovation. Methodologically sophisticated and deeply researched, The Fifth Freedom represents the best of interdisciplinary social science."—Thomas J. Sugrue, University of Pennsylvania"This is an important, meticulously researched, and engagingly written contribution to our understanding of the origins and consequences of civil rights policies in employment. Chen's analysis highlights the early—and often overlooked—years of the civil rights era, and in so doing, vividly demonstrates both the possibilities and the readily apparent fault lines that continue to impact the politics surrounding efforts to remedy racial inequality."—Paul Frymer, Princeton University"The Fifth Freedom is an important achievement of historical reconstruction, substantially revising our understanding of the civil rights revolution and the politics behind it. I have tremendous admiration for this book."—Robert C. Lieberman, author of Shaping Race Policy
The Fifth Freedom is a masterpiece—a brilliant new take on the history of equal opportunity in America. Chen combines the best traditions of history, sociology, and political science to explain the decades-long effort to bring equal protection to the workplace. This gripping account not only charts the long struggle against workplace discrimination, it explains the origins of our ineffectual system of enforcement.
— Frank Dobbin, Harvard University
This is an important, meticulously researched, and engagingly written contribution to our understanding of the origins and consequences of civil rights policies in employment. Chen's analysis highlights the early—and often overlooked—years of the civil rights era, and in so doing, vividly demonstrates both the possibilities and the readily apparent fault lines that continue to impact the politics surrounding efforts to remedy racial inequality.
— Paul Frymer, Princeton University