Kristoffer Smemo Department of History

University of California, Santa Barbara Paper prepared for the Colloquium in Work, Labor and Political Economy

The Human Problem:

Black Voting Power, Industrial Peace, and the Republican Civil Rights Agenda During World War Two

Introduction

By late 1943, the unrivaled productive capacities of Detroit’s “arsenal of democracy”

prompted much gloating among the auto industry’s corporate managers. George Romney of the

Automobile Manufacturers Association boasted, “the war has reached the point where the supe-

riority of free men over Nazi, Fascist, or any other type of planned economy robots is fully dem-

onstrated.” Nevertheless, the “unbelievable heights” of production achieved by the U.S. war

economy remained beset by one staggering dilemma. “We have met all of our production prob-

lems,” a puzzled Romney complained, “except the human one.”1 The human problem tightly

intertwined immediate shop floor concerns over productivity with larger fears about social insta-

bility. The human problem therefore blended corporate managers’ desire for industrial peace

with the desires of government war planners and elected officials for social harmony.

The human problem proved especially explosive that year as demand for military mate-

riel reached its wartime peak. Rank-and-file workers pushed back hard against punishing pro-

duction schedules with a massive wave of unauthorized protests, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes.

In addition, that rank-and-file looked increasingly diverse. According to Robert C. Weaver of

the Negro Manpower Commission, the pull of “economic necessity”—not the organizationally

anemic President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice—finally brought workers of color

into war industry en mass.2 The labor migrants who came to Detroit and other northern and

western industrial cities immediately faced rigidly defined forms of local apartheid, and met with

Smemo, 2

the vicious hostility of police and other white workers. Hate strikes—such as the walkout of

some 25,000 whites at Packard Motors over the promotion of three black workers—only ampli-

fied racial tensions in the neighborhoods, streetcars, and parks of densely overcrowded war pro-

duction centers. By summer these daily frictions exploded into bloody race riots in the Motor

City, Los Angeles, Harlem, and elsewhere across the country. In an article published that June

on American “race pogroms,” the Afro-Trinidadian Trotskyist C.L.R. James, declared, “Even if

the government dislikes race riots, it cannot take vigorous steps to repress them because that will

tear down the prejudice on which so much depends.”3 For a growing and assertive movement of

labor and civil rights activists, the human problem so blithely described by Romney exposed the

very contradictions at the heart of the Democrats’ federally directed war effort.

Faced with white riots, unrelenting discrimination, and the southern stranglehold over

Democratic policymaking, black voters by the mid-1940s appeared to be seriously questioning

their newfound loyalty to Roosevelt and the New Deal. During the war, labor and civil rights

activists channeled James’ critique into an ambitious electoral strategy for winning racial equal-

ity. Henry Lee Moon captured this idea in his influential 1948 book Balance of Power: The Ne-

gro Vote. Moon reiterated the argument of wartime activists who contended the “greatest hope

for continued and accelerated progress lies in independent political action subject to the political

domination and control of no political party.”4 In presidential elections, the very “size, strategic

distribution, and flexibility of the Negro vote” made it more important than that of the Solid

South.5 Indeed, despite a strong preference for Franklin Roosevelt, it is important to remember

that black party identification remained almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans

throughout the 1930s and 1940s.6 Furthermore, labor migration made the urbanized and prole-

tarianized black vote decisive in close races for governorships, senate seats, and in congressional

Smemo, 3

and state legislative districts across the North.7 Moon’s “balance of power” thesis found expres-

sion during the war in the mélange of unions, civil rights groups, churches, radical sects, and

newspapers that comprised the Black Popular Front.8 The strategy proceeded from the insight

that white politicians of either major party could only be prodded into action by a disciplined,

independent, and race and class conscious black electorate. In the pages of the Chicago De-

fender, a vital organ of the Black Popular Front, Alfred Edgar Smith ended each of his im-

mensely popular “National Grapevine” columns with the call to arms, “Keep ‘em squirming!”9

This strategy held the potential to realign mid-century politics, but not in ways typically

appreciated by contemporary scholarship. According to the prevailing narrative, the growing

wartime movement for racial equality—and the often-violent white reaction against it—

sharpened partisan polarization over race, labor, and institutional capacity. For Democrats, the

war years witnessed intensified pressure from the party’s northern coalitional allies in the Con-

gress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights movements against the dominance of the

segregationist South, setting in motion the “Second Reconstruction” of the postwar years.10

Similarly, a growing scholarly consensus also identifies the war years as the critical period when

the modern GOP consolidated itself as the party of both business and racial conservatism.

Rightwing Republicans, business advocacy groups, and a mass of “ordinary rural and suburban

whites” mobilized against what they perceived as the deepening bonds between the Democratic

“Negro-labor” alliance and federal administrative agencies.11 Thus, as political scientist Eric

Schickler states, “for Republicans to make civil rights their issue, they would have to overcome

the deep skepticism of their own economically conservative core partisans.”12

This narrative, however, largely ignores the influential bloc of moderate and liberal Re-

publicans who competed with conservatives to set the party’s agenda during the mid-1940s. Un-

Smemo, 4

like party rivals safely ensconced in solidly conservative and gerrymandering districts, Republi-

cans eyeing statewide office in major industrial states confronted an urban political landscape

defined by an organized, assertive, and evermore-diverse working-class electorate. This national

cohort of liberal Republicans contended that crafting a winning formula for the beleaguered GOP

required accommodating the institutions, discourses, and coalitions of the New Deal.13 Doing so

delivered big gains for liberal Republican at the polls. Despite the GOP’s status as a minority

party in national politics some twenty-six states covering seventy percent of the country’s popu-

lation claimed a Republican governor just before the 1944 elections.14 Winning those elections

demanded that liberal Republicans also come to terms with the growing importance of the north-

ern black vote. The largely working-class character of black voters in turn made access to war

work, and the preservation of industrial and social peace, key policy questions for Republicans.

Thus, liberal-inclined Republicans recognized and grappled with what historian Thomas

Sugrue calls the “proletarian turn” in the mid-century struggle for racial equality.15 By casting

the New Deal coalition as an unholy, and unstable alliance of CIO leftists, corrupt big city ma-

chines, and, above all, rabid segregationists, Republicans attempted to convince working peo-

ple—especially black workers—that only the GOP could lay an authentic claim to the mantel of

modern liberalism. Liberal Republican governors in New York, Illinois, and California pledged

to support—and frequently established—commissions to investigate job discrimination, substan-

dard housing, and poor to nonexistent social services in rigidly segregated cities. In the Empire

State, Thomas Dewey signed the country’s first state-level fair employment practices commis-

sion (FEPC) into law over fierce objections from much of his own party. Above all, liberal Re-

publicans made access to war work the key to industrial peace and social stability. This agenda,

however, remained limited and riddled with its own inconsistencies and contradictions. Liberal

Smemo, 5

Republican civil rights rested on the hoary shibboleth that government simply could not “legis-

late tolerance.” As a result, most of the party’s liberals shared with their conservative rivals a

powerful opposition to any agencies empowered to undermine managerial prerogatives.

Whatever its limitations, the liberal Republican civil rights agenda took shape in direct

relation to the balance of power thesis so central to the Black Popular Front. The discourses and

institutions of the New Deal offered unprecedented opportunities for an insurgent labor-based

civil rights movement to put racial egalitarianism at the center of national politics. But so long

as segregationists locked Democratic policymaking, especially the CIO bloc, in a “southern

cage,” the party of FDR could not become the sole vehicle for challenging white supremacy.16

Nor could liberals in the old Party of Lincoln be expected to break totally with the GOP’s his-

toric base in the white rural “Old Guard” and among business conservatives. But the deep ideo-

logical and coalitional divisions within both parties appeared to reinforce the conditions needed

for black voters to decide close elections. Thus, by 1944, black functionaries in the Democratic

and Republican parties each advocated some form of fair employment legislation, an end to seg-

regation in the armed forces, government support for public housing, and the integration of “Ne-

gro interests—social and economic” in postwar planning.17 Therefore, the balance of power the-

sis presumed a kind combative bipartisanship needed to achieve civil rights legislation through

intense competition between the liberal wings of each party for the black vote. This combative

bipartisanship proved crucial to prompting President Harry Truman’s embrace of civil rights in

the 1948 election, and structured the coming of the “second Reconstruction.” Reexamining elec-

toral entrepreneurship during the 1940s reveals how the human problem of wartime problem im-

bricated race and labor at the heart of mid-century American politics.

Race, Republicans, and the War Effort

Smemo, 6

After a disastrous decade of landslide defeats, the GOP pinned its hopes on the idiosyn-

cratic lawyer, utilities executive, and former Democrat Wendell Willkie to stymie President

Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for an unprecedented third term. Willkie’s nomination in 1940 spoke to

the deeply divided character of the GOP on the eve of America’s entry in World War Two. He

was an avowed internationalist in a party still beset by isolationists; he urged the party of busi-

ness to accommodate the laboring constituencies of the New Deal; and, finally, he challenged the

decades’ long ambivalence of the Party of Lincoln to the cause of racial equality by advocating a

strong civil rights platform. Though the national convention ignored Howard University politi-

cal scientist Ralph J. Bunche’s report to the Republican Program Committee upbraiding the GOP

for its abysmal record on race, his larger strategic arguments resonated with party liberals.

Bunche argued that black northerners, especially newly enfranchised labor migrants, “know the

ballot is negotiable and can be exchanged for definite social improvements.”18 The Willkie cam-

paign placed considerable emphasis on antidiscrimination measures to appeal to the growing

ranks of northern working-class black voters in hopes of outflanking Roosevelt in key northern

cities such as Chicago and New York.19

For many black commentators and activists working in the shadow of another world war,

Willkie’s campaign only sharpened the distinctions between northern Republicans and segrega-

tionist southern Democrats. In their classic piece of Chicago urban sociology, Black Metropolis,

St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton noted approvingly, “Willkie supported a straight frontal at-

tack on army Jim-Crow and on undemocratic practices wherever they existed.”20 Stumping for

Willkie, Harlem lawyer and Republican activist Francis E. Rivers forewarned the particularly

grave danger faced by black Americans under wartime Democratic administration. “In the event

of war, with Southerners in control of war-time policies, it will be too late then to protest against

Smemo, 7

mistreatment.”21 Even though he never overcame his status as an interloper in party affairs and

continued to draw the most enthusiasm from the more conservative black bourgeoisie, Willkie’s

emphasis on discrimination suggested a tantalizing route for Republicans interested in reaching

out to the growing black proletariat.22 By blending the promise of equal access to war work with

the specter of the Solid South, Republicans could underscore the steep political barriers to

achieving racial equality and economic security under the Democrats.

Willkie’s defeat (and the ongoing defection of northern black voters to the Democrats)

hardly dampened the increasingly militant mobilization of civil rights groups against discrimina-

tion in war work. The Roosevelt administration confronted mass protests, especially A. Philip

Randolph’s March on Washington Movement, demanding an end to racially discriminatory hir-

ing practices and an equal share in the war-fueled economic recovery.23 The mounting protests

also directly informed Republican critiques of the administration’s war effort. In the spring of

1941, the RNC urged “Republicans in industry and in politics to widen the opportunities for the

employment of Negroes without discrimination.”24 The California Republican Assembly, a lib-

eral-leaning grassroots pressure group, charged, “discrimination obviously exists, on the part of

the present national administration toward racial groups, and particularly towards the colored

citizens of California and of the nation, who are refused work in the National Defense Pro-

gram.”25 Charles J. Jenkins and William H. Warfield, two black Republican state representatives

from Illinois, traveled to Washington DC in the hopes of making access to war work a legislative

priority for the GOP in Congress.26 For most white Republicans, though, congressional investi-

gations of job discrimination simply provided a handy way to embarrass northern Democrats.

Republican criticisms carried little in the way of concrete policy prescriptions, much less an im-

Smemo, 8

petus to act. Indeed, none other than leading liberal Republican and Minnesota governor Harold

Stassen refused to integrate the state’s National Guard units that spring.27

The creation of the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice in June 1941

dramatically transformed the policy landscape for Democrats and Republicans alike. The labor

and civil rights activists who succeeded in pressuring President Roosevelt to put the executive’s

stamp on antidiscrimination envisioned the FEPC as a muscular agency modeled on the National

Labor Relations Board. This ideal FEPC came armed with the administrative power to investi-

gate and mediate disputes, issue cease and desist orders, and even demand “affirmative action” to

redress systematic workplace discrimination. The Roosevelt administration, however, hoped to

placate activists with only piecemeal change and denied the agency substantial enforcement

powers. Meanwhile rightwing Republicans and segregationist Democrats in Congress starved it

of needed funding.28 Nonetheless, the president’s Executive Order 8802 enshrined the FEPC as

the choice regulatory model for antidiscrimination policy, established enduring links between

civil rights organizations and the federal government, and elevated the intertwined questions of

race and labor to the mainstream of partisan politics.29 But, as a host of legal scholars now argue,

the very design and implementation of New Deal social policy left questions of racial discrimina-

tion beyond the purview of labor lawmaking, further alienating civil rights groups from a labor

movement that overwhelmingly benefited white workers.30 That very contradiction provided fer-

tile ground for Republican policymaking on race and labor.

In July, only a month after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802, Illinois governor

Dwight Green signed a pioneering state anti-job discrimination statute into law. Written largely

by state representative Charles J. Jenkins, the law sought to bolster the federal FEPC and put fur-

ther pressure on Illinois firms with military contracts to hire workers of color.31 Jenkins, a law-

Smemo, 9

yer who represented the heavily black wards of Cook County in Chicago, had been an advocate

of antidiscrimination measures covering public accommodations and employment in the Illinois

legislature since the 1930s.32 To pass through a chamber dominated by downstate white conser-

vatives and placate a Green administration at best indifferent to the daily material effects of bias

and prejudice, Jenkins’ law was stripped of any enforcement mechanisms or staff.33 The almost

entirely symbolic Illinois statute set the precedent for all subsequent white liberal Republican fair

employment legislation with its emphasis on public education and voluntary compliance, man-

aged by a weak caretaker agency at the state level.

But structuring fair employment practices legislation in this way provided two distinct

advantages for Republicans. For those flirting with Willkie-style racial liberalism, state-level

action offered a competing institutional pathway for civil rights that circumvented the grip of

southern segregationists over national policymaking. Doing so also resonated with deep-seated

Republican hostility to a massive federal war economy controlled by a Democratic president and

Congress. State civil rights institutions emblemized the desire of leading liberals such as Tho-

mas Dewey and Harold Stassen to devolve war planning authority to “strong and enlightened

State governments.”34 At the same time, the Illinois statute enhanced the very limitations of the

federal FEPC by assuring business conservatives that government would not interfere with

managerial prerogatives in the workplace.

Once the country entered World War Two in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the electoral

stakes for Republican civil rights agenda escalated. In Los Angeles, speaking before the national

NAACP conclave in the summer of 1942, Wendell Willkie assured the gathered delegates, “we

are finding that under the pressures of this present conflict long-standing barriers and prejudices

are breaking down.”35 Such lofty projections never precluded vicious wartime xenophobia

Smemo, 10

among liberal-leaning Republicans, especially California attorney general Earl Warren’s dema-

gogic campaign to intern Japanese-Americans. The uniquely western case of internment con-

verged with the Second Great Migration of black workers out of the South to flatten white Re-

publican understanding of race into a black-white binary.36 The War Manpower Commission

reported that between 1940 and 1944 the Japanese internment exacerbated the sharp decrease in

the number of non-white residents in “congested production areas” up and down the Pacific

Coast. At the same time the black population in California, Oregon, and Washington exploded

over the course of a few short years, increasing by over 200 percent in the shipyard towns and

laboring neighborhoods of the Bay Area alone.37 Under these conditions Republicans came to

appreciate the arguments of civil rights activists who contended that black labor migrants now

held the “balance of power” in the war industry boomtowns of the Pacific Coast, as well as in the

big cities of the old manufacturing Northeast and Midwest. The Republicans who swept into

statewide office in the fall of 1942 therefore felt acute pressures to accommodate a burgeoning,

and distinctly black, proletarian civil rights movement.

Accommodating Proletarian Civil Rights

In an election otherwise best remembered for notoriously low turnout by workers and

gains for congressional conservatives, the 1942 midterms also swept a much more moderate Re-

publican into office. The “Republican Renascence,” according to a piece in Life magazine, be-

longed to the party’s “new and progressive leadership” who claimed governorships of the coun-

try’s major war production states.38 In landslide wins in California and Franklin Roosevelt’s

home state of New York, state attorney general Earl Warren and Manhattan district attorney

Thomas Dewey joined a whole corps of liberal-minded governors across New England, the

Midwest, and Northwest.39 These liberal Republicans won office by splitting the ranks of the

Smemo, 11

vaunted working-class base of the New Deal coalition. They courted the more conservative un-

ions of the American Federation of Labor, promised an improved and more efficiently adminis-

tered social safety net, and continued to rail against pervasive racial discrimination in the federal

war effort. This platform yielded especially big gains for Republicans in heavily black urban

districts such as Harlem and on the Southside of Chicago.40 In order to sustain these gains, Life

contended, Republicans needed to grasp that the people “will demand that the Party evolve a set

of liberal, or progressive, principles around which they can build.”41

Northern black war workers in particular appeared uniquely capable of willing a progres-

sive GOP into existence. Outraged, as Walter White of the NAACP explained, by the “domina-

tion of national policy on the Negro by the reactionary South” in league with “reactionary Re-

publicans,” black voters intended to use the franchise to put racial equality at the center of na-

tional politics.42 The black proletariat, according to Harry McAlpin of the Chicago Defender,

“appears to be shedding party labels,” and as a result, “[h]is balance of power may be even more

potent.”43 The black balance of power in at the polls reinforced black workers’ newfound lever-

age in increasingly tight industrial labor markets. Together, both reshaped Republican racial

politics in two wartime centers of working-class black political mobilization: New York and

Michigan.

New York

The possibility of winning over disaffected working-class black Democratic voters en-

ticed liberal Republicans to play up the policy goals of antidiscrimination enforcement. Under

Governor Thomas Dewey, the Empire State quickly emerged as the cutting edge of liberal Re-

publican civil rights. To win office in the first place, Dewey understood that he needed to secure

some support from New York’s established and growing black communities. Dewey campaign

Smemo, 12

strategists noted that even though black labor migrants overwhelmingly supported the president,

they still hoped to steer a bloc of black voters to the GOP by casting Dewey’s anti-Roosevelt

Democratic opponent as an ally of the party’s segregationist bloc.44 Dewey furthermore encour-

aged ongoing protest against discrimination in war work.45 But by denouncing management bias

in hiring and taking up the plight “of Negroes being discriminated against by unions,” Dewey’s

campaign threatened to alienate the Republican base in business as well as among racially exclu-

sionary craft unions.46 Building on the precedents set by Governor Dwight Green in Illinois,

Dewey’s advisors proposed a government commission empowered simply “to make suggestions

with respect to legislation and educational policies.”47 The proposed agency acknowledged the

material realities of discrimination in order to appeal to a black constituency increasingly frus-

trated with Democratic inaction on civil rights. But as in Illinois, the New York Republican al-

ternative promised only non-binding suggestions and encouraged strictly private solutions to the

brutalities of discrimination and segregation.

The intensifying pressure for access to war jobs as labor demand in war industry peaked

compelled Dewey to keep civil rights on the agenda. In New York and across the country, the

proletarian civil rights movement that first cohered around the Pittsburgh Courier’s “Double V

for Victory” campaign entered electoral politics in 1943 through a range of newly created pres-

sure groups such as the Negro Labor Victory Committee and the National Council for a Perma-

nent FEPC.48 In order to reconcile rising demands for governmental remedies to tackling racial

inequality with the Republican inclination to gradualism and voluntarism, the young Dewey ad-

ministration framed job discrimination as an inefficient use of labor. Building on the War Labor

Board’s concept of “manpower utilization,” the Dewey administration cast racism as a particu-

larly vicious “bottleneck” that an ineffectual federal war bureaucracy could do little to amelio-

Smemo, 13

rate.49 Therefore, the governor, as one aide wrote during the campaign, ought to “use every pos-

sible means at his command to see that prejudice and discrimination are not allowed to interfere

with the total war effort.”50

Writing to Lester Granger of the Urban League in March 1943, Dewey assured the civil

rights leader that black Americans “ask no favors—only equal opportunity.” “Given the proper

opportunity,” he continued, “they can multiply their share in the war effort manifold.”51 The pa-

ternalistic tone of Dewey’s overtures to Granger aside, the governor still complimented the Ur-

ban League’s longstanding emphasis on racial uplift and self-help as the keys to speeding the

economic and social integration of black workers into a white-ruled economy.52 For Dewey, de-

ploying the language of manpower utilization also spoke directly to the immediate demand of

labor-based civil rights activists for access to war work. As reports compiled by the Dewey ad-

ministration on job discrimination noted, black workers made only one percent of those em-

ployed in war industries, but twenty percent of those on relief.53 Saddled with the discourse of

“opportunity,” Dewey also stressed the strong Republican preference for largely private and vol-

untary solutions to the crisis of pervasive labor market discrimination.

During the 1940s, however, the historically genteel Urban League and NAACP joined

with proletarian civil rights organizations in upholding the FEPC model as the essential govern-

ment mechanism to build social and economic equality in a modern industrial society. By at-

tempting to forge alliances with established civil rights groups such as the Urban League, the

Dewey administration committed itself to working within the FEPC framework. In his first ad-

dress as governor of New York, Dewey praised the State War Council on Discrimination in Em-

ployment established by his Democratic predecessor Hebert Lehman. “It is our duty,” he pro-

claimed, “to make these laws a living thing.”54 Dewey, however, also claimed to be “deeply dis-

Smemo, 14

satisfied” with the work of Lehman’s appointees, but nevertheless waited until the fall of 1943 to

appoint a new chair or committee members.55

Dewey’s dissatisfaction no doubt stemmed from the work of Lehman’s first chair, eco-

nomics professor and state industrial commissioner Frieda Miller, who proposed issuing admin-

istrative orders modeled on those issued by the National Labor Relations Board to offending em-

ployers and unions.56 Miller’s proposals moved far beyond the agency’s initially modest public

education and fact-finding goals, and appalled business conservatives who never wavered in

their opposition to fair employment. But it also unnerved much more moderate Republicans,

such as Dewey, who were interested in promoting only the most piecemeal change. Crucially,

the administration’s approach to antidiscrimination operated under the guiding principle that “no

amount of laws, resolutions or letters can influence industrialists to integrate minority groups.”57

Dewey thus left the Council on Discrimination in Employment in state of institutional limbo for

almost a year. With no chair and limited resources throughout 1943, Dewey’s Council could

claim only modest gains: a handful of public hearings, the distribution of some literature, and

ultimately the integration of a few thousand workers across the entire state.58

Michigan

Such token solutions did little to quell the deep and growing discontent among black

workers in New York and other manufacturing centers throughout the country. Along with the

Empire State, the sprawling auto plants and dense, tightly segregated neighborhoods of industrial

Michigan boasted another insurgent vanguard of the proletarian civil rights movement.59 In De-

troit, black rank-and-file members of the UAW intensified their protests against the ineffective-

ness of the federal FEPC throughout the spring of 1943.60

Smemo, 15

Such mobilizations in turn impacted Michigan policymakers, including Republicans in

the usually conservative and rural-dominated state legislature. Black working-class discontent

represented a threat to social stability in war production centers but also an opportunity to out-

flank the Roosevelt administration. That March, white liberal Republican state senator Murl

DeFoe of Lansing joined with black Detroit Democrat Charles Diggs to propose the country’s

first fully enforced fair employment agency. The proposed Diggs-DeFoe bill applied to all pri-

vate industry and not just publically financed war plants covered by the federal authorities,

authorized class action lawsuits, and empowered the state department of Labor and Industry to

issue cease and desist orders to offending parties.61 The surviving historical record tells us little

about what precisely led the Diggs-DeFoe bill to die—as so many fair employment laws did—

languishing in committee in the state house. Reports of intense business lobbying and craft un-

ion hostility, however, do confirm historical narratives of a shared racial conservatism among

capital and more privileged sections of organized labor.62 But the fact that Diggs-DeFoe first

passed through the state senate with overwhelming Republican support suggests another, less

appreciated, story about how radically shifting social and electoral realities forced GOP lawmak-

ers in major industrial states to begin, however hesitantly, to include some form of civil rights

agenda within their policy repertoire.

At the same time, President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9346 and relented in the

face of ongoing pressure for a reorganized and strengthened federal FEPC in May.63 But only

one month later, the racial violence that exploded on the beaches of Belle Isle quickly engulfed

the Motor City. The rioting that swept from one industrial center to another that summer only

amplified pressures felt by governing Republicans and the business community to address racial

inequality in the name of industrial peace for the war effort.

Smemo, 16

Interracial Productivism

As white policymakers struggled to make sense of the rioting, they returned again to the

largely symbolic commissions and committees established to investigate job discrimination.

These institutional innovations reinforced the post-riot trend towards liberal interracialism that,

as historian Harvard Sitkoff writes, “all too easily accepted the appearance of racial peace for the

reality of racial justice.”64 Together, liberal Republicans in business and government forged a set

of public and private institutions designed first and foremost to promote social stability in the

name of uninterrupted war production. Interracial productivism emerged as the political com-

promise with labor and civil rights movements, and provided a template for a competing liberal

Republican vision of racial governance.

Unsurprisingly, the first iteration of interracial productivism took shape in the GOP’s his-

toric base in the business community. In the aftermath of the Detroit rioting, George Romney of

the Automobile Manufacturers Association joined with UAW War Policy division director Vic-

tor Reuther to form the Detroit Victory Council. Established to “coordinate the efforts of all

groups working on Detroit manpower problems,” the Victory Council dealt overwhelmingly with

what Romney described as the “intensified community problems” caused by the flood of war

workers into the Detroit area.65 In the particular, the Victory Council concentrated on the par-

ticular obstacles faced by “minority groups,” including housing shortages, inadequate public

transportation, and overburdened schools and hospitals.66 For Reuther, the Victory Council’s

tripartite character suggested a potentially fruitful avenue for the building local, interracial social

democracy.67 For Romney, however, the Victory Council channeled Tocqueville through Henry

Ford to foster a kind of corporate-industrial communitarianism. Romney heaped praise on the

“voluntary and locally-inspired community and industrial teamwork and cooperation that over-

Smemo, 17

came the human friction and confusion arising from unenlightened human selfishness.”68 By

framing racial discrimination in terms of manpower—and therefore as a fundamentally economic

matter—Romney implied that racism, like other production problems, could only be overcome

by private, voluntary associations within a free enterprise system. Romney’s idea of the Detroit

Victory Council shared with Dewey’s State War Council on Discrimination in Employment the

belief that racial inequality represented an inefficient use of manpower resources best rectified

by the slow and patient application of public education measures.

The emergence of the Detroit Victory Council dovetailed with what political scientist

William Riker called the escalating, post-riot “negro fluctuations” between the major parties.69

After the violence in Detroit, U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle outraged the NAACP and the

Urban League by suggesting banning all black labor migration to northern production centers.

Biddle’s remarks, coupled with their enthusiastic reception by some local Democrats, spurred

influential black Michigan state senator Charles Diggs to seriously contemplate crossing the aisle

to join the GOP (Diggs yielded ultimately under “considerable pressure” from black UAW activ-

ists and white CIO leaders anxious not to split the black Democratic vote).70 The Diggs episode

underscored the political possibilities opened up by the war. Biddle’s comments strongly sug-

gested that the Roosevelt administration seconded the views of conservative Republicans such as

Michigan governor Harry B. Kelly who laid the blame for the violence squarely on black labor

migrants.71 Therefore, the Victory Council’s cautious, production-oriented solutions suggested a

competing institutional pathway to cultivate alienated black voters.

To do so, the Detroit Victory Council’s ultimately (and ironically) depended on the

authority of the federal command economy so loathed by Romney and the automakers. The Vic-

tory Council’s overall record proved dismal given that management representatives assiduously

Smemo, 18

worked to scuttle any threatening initiatives.72 Nonetheless, through intensive lobbying of the

Federal Housing Authority, the Victory Council succeeded in opening up over 3,000 units of

previously all white public dwellings for black workers near the massive Ford-operated (but fed-

erally owned) Willow Run bomber plant in Ypsilanti.73 Unlike the violence surrounding the in-

tegration of Detroit’s Sojourner Truth Homes in 1942, the construction of interracial public hous-

ing in the industrial suburb of Willow Village only a year later proceeded much more peacefully.

Romney played a critical role, convincing an otherwise hostile business community to support

public rather than for-profit housing. “If he had leaned the other way,” a Victory Council col-

league later recounted, “it wouldn’t have been done.”74 At the same time, though, Romney and

the Victory Council did not challenge Willow Village’s racially restrictive covenants and placed

black families in effectively segregated subdivisions.75 Romney and his business colleagues on

the Victory Council conceded the immediate need for federal housing to accommodate a diver-

sity of war workers. But they also remained convinced that full integration could not proceed by

government fiat.

The Detroit Victory Council’s interracial productivism appeared in liberal Republican

state governments across the country in the wake of the summer’s rioting. In Los Angeles, the

explosion of the so-called “Zoot Suit” riots in early June forced the otherwise ambivalent Cali-

fornia governor Earl Warren tograpple directly with questions of racial inequality. Warren es-

tablished a blue ribbon committee to study racial violence. But his handpicked appointees of

clergy and local dignitaries recommended a law and order cocktail of more and better equipped

police on the streets, work camps for juvenile delinquents, and expanded detention cells for Los

Angeles County. In hopes of remedying the underlying causes of racial violence, the committee

merely called for volunteer legal assistance panels organized by lawyers associations and church

Smemo, 19

youth programs.76 A year later, Warren declared that “continued and more extensive co-

operation between private social agencies and public departments” held the key for eradicating,

piece by piece, all forms of intolerance and discrimination.77

In July 1943, Governor Dwight Green established the country’s first publically supported

race relations agency, the Illinois Interracial Commission.78 Initially conceived in the offices of

the Defender following the violence in Detroit, the statewide commission complimented a simi-

lar Chicago-based agency spearheaded by Green’s rivals in the city’s Democratic machine. The

state Interracial Commission, however, proved as anemic as Dewey’s Council on Discrimination

in Employment; it possessed no enforcement mechanisms, did not hold public hearings, and

never coordinated its activities with the federal FEPC operating in Illinois’ many bustling war

production centers.79 Officially, the Interracial Commission identified the politically explosive

issue of open housing “as the most acute problem…in promoting better relations between Ne-

groes and whites.”80 The governor, however, ignored northern issues, and saved his public

broadsides to assail the poll tax and other specifically southern techniques of apartheid.81 By

highlighting the racial contradictions of the fractious New Deal coalition Green and liberal Re-

publicans elsewhere hoped to paint the Democratic Party as the real bastion of reaction. Rom-

ney, Warren, and Green each argued that the social stability needed for the war effort could only

be achieved through voluntary cooperation of private associations (led naturally by the GOP’s

base in the business community) at the state and local levels. Stressing this particular institu-

tional pathway to winning access to jobs and housing provided the foundation for an emerging

Republican strategy to win over disillusioned black proletarian voters.

Holding the Balance of Power

Smemo, 20

The frustrations of northern black workers and civil rights leaders with the New Deal

coalition stood poised to once again potentially remap the country’s political terrain. As the

election of 1944 loomed, Harry McAlpin of the Chicago Defender opined, “With no WPA or

Emergency Relief to appeal to his breadbasket, and with the rebellious South threatening to

withdraw from the party unless the New Deal simmers down on the progressive moves in favor

of the Negro, the winning of Negro votes is no foregone conclusion.”82 Similarly, in his recently

published tome An American Dilemma, the Swedish social democrat and social scientist Gunnar

Myrdal optimistically predicted that the “political fluidity” of working-class northern black vot-

ers would cement racial liberalism as the foundation of all future party competition. The seismic

transformations wrought by the war ensured that the “Conservative party will not ignore the Ne-

gro’s vote completely and the Liberal party will realize that it can lose the Negro vote.”83

The NAACP seemed to confirm McAlpin and Myrdal’s points when it arranged a meet-

ing of representatives from twenty organizations to draft “A Declaration of Negro Voters.” The

Declaration underscored the political independence of a proletarianized and politically independ-

ent black electorate. Any opponent of a permanent FEPC, open federal housing, expanded social

security, and organized labor, whether Democrat or Republican, the Declaration read, “is as

much the enemy of the Negro as is he who would prevent the Negro from voting.”84 The Decla-

ration also underlined the incredible degree of black nonpartisanship, citing black voters’ support

for the Republican governor of Kentucky as well as Harlem’s Communist city council member

Benjamin Davis Jr.85 Similarly, in Chicago’s Black Belt voters abandoned their decade-long

support for Democrats and turned to Republican candidates for Congress, alderman, and mayor

in 1942 and 1943.86 Black voters held fast to the most expansive and racially egalitarian possi-

Smemo, 21

bilities of the New Deal, this did not yet constitute a strong partisan preference for the Democ-

rats.

The political independence cited by the Declaration events further convinced Republican

leaders that northern, urban blacks held the balance of power in crucial states. At a meeting of

the RNC in early 1944, a white West Virginia Republican asserted, “We are not going anywhere

unless the colored people go along with us.”87 A statement prepared at a meeting of 200 leading

black Republicans asserted that the GOP could never reclaim the White House without black

votes. Therefore the party needed to pledge itself to collective bargaining, federal housing, and

“full participation in economic and social planning for the postwar period.”88 How to convince a

sizeable bloc of northern black voters to shift their loyalties to the GOP remained a puzzle for a

party with—at best—an ambivalent relationship to the cause of racial equality. Republican con-

gresswoman Clare Boothe Luce of Connecticut put the matter bluntly: “neither the Democratic

nor the Republican party has the interest of the Negro at heart, but of the two, the Republican

party will do more to help his cause.”89 Ideologically, Republicans by and large would not be

convinced to support the kind of racially inclusive, proto-social democratic program needed to

appeal to the critical swath of working-class black voters. Indeed, the very modest accommoda-

tions to proletarian civil rights advanced by businessmen such as Romney and governors such as

Dewey, Warren, and Green, emerged from a larger strategy to placate labor and civil rights

groups. Nonetheless, even such halting policies demonstrated the impact of the balance of power

thesis on Republican electioneering. The strategic question of the black vote shaped the calcula-

tions of Thomas Dewey, the country’s leading liberal Republican, as he prepared to win the

party’s presidential nomination.

Smemo, 22

In a crowded field of more established and conservative contenders, Dewey quickly

emerged as a frontrunner. But Dewey himself inspired little confidence among civil rights lead-

ers. Polling showed that second only to Roosevelt, the Republicans’ iconoclastic 1940 nominee

Wendell Willkie still enjoyed the overwhelming support of black voters, including the NAACP’s

Walter White.90 White also held “very real doubts” that the GOP, and Dewey in particular, could

be a vehicle “for the betterment of the Negro people.”91 White worried that as president Dewey

would buckle under pressure from the “southern anti-Negro bloc” and quickly abandon any

commitment to civil rights once in Washington.92 White had good reason to be skeptical. De-

spite concerted pressure from labor and civil rights groups, Dewey refused to use his growing

influence in the party to convince congressional Republicans to pass anti-poll tax and soldier vot-

ing legislation.93 Furthermore, after the Supreme Court invalidated the white primary in Smith v.

Allwright, Dewey also flirted with reprising Herbert Hoover’s “lily-white” appeals to lure dis-

gruntled southern Democrats into the GOP. Alf Landon, for one, argued that if Dewey ap-

proached the Solid South with conciliation, he, like Lincoln in 1860, would be the “better candi-

date to carry the doubtful states” than a more racially liberal Republican in the mold of William

H. Seward.94 Nervous to put his imprimatur on fair employment, Dewey effectively blocked leg-

islation drafted by the State War Council on Discrimination in Employment calling for a perma-

nent state FEPC. Instead Dewey endorsed a bill to create a separate and explicitly temporary

commission to study the looming dilemma of discrimination in the reconversion process.95

Dewey’s decision gutted the existing antidiscrimination agency as eight of its members resigned

in protest, including Lester Granger of the Urban League. The NAACP’s Walter White also

sharply criticized Dewey for appointing a union leader from an all-white railroad brotherhood to

the new Temporary Commission Against Discrimination.96

Smemo, 23

Labor-based civil rights groups still understood Dewey, much like Roosevelt, could only

be compelled into action by concerted pressure. In a series of articles on “the national political

picture” for the Chicago Defender, journalist and academic Deton J. Brooks surveyed key sites

of concentrated black voting power. In Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, he argued, “party labels

mean very little” to the mass of black voters.97 For Brooks and balance of power advocates, “the

acute everyday problems which Negroes are now facing because of their color—and which have

been magnified by the present war—takes them out of the category of ordinary voters.”98 Black

workers could not simply link arms with the European immigrant machine tenders at the core of

the New Deal coalition precisely because “they have no domestic problem—Jim Crow—which

separates them from the class group to which they belong.”99 Using Detroit as an example, the

Defender illustrated the interlocking raced and classed issues informing the rapid shift in black

voting patterns since 1932. During World War One and on through the 1920s, black labor mi-

grants found work in Ford Motor Company’s plants, and in turn loyally voted for the party of the

automakers. The New Deal years transformed the black proletariat into a solidly Democratic

bloc, but wartime race riots and the “mistreatment of Negro soldiers” threw this attachment into

question. Brooks cast the wartime rise of interracial industrial unionism as a tremendous source

of political independence.100 Thus, the innovations as well as the contradictions of the New Deal

collided to forge an independent political bloc.

Smemo, 24

The Defender’s illustrated history of black voting in Detroit, as well as its uncertain future. Source: Chicago Defender, June 3, 1944, p. 4.

Such considerations did not escape Republican leaders and activists as the party faithful

gathered for the national convention. One civil rights delegation after another went before the

party’s platform committee and urged the GOP to vigorously advance the cause of racial equal-

ity.101 Dewey advisors admitted that their candidate could not hope to beat Roosevelt without

significant black support in seventeen critical northern and midwestern states.102 This hard elec-

toral calculation finally trumped any idea of luring disgruntled southerners into the GOP. Build-

ing on the racially liberal proposals of 1940, the GOP four years later sharply denounced segre-

gation for impairing the “morale and efficiency” of the war effort. Dewey’s campaign would be

formally committed to demanding a permanent federal FEPC, the extension of social security to

domestic and agricultural workers, constitutional amendments banning poll taxes and lynching.103

Black Republican delegates cheered the inclusion of a peacetime FEPC in particular as crucial to

putting job discrimination at the center of national political debate.104 At its conclave in Chicago

Smemo, 25

that summer the party of business made significant accommodations to many of the key demands

of working-class black voters.

Thomas Dewey speaking with civil rights leaders after the national convention. Source: Chicago Defender, July 8, 1944, p. 1.

“The Republicans have a potent platform to appeal to the Negro at the polls,” the Chi-

cago Defender declared. But the Republicans’ “real secret weapon” remained the segregationists

who continued to dominate Democratic politics.105 Walter White of the NAACP dismissed the

Democrats’ paltry civil rights plank as a mere “splinter.”106 In addition, Roosevelt’s decision to

replace the left-leaning vice president Henry Wallace with Missouri senator and longtime

Pendergast machine operative Harry Truman epitomized the worst fears of civil rights activists.

Such maneuvering played directly in the hands of red-baiting Republican propagandists who

gleefully described bitter infighting between New Deal Communists and the “Boss clique” of

urban machines.107 The black Kansas City newspaper the Call endorsed Dewey and the Republi-

cans, charging that the president’s fear of riling the Solid South “puts us at the mercy of our

Smemo, 26

enemies like the Christians and the lions.”108 Along with the Call, the country’s two largest black

papers, the Pittsburgh Courier and New York’s Amsterdam News, also came out for Dewey.109

Although the more leftwing-oriented Defender still endorsed FDR, the newspaper’s editorial

staff nevertheless ruefully noted, “the Dixie gentlemen who preach race hate with Hitler venom

will probably win more Negro votes for the Republicans than the combined efforts of half a

dozen Deweys.”110

Following the convention in Chicago, Dewey organized a separate meeting of Republican

governors in St. Louis to plot campaign strategy. The gathered governors worked through a se-

ries of position papers on a range of issues, and the most intriguing is an extensive analysis of

“Voting Trends Among Negroes.” Underscoring the tremendous electoral leverage of black la-

bor migrants, the report’s findings echoed Ralph Bunche’s candid 1939 report to the GOP and

anticipated Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power.111 The report indicates that Republicans

clearly understood the proletarian character of 1940s black politics, but remained puzzled as how

to incorporate the interests of the black electorate into GOP policymaking.

To win over this crucial segment of voters, the report urged the GOP to abandon its his-

toric commitment to laissez faire rhetoric in favor of economic security. “In the states where the

Negro voting power is most important […] the majority of the Negro-gainfully-occupied persons

are connected either with the Labor Movement or with welfare movements.”112 Confronted with

intense and unrelenting discrimination, North and South, black voters showed a strong “prefer-

ence for an enlarged central government” able to provide access to federal jobs, enforce fair em-

ployment practices, and guarantee voting rights. Moreover, the report claimed that proletarian

black voters’ tended to favor Democrats because of the “transcendent” influence of labor-liberal-

Left groups within the Roosevelt administration, including the “National Lawyers Guild, the

Smemo, 27

Communist Political Association, the Political Action Committee of the C.I.O., and other fellow-

travelling New Deal organizations.”113

Confronted with the strongly social democratic tenor of black politics, the governors’ re-

port used civil rights to articulate competing ideas of government power. To do so, the report

proposed first reclaiming and rebranding the conservative, segregationist slogan of “states’

rights” as “state’s-responsibility.”114 The principle of state’s responsibility offered distinct ideo-

logical advantages for Republicans keen to accommodate (and undermine) the institutions and

coalitions of the New Deal. To win elections, Republicans needed to embrace the overarching

“social goals” of the New Deal such as social security, unemployment insurance, and collective

bargaining. But only by “perfecting them on a state-wide basis” could minority party Republi-

cans exert control over the implementation of New Deal social policy.115 This institutional focus

on the states lent itself best to civil rights policymaking, the report argued, because racial issues

would never escape a southern dominated Congress. Accordingly, “racial tension is best pre-

vented in cities where there exists a strong and enlightened state government.”116 Even though

the Republican platform formally committed the party to a permanent federal FEPC, the report

reiterated the GOP’s overarching demand to devolve political authority away from national insti-

tutions.

Despite a fantastic projection that the black could swing by “seventy or eighty percent,”

the GOP in 1944 failed to take a forthright stand on civil rights.117 Before the governors’ meeting

in Saint Louis, Dewey dismissed out of hand the notion of expanding the party’s commitment to

civil rights beyond the platform adopted at the national convention.118 In a letter to one of

Dewey’s advisors, a board member of the National Committee for a Permanent FEPC demanded

to know why neither the candidate nor those in Congress would seize on the tremendous “Re-

Smemo, 28

publican opportunity contained” in making job discrimination an electoral priority.119 The Re-

publicans’ halting and inconsistent support for civil rights, however, matched that of the Roose-

velt campaign. In addition to Harry Truman’s place on the ticket and the party’s paltry civil

rights platform, the Roosevelt administration also engineered the postponement of congressional

hearings on the fate of the federal FEPC until after the election.120 The administration’s real fears

of open rebellion by the Solid South only compounded the ongoing isolation of the proto-social

democratic CIO bloc within the Democratic Party. With neither party fully committed to racial

egalitarianism, balance of power advocates needed to demonstrate the critical weight of the black

vote.

In an election with the closest popular vote since 1916, Roosevelt managed to overcome

Dewey’s initial leads in New England and the manufacturing belt of the Great Lakes to win his

fourth term. The thin margin of victory for the president reinforced the idea that northern black

voters did in fact hold the balance of power. Dewey still managed to win forty percent of the

black vote—the highest percentage of any Republican candidate in the latter half of the twentieth

century.121 Examining the election returns, Republican National Committee chair (and longtime

Dewey ally) Herbert Brownell concluded, “a shift of 303,414 votes in fifteen states outside of the

South would have enabled Dewey to capture 175 additional electoral votes and to win the presi-

dency with an eight electoral vote margin.”122 Five of those fifteen included those states with the

country’s largest northern black populations (New York, Michigan, Illinois, New Jersey, and

Pennsylvania), and in each of those states black voters provided the crucial margin needed for

FDR’s win.123 In Michigan—a critical state that the president carried by only a little over 20,000

votes—black voters cast over 40,000 ballots for Roosevelt.124 Though he was unable to defeat a

Smemo, 29

sitting president during a time of war, Dewey’s strong showing underscored to his party’s liberal

wings the importance of the black vote to the GOP’s electoral future.

The Coming of the Second Reconstruction

Undaunted by Dewey’s defeat, GOP liberals led by Herbert Brownell claimed in 1945

that questions of race and labor would ultimately destroy the Democrats. The end of the war led

the Republican liberal wing to intensify its focus on the Solid South as the ultimate contradiction

of the New Deal coalition. For Brownell the irresolvable tension between the leftwing North and

the reactionary South had effectively “disintegrated” the Democratic Party “until it no longer

represent[ed] a unified party but a combination of factions.”125 Against the unholy and authoritar-

ian admixture of Communism and Jim Crow that defined the New Deal coalition Brownell coun-

terpoised civil rights as the cornerstone of the “true liberalism” of GOP.126

This vision of Republican “true liberalism” quickly found expression in New York as

Governor Dewey signed the country’s first state-level FEPC into law in the spring of 1945.

Fears of postwar depression animated the imaginations of Republican leaders anxious that ra-

cially charged violence would escalate as war production ceased. In one of its final reports, the

State War Council Committee on Discrimination in Employment noted with alarm how “[g]roup

tensions along racial and religious lines reached serious proportions” in New York workplaces.127

Furthermore, as workers of color disproportionately bore the brunt of layoffs, New York’s mili-

tant Black Popular Front mobilized to pressure politicians into taking action.128 In the legislature,

upstate liberal Republican state senator Irving Ives joined with Democrat Elmer Quinn to draft

and win approval from the chamber’s Republican majority for a permanent state FEPC. Despite

a vociferous opposition from rural legislators and business groups, the Ives-Quinn law enshrined

the government enforcement of civil rights into law.129 The Ives-Quinn bill offered what Dewey

Smemo, 30

proudly called a “non-political” solution to the social tensions caused by racial discrimination.130

Although the new commission came with extensive cease-and-desist powers over hiring, termi-

nations, seniority, and pay, the complaint process itself prioritized private and informal confer-

ences and educational components to deal with discrimination on a strictly case-by-case basis.

Surveying the first five years of Ives-Quinn in action, sociologist Frieda Wunderlich complained,

“Strong enforcement has in fact been supplanted by long-range education. The teeth of the

law—cease and desist orders and penal sanctions—remain unused.”131

But just as Dewey signed the New York FEPC into law, rightwing Republicans in Con-

gress continued to dilute and block fair employment legislation in concert with segregationist

Democrats.132 Although northern Democrats in Congress to led the charge to transform the war-

time FEPC into a permanent peacetime agency, liberal Republicans, too, felt pressure to advo-

cate for civil rights legislation.133 Faced with bitter resistance from southern Democrats as well

as conservative Republicans, a diverse array of labor and civil rights activists hoped to play am-

bitious liberal Republicans against northern Democrats. Mary McLeod Bethune, A. Philip

Randolph, and the left-led United Packinghouse Workers, for instance, all appealed to Dewey as

the “titular leader of the Republican Party” to fulfill the promise of the party’s ambitious 1944

platform and seize the mantel of civil rights.134 New York representative Joseph C. Baldwin, for

one, acknowledged his party’s reservations about a federal FEPC, but he also realized the tre-

mendous gains the party could make by outflanking hidebound Democrats on race. “I feel that

the pledge our party gave to the people [in 1944] should be fulfilled.”135 Urging the GOP to lead

the fight for a federal FEPC, Indiana representative Charles M. LaFollette asserted that the party

“must return to the traditions of its founders; that is, it must be the radical party.”136

Smemo, 31

Liberal Republican voices in Congress remained few as most delegations disproportion-

ately represented the rural and growing suburban bastions of racial conservatism. In the states,

however, electoral pressures forced Republican governors to continue pushing for some form of

fair employment law. Like Dewey, California governor Earl Warren’s vision of fair employment

practices looked dramatically different from the kind demanded by labor-based civil rights activ-

ists who hoped to confront systematic discrimination. Before the State Assembly in January

1945, Warren insisted, “the tolerance which comes only with understanding by both

groups…will never be brought about by legislation alone.”137 Warren’s FEPC proposed merely

bringing together different minority groups along with employers and unions under the auspices

of a non-binding fact-finding and public education commission, leaving enforcement up to the

courts on a case-by-case basis. “With the right kind of people,” Warren attested, “we might come

up with the right answer,” but his administration drafted the bill without actually consulting any

civil rights or labor groups.138 No one shaped Warren’s thinking on civil rights more than his

close confidant, San Francisco attorney Jesse Steinhart, stressed the dire political consequences

of a segregated America with the California governor. As Steinhart’s former law partner re-

called, “His point was that if twenty million Negros, more or less, in the country were going to

be disenfranchised it was silly not to expect them to become friendly toward the people who

urged them to become communists.”139 Warren apparently dismissed Steinhart’s concerns about

communist subversion, but remained convinced that Republican civil rights could split the black

Democratic vote.140

Unlike in New York, the failure of California’s fair employment practices law hinged on

the limitations of the balance of power thesis. FEPC supporters clustered around California’s

left-led industrial unions, civil rights organizations, and the Popular Front Democratic Party

Smemo, 32

hoped to pressure Warren into action by highlighting that “Gov. Dewey followed thru [sic].”141

Without the governor’s essential support to overcome staunch conservative opposition, two sepa-

rate FEPC bills, including one sponsored by Warren, failed to make it out of committee.142 War-

ren proved most uncomfortable with empowering a state agency to define managerial preroga-

tives, and he criticized FEPC advocates who demanded “a lot of powers that a commission had

never been given in any other state of the union.”143 By 1946, frustrated FEPC advocates put job

discrimination on the ballot as a statewide proposition. Warren, though, soon found himself

freed of having to take a stand on the divisive issue. In his bid for reelection, Warren won the

unprecedented nomination of both the Republican and Democratic parties, thereby all but ensur-

ing an easy victory. As C.L. Dellums, a leader in the sleeping car porters union and the Oakland

NAACP, explained: “he wasn’t campaigning in November and he didn’t have to take a stand on

FEPC and it got defeated.”144 The failure of FEPC legislation in California underscored the lim-

its of the balance of power thesis. With FEPC supporters clustered on the left and no stiff party

competition, the hope that civil rights advocates could exploit partisan electoral competition

proved fleeting.

Nationally, the party liberals continued to play up partisan difference. To cultivate voters

for the upcoming midterm elections, liberal Republicans cast southern Democrats as the most

pernicious and despotic pillar of the New Deal coalition. Herbert Brownell continued to point to

the vast black disenfranchisement and the terrorism of lynching as the foundation of the white

Solid South’s stranglehold over the legislative process. Precisely because the “Democratic Party

is so constituted that it must deny those rights” of black citizenship in the South, Brownell con-

tended, Republicans could in fact rebuild its black constituency in the North.145 Joseph V. Baker

of the National Council of Negro Republicans urged black voters to rally behind the GOP in

Smemo, 33

1946 as they did in 1866 “to set back on its heels a new attempt of the Democratic South to sub-

ject the entire Nation to its nefarious doctrine of dual citizenship.”146 Oregon’s firebrand liberal

Republican senator Wayne Morse crystallized these sentiments by asserting that “there is no

hope for liberalism” in a Democratic Party so dependent on the violence and exclusion of the Jim

Crow South.147 But when Brownell attempted to convince a rightly dubious Roy Wilkins of the

NAACP that only a Republican Congress could advance an enforceable FEPC through the legis-

lature, Wilkins retorted, “the record made by the Republicans is nothing about which the party

can boast.”148 Indeed, the reactionary cast of the Eightieth Congress proved Wilkins right.149

But in major industrial states throughout the early postwar period, liberal Republicans

continued to push the party further on civil rights in the run up to the 1948 election. The balance

of power thesis remained central to not only liberal Republican politics, but also the beginning of

the postwar “second Reconstruction.” Denouncing the reactionary leadership of congressional

Republicans, Wayne Morse urged the party to adopt a “moderate, progressive course of action”

to win over the mass of “independent” black voters.150 To do so, the GOP needed to continue

accommodating the interests of the black proletariat. In a letter to Herbert Brownell, CA Frank-

lin, the publisher of Kansas City’s black newspaper The Call, argued, “whatever labor legislation

is passed will recommend the party to Negroes.”151 Liberal Republicans also leaned on Thomas

Dewey, on track to again claim the party’s presidential nomination, to solidify his commitments

to a working-class civil rights program. New York city council member Newbold Morris, chair

of the Committee to Support the Ives-Quinn Law, subjected the Dewey administration to ongo-

ing criticism of the state’s anemic fair employment practices agency.152 Before the Republican

national convention in 1948, the NAACP and the CIO accused Dewey and the party of reneging

on the GOP’s ambitious 1944 platform.153

Smemo, 34

The bitter debates within the Republican Party over how to accommodate the black work-

ing class ultimately influenced the Democrats to seize the agenda on civil rights. As Truman

aide Clark Clifford argued in his famous 1947 memo to the president, the Democrats could only

win by securing the vital northern black vote. The balance of power thesis, Clifford noted, “may

not be absolutely true, but it is certainly close enough to the truth to be extremely arguable.”154

As many scholars recognized, Clifford’s memo sketched out the basics of postwar interest group

politics.155 Rereading Truman’s embrace of civil rights in 1948 through the lens of black voting

power reveals intense electoral competition with liberal Republicans. Without a vigorous De-

mocratic civil rights platform geared to the black working class, Clifford warned, “the Negro

bloc, ” in key GOP governed states “will go Republican” and cost Truman the White House.156

Liberal Republican attempts to address the wartime “human problem” of racial discrimination

cast a long shadow over the course of civil rights policymaking. The partisan origins of the

“second Reconstruction” therefore need to be situated in the long struggle of black workers to

enter the mainstream of American politics.

Notes 1 George Romney to William Goodair, December 5, 1943, box 1-E, folder Personal, 1943 and prior, George W. Romney Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 2 Robert C. Weaver, Negro Labor: A National Problem (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1946), 92. 3 C.L.R James, “The Race Pogroms and the Negro: The Beginnings of an Analysis,” in C.L.R. James on the 'Negro Question,' ed. Scott McLemee (Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1996), 40. 4 Ibid., 7. 5 Henry Lee Moon, Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (New York: Double Day, 1948), 10. 6 Michael K. Fauntroy, Republicans and the Black Vote (London: Lynne Rienner, 2007), 5. 7 Between 1940 and 1950 the movement of almost one-quarter million black migrants to Chicago, Detroit, and New York alone increased the number of potential voters in each city by nearly eighty percent. Oscar Glantz, “The Ne-gro Voter in Northern Industrial Cities,” Western Political Quarterly, 13 (December 1960), 1000. For the political impact of the Second Great Migration see also, Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930-1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 82; James N. Gregory, The Southern Dias-pora: How The Great Migrations of Black and White Southerners Transformed America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 260; and Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), 113.

Smemo, 35

8 Bill Mullen, Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1935-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 47-48; Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 16; and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Move-ment and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History, 91 (March 2005), 1235. 9 See, Patricia A. Frank, “‘Keep ‘em squirming!’: Alfred Edgar Smith, Charley Cherokee, and Race Relations, 1933-1943,” (M.A. thesis, University of Arkansas, 1993). 10 Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000); Richard M. Valelly, The Two Reconstructions: The Struggle for Black Empowerment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 149-72; and Christopher A. Baylor, “First to the Party: The Group Origins of the Partisan Transformation on Civil Rights, 1940-1960,” Studies in American Political Development, 27 (Fall 2013), 1–31. 11 David Karol, Party Position Change in American Politics: Coalition Management (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2000), 108-9; Brian Feinstein and Eric Schickler, “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realign-ment Reconsidered,” Studies in American Political Development, 22 (Spring 2008), 1-31; Anthony S. Chen, The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941-1972 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 20-21; Eric Schickler, Kathryn Pearson, and Brain Feinstein, “Shifting Partisan Coalitions: Support for Civil Rights in Congress from 1933-1972,” Journal of Politics, 72 (July 2010), 672-89; Alexander Gourse, “‘Such Power Spells Tyranny:’ Business Opposition to Administrative Governance and the Transformation of Fair Em-ployment Policy in Illinois, 1945-1964,” in The Right and Labor America: Politics, Ideology, and Imagination, ed. Nelson Lichtenstein and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 183. This work expands and elaborates on the classic (and enduring) narrative offered by James T. Patterson, Congres-sional Conservatism (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967). Recent historical scholarship on race and the Republican Party follows a similar narrative, see in particular, Timothy N. Thurber, Republicans and Race: The GOP’s Frayed Relationship with African Americans, 1945-1974 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2013). 12 Eric Schickler, “New Deal Liberalism and Racial Liberalism in the Mass Public, 1937-1968,” Perspectives in Politics, 11 (March 2013), 76. 13 There is as yet only a slim literature on mid-century liberal Republicans, and even less covering the emergence of liberals as a party bloc in the 1940s. See especially, Nicol Rae, The Decline and Fall of the Liberal Republicans from 1952 to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 30-34; William Russell Coil, “‘New Deal Republican:’ James A. Rhodes and the Transformation of the Republican Party, 1933-1983,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005), 188-233; and Kristoffer Smemo, “The Little People’s Century: Industrial Pluralism, Economic Development, and Liberal Republicanism in California, 1942-1946,” Journal of American History, 101 (March 2015), 1-35. 14 Robert Mason, The Republican Party and American Politics from Hoover to Reagan (New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2012), 121. 15 Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, 34. 16 Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013), 16; William Riker, “The CIO in Politics, 1936-1946,” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1948), 3-4; and Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule: Sidney Hillman and the Rise of American Labor (New York: Free Press, 1991), 531. 17 Deton J. Brook, “Chicago Defender Reports on National Politics,” Chicago Defender, June 17, 1944, p. 4; Simon Topping, Lincoln's Lost Legacy: The Republican Party and the African American Vote, 1928-1952 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2008), 79; and Leah Wright Rigueur, The Loneliness of the Black Republican: Prag-matic Politics and the Pursuit of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 24. 18 Ralph J. Bunche, “Introduction to a Confidential Report to the Republican Party,” in Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Chris P. Henry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 89. 19 Nancy Joan Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 1982), 271-72; and Harvard Sitkoff, “Willkie as Liberal: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights,” in Wendell Willkie: Hoosier Internationalist, ed. James H. Madison (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1992), 74. 20 St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton, Black Metropolis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1993 [1945]), 355. 21 Francis E. Rivers, “Final Appeal to the Colored Voters,” typescript, November 5, 1940, p. 6, series 9, box 43, folder 6, Dewey Papers. 22 Mason, Republican Party in American Politics, 98; Topping, Lincoln's Lost Legacy, 79; and Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 24. 23 See William P. Jones, The March on Washington: Jobs, Freedom, and the Forgotten History of Civil Rights Movement (New York: Norton, 2013), 1-40; and Andrew E. Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the

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Midwest, 1941-46 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 9-20; and Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices, 1941-1946 (Baton Rouge: Lou-isiana State University Press, 1991), 21-143. 24 Quoted in “Republican Committee Meets in U.S. Capital,” Chicago Defender, April 12, 1941, p. 4. 25 California Republican Assembly, business session of annual convention, minutes, typescript, March 5-7, 1941, p. 9, box 2, folder 6, California Republican Assembly Records (Collection 2039), Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. 26 “State Acts to Protest Nat’l. Jim Crow,” Chicago Defender, April 12, 1941, p. 5; and “Legislators Protest Bias in Defense,” Chicago Defender, May 10, 1941, p. 5. 27 “Minnesotans Plan Defense Bias Suit,” Chicago Defender, March 22, 1941, p.4. 28 Kryder, Divided Arsenal, xii; David Freeman Engstrom, “The Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law: Regulatory Choice and the Making of Modern Civil Rights, 1943-1972,” Stanford Law Review, 63 (May 2011), 1075; and William J. Collins, “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets,” American Economic Review, 91 (March 2001), 272-86. 29 Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American History, 75 (December 1988), 787; Reed, Seedtime for Civil Rights, 15; and Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War. 30 Paul Frymer, Black and Blue: African Americans, the Labor Movement, and the Decline of the Democratic Party (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); Engstrom, “Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law,” 1074-75; Reuel Schiller, Forging Rivals: Race, Class, Law, and the Collapse of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 2015). 31 “Seek Laws to Win Jobs For Race,” Chicago Defender, May 10, 1941, p. 13. 32 August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick, “Come to the Fair?” Crisis, March 1965, 150, 194; and Deton J. Brooks, “Jenkins Fights for Race in Illinois Legislature,” Chicago Defender, February 19, 1944, p. 11. 33 “Assembly Ends Heated Session; Bills Aid Race,” Chicago Defender, July 12, 1941, p. 13; and Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War, 28. 34 See for example, “Governor’s Stress Role in Defense,” New York Times, January 22, 1941, p. 4; Harold Stassen, address to the National Association of Attorney Generals, typescript, September 30, 1941, box X, folder X, Stassen Papers; Thomas E. Dewey, Address to Annual Convention of New York State Council of Retail Merchants, type-script, November 11, 1941, p. 4, series 4, box 130, folder 10, Dewey Papers. 35 Quoted in “Willkie Says War Liberates Negro,” New York Times, July 20, 1942, p. 28. 36 Scott Kurashige, “The Many Facets of Brown: Integration in a Multiracial Society,” Journal of American History, 91 (June 2004), 57; Daniel Martinez HoSang, Racial Propositions: Ballot Initiatives and the Making of Postwar California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 19; and Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 4. 37 War Manpower Commission, Region XII, Tenth Monthly Report of the Regional Director, September 16 through October 15, 1944, typescript, October 20, 1944, pp. 24-25, box 15, folder 2, California Department of Industrial Relations Records, , San Francisco State University. 38 Russell W. Davenport, “Republican Renascence,” Life, September 6, 1943, 107. 39 Arthur Krock, “New Survey of 1942 Vote,” New York Times, November 18, 1942, p. 19. 40 “South Side and Harlem Join in Swing to GOP,” Chicago Defender, November 14, 1942, p. 3; George Tagge, “G.O.P. Nominees Acclaimed at Negro Meetings,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 2, 1942, p. 4; “Dewey Says Foes Exalt Race Bias,” New York Times, June 4, 1942, p. 12; “GOP Votes Fight On Army, Labor Jim Crow,” Chi-cago Defender, April 25, 1942, p. 1. 41 Davenport, “Republican Renascence,” 121. 42 Quoted in “‘Negro Vote Under-Rated By Press:’ Walter White,” Chicago Defender, November 14, 1942, p. 4. 43 Harry McAlpin, “Race to Discard Party Labels in 1944 Vote,” Chicago Defender, May 22, 1943, p. 1. 44 I.M. Ornburn to Herbert Brownell, November 13, 1942, series 10, box 6, folder 1, Dewey Papers; Ferdinand Mayer, memo, September 2, 1942, series 9, box 44, folder 16, Dewey Papers; memo for Thomas E. Dewey, [1942], series 9, box 44, folder 20, Dewey Papers; Campaign strategy paper, [1942], ibid. 45 “Interview with Mr. Dewey for Amsterdam Star-News,” October 26, 1942, news clipping, series 9, box 10, folder 11, Dewey Papers. 46 “Dewey Says Foes,” p. 12; Elliott V. Bell, speech notes on labor, typescript, [1942], p. 2, series 9, box 44, folder 16, Dewey Papers.

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47 Memo for Thomas E. Dewey, p. 23 48 Martha Biondi, To Stand and Fight: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Postwar New York City (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 10; Kevin M. Schultz, “The FEPC and the Legacy of the Labor-Based, Civil Rights Move-ment of the 1940s,” Labor History, 49 (February 2008), 76; and Erik S. Gellman, Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 203. 49 For a contemporary account of manpower utilization, see, Manpower Utilization: Case Material from 329 Plants (McGraw-Hill publishing Company, 1943). See also Alan Gropman, “Industrial Mobilization,” in The Big ‘L’: American logistics in World War II, ed. Alan Gropman (Washington DC: National Defense University Press, 1997), 43. 50 John Lumbard memo to Hickman Powell, August 27, 1942, series 9, box 44, folder 15, Dewey Papers. 51 Thomas E. Dewey to Lester B. Granger, March 13, 1943, series 4, box 245, folder 17, Dewey Papers. 52 On the class politics of racial uplift during World War Two, see Touré F. Reed, Not Alms But Opportunity: The Urban League and the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 107-168. 53 Alvin Johnson, Charles Berkley, and Bernard Gittelson, “Committee on Discrimination in Employment, New York State War Council, Report, March 1941 to July 1944,” typescript, [1944], p. 53, series A, part, 13, reel 1, NAACP Papers, microfilm edition. 54 Annual Message of Governor Thomas E. Dewey to the Legislature, typescript, January 6, 1943, p. 8, series 4, box 207, folder 19, Dewey Papers. 55 Quoted in “New Board Named on Discrimination,” New York Times, August 5, 1943, p. 36. 56 Chen, Fifth Freedom, 93. 57 Charles C. Berkley, “Fighting Discrimination in War Employment in New York State,” typescript, [1943], p. 1, series 4, box 220, folder 8, Dewey Papers. 58 Edward L. Bernays, memo, June 23, 1943, series 4, box 220, folder 8, Dewey Papers. 59 August Meier and Elliott M. Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (Ann Arbor: University of Michi-gan Press, 2007), 108-74. 60 Beth Tompkins Bates, “‘Double V for Victory’ Mobilizes Black Detroit, 1941-1946,” in Freedom North: Black Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, ed. Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodward (New York: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2003), 28. 61 Engstrom, “Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law,” 1072-73. 62 Sidney Fine, “‘A Jewel in the Crown of All of Us’: Michigan Enacts a Fair Employment Practices Act, 1941-1955,” Michigan Historical Review, 22 (Spring, 1996), 21; Engstrom, “Lost Origins of American Fair Employment Law,” 1101. See also Frymer, Black and Blue, for the national scope of AFL hostility to antidiscrimination meas-ures in labor legislation. 63 Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 112. 64 Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” Journal of American His-tory, 58 (December 1971), 678. 65 George W. Romney, Automotive Council for War Production statement in U.S. Congress, Senate, Investigation of the National Defense Program, S. Res. 55, Part XXVIII, 79 Cong., 1 sess., March 9, 1945, p. 13542. 66 Ibid, p. 13562. 67 Victor G. Reuther, The Brothers Reuther and the Story of the UAW: A Memoir (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 240. 68 George Romney, “America’s Greatness Still Ahead,” press release, May 28, 1946, p. 1, box 4-E, folder Speeches/Articles 1946, Romney Papers. See also, “Detroit Victory Council is Helping to Meet the Manpower Situation on a Community Level,” Automotive Industries, 89 (1943), 54 69 Riker, “CIO in Politics,” 258. 70 Ibid. 71 “The Riot Report,” Chicago Defender, August 28, 1943, p. 14; and Dominic Capeci and Martha Wilkerson, Lay-ered Violence: The Detroit Riots of 1943 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1991). 72 Alan Clive, State of War: Michigan in World War II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979), 97. 73 “Willow Run and the National Housing Agency,” Chicago Defender, July 22, 1944, p. 12. 74 Quoted in T. George Harris, Romney’s Way: A Man and an Idea (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), 115.

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75 Sarah Jo Peterson, Planning the Home Front: Building Bombers and Communities at Willow Run (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2013), 268. 76 “Warren Orders Zoot Quiz; Quiet Reigns After Rioting: Kenny Instructed to Investigate,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1943, p. 4; “Punishment of All Urged to Break Up Zoot Suit War,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 1943; p. 2; and “Racial Peace Here Pledged,” Los Angeles Times, July 10, 1943, p. A1. 77 “Warren Urges Racial Tolerance,” Los Angeles Times, May 7, 1944, p. 5. 78 Shortly thereafter, liberal Republican governor Raymond Baldwin created the more expansive Connecticut Inter-Racial Commission, empowered to investigate claims of job discrimination, and became the forerunner to the state’s 1947 FEPC. Duane Lockard, Toward Equal Opportunity: A Study of State and Local Antidiscrimination Laws (New York: MacMillan, 1968), 20. 79 “Green Appoints Group to Study Racial Discord,” Chicago Daily Tribune, August 1, 1943, p. 14; “Illinois,” Race Relations, 1 (August 1943), 13; and Kersten, Race, Jobs, and the War, 50. 80 Quoted in “Housing Seen Big Barrier to Racial Peace,” Chicago Defender, October 9, 1943, p. 6. 81 “Gov. Green Praises Negro Social Service Work; Rips Poll Tax,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 9, 1943, p. 27. 82 Harry McAlpin, “Silver Lining,” Chicago Defender, January 2, 1943, p. 15. 83 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, Vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Row, 1962 [1944]), 511. 84 “A Declaration by Negro Voters,” Crisis, 51 (January 1944), 16. 85 “A Declaration,” 16. 86 Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis, 355. 87 Quoted in “‘Negroes Hold Balance of Power,’ GOP Admits,” Chicago Defender, January 22, 1944, p. 18. 88 Quoted in Deton J. Brooks, “GOP Leaders Warn Party to Meet Negro Demands,” Chicago Defender, February 19, 1944, p. 1. 89 Quoted in “Rep. Clare Luce Trusts Neither GOP Nor Democrats On Negro Question,” Chicago Defender, January 22, 1944, p. 2. 90 “Willkie Win Negro Poll,” New York Times, October 29, 1943, p. 16. 91 Quoted in “Challenge GOP Claim of Better Deal for Negro,” Chicago Defender, December 25, 1943, p. 1. 92 Walter White, “People and Places,” Chicago Defender, August 7, 1943, p. 15. 93 “Foul Tip by Dewey,” Crisis, June 1944, 185; and “Dewey’s Campaign Promises Just Hollow Talk,” Chicago Defender, October 21, 1944, p.16. 94 Alf Landon to Thomas E. Dewey, April 6, 1944, series 10, box 24, folder 3, Dewey Papers. See also Alf Landon to Dewey, May 10, 1944, series 10, box 24, folder 3, Dewey Papers; Thomas E. Dewey to Alf Landon, May 17, 1944, ibid.; and Alf Landon to Thomas E. Dewey, June 2, 1944, ibid. 95 Chen, Fifth Freedom, 95. 96 Walter White to Thomas Dewey, June 9, 1944, series 7, box 76, folder X, Dewey Papers. 97 Deton J. Brooks, Jr., “Chicago Defender Reports on National Politics,” Chicago Defender, May 27, 1944, p.18. 98 Brooks, “Reports on National Politics, June 17, 1944, p. 1. 99 Deton J. Brooks, Jr., “Negro Vote May Swing Election to Right President,” Chicago Defender, May 20, 1944, p.1. 100 Deton J. Brooks, Jr., “Chicago Defender Reports on National Politics,” Chicago Defender, June 3, 1944, p. 4. 101 Rigueur, Loneliness of the Black Republican, 25. 102 Richard Durham, “GOP Platform Bids for Negro Vote,” Chicago Defender, July 8, 1944, p. 1. 103 Republican National Committee, 1944 Platform of the Republican Party, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=25835 104 Ernest E. Johnson, “GOP Platform May Block Lily-White Bid to Demos,” Chicago Defender, July 8, 1944, p. 18. 105 “Up for Sale: The Negro Vote,” Chicago Defender, July 15, 1944, p. 12. 106 Quoted in Topping, Lincoln’s Lost Legacy, 99. 107 “Democrats’ Split Cheers Brownell,” New York Times, August 11, 1944, p. 9; and “Brownell Pictures New Deal Rule By PAC With Labor in Revolt,” New York Times, August 30, 1944, p. 32. 108 Quoted in Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 163. 109 Martin Dodge and Company, memo, n.d., series C, part 18, reel 18, NAACP Papers microfilm. 110 “Up for Sale,” p. 12.

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111 The report prepared for the Republican governors conference reached the same conclusions as the electoral analysis produced by NAACP in conjunction with the CIO in spring of 1944. See, Leslie S. Perry, memo, April 29, 1944, series C, part 18, reel 18, NAACP Papers microfilm. 112 Voting Trends Among Negroes to be Considered by Governors’ Conference, typescript, n.d., p. 10, series 4, box 152, file, 12, Dewey Papers. 113 Voting Trends, pp. 11-12. 114 Voting Trends, pp. 18-19 115 Voting Trends, p. 22. 116 Voting Trends, pp. 21-22. 117 Voting Trends, pp. 2-3. 118 Warren Moscow, “Dewey Presents 15 Home State Problems to GOP Governors,” New York Times, August 3, 1944, p. 11. 119 Mary Blanshard to Charles Breitel, September 4, 1944, series 4, box 245, folder 17, Dewey Papers. 120 Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 163. 121 Fauntroy, Republicans and the Black Vote, 5. 122 Quoted in Moon, Balance of Power, 35-36. 123 RNC, Research Division, The 1944 Elections, A Statistical Analysis, typescript, April 1945, p. 1, series A, box 123, folder Republican Party National Committee, 1945-47, Wayne Morse Papers, Coll. 001, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon. 124 Moon, Balance of Power, 36. 125 Herbert Brownell, “The Republicans’ Future Role,” Talks (April 1945), p. 40, series 2, box 38, folder 11, Dewey Papers. 126 Herbert Brownell, speech notes, typescript, [1945], p. 1, series 2, box 38, folder 11, Dewey Papers. 127 Charles C. Berkley, “Annual Report Committee on Discrimination in Employment, 1944,” typescript, [1945], series 4, box 220, folder 9, Dewey Papers. 128 Biondi, Stand and Fight, 98-111. 129 For business resistance to Ives-Quinn, see, Anthony S. Chen, “‘The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas’: Racial Conserva-tism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941-1945,” Journal of American History, 92 (March 2006), 1238-64. 130 Thomas E. Dewey, “Address at the Executive Chamber…March 12, 1945,” in Public Papers of Governor Tho-mas E. Dewey, Fifty-first Governor of the State of New York, 1945, Vol. III (Albany: New York State Printing Of-fice, 1946), 418 131 Frieda Wunderlich, “New York's Antidiscrimination Law,” Social Research, 17, (June 1950), 225-26. 132 Venice T. Spraggs, “Taft Knifing of Permanent FEPC Splits Republicans in Congress,” Chicago Defender, Feb-ruary 17, 1945, p. 3. MORE 133 For Republican congressional activity for FEPC legislation see, National Council for a Permanent Fair Employ-ment Practice Commission, “List of US Senators and Representatives committed to FEPC Legislation,” typescript, December 15, 1944, series 4, box 245, folder 17, Dewey Papers; and RNC Research Division, “Republican Efforts on Behalf of F.E.P.C. legislation in 1945,” typescript, [1945], series 4, box 222, folder 28, Dewey Papers. For the frustrated effort to pass a federal FEPC in during the early Truman years, see, Chen, Fifth Freedom, 52-55 134 Esp. Mary McLeod Bethune, et al., to Thomas E. Dewey, telegram, June 24, 1945, series 4, box 222, folder 28, Dewey Papers; National Council for a Permanent FEPC to Thomas E. Dewey, telegram August 25, 1944, ibid; and William Rix to Thomas E. Dewey, June 30, 1945, ibid. 135 “GOP Solons Challenged to Keep Pledge on FEP,” Chicago Defender, June 23, 1945, p. 1. 136 Statement of Charles M. LaFollette, typescript, December 6, 1945, p. 2, series A, box 122, folder Republican Party, general, 1946-1949, Morse Papers. 137 Earl Warren, Biennial Message of Earl Warren, Governor of the State of California, delivered to the Senate and Assembly in Joint Session, January 8, 1945, series 387, file 6040, Earl Warren Papers, California State Archives, Sacramento. 138 Earl Warren, Memoirs, 232; Warren interview, 241–242; Samuel Ladar interview by Amelia Fry, Oct. 23, 1973, transcript, p. 2b, in Earl Warren’s Campaigns Vol. II, Earl Warren Oral History Project (Regional Oral History Of-fice, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1977). 139 Ladar interview, p. 2b. 140 Ladar interview, p. 3b.

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141 Southern California Committee for a State FEPC, “Don’t Mess it Up Now, Buddy,” leaflet, [1945], box 160, folder 1, California Ephemera Collection, 1860-, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles. 142 California State Federation of Labor, “Combined Reports on Labor Legislation,” 15; Anthony S. Chen, Robert W. Mickey, and Robert P. Van Houweling, “Explaining the Contemporary Alignment of Race and Party: Evidence from California’s 1946 Ballot Initiative on Fair Employment,” Studies in American Political Development, 22 (Fall 2008), 215-16. 143 Warren interview, 179. 144 C.L. Dellums, interview by Joyce Henderson, February 26, 1971, transcript, p. 114, in International President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Civil Rights Leader (Earl Warren Oral History Project (Regional Oral History Office, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, 1973). 145 Herbert Brownell, “Report to the Republican National Committee,” typescript, April 1, 1946, p. 5, series 2, box 38, folder 11, Thomas Dewey Papers, University of Rochester. 146 Joseph V. Baker, “From Here by the Hills,” Negro Statesman, April 15, 1946, series 2, box 46, folder 1, Dewey Papers. 147 Wayne Morse to Karl Armstrong, September 24, 1946, series A, box 122, folder Republican Minority Commit-tee, 1946-1949, Morse Papers. 148 Herbert Brownell to Roy Wilkins, February 28, 1946, part 18, series X reel 29, NAACP Papers, microfilm; Roy Wilkins to Herbert Brownell, March 7, 1946, ibid. 149 See, for example, Walter White to Robert Taft, May 20, 1948, part 18, series C, reel 29, NAACP Papers, micro-film. 150 Wayne Morse to BA Kliks, January 16, 1948, series A, box 122, folder Republican Party, general, 1946-1949, Morse Papers; Wayne Morse to Robert R. Church, September 27, 1947, ibid.; and Wayne Morse to Arden L. Gawith, April 27, 1948, ibid. 151 CA Franklin to Herbert Brownell, March 27, 1947, series 2, box 46, folder 1, Dewey Papers. 152 See, for example, Newbold Morris to Charles Garside, [1948], part 13, series C, reel 11, NAACP Papers, micro-film; Marian Wynn Perry to Arthur H. Harlow, Jr., January 14, 1948, ibid.; and Marian Wynn Perry to Graham McConnell, March 18, 1948, ibid. 153 Congress of Industrial Organizations, “Van A. Bittner Presents CIO Program to Republican Resolutions Commit-tee,” press release, June 17, 1948, part 18, series C, reel 29, NAACP Papers, microfilm; and NAACP, “Republican Convention Hears Spokesmen for Six Million Negroes,” press release, June 17, 1948, ibid. 154 Clark Clifford memo to Harry S. Truman, November 19, 1947, box 21, Political File, Clark Clifford Papers, Harry S. Truman Presidential Library. 155 Alonzo Hamby, Beyond the New Deal: Harry S. Truman and American Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1973), 209-12; Kevin Boyle, The UAW and the Heyday of American Liberalism, 1945-1968 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-sity Press, 1995), 53-54; and Valelly, Two Reconstructions, 166-67. 156 Clifford memo to Truman.