Roosevelt's New Deal in the Haze of Apartheid: A Hijacked Constitutional Transformation and Its Consequences

(authored on October 2, 2017, published in "Reading", No. 2, 2018, pp. 42-51)

Roosevelt's New Deal in the Haze of Apartheid

——Historized Constitutional Transformation and Its Consequences

In the last two volumes of the three-volume We the People ( We the People , Ackerman 2000; Ackerman 2014), Yale constitutionalist Bruce Ackerman sees the Civil War, Roosevelt's New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement as the post-constitutional three moments of constitutional transition.

The Civil War, along with the three ensuing amendments to the Constitution, resolved the legacy of slavery and the struggle for sovereignty between the Commonwealth and the states, and (especially the Fourteenth Amendment) provided greater access to judicial review in the future. The great effect laid the foreshadowing; Roosevelt's New Deal broke the myth that the government should not interfere in economic life, and its measures in social security, labor relations, infrastructure construction and other aspects are still shaping the landscape of the US political economy; the civil rights movement not only It has contributed to the legal abolition of racial segregation, which has profoundly changed the social and cultural norms of the United States, making the discriminatory speech and ideas that were popular in the past gradually rejected by mainstream public opinion (although Trump's coming to power once again shows that racism is deeply rooted) .

The issue of race is one of the fundamental clues running through the entire American political history, and its influence is especially vividly displayed in several constitutional transitions. The racial background of the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement goes without saying; it is easy to overlook the important role that race played in the New Deal's economic and social welfare. However, this neglect is precisely the consequence of the continued obscuring of the sin of racism by the mainstream political narrative in the United States.

Leo Ferrero, an Italian writer who was exiled to the United States because of his opposition to Mussolini's fascist policies, sighed in 1933 when he was researching in the southern United States: "I am always quarreling with others over black issues here. The southern The attitude towards black people is utter insane - no [white] people here have the slightest understanding of what black people suffer. What a barren imagination! Hardly a single [white southern] person is aware of political liberty and the law The importance of rights. Every [white southern] person is attached to the tyranny and lynching [of black people].”

WEB Du Bois, a black sociologist and pioneer of the civil rights movement, also wrote in 1935: "The situation facing the Negro in America has never been more critical than it is today—not in 1830 [at the time of abolitionism], not in 1861. Not in 1867 [when the Civil War broke out], and not in 1867 [when Reconstruction of the South began]. Never has the black man's demands for the most basic justice been on deaf ears as they are today. Three-quarters of us are disenfranchised ; but no writer on democratic reform has said a word about the black question.”

This was the general environment of American racial politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and it was also the background of the times before and after the introduction of Roosevelt's New Deal. This was a time when racial segregation was legally enforced in seventeen southern states (and brought into the federal government by Wilson) and the national public became accustomed to it, a time when a white mob could unscrupulously use "lynching, including The era of hanging, beheading, burning, whipping, castration, etc.)” was also an era in which “the Southern bloc (also known as the Solid South)” held a disproportionate amount of political power within the Democratic Party and in Congress.

The many specific measures of Roosevelt's New Deal, and their profound impact on the racial situation in the United States, cannot be understood without understanding the peculiar racial background of this era. Shifting the Color Line (Lieberman 1998) by Robert Lieberman, former provost and political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, and Ella S. Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White (Katznelson 2005) is a must-read for understanding the relationship between the New Deal and race and its consequences.

The so-called "south" in American politics does not refer to the entire South of the United States in the geographical sense, but to a dozen states from the southeastern coast to the central and southern parts of the country, the specific scope of which has changed in different times. During the nearly 100 years from the failure of the "Southern Reconstruction" in 1877 to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, the eleven states (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Ala Bama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, North Carolina), and six or seven surrounding states, from state legislatures, local public offices at all levels to congressional seats are basically dominated by Democrats; and After these southern Democrats came to power, on the one hand they implemented the Jim Crow law and the segregation system, and used various means to deprive blacks and other minorities of their voting rights. Take the grassroots organizations in these states and create a de facto one-party system.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of states enforcing segregation by legislation stabilized at seventeen, advancing and retreating together in federal politics, forming an unbreakable "Southern camp"; about three-quarters of the nation's blacks at the time lived in in these southern states.

The "southern camp" is at a disadvantage compared to other regions, both economically and demographically. However, the constitution and the constitution of the congress have disproportionately enlarged the political power of this camp. First, every state, big or small, has two seats in the Senate, which considerably dampens political power in the more industrialized and densely populated Northeast and West. At the same time, the "obstruction" system in the Senate means that as long as one camp gets one-third of the votes, it can obstruct the passage of any bill, greatly improving the minority's bargaining power; and the southern camp just reaches this number of votes, Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the filibuster system was used repeatedly to prevent Congress from enacting "anti-lynching laws."

In addition, it is also important that various bills in Congress often need to be drafted and recommended by committees in related fields of the two chambers before they can enter the actual voting process, and the selection and position arrangement of committees are extremely dependent on the "seniority" of members. That is, the length of time a member of the House of Representatives serves; in southern states with one-party dictatorship, congressional Democrats can sit back and relax once they are elected, and it is common for them to be re-elected for decades. On the contrary, in other states where the competition between the two parties is relatively fierce, members change frequently and every year. Due to the relatively low capital, the key positions in the congressional committees are basically dominated by members from the southern camp, and the drafts released from the committees have to be deeply branded by them.

After the Great Depression, the Democrats entered the White House and won majorities in the Senate and House of Representatives, which seemed promising. However, at this time in Congress, it is rather a three-pronged situation between the Northern Democratic Party, the Southern Democratic Party, and the Republican Party. Although the Northern Democratic Party is backed by the executive branch, the chairmanships of most congressional committees are in the hands of the Southern Democratic Party. The Republican Party split from the party twice after the old Roosevelt and the old LaFrett, and the small governmentists of Taft and Coolidge gained the upper hand in the party, and had no intention to join forces with Roosevelt to promote economic stimulus and social redistribution; ambitious plans for the New Deal of Northern Democrats, with no alternative but to work with Southern Democrats.

Southern states were poorer and in need of federal relief more urgently than the rest of the country under the impact of the Great Depression, Southern Democrats, at least early on, were ideologically supportive of the New Deal (but later, feared that union activism would increase blacks) Labor's awareness of political participation, so most Southern Democratic congressmen turned to oppose the labor relations legislation in the New Deal). Nonetheless, for Southern bloc legislators, preventing blacks (and other people of color) from achieving socioeconomic parity with whites is as important, if not more important, a political task than surviving an economic crisis; if the South The premise of white people receiving federal economic aid is that black people can enjoy the same opportunities for relief and benefits, and even break apartheid, then they would rather not receive these aids from anyone.

It is necessary to emphasize here that, although racists firmly believe that there are natural boundaries and differences between different races, the concept of "race" has always been the product of "social product"; The dividing line between "white people" and "colored people" has always been in controversy and adjustment. In the 1840s and 1850s, when Irish fleeing fugitives flocked to the United States to make a living, many native white Americans (especially the anti-immigrant "ignorant" people) actually regarded them as "people of color".

An 1864 pamphlet against "miscegenation," for example, declared that the Irish were "a more savage race and a lower civilization than the Negroes" and that "as a race of color [should live in] Near the tropics [,] but degraded to a level worse than the most depraved Negroes because of their long settlement in the North [,]."

At the same time, Irish immigrants, eager to integrate into mainstream society, were "promoted" to the ranks of "whites" in the second half of the nineteenth century by opposing the abolition of slavery and advocating the exclusion of Chinese more vigorously than the native whites (see Il Ignatiev's classic How the Irish Became White , Ignatiev 1995).

Similarly, immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who came to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were initially ambiguous in their "racial affiliation" and thus became one of the targets of the "second wave of the Ku Klux Klan movement" in the early twentieth century. ; fortunately, the widespread anarchist and communist tendencies of this group of immigrant workers in southeastern Europe made them the focus of the New Deal's inclusion of the labor movement, and their "white identity" was thus assured (see David Rowe Diger, "Being White Through Work"; Working Toward Whiteness , Roediger 2005).

In contrast, for "high caste" Indians and lighter-skinned North Indians who also sought to obtain white status, the US Supreme Court in 1923 "United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind" ( United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind )" The judgment stated: Although the mainstream view of the scientific community at the time held that the North Indians were closely related to the Aryans, the racial division was based on "common sense", not science; "Common sense", Indians are not white. The fate of Indian immigrants in the United States and immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europeans has parted ways.

Various laws enacted by southern states during the apartheid era, including prohibiting interracial marriage, prohibiting mixed use of public facilities of different races, and prohibiting restaurants from providing services to different races, gradually strengthened and fixed the "white" and "colored" in American social culture. race" distinction. At the beginning of the New Deal, using their disproportionate influence in the Democratic Party and in Congress, Southern politicians used a two-pronged strategy to ensure that the measures of the New Deal did not benefit blacks and other people of color as much as possible.

First, they impose various occupational and status restrictions that are highly racially relevant to various draft laws. In enacting the Social Security Act of 1935, for example, Southern senators insisted that agricultural and domestic workers be excluded from social security. These two types of occupations accounted for more than 60% of the black labor force at the time, and 75% of the southern black labor force. Excluding these two types of occupations also excluded most black families from the scope of social security ( Of course, this approach inevitably "injured" many white farmers).

Southern senators, on the other hand, insisted on transferring the enforcement powers of welfare programs from the federal to the states when they drafted the bill, and firmly blocked the inclusion of anti-racism provisions in any welfare bill. Although funding for welfare programs comes entirely from the federal government, once the funds are released to the state government, the eligibility review and subsidy process for individual applicants is left to the state or municipality. Local officials have no federal constraints, and they are more reckless in discriminating against black applicants. This has further narrowed the scope of blacks covered by social security, with more than 65% of blacks nationwide excluded from the new law, and this proportion has reached more than 80% in some parts of the south .

The GI Bill of Rights of 1944 was one of the most important pieces of legislation in the United States during the New Deal, providing unemployment insurance, low-interest loans, higher education, and vocational training for more than 16 million veterans Tuition subsidies and other benefits. Fifteen percent of federal funding in 1948 was used to place veterans; as of 1955, 2.25 million veterans had entered colleges for higher education under the Act, and 5.6 million were enrolled in technical schools for vocational training. The act enabled veterans to successfully integrate into civil society and cultivated a large middle-class and skilled workforce that contributed immeasurably to postwar American prosperity.

But like other New Deal programs, the creation and implementation of the GI Bill was hijacked by racists. Because the military's "national hero" status made it difficult for the Southern camp to take advantage of the race-occupation relationship as it had with other New Deal legislation, the latter's main goal was to prevent the federal "intervention" of the veterans' transition process; The House World Wars Legislative Committee, chaired by racist and Mississippi Rep. John Rankin, with the cooperation of southern senators and various southern lobbying groups, overturned several sets of proposals successively proposed by the presidential team and the Senate Education Committee. The federal career transition program, which delegates execution of the Veterans Assistance Program to the states.

This means that black veterans once again need to face unscrupulous discrimination and hardship by local officials in applying for low-income relief, housing loans, business loans, etc.; In the most important areas of higher education and vocational training, black veterans will suffer an additional blow.

At that time, seventeen southern states, including Virginia and Tennessee, clearly stipulated that whites and people of color could not be educated in the same school. Accept black people. Most of the black schools in the segregated southern states were established under pressure from Congress in the Second Morrill Act of 1890: If segregated states refused to build black schools, they had to less than federal funding; but these black schools, reluctantly established by state governments, are few in number (for example, in 1947 Mississippi was more than half the population black, but only seven of the state’s 33 colleges were allowed to admit blacks), Funding is even more stretched, resulting in limited enrollment (more than 50% of black universities in the United States have less than 250 students, and more than 90% of black universities have less than 1,000 students), and resources in venues, equipment, books and other aspects are seriously scarcity.

Since the implementation of the GI Bill was delegated to the states, the entire system of segregation in higher education was completely retained. Even if black veterans received higher education retirement coupons in accordance with the law, they would either be unable to study because of the limited number of black colleges and universities. door, or you can only transfer to the mixed diploma of the Pheasant University, which is not certified by the National Association of Colleges and Universities. In theory, southern black veterans can also go to the north or the west to study with a discount coupon, but in reality, it is limited by insufficient information, high travel costs, and racial discrimination in many foreign universities (such as Princeton University in 1942). According to the survey, two-thirds of the students oppose the admission of black people) and other factors, this dream is basically impossible to achieve.

The situation is similar in vocational training for veterans. Take Georgia as an example. Of the 246 vocational training programs in the state in 1946, only 6 were open to blacks; not only that, before veterans could sign up for vocational training, they had to first find an employer who was willing to sponsor them. This requirement Further exclusion of blacks from training programs. Of the 120,000 black Southern soldiers who retired during the first two years of the GI Bill, only 7,000 received vocational training.

In addition, the housing policies of the New Deal also had a profound impact on race relations in later generations. For this history, Richard Rothstein, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, combs through the relevant chapters of his new book The Color of Law (Rothstein 2017).

In a nutshell, before the New Deal, the prevailing rule in the US real estate industry was that the down payment for the purchase of a house must be more than half, and the remaining mortgage part should be taken on a high-interest loan that must be repaid within five to seven years. This requirement is enough to discourage most people. , the urban middle- and working-class homeownership rates are particularly low.

After Roosevelt came to power, in order to realize the concept of "Home Ownership", the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) were established successively. Homebuyer guarantees, longer mortgage terms, lower down payment ratios and mortgage interest rates have greatly increased the homeownership rate of the American people, and suburban middle-class communities have sprung up across the United States. By 1950, about half of all home mortgages in the United States were guaranteed by the FHA (and the Veterans Affairs Administration); from 1934 to 1972, the FHA directly helped nearly 11 million households own their homes and 22 million more with repairs house.

But in the process, HOLC and FHA deliberately excluded blacks and other people of color from the scope of home purchase guarantees; from 1934 to 1962, FHA provided a total of $120 billion in home purchase guarantees to new homeowners, of which more than 98% offered to whites.

The FHA's Guarantee Manual clearly states that if a community has "infiltration of inharmonious racial or nationality groups", all properties in that community will be downgraded and not eligible for the FHA guarantee.

This policy not only encourages, but in disguise compels developers to take various measures to expel people of color from the residential areas to be developed, and even from other neighborhoods around the development area (because if there are residents of color such as blacks in the surrounding neighborhoods, FHA The same may be refused). For example, Levittown in Nassau County, New York, which was regarded as the prototype and model of postwar suburban development in the United States, was the first large-scale construction of suburban residential areas in American history. Levitt & Sons clearly stipulated in the purchase contract that all houses in the town could not be resold, leased or loaned to anyone other than the "Caucasian race".

As a result, even in the desegregated northern and western states, blacks and other people of color are actually increasingly concentrated in the "redlining" of the FHA map, subsidized by public housing and banks Inner-city poor communities abandoned by loan programs and various other public services. At the same time, in order to support the development of traffic in the emerging "all-white" suburban residential areas, the government began to build highways on a large scale, and a large part of these highways came from the forced demolition of communities of color, further destroying the original Some community structures exacerbate the formation of "ghetto".

As one of the few constitutional transitions in American political history, Roosevelt's New Deal successfully incorporated white labor into the framework of a strong welfare state by establishing a social security system and various other welfare programs. Eastern European and Southern European whites, mostly at the bottom of society) provided a channel for social ascent and social integration; processes such as the University of Kansas historian David Rodiger's " Working Toward Whiteness " , Roediger 2005) and other monographs are detailed.

But at the same time, the Southern camp’s hostage of the New Deal program, and the appeasement of the rest of the party on this issue, pushed the black community to the fringes of the welfare state, further widening the socioeconomic gap with whites. Thirty years later, the civil rights movement ended legal segregation, but because of the breakdown of the "New Deal alliance", it was no longer able to convene a social and economic plan of the same scale, and could only allow the majority of black families to struggle at the bottom and fall into racial A vicious circle of wealth inequality.

Ironically, when Affirmative Action programs finally began to help blacks in the 1970s, even though these programs were only a drop in the bucket compared to the New Deal's aid to poor whites, they were still ignored. Some people who unknowingly or unintentionally forget the history, take it as "evidence" that the black group "will not work hard and only know how to eat government benefits", and further rationalize their racist complex.

It should be pointed out that racial segregation (and the ubiquitous racism of the New Deal) harmed not just black Americans, but all "people of color" at the time, including Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Hispanics, etc. However, after the reform of the U.S. immigration system in the 1960s, the rest of these "colored people" benefited from the continuous arrival of immigrants of the same ethnicity in their home countries, and gained additional social and human capital. In this context, there are still opportunities to rebuild communities and improve the economic status of ethnic groups based solely on internal resources; for black Americans whose ancestors were plundered and sold as slaves to the New World and whose "hometown" has long since disappeared, blood transfusions through immigration" The shortcut to "self-reliance" was blocked at the beginning, and now it has been left behind by the special car of economic and constitutional transformation . At this time, it would be a big joke to accuse them of "why didn't they work harder to catch up".

Racism is a chronic disease of American politics, and racial justice is the unfinished business of the constitutional transformation of the United States. This lesson has become more and more real and painful today when Trump is on the stage and white supremacy is swaggering.

references:

Bruce Ackerman (2000), We the People, Volume 2: Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Bruce Ackerman (2014), We the People, Volume 3: The Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

Noel Ignatiev (1995), How the Irish Became White (New York, NY: Routledge)

Ira Katznelson (2005), When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York, NY: WW Norton)

Robert Lieberman (1998), Shifting the Color Line: Race and the American Welfare State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)

David Roediger (2005), Working Toward Whiteness: How America's Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs (New York, NY: Basic Books)

Richard Rothstein (2017), The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York, NY: Liveright Publishing)