American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  Conservative critics of the New Deal found allies, at least on some issues, among southern Democrats, who did not necessarily object to expanding government but opposed federal programs that by providing jobs or benefits to African Americans might undermine the southern system of racial rule. During the war, Congress terminated the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Works Progress Administration, the National Youth Administration, and the National Resources Planning Board. The 1944 Democratic Party decision to jettison from its ticket incumbent vice president Henry A. Wallace, a forceful advocate of extending the New Deal at home and abroad, replacing him with Truman, an undistinguished border-state moderate, reflected the changing political balance.

  Pro-business forces generally bested liberal and pro-labor elements in battles over economic reconversion. As was the case after World War I, business wanted Washington to dismantle its wartime economic apparatus as quickly as possible, rejecting liberal hopes for a gradual reconversion aimed at maximizing employment and spending power. Even before the war ended, the government began abruptly terminating contracts for war supplies, leading to sudden factory shutdowns and layoffs, while handing over government-built war facilities to private business.

  The shifting political tide could be seen in the fate of the Full Employment Bill, introduced to Congress in January 1945. During the war, liberals increasingly focused on full employment as the centerpiece for a postwar economic and social program. More optimistic than in the prewar years, when many New Dealers feared permanent economic stagnation, full-employment advocates believed that government policies could ensure a job for every person who wanted one, which in turn would stimulate consumption and economic growth. In its original form, the Full Employment Bill would have required the president to make an annual assessment of the number of jobs needed for full employment and the level of economic activity required to generate them. If he determined that the private sector would not provide sufficient openings, the government would be mandated to intervene through direct spending, loans, and investments to fill the employment shortfall.

  Truman actively backed the Full Employment Bill, as did the CIO and the National Farmers Union. But it faced fierce opposition from business groups and large-scale farmers, who feared that full employment would drive up labor costs. As the employment bill slowly wended its way through the legislative process, one provision after another was stripped from it. Once the war ended and a feared postwar recession failed to materialize, what little enthusiasm there was for a potentially costly new government program drained away. As finally passed in early 1946, the bill retained a rhetorical commitment to government action to ensure a growth-oriented, full-employment society, but it had few mechanisms to achieve it, other than a new Council of Economic Advisers to assist the president.

  The one major piece of social legislation that did get passed during the war adopted the language and some of the programmatic ideas of those seeking to expand the New Deal, while moving fundamentally in a different direction. No law from the 1940s had greater impact on the social and physical landscape than the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. The law grew out of a modest American Legion proposal for mustering-out pay. When a congressional committee tried to reduce the proposed pay level, the Legion vastly expanded its proposal into what it initially called “The Bill of Rights for GI Joe and Jane.”

  The GI Bill built on a precedent established early in the war. In 1942, the Roosevelt administration proposed a Federal Rehabilitation Service to help both civilian and military disabled. Veterans’ groups, with the support of some New Deal opponents, rejected the measure, arguing that veterans deserved special treatment because of their service, not wanting them to be used to promote a broad new federal program. In its stead, Congress passed a rehabilitation bill covering only veterans, reiterating the idea that men and women who served in the armed services deserved separate, better benefits than the general population.

  The GI Bill gave returning veterans $500 mustering-out pay and a comprehensive package of benefits, including health care, up to four years’ tuition and living expenses for college or training school, employment counseling, unemployment benefits for up to a full year, and loans on favorable terms to purchase a home, farm stock or equipment, or to start a business (like the many diners onetime Army and Navy cooks put up across industrial America). Although the Roosevelt administration had its own veterans’ bill, the president prudently accepted the American Legion proposal, which went through Congress with little opposition in spite of its expansiveness and expense. (In 1948, the GI Bill accounted for 15 percent of the federal budget; the education provisions for World War II veterans alone ended up costing $14.5 billion.)

  In its language of expanded rights, and its provision of what in other contexts might have been called social democratic benefits, the GI Bill resembled the proposals of the unreconstructed New Dealers. But its authors rejected some of their key premises. Most obviously, the GI Bill benefited only a particular segment of society. Many New Deal measures had not been universal, including the Social Security Act, National Labor Relations Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which excluded large parts of the workforce and privileged wage earners over homemakers. But New Dealers saw the exclusions as necessary and hopefully temporary concessions to powerful lobbies like farm groups, which succeeded at blocking coverage for agricultural labor, and southern Democrats, who got domestic workers (mostly African Americans in their region) shut out. The GI Bill, by contrast, had categorical distinctions at its very heart.

  In some respects, the GI Bill did represent a move toward equal rights. In contrast to New Deal programs that either explicitly provided inferior benefits to blacks or treated disproportionately African American groups, like sharecroppers and domestic workers, more poorly than heavily white ones, the GI Bill treated black and white veterans equally. For this reason, Mississippi congressman John Rankin led a last-minute effort to kill it. But in practice the GI Bill also reinforced or created inequities. For one thing, in a segregated world, many African Americans found themselves less able than their white peers to actually use their GI benefits because colleges would not admit them, businesses would not sell to them, and public laws and private practices limited where they could buy homes. For another thing, though female veterans could take advantage of the GI Bill—getting somewhat less generous benefits than men—there were far fewer GI Janes than GI Joes, since women had not been subject to the draft and caps had been placed on the number allowed to enlist. With women making up only 2 percent of the armed services, the effect of the GI Bill was to further the economic and social distance between the sexes. The GI Bill also became the first federal benefit program to explicitly discriminate against gays and lesbians, when the Veterans Administration decided to deny benefits to veterans given “undesirable” discharges for homosexuality.

  Beyond its rejection of universalism, the GI bill departed from the New Deal in its stress on individual benefits and individual mobility. The New Deal provided many of its benefits through government institutions that directly hired people, housed them, educated and entertained them. The GI Bill took a different tack, giving funds to individuals to shop for education, housing, employment, and business opportunities in the private market. (Health care came directly from the government through Veterans Administration hospitals and clinics.) In promoting its bill, the American Legion used the language of individual freedom, not social provision. Some of the strongest congressional support for the measure came from conservative critics of the New Deal.

  The GI Bill proved one of the most successful pieces of legislation in the nation’s history. By providing veterans with generous unemployment and education benefits, it prevented a postwar flooding of the labor market that might have led to soaring joblessness and discontent. The bill funded a massive expansion of higher education and enabled veterans to equip themselves for upward mobility as wage earners
or businessmen. GI Bill mortgages financed one-fifth of all single-family homes built between the end of World War II and 1966. Yet in easing the economic and social transition from war to peace and helping a generation of young men and women reach a level of comfort unknown to most Americans before the war, the bill launched postwar social policy on a trajectory that favored aid to particular groups over universal benefits, promotion of individual mobility over the creation of new social institutions, and pumping money into the private marketplace over the direct provision of government benefits.

  Rights

  The idea of an economic bill of rights or a “Bill of Rights for GI Joe and Jane” to provide economic and social benefits built on the presumption that political rights already received adequate protection. In practice that was far from the case. By standards that came to be broadly accepted in the late twentieth century, the United States had serious deficiencies as a democratic polity at the end of World War II.

  The United States had never been a universal democracy. Over its history, political rights had expanded and contracted, with some groups gaining rights even as others lost them. The New Deal had not made the extension or protection of political rights a high priority. Roosevelt refused to endanger his southern white support by backing measures to protect African Americans from discrimination or violence or to ensure their right to vote. The rhetoric of World War II, however, with its stress on freedom as the defining characteristic of the United States and its allies, along with the need to mobilize millions of African Americans into military and industrial service, made it more difficult for the government to ignore glaring examples of undemocratic ways. During the war, Congress guaranteed the right of all soldiers, regardless of race, to vote without paying a poll tax, while the Supreme Court issued its ruling against whites-only primaries. Congress also eliminated long-existing bars that effectively prevented Asian immigrants from ever achieving citizenship. African Americans and their allies took advantage of wartime conditions to push harder for equal rights, with the percentage of southern blacks registered to vote increasing fourfold between 1940 and 1947, from 3 to 12 percent.

  Wartime advances still left a huge gap between democratic verbiage and political practice. Across the South, poll taxes, literacy tests, threats of violence, and the simple refusal by local registrars to enroll them kept the vast majority of blacks away from the polls. Indians, too, faced obstacles to voting. An Arizona law banning Indian voting—one of several such state laws—kept Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian who achieved fame as one of the flag raisers at Iwo Jima, from casting a ballot. In many localities, whites also faced high hurdles when they sought to vote. The poll tax, in place in five southern states through the 1950s, kept more whites than blacks away from the polls. South Carolina and Alabama had property requirements for voting. In one postwar election, out of one and a quarter million Mississippians of voting age, only 180,000 actually cast a ballot. Residents of the territories of Alaska, Hawaii (which in 1950 exceeded three states in population), Puerto Rico (which exceeded twenty-three), and the District of Columbia (which exceeded thirteen) had no representation in Congress and could not vote for the president.

  Even when a citizen did get to vote, that vote might count for very little. At the end of World War II, seven western states had fourteen senators to represent their 3.6 million people, the same number as represented 51.9 million residents of seven eastern states. Failure to reapportion as population urbanized introduced further inequities into congressional representation. In Illinois, which at the end of World War II still used congressional district lines drawn in 1901, Cook County had over half the state population but only ten of twenty-six House seats.

  Many states had similar skews in the makeup of their state legislatures, with generally more conservative rural areas having disproportionate representation. In California, half the population lived in San Francisco or Los Angeles but elected only two out of forty state senators. Georgia picked its governor and congressmen not by popular vote but by a system that gave the winning candidate in each county a certain number of “units” weighted to heavily favor rural and small counties. In 1946, the governor and a congressman were elected by the unit count even though they lost the popular vote.

  In addition to their geographic disproportionality, legislative bodies failed to mirror the population in their sexual and racial composition. In 1949, fewer than 3 percent of state legislators were female. Congress had but eight female House members and one female senator. (Three had taken over their husbands’ seats when they died, including Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith, the best-known woman on Capitol Hill.) Only two African Americans sat in the House—William Dawson representing the South Side of Chicago and Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—and none in the Senate.

  The structure of representation gave a conservative tilt to national and state politics. Working-class men and women tended to be more liberal than their middle- and upper-class peers, but millions of them, particularly nonwhites, could not vote, while millions more, living in cities or big eastern and midwestern states, had their political weight diminished by unequal apportionment. Liberals in effect needed a supermajority to achieve power. Only at moments of massive support for change, like the early and mid-1930s, could liberal reformers translate popular backing into legislative action. Had the makeup of Congress and the state legislatures mirrored popular political views, the chances for an expanded New Deal would have been far greater.

  Congress’s own rules further devalued the political influence of some Americans while elevating that of others. The use of seniority to choose committee chairs favored the southern states, where a one-party system meant that incumbents rarely faced serious challenge. In the Senate, the rule requiring a two-thirds vote to cut off debate (“cloture”) gave the South an effective veto over legislation. While these rules were defended in terms of abstract political principles, southern congressmen used the institutional arrangements that favored them primarily to funnel federal appropriations to their region and to block any move toward advancing the civil rights of African Americans. Repeatedly during the 1940s, southern senators used the two-thirds rule to kill anti-lynching and anti–poll tax legislation and bills to make permanent the wartime Fair Employment Practices Committee.

  Various state constitutional provisions also limited popular democracy. All but five state legislatures met only every other year, and in many cases for just brief sessions. Many states forbade governors from succeeding themselves, with two-year terms of office common. With most elected state officials rarely present, lacking experience, or both, lobbyists and political insiders wielded inordinate power.

  The right to a fair trial, like the right to vote, often proved illusory, in spite of seemingly clear constitutional guarantees. In the South, African Americans facing serious charges routinely suffered beatings in efforts to force confessions, and received only token and often utterly incompetent representation by court-appointed lawyers, in spite of a series of prewar Supreme Court rulings that theoretically gave black defendants greater rights. In places where African Americans or Native Americans were denied the right to vote, they generally could not sit on juries either. Furthermore, in most of the country, women were either barred or discouraged from jury service. In 1946, the Supreme Court forbade the exclusion of women from federal juries in states where they could serve on state juries, but the states themselves could and did continue to discriminate (as did federal courts in states that limited women’s jury rights). While many states loosened jury restrictions after the war, three states continued to forbid women from serving on juries into the 1960s, with the last, Mississippi, dropping its bar in 1968. Even then, in twenty-two states women could be excused from jury service on grounds not available to men. Economic conditions also shaped jury composition; in many parts of the country, both state and federal courts systematically favored wealthier individuals in picking petit and grand juries, while weeding ou
t workers and the unemployed.

  The democratic rhetoric of the New Deal and the fight against fascism, along with wartime demographic shifts that pulled hundreds of thousands of African Americans out of the rural South, brought increased scrutiny to the limitations on the basic rights of Americans. For the first time since the mass disenfranchisement of black voters at the end of the nineteenth century, equal rights for African Americans got placed on the national agenda—debated in Congress, supported by various black, liberal, and labor groups, and discussed in books by African Americans and white social scientists, most famously Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study of racial inequality, An American Dilemma. But actual progress toward guaranteeing basic political rights proved extremely limited.

  Labor

  Elections and legislation helped determine the trajectory of postwar society, but so did popular mobilizations, especially by union members and, to a lesser extent, consumers. The union movement loomed large in the immediate postwar years, not only because of its ability to shut down much of the nation’s economy. Compared to other non-elite organizations, unions had unusually rich financial and ideological resources and greater capacity to mobilize mass action. In the mid- and late 1940s, they played a larger part in shaping the political economy than would be the case in later years.

  Even before World War II ended, tens of thousands of workers began walking off their jobs. Tens of thousands soon became hundreds of thousands, and hundreds of thousands became millions, in the largest strike wave in U.S. history. At its height, in January 1946, nearly two million workers were off the job. All told, some five million workers struck in the year following VJ Day.

  The postwar strikes stemmed from specific employer-union disputes over contracts and grievances, but they had broad implications, as labor and management battled to establish the parameters of postwar union power and the relationships among wages, prices, and profits. Given the nature of the issues involved and the repeated efforts by the Truman administration to prevent or end strikes through fact-finding boards, administrative rulings, and threats of repression, the industrial conflict took on a highly political cast.