part two Civil and Social Rights “The Right to Work Is the Right to Live!”

the right to work

African-American spokesmen demanded fair employment in universal terms, especially in reference to the duties of citizens. “Employment is a civil right,” Lester Granger of the Urban League asserted.^[311] In February 1943 the St. Louis Argus exemplified the reasoning found throughout the black press: “If the Negro is good enough to die for his country and his state, then we declare that he is good enough to enjoy the fruits of his sacrifices just as any other citizen.” A local pamphlet by Randolph’s March on Washington Movement (MOWM) protested employment discrimina­tion as “undemocratic, un-American and pro-Hitler... while thousands of our sons and brothers, white and black are on the battle fronts of the world fighting and dying in the name of democracy.”^[312] The citizen-soldier was male, but the citizen-worker concept now included women who could make claims for citizenship on the basis of contributing to the war effort. Recognition of the citizen-worker lay behind the MOWM demands for entry into defense jobs, just as the citizen-soldier fueled calls for ending the Jim Crow army. But the dying/employment trade-off favored men even when it offered space for women to protest discrimi-

nation on the basis of belonging to the African-American community. The struggle was often masculinized: The Ladies Auxiliary of the BSCP spoke of their men battling “for the right to live and labor and enjoy the fruits of their toil.”^[313]

The lack of economic opportunity affronted manhood. As one activist proclaimed in terms merging the male breadwinner identity with that of the father-protector, and distinguishing by gender the consequences of economic discrimination:

I have less venom in my heart for the man who lynches me than I do for the man who deprives me of my opportunity to work.

Randolph’s 1941 “Call to Negro America,” that is,“To March on Wash­ington for Jobs and Equal Participation in National Defense,” appealed to a national creed of democracy, freedom, justice, and equality of opportu­nity (the “American creed” coined by Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal, with help from Ralph Bunche and other African-American scholars).^[315] He demanded fulfillment of its universal terms.^[316] The “Call” declared, “if American democracy will not give jobs to its toilers because of race or color... it is a hollow mockery and belies the principles for which it is supposed to stand.” Expressing the essence of the “Double V” campaign, the MOWM believed “that democracy, like charity, begins at home.”^[317] For African Americans were loyal Americans. As one black busi­nessman seeking war contracts wired the president, “They are the largest bloc of simon-pure unadulterated Americans without European or foreign ties or allegiances... they have never betrayed America, but on the con­trary have given to this country more of unrequited toil than any other element of our citizenship.”^[318]

Using religious cadences, Randolph linked patriotism and morality to economic demands that could potentially rearrange the social order. He explained: “Negroes seek opportunity and not alms.” Defense jobs would improve the standard of living of African Americans, leading to “more education and recreation for the children, a greater security and assurance of more abundant life.” But inclusion also “will help to cleanse the soul of America... strengthen our country’s foundation for national unity and national defense and give it the moral and spiritual force to achieve the preservation of our democratic faiths.”^[319] As a socialist, he understood the right to work as a facilitator of social welfare.

The Roosevelt administration responded to Randolph’s pressure by issuing Executive Order 8802 in July 1941 to end discrimination in indus­tries vital to war production. The order created the FEPC as an inde­pendent agency; it later became part of the War Manpower Commission until a subsequent executive order, 9346, reconstituted the FEPC under the President’s Office of Emergency Management in May 1943. The administration planned to sell the FEPC “to the country as primarily designed to prevent limitations of the use of all manpower rather than as a present basis for the general advance of the Negro,” explained White House assistant Jonathan Daniels.^[321] Although a weak agency that relied on public exposure and persuasion, with presidential withdrawal of war contracts as an ultimate, unlikely threat, the FEPC represented a beach­head for civil rights within the federal government. With a committed interracial staff, it legitimized black protest.

The FEPC’s first executive secretary, Lawrence Cramer, told the National Conference of Social Work in 1943, “If for no other reason than the practical necessity arising out of manpower shortages, there is need for vigorous, prompt and effective action in eliminating irrelevant con­siderations other than qualification and capacity in matters of labor supply.” The agency continued to stand for “no special privilege” but “a fair break.” Proponents of the FEPC shared with Randolph a general rhetoric of democracy, opportunity, and fairness. Cramer, the former gov­ernor of the Virgin Islands, was a liberal moralist who offered more than a resuscitated Taylorism to justify federal intervention in the hiring and promotion practices of private businesses. He viewed human rights as a basis for national rights, reminding his audience that “any plan of action must, of course, take into account the deep-rooted and emotional char­acter of prejudice based on race, creed, color and national origin. At the same time there must be recognition of the fact that these prejudices are the raw materials of wars and must be greatly decreased or eliminated if we are eventually to emerge into a period of prolonged world peace.”²⁴

Fair employment meant equality and a challenge to segregation because war plants could not afford to maintain physical barriers or duplicate equipment or facilities. For George M. Johnson, the FEPC’s assistant exec­utive secretary and dean of Howard University Law School, segregation undermined equality of opportunity. So even though the FEPC “has not taken any steps to do away with racial segregation as such,” as critics charged, “the custom of racial segregation frequently presents employ­ment problems.”²⁵ FEPC investigators often argued that “installing of seg­regated duplicate facilities cannot but lead to discriminatory employment

A. Davis and G. James Flemming; and the sociologist John Hope II. For a rundown on some of the more prominent members of the FEPC, see Reed, Seedtime, 350—7.

24 On Cramer, see Reed, Seedtime, 24. Lawrence W Cramer, “Available and Needed Workers Have Been Barred from Employment,” speech at the regional meeting of the National Conference of Social Work in New York City, Mar. 11, 1943, in folder: “Speech - Regional Meeting,” in FEPC papers, reel 75H. Cramer was the former governor of the Virgin Islands who resigned the post “over the construction of public housing that lacked plumbing facilities.” For “fair break,” see “Report to the President,” Aug. 27, 1945, 2, in office files of Ross, in folder: “Letters to the President,” reel 3H.

25 George Johnson, “The Segregation of War Workers Because of Race, Creed, Color or National Origin,” Apr. 21, 1943, before the New York chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, 3, in folder: “FEPC: Johnson, George, 1941-43,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 14. On Johnson, see Reed, Seedtime, 24, 355.

practices and would be in violation of [the] Executive Order.”^[322] Because the right to earn a living is a fundamental right, “there can be no sepa­rate but equal theory applied”; thus segregation in employment consti­tuted discrimination.^[323]

The agency fought major battles against Jim Crow auxiliary unions, especially those run by the AFL Boilermakers on the West Coast. In label­ing segregated unions discriminatory and finding that unions were public entities rather than private clubs the California Supreme Court in 1944 constructed its argument around segregation’s restriction of “the funda­mental right to work for a living” and thus provided further justification for defenders of the FEPC. Drafters of the federal FEPC bill refused to consider an AFL recommendation in 1947 that would have permitted Jim Crow auxiliaries as long as they did not deprive members of employment opportunities - a dubious proposition given the wartime record of seg­regated unions.^[324]

Fair employment became an extension of the rights of labor, indeed of the Wagner Act, in an analogy that FEPC Chairman Monsignor Francis J. Haas used before the 1943 AFL National Convention.^[325] This con­nection made fair employment more universal, less associated with the African-American civil rights cause that had forced its birth and perhaps easier to sell to white unionists, who could compare their own position with others denied equal rights under the law.^[326] Just as “the right to orga­nize is a natural right,” so Haas viewed fair employment as “minority group members’ [right] to obtain opportunity for economic security.”The FEPC would open participation in the trade union with all its benefits, for it would promote the right to earn a living.^[327] Other Catholic priests

Fair Employment and the Quest for Social Citizenship 129 similarly argued “that this same principle [the right to work] applies to the minority-group working man (notably the Negro) exactly as it applies to all working men, or to working men in general.”³² CIO leaders reit­erated such sentiments when analogizing the obstacles faced by workers before the Wagner Act to those faced by minority workers before the FEPC legislation. In 1942 the CIO responded to black unionists by cre­ating the Committee Against Racial Discrimination (CARD), which over the years rallied unionists in support of the FEPC.³³

These defenses came from a reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amend­ment that emphasized the rights of employees but also drew on the police power of the state to protect the general welfare. As George Johnson approvingly quoted the U.S. Supreme Court in Truax v. Raich (1915):“The right to work for a living in the common occupations of the commu­nity is of the very essence of the personal freedom and opportunity that it was the purpose of the Amendment to secure.”³⁴ The FEPC stood as the last in a series of labor standards that restricted the actions of employ­ers against the public welfare. Like child-labor and the wage-and-hour laws - the latter named the “Fair” Labor Standards Act (FLSA) - fair employment restricted freedom of action, the notion of “freedom of con­tract” which, when applied by the court to wage labor and corporations, had perverted the meaning of the Reconstruction amendments in the late nineteenth century. Fairness in employment thus belonged to the Roo­sevelt court’s remaking of labor law.³⁵

75H. Significantly, when Walter White suggested that the National Labor Relations Act be amended to prohibit racial discrimination by unions, administration officials rejected that idea, but said it could be incorporated into the executive order. See “President Roosevelt Opposes Negro March on Washington,” 4-5.

32 Richard J. Roche, O.M.I., “F.E.P.C.: A Challenge to Democracy,” extension of remarks by Hon. David I.Walsh, May 15, 1945, Congressional Record, 79th Congress, lst sess., 1, reprint.

33 E.g., John Gibson, state president, Michigan CIO Council, in Fair Employment Practice Council of Metropolitan Detroit, “Brief Extracts of Testimony of Michigan Citizens in Support of State Fair Employment Practice Legislation,” typescript, Mar. 1945, in folder: “FEPC: Inquiries, 1944-46,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 10. On CARD and the CIO’s mixed wartime racial policies, see Robert H. Zieger, The CIO: 1933-1955 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995), 152-63. Both the AFL and the CIO had a representative on the FEPC. For the compli­cated ongoing struggle for racial equality even within a union supportive of civil rights, see Kevin Boyle, “�?There Are No Union Sorrows that the Union Can’t Heal’: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the United Automobile Workers, 1940-1960,” Labor History 36 (winter 1995): 5-23.

34 239 U.S. 33; Johnson, “The Segregation of War Workers,” 5, 7; see also, Harold Dublirer, “Legis­lation Outlawing Racial Discrimination in Employment,” Lawyers Guild Review 5 (Mar.-Apr. 1945), 1-9, reprint NAACP. He argues that “the right to life is the most basic of all civil rights,” which cannot be fulfilled without “the right to work” (p. 8).

35 FEPC proponents were conscious of such connections. See “Land of the Free,” a speech to be adapted to local situations in states considering FEPC legislation, in folder: “FEPC: General, 1949,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 13. See also Melvyn Dubofsky, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1994), 137-67; however, he has only a

The attachment of the FEPC to an overall American creed, but par­ticularly to the rights of labor, distinguished the rhetoric of agency pro­ponents in Congressional debates from 1944, when they first attempted to make the agency permanent, to the early 1950s. In supporting the early bills, liberal Republican Charles M. LaFollette of Indiana found justifica­tion for the FEPC in the constitutionality of the Wagner Act, the FLSA, and the Walsh-Healey Public Contracts Act. These bills proclaimed “the right to work and to seek work without discrimination” as an unabridged immunity. LaFollette emphasized a newly found property rights interest that sustained the Wagner Act rather than the state’s police power that had justified other labor standards. A job had become “a form of prop­erty,” moving from “the concept of a commodity... [to] the dignity of at least a quasi property right.”³⁶

This right to gainful employment constituted the legacy of the New Deal, extended through the opportunity to hold a job promised by the FEPC and through Roosevelt’s 1945 State of the Union call for “a second bill of rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all - regardless of station, race, or creed.” This right became one component of “the economic rights of American citizenship,” which Roosevelt, like Randolph, defined “as the right to a decent home, to a good education, to good medical care, to social security, to reasonable farm income.” In demanding “an Economic Bill of Rights,” Randolph could say it no better. As early as 1943 he addressed rallies of African Americans in support of a permanent FEPC organized similarly to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which administered the Wagner Act.³⁷

Jobs and social welfare and civil and social rights were two sides of the same equation, a fulfillment of the Declaration of Independence. As the

descriptive discussion of FEPC, 187-8. For the connections between the Fourteenth Amendment and wage labor, see Amy Dru Stanley, “Conjugal Bonds and Wage Labor: Rights to Contract in the Age of Emancipation,”Journal of American History 75 (Sept. 1988): 471-500; on the FLSA, see Vivien Hart, “No Englishman Can Understand: Fairness and Minimum Wage Laws in Britain and America, 1923-1938,” in Brian Holden-Reid and John White, eds., American Studies: Essays in Honor of Marcus Cunliffe (London, 1991), 249-69.

36 “Fair Employment Practice Act,” extension of remarks of Hon. Charles M. LaFollette of Indiana, House of Representatives, June 15, 1944, Congressional Record, 78th Congress, 2d sess., reprint of remarks, 2; for use of “the right to a job” as a “property right” for other legislation, see Com­mittee on Social Legislation, Philadelphia Chapter, National Lawyers’ Guild, “Brief In Support of Proposed Philadelphia Fair Employment Practices Ordinance,” c. 1946, in folder:“FEPC: General, 1946,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 13; for an early bill, H.R. 3986, 78th Congress, 2d sess., 2, in folder: “FEPC: General, 1944,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 12.

37 “�?State of Nation’ Message: President Ignored FEPC In Recommendations to Congress,” Pitts­burgh Courier, Jan. 13, 1945, 1, 4; Daniel Bell, “A. Philip Randolph Leads Drive for Permanent FEPC,” New Leader, Sept. 18, 1943.

New York Post put it, “for the chance to have a job is certainly an impor­tant step in his [sic] pursuit of happiness.” For New York’s left-wing independent Vito Marcantonio, the FEPC was “a continuation of the Emancipation Proclamation”; he too discovered “the genesis of FEPC” in the Declaration of Independence: “And when they said, �?All men are created equal,’ they meant that every man had a right to work, irrespec­tive of his race, color, and creed.” His use of the Declaration pointedly omitted “pursuit of happiness” or property.^[328] Lauding the “real Ameri­canism of the FEPC,” African-American Congressman William Dawson of Chicago embraced the cry of other supporters: “The right to work is synonymous with the right to live.”^[329]

California Representative Ellis E. Patterson associated the FEPC with full employment, a bill for which was also pending before Congress in June 1945. Both bills represented “the right to work... [as] one of the most basic rights for which man strives.” Patterson wrapped his arguments around Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter with its call for “freedom from want,” which he called, “the right to work, the right to live” defined as “the right to earn the money with which to buy food, shelter, clothing, medical attention. Without these basic bodily requirements you and I cannot live.”^[330] Fair employment equated with Roosevelt’s “jobs for all who can work.”^[331]

The Atlantic Charter and Roosevelt’s subsequent addresses offered a U.S. version of social citizenship, a vision of the welfare state upheld most strongly by religious liberals. The Detroit Council of Churches presented this creed when connecting the right to work through fair employment with “the right to have robust and healthy bodies, the right to a harmo­nious family life, the right to secure the education needed for modern living... and the right to provide for their families the environment that permits the development of moral character and a wholesome attitude toward life.”^[332] In keeping with the gender ideology of the period, this familialism assumed men as the referent to the “men” whose rights required guarantees. Full-employment legislation significantly excluded housewives and mothers from the potential labor force, a move that further illuminates the gendered meaning of the right to work.^[333]

Opponents of the FEPC presented a consistent interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, embracing both Plessy v. Ferguson and the Slaugh­terhouse dissents.^[334] These linked freedom of association, or the right to seg­regation, with freedom of contract. Some segregationists claimed that blacks’ “freedom to work and earn their own way has not been denied. They own property, and the laws of the States protect them, just as they protect others.” Supporters of states’ rights insisted that a permanent FEPC meant the nationalization of business and, thus, federal bureaucratization, which extended its influence from economic to social relations.^[335] Rep­resentative Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina warned, “when you under­take to regulate the private lives of people and their private business with political and police power you are creating a dangerous situation.” The FEPC infringed on employers and union members “to choose their asso­ciates,” thus “interfering with a peculiarly intimate freedom,” an Arkansas representative contended. Or, as another more forcefully exclaimed, “It would mean that the employee would be required to work side by side with individuals he would not associate with except by compulsion.” The FEPC, belatedly lauded by the AFL’s William Green as the antidote to Nazism, would become a Gestapo. During the initial attempt to gain con­gressional funding for the agency in 1944, Representative John Rankin of Mississippi asserted: “They want to dictate to you who shall work in your factory, who shall work on your farm, who shall work in your office, who shall go to your schools, and who shall eat at your table, or intermarry with your children.” But, as Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey later countered, “we are not talking about marital rela­tions. We are not even talking about childbirth. We are talking about employment.”^[336]

Others viewed the FEPC as merely interfering in the labor contract. Utah wool growers claimed, “free enterprise and production will receive serious set-back if the FEPC bill should become law.” Trade union oppo­nents asked “why not go all the way and take in discrimination against a man because he does not belong to a labor union?” The Committee for Constitutional Government, a pro-business front, charged that the FEPC was “an attempt by vote-seeking politicians to barter the individual’s eco­nomic freedom for the votes of minority groups” and reprinted a speech by Georgia Senator Richard B. Russell attacking the FEPC as “unfair” for disadvantaging “average,” that is, nonminority, American citizens “in the competition for jobs and promotions.” Thus freedom of contract served as a code for white supremacy, which continued to rely on sexu­alized portraits of social equality.^[337]

By the late 1940s the “right to work” had taken on another mean­ing, that is, the right of employers to run a nonunion or open shop, embodied in the Taft-Hartley Labor Relations Act (1947).To the conster­nation of FEPC supporters who associated right to work with union rights (and whose National Committee received significant funds from CIO unions), Republican National Chairman Guy George Gabrielson in 1949 defined freedom as “the right to work and to pick one’s own employees.”^[338]

Thus, two notions of freedom existed, but both relied on a male ideal worker; neither embraced the unpaid labor of women in the home. During World War II black women, long forced into nonfamilial labor, sought upgraded occupations. White women, the referent behind the public discussion of “women,” sought inclusion under the general under­standing of “work” as paid labor, which ironically disparaged the repro­ductive activities of mother work and household maintenance for which all women were responsible.^[339] FEPC defenders reflected such gendered thought. They wrote a radio skit that featured women as consumers, explaining the significance of the FEPC. A different skit portrayed union, business, and religious men discussing discrimination in the workplace. Men suffered job discrimination; women could punish such wrongs by wielding their purchasing power.^[340]

By connecting production to consumption, the National Council for a Permanent FEPC became part of the larger liberal concern with plan­ning against a depression that many feared would result from postwar reconversion.^[341] Defenders understood the FEPC as sharing “the philoso­phy” of Social Security as well as of the FLSA, “a continuation of a Federal policy directed against the wiping out of the depressed groups in the United States.”^[342] New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez introduced a bill in September 1944 “Prohibiting Discrimination in Employment Because of Race, Creed, Color, National Origin, or Ancestry.” In this bill he argued, “We cannot afford to return to the situation in which efficient workers are separated from their machines and condemned to unem­ployment and the social evils which grow out of unemployment merely because of their skin color, ancestry, or religion.” Raising “the standard of living and purchasing power,” he continued, became one of the goals of a permanent FEPC, whose enactment would also “promote... national harmony and efficiency,” prevent race riots, and improve U.S. standing in the ideological battle for the hearts and minds of a postcolonial world.^[343]

The FEPC stood as an alternative to relief or welfare, an employment policy intertwined with welfare policy. The NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall warned New York state legislators that unless they passed an FEPC bill, “no blame can be attached to Negro citizens... who find themselves unable to provide for their families because of discrimination in employ­ment and are thereby relegated to relief rolls.” An Ohio congressman face­tiously asked, “If a Negro has a right to work and no employer has an obligation to hire him for work for which he is properly qualified, then does the Government have the duty to provide such work? Or does the Negro have a duty to go on relief?” As the executive secretary of the Fair Employment Practice Council of Metropolitan Detroit testified in 1945, “Either we cotton to having both frustrated taxpayers and frustrated recip­ients of relief - or else we provide jobs whereby taxes can be more evenly shared by all.... Under an FEPC, those who are not denied equal eco­nomic opportunities will be enabled to provide housing, food and medical costs out of their own earnings.” Having the right to work, they would be able to partake in the right to live; this formulation, however, was slip­pery. It privatized citizenship rights by suggesting that access to jobs could substitute for social benefits like the universal health insurance then pro­jected as a next step toward social security.^[344]

Not all supporters of the FEPC interpreted it as a promise of income. Many in Congress emphasized “equal opportunity” rather than job guar- antees.Their denial that the FEPC had anything to do with “racial equal­ity or social equality” was often a disingenuous counter to Dixiecrat rantings.⁵⁵ Chairman Malcolm Ross (Haas’s successor) defended “equality of work opportunity” before Congress in 1945. The FEPC,

it would seem to me, no more involves social relationships than does the Wages and Hours law [FLSA] and the National Labor Relations Act [Wagner Act]. The mass of the American people can do as they please in their private lives but when it comes to earning a living, someone else with the hire and fire power offers the terms and conditions under which a man can earn his bread.... It is with any possible unfair barriers to a worker — because of the color of his skin or religious belief or national origin — that this bill is addressed.⁵⁶

Ross presumed the male worker and the family wage, as did Catholic lib­erals like Haas, who believed “it is unwise to employ mothers with young children [and] school boys and old men should not be employed, if we can help it.”⁵⁷ Before the NAACP in Baltimore Ross declared “that the individual worker’s relationship to his job is the most important fact about his life, out of which comes the satisfaction of work done, the content of a decent family life, a sound integration of himself with his neighbors, his community and his country.” Although he began his testimony by noting, “We need not waste time considering this problem as one on the social plane,” it was precisely because questions of employment never existed apart from what opponents of the FEPC called “the social plane” and from what African Americans experienced in their daily lives, that the FEPC threatened existing social hierarchies.⁵⁸

working-class voices

Randolph envisioned the MOWM as a place where “little men can tell their story their own way” about “jobs... sought but never got.”⁵⁹ The

Is the Right to Live,” 3, typescript, in folder: “FEPC: Inquiries, 1944—46,” in NAACP papers, microfilm ed., pt. 13, ser. B, reel 10. On National Health Insurance, see works in progress by Colin Davis and Jennifer Klein.

55 See, e.g., “Fair Employment Practices Committee,” extension of remarks of Hon. Thomas E. Scanlon, June 23, 1944, Appendix to the Congressional Record, vol. 90, p. A3326.

56 “Testimony of Malcolm Ross, Chairman, President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, Before the House Labor Committee in Hearings on HR 3986 — 78th Congress, Second Session,” 1, 2, in office files of Max Berking, in FEPC papers, reel 3H.

57 Haas,“Address,” 10; see also Roche,“F,E.P,C.,” 1.

58 Advance Release, “Test of Address by Malcolm Ross,” in folder: “Baltimore NAACP Speech, Ross, June 18, 1944,” 6, in FEPC papers, reel 69H.

59 A. Philip Randolph, “A Reply to My Critics,” Chicago Defender, June 12, 1943, quoted in Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, 60. files of the FEPC contain stories that “little men” - but also women - constructed out of the American creed of equality, fairness, and justice. The black working class drew on public discussions of fairness, which like the FEPC itself provided “a lexicon of legitimacy and authority.”^[345] Addressed to the president, the first lady, and the FEPC, and sometimes shepherded by a race-advancement organization, these letters protested the refusal of employers to hire or upgrade, unfair treatment by unions, and poor working conditions. Most of all, they requested better treatment, dignity, and citizenship rights. We might read them as reflections of, as well as windows on the system of meaning through which members of the black working class named the experience of discrimination. Written to initiate complaints or as pleas for redress, these letters are expressions of agency, translations of “the right to work” as “the right to life.”^[346]

Nearly all the letters demanded rights on the basis of being “an American citizen.”^[347] Like Congressman Dawson, they asked “for ourselves - the same thing that every American citizen has a right to ask for.”^[348] Like Randolph, they questioned a democracy that would send men to die while withholding citizenship rights. A twenty-one-year-old woman from Portland, Oregon, posed a typical question: “Is America a true democracy?” when black men could be drafted but she was denied a job. One woman pointed out: “Colored boys die side by side with white boys but the white and colored wives can’t work together.”^[349] A Seattle woman told the president, “We are all out for double victory over here and over there.” Another proclaimed, “Our Constitution declares All men equal, and isn’t that what our boys are shedding their blood and giving their lives for in this present war?” A widow with “nephews and everybody son in the army” wrote that she “want[ed] to work to help my country by buying defense bond to help win the war. I feel it my duty to do so because its everybody war.”^[350] Another woman expected Roosevelt to deliver “our rights” because “we voted for you in the election.... We pay every tax any one else pay. We buy bonds. We give in the war chest funds but yet we are denied the right to work; it isnt fair.”^[351] In claiming citizenship rights these women spoke of duties as well as privileges. After declaring, “I Frankie Lee Mitchell is an American Negro woman,” one proud African American pled: “As an American citizen I feel we should have a fair share of jobs. So please take this letter under consideration and break that southern style of democracy that some southern try to prac­tice here in Richmond [California].”^[352]

Men also spoke of “fighting for my rights.”^[353] Like New York Con­gressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. they believed “it is high time that we start winning the war at home as well as abroad; that we make America safe for democracy.”^[354] They fought those who sought “to deprive me of my rights.” Men commented on how the draft board “will not refuse me because I am a Negro.” A petition by young men, who realized their vul­nerability to the draft, threatened, “We are going to have our rights. The Co. won’t stop us, neither will the white workers, if there has to be blood shed to get our rights, we are willing to give our all Rather than die

on the battle fields, we all will die in Plant #3.”^[355] One narrated a tale of trials and tribulations involving his arrest in a plant altercation while his wife was delivering their baby alone in a hospital. He named himself “a brain-child of America and an ardent follower of Democracy, and like

Fair Employment and the Quest for Social Citizenship 139 unto the ever-loyal Job devoted to the Christ, I say to you as He said to them.... Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.”⁷¹

A migrant from St. Louis to Portland, Oregon, expressed his dissatis­faction with discrimination, exposing multiple themes scattered through­out the letters. Complaining about discriminatory assignment of housing in the crowded shipyard communities, this veteran of World War I, with sons in the armed forces, viewed Kaiser’s refusal to upgrade him to a lea­derman as an affront to his dignity, an interference with his breadwinner status. He confided in the Roosevelts: “All you can is Nigger this, Nigger the other + I cant get living quarters for my wife + family although there are plenty vacancys set aside for white people but we colored people cant live in them.” Wanting to do his part, he needed “a decent job now + I am looking to you + you only to get it for me. $50.00 per mo. com­pensation will not support me + my family.” Rejecting segregation as unfair while African Americans fought for their country, he asked for “My race the authority + privalages the white race + foreigner have.”⁷² Another World War I veteran and NAACP member protested being brought out to Vancouver only to be forced from his job by his gang leader, writing the FEPC that “I am in need of your help to have a job and to care for my family.”⁷³ One Michigan man, about to be inducted into the army, reaffirmed his manhood by defending his wife: “How do you think I feel going to lose my life for freedom an my wife back here been push an shelve around from one factory to another an talk to as if she was a dog.”⁷⁴ He recognized the same irony that countless women lamented.

Whereas men objected to being deprived of the opportunity to earn for their families on the basis of race, women often claimed their right to work in terms of their relationships to husbands and sons. They became “an American Negro mother with a boy in the service, who is in need of and entitled to work.”⁷⁵ Another woman wrote: “My son is in the army and I’m in need of a job.” Some expressed the bitterness suffusing the African-American community: “Our fathers, son, and brothers are begin­ning to wonder, they fight for our country and their wifes, sisters, and

71 Statement of Ernest Mohand, Los Angeles, Calif., Dec. 8, 1944, case no. 12-GR-1435, in folder: “U.S. Navy Drydocks,” in FEPC papers, reel 106F.

72 Letter to president and first lady from Jesse Bullock, Swan Island, Portland, Ore., Sept. 7, 1944, attached to case no. 12-BR-474, in file: “Kaiser Co., Swan Island,” in FEPC papers, reel 110F.

73 Letter to president from Lairie White, Vancouver, Wash., Jan. 9, 1945, received, case no. 12-BR- 566, in FEPC papers, reel 110F.

74 Letter to president from Mark Pruitt Jr., n.d., in file: “Budd Wheel,” in FEPC papers, reel 58F.

75 Letter to Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt from Dorothy Custer, Berkeley, Calif., May 11, 1943, in folder:

“Boilermakers’Auxiliary Union Issue,Aug. 20, 1943, Exhibit C,” in FEPC papers, reel 112F

sweethearts are treated like dogs.”^[356] Mrs. Ake of Oakland, California, one of numerous black women denied entry into the AFL’s Boilermakers’ Union, declared: “I am a true American too. I have a son in a few days will join the arm force of other American and I do have a husban who is in draft age to and don’t see why I cant have a decon job as other American citison.” Another Oakland woman asked the chief of the U.S. Employment Service, “Are you going to allow them to kick me, and other honest mothers around?”^[357] Contrasting “decent” conditions with being treated like a “dog,”African-American women and men demanded respect along with the right to work. “They want our boys to defend our country and we haven’t got any country - we can’t go in shows, hotels - just so many places. They even treat dogs better than they do us,” a domestic worker described the dignity gap generated by segregation. A woman caterer from Cincinnati captured the feelings of many when she called the United States “a stepmother, the way she treats a child,” in her treat­ment of her black citizens. “She may not be fair to it but she is its mother.” The FEPC was appealing to African Americans because most embraced a discourse of fairness; they believed in the ideal of equal rights, the right to be “treated as an American and not as a Negro.”^[358] Respond­ing to the call to serve their country, they sacrificed money, effort, and family members, and expected to work at a well-paying job and be judged on the basis of their abilities alone. They not only spoke of fairness but also demanded a fair exchange.

Although they sometimes made claims on the basis of their situations as working-class black women, they also joined a conversation wherein universal talk of citizenship undermined the ideal of the citizen-worker as white man. But such a self-fashioning of citizenship was not enough. “The right to work” was more precarious for black women than for any other group. The last to enter war production, they were the first fired. They suffered discrimination because they were black and because they were women, often mothers. But most of all they faced barriers derived from their intersecting identity as black women who sought work in the white-collar sector reserved for whites and they experienced stereotyp­ing based on their racialized gender.^[359]

conclusion

Those who advanced fair employment over a half-century ago placed the right to earn at the center of citizenship. They understood this civil right as facilitating social rights. The New Deal state relied on the model of the citizen-worker to establish social security benefits, thus making jobs - and better paying jobs - crucial for full citizenship. This formulation discriminated not because it directly excluded people on the basis of their race or gender but because it indirectly eliminated those who labored at uncovered occupations or whose labor-force attachment failed to meet statutory standards: mostly white women and men and women of color.

The failure to establish a permanent FEPC in the early postwar years shifted the point of debate. The federal government would prove a weak ally over the next decades when it came to the right to earn, in part because the moment of economic reform passed with the end of the New Deal, curtailed by the southern reactionaries who fought any form of civil rights. The right to earn, essential for so many other rights, relied on political clout, which was insufficient until the civil-rights movement of the early 1960s. Perhaps most significantly, rights talk faded into the lan­guage of opportunity, with the right to work turning into the opportu­nity, but not the imperative, to do so. Fair employment begot equal opportunity, not the economic or social justice envisioned by its World War II defenders.