166 e lusive v ictories
1943 had eliminated such New Deal mainstays as the Civilian Conser-
vation Corps and the Works Progress Administration. Rejecting the
New Dealers’ approach to planned demobilization, Congress also voted
to terminate the NRPB. At the same time, however, Roosevelt’s foes
declined to test their strength against popular New Deal programs
such as Social Security and minimum wage laws, while southern
Democrats remained attached to agricultural programs that favored
their constituents.
Th e unpopularity of wartime strikes, especially the disruptive mine-
workers’ stoppage, also created an opening for conservatives to legislate
against organized labor. Congress overrode a Roosevelt veto to pass the
Smith-Connally Act, which permitted the president to seize companies
or industries in response to a strike and imposed criminal penalties on
a union that promoted a strike after such a seizure. In a direct slap at
the pivotal role organized labor played in the Democratic Party, the
measure also prohibited union campaign contributions.
Social dislocations generated by the war brought the president’s
political coalition under acute pressure from yet another direction, too.
During Roosevelt’s fi rst two terms, he had drawn together an uneasy
alliance of white southern Democrats, working-class white ethnics in
northern cities, liberals who favored racial moderation, and a modest
but growing number of northern African Americans. Th is was an inher-
ently unstable mix that could endure only so long as he and his party
could keep racial issues off the agenda or address them with symbolic
gestures.
Th e war made that impossible. In search of jobs in the expanding
war industries, blacks migrated from the rural South to cities there and
elsewhere, only to fi nd themselves barred from most openings. African
Americans demanded that the United States practice at home the values
the president claimed Americans were fi ghting for abroad. When A.
Phillip Randolph threatened a march on Washington on July 1, 1941, to
protest the exclusion of blacks from defense plants, Roosevelt agreed to
issue an executive order to assure that hiring in defense industries would
be done without regard to race and establish a Fair Employment Prac-
tices Commission (FEPC) to investigate and act on complaints. I n h i s
1942 State of the Union Address he also declared that racial discrimi-
nation in hiring impeded war mobilization. But even the smallest steps