700 Chapter 26 The New Deal: 1933–1941
Many of the early New Deal programs treated
blacks as second-class citizens. Blacks were often
paid at lower rates than whites under NRA codes
(and so joked that NRA stood for “Negro Run
Around” and “Negroes Ruined Again”). The early
farm programs shortchanged black tenants and
sharecroppers. Blacks in the Civilian Conservation
Corps were assigned to all-black camps. TVA devel-
opments were rigidly segregated, and almost no
blacks got jobs in TVA offices. New Deal urban
housing projects inadvertently but nonetheless
effectively increased the concentration of blacks in
particular neighborhoods. Because the Social
Security Act excluded agricultural laborers and
domestic servants, it did nothing for hundreds of
thousands of poor black workers or for Mexican
American farmhands in the Southwest. In 1939
unemployment was twice as high among blacks as
among whites, and whites’ wages were double the
level of blacks’ wages.
The fact that members of racial minorities got less
than they deserved did not keep most of them from
becoming New Dealers: Half a loaf was more than
any American government had given blacks since the
time of Ulysses S. Grant.Southerner made the same point differently: “She
goes round telling the Negroes they are as good as
anyone else.”)
Blacks During the New Deal
The shift of black voters from the Republican to the
Democratic party during the New Deal years was
one of the most significant political turnarounds in
American history. In 1932 when things were at
their worst, fewer African Americans defected from
the Republican party than the members of any other
traditionally Republican group. Four years later,
however, blacks voted for Roosevelt in overwhelm-
ing numbers.
Blacks supported the New Deal for the same rea-
sons that whites did, but how the New Deal affected
blacks in general and racial attitudes specifically are
more complicated questions. Claiming that he dared
not antagonize southern congressmen, whose votes he
needed for his recovery programs, Roosevelt did noth-
ing about civil rights before 1941 and relatively little
thereafter. For the same reason, many southern white
liberals hesitated to support racial integration for fear
that other liberal causes could be injured as a result.
Eleanor Roosevelt dispenses soup to the needy. As a wealthy young socialite, she exhibited little interest in
public matters. But after she discovered that Franklin was having an affair with her own social secretary,
Lucy Mercer, Eleanor began to change. Her marriage, she confided to a friend, ceased to have any
“fundamental love to draw on.” She found new purpose by throwing herself into social and political reform.