A Study on the Impact of the American Communist Party’s “United Front” Movement on “Americanism” and “New Deal Liberalism” (1935–1939)

Reviewed by: Ethnic and Racial Administrative Diversity: Understanding Work Life Realities and Experiences in Higher Education Denise O'Neil Green, Associate Vice President Jerlando F. L. Jackson and Elizabeth M. O'Callaghan. Ethnic and Racial Administrative Diversity: Understanding Work Life Realities and Experiences in Higher Education. San Francisco: Wiley Periodicals, 2009. 95 pp. Paper: $29.00. ISBN-978-0-4705-8814-7. In the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling of the Grutter v. Bollinger case, diversity research in higher education was recognized for its contributions in demonstrating that ethnic and racial diversity among students, faculty, and staff greatly benefits student learning. Since that time, higher education [End Page 710] scholars have continued to investigate aspects of diversity and its impact with respect to students and faculty. However, diversity among the administrative and executive ranks has received less attention in the literature and in practice. If diversity is, in fact, a compelling interest for society, then higher education leaders and researchers alike need a better understanding about the ways in which diversity is achieved and experienced among the administrative ranks within colleges and universities. How diverse are the ranks and what can institutions do to improve the structural diversity of their administration? What challenges do people of color face in entering and advancing in administration? What are their experiences and what coping strategies do they employ? In Ethnic and Racial Administrative Diversity: Understanding Work Life Realities and Experiences in Higher Education, Jerlando Jackson and Elizabeth O'Callaghan address these important questions by presenting an analysis of relevant literature and two national datasets from 1999. While college and university leaders articulate the need to increase racial and ethnic diversity among administrators, stating the need is often easier than pursuing and achieving change. The authors provide a thoughtful discussion that goes beyond the traditional theoretical frameworks and anecdotal information that are so often relied upon but do not yield desirable results. The book consists of five chapters. In Chapter 1, the introduction and overview, the authors outline the growing concern for the lack of people of color in senior-level positions which both results from and perpetuates a lack of a commitment to ethnic and racial diversity. They highlight empirical studies and news articles that speak to the difficulty in hiring and retaining people of color in administrative higher education posts, particularly at predominantly White institutions. Jackson and O'Callaghan then introduce two relatively new concepts to justify the importance of workforce diversity in higher education: representative bureaucracy and retention. They describe these concepts in detail to underscore their relevance to higher and postsecondary education. The remainder of the introduction briefly describes the literature review underlying the book and overviews the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2, "Status of Ethnic and Racial Diversity in College and University Administration," begins with a description of what constitutes the administrative workforce examined in the book, including both academic affairs leaders and student affairs practitioners. With the unit of analysis defined, the authors present sixteen tables detailing the distributions of the aforementioned groups by race/ethnicity and demographic, career/ job, and institutional variables. Drawing upon two 1999 datasets, the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF) and a study by the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA), the authors make comparisons for both student and academic affairs personnel by race/ ethnicity. Although the data are relatively dated, the authors indicated that, based on more recent trend analysis, the 1999 datasets reflect today's demographic trends. The chapter concludes with several notable observations. First, people of color enter administrative positions earlier in their careers than their White counterparts, which has a negative correlation with their attaining such senior-level positions as provost or dean. Second, women of color hold more student affairs positions than White men or men of color. Finally, institutional type and geographic location correlate with the likelihood that people of color will hold administrative positions at a particular college or university. Although the analysis is primarily descriptive statistics, it is very instructive and fills a disturbing void in the literature. In Chapter 3, the authors articulate the barriers that frequently face people of color as they pursue careers in administration. Jackson and O'Callaghan suggest that...

Women in the American Communist Party believed the rise of fascism in Europe was a direct threat to women’s rights. Hitler’s rise to power and what Communists read as a push to ‘nationalize’ German women’s maternity compelled Communist women to argue that fascism was a threat to women’s rights and perpetuated false ideals of ‘natural’ gender roles. Communist women dutifully followed the party’s anti-fascist line; however, they expanded it by arguing that gender inequality was on the rise in fascist nations and women’s rights had to move to the forefront of Popular Front struggles. Communists emphasized the rights of mothers and workers in an effort to better secure the rights of women. This article argues that party women rejected Nazi pronatalism, advanced women’s rights within the party’s ‘United Front’ and pushed their agenda within the American Communist Party.

Governors, Regents, and New Deal Liberalism: Student Activism at the University of Texas at Austin, 1917–1945 John Moretta (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution University of Texas students gather before a protest against Texas governor James E. Ferguson, May 28, 1917. PICA 08003, Austin History Center, Austin Public Library. In 1960, southern historian Charles Ramsdell described a University of Texas colleague as “born and marinated in the deep South [Mississippi] and educated at the University of Virginia,” who declared that he found “absolutely no trace of Southern tradition either in the city of Austin or in his students from every part of the state. They are interested, he says, in no [Southern] traditions whatsoever, and Austin is a typical American college town, with a most un-Southern bustle about it; a general student and faculty environment and outlook not much different than that displayed on most of the Northern university campuses he had visited.”1 Inextricably linked and driving much of the city’s exceptionalism, especially when compared to other southern university towns, were the University of Texas’s students, who, beginning in the early twentieth century through World War II, became the vanguard for sociocultural and political [End Page 1] change in the state and institutional reform on their campus. Until the late 1950s and ’60s, student protests and demonstrations were a rarity on southern universities and colleges. However, that was not the case at the University of Texas (UT). Compared to other southern universities during the period, UT became a veritable “hotbed” of progressive student activism, countering the stereotypical image of southern White youth as a mass of conservative conformists at best and racist, red-baiting reactionaries at worst. Although such words may have described some Texans, UT students, especially by the late 1930s, were more inspired to action by the positive views of local, liberal religious leaders and faculty mentors who defied these regressive impulses. By comparison to 1960s direct action, pre-World War II student activism was more interpersonal and self-reflective, originating in existing student organizations, which increasingly reflected student interests in human rights and global peace. In many ways, prewar student advocates established the template for future student protest movements. This article explores some of the pivotal events and issues in the history of UT that ignited student activism in years 1917–45, emboldening collegians to publicly resist institutional policies and outside political interference they believed directly infringed upon their rights as students and the sanctity of the university environment. The university was to be a place where democratic values were inculcated and students’ civil liberties were respected by peers, faculty, and administration. Equally important to UT students by the 1930s was the recognition by regents and administrators that a democratically constituted student government and related student-sanctioned and -supported campus activities and institutions, such as the college newspaper, The Daily Texan, deserved the authority to act and advocate on students’ behalf. By the 1930s, existential crises, particularly the domestic socioeconomic upheaval caused by the Great Depression, further energized many UT students to engage in the reformist impulse unleashed by the New Deal. For many 1930s UT student activists, the Depression years not only revealed the inherent flaws of laissez faire capitalism, but perhaps more importantly, the social consequences of an unregulated economy. In the New Deal liberal ethos, students saw not only the means of immediate amelioration of human despair, but the long-range efficacy of positive government action in both mitigating and remedying future marginalization and disfranchisement, which if not addressed, could lead to class antagonisms and unrest as was the possibility in the 1930s. UT student activists also correlated the external crisis confronting the nation in the 1930s with their internal university battle against the regents’ suppression of academic freedom and student rights. As they saw it, the very same individuals responsible for the economic crisis were now in charge of their university, and as these wealthy plutocrats had abused the economy for their own material aggrandizement, they were inflicting [End Page 2] upon UT a self-serving agenda that was detrimental to the entire university community. American entry into World War II against the...

The New Deal placed security at the center of American political and economic life by establishing an explicit partnership between the state, economy, and citizens. In America, unlike anywhere else in the world, most people depend overwhelmingly on private health insurance and employee benefits. The astounding rise of this phenomenon from before World War II, however, has been largely overlooked. In this powerful history of the American reliance on employment-based benefits, Jennifer Klein examines the interwoven politics of social provision and labor relations from the 1910s to the 1960s. Through a narrative that connects the commercial life insurance industry, the politics of Social Security, organized labor's quest for economic security, and the evolution of modern health insurance, she shows how the firm-centered welfare system emerged. Moreover, the imperatives of industrial relations, Klein argues, shaped public and private social security. Looking closely at unions and communities, Klein uncovers the wide range of alternative, community-based health plans that had begun to germinate in the 1930s and 1940s but that eventually succumbed to commercial health insurance and pensions. She also illuminates the contests to define "security"--job security, health security, and old age security--following World War II. For All These Rights traces the fate of the New Deal emphasis on social entitlement as the private sector competed with and emulated Roosevelt's Social Security program. Through the story of struggles over health security and old age security, social rights and the welfare state, it traces the fate of New Deal liberalism--as a set of ideas about the state, security, and labor rights--in the 1950s, the 1960s, and beyond.

Achieving a Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive Environment for the Black Orthopaedic Surgeon: Part 1: Barriers to Successful Recruitment of Black Applicants.

A Novel Use of Artificial Intelligence to Examine Diversity and Hospital Performance

From Intention to Action: Operationalizing AGA Diversity Policy to Combat Racism and Health Disparities in Gastroenterology

To examine the evolution of racial, ethnic, and gender diversity in US otolaryngology-head and neck surgery residency programs and compare these figures with other residency programs. Retrospective database review. US residency programs. Information concerning minority and female representation in US residency programs was obtained from annually published graduate medical education reports by the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1975 to 2010. Minority representation among US population and university students was obtained from the US Census Bureau. The racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of otolaryngology residents was then compared with other medical fields (general surgery, family medicine, and internal medicine). Underrepresentation in otolaryngology-head and neck surgery is particularly disconcerting for African Americans (-2.3%/y, P = .09) and Native Americans (1.5%/y, P = .11) given their nonsignificant annual growth rates. Hispanic representation (17.3%/y, P < .0001) is growing in otolaryngology but is half the rate of growth of the Hispanic American population (32.8%/y, P < .0001). There is nonetheless promise for women (70.6%/y, P < .0001) and Asian Americans (63.0%/y, P < .0001), who demonstrated statistically significant growth trends. To our knowledge, this is the first study to describe the evolution of female and minority representation among US otolaryngology residents. Despite increasing gender, ethnic, and racial diversity among medical residents in general, female and certain minority group representation in US otolaryngology residency programs is lagging. These findings are in contrast to rising trends of diversity within other residency programs including general surgery.

Does the racial and ethnic diversity of the area in which a voter lives affect his or her political behavior? Scholars have suggested a range of such effects, but these conclusions have questionable generalizability because the behavior they typically examine is racially charged. In this article, I test more general affects of racial and ethnic context by examining political behavior on a range of issues, both racially relevant and racially neutral. Specifically, I examine the impact of the racial and ethnic context on individual-level voting by whites in initiative elections. Merging 1996 and 1998 Voter News Service state exit poll survey data and United States Census Bureau contextual data, I find that there is a distinct relationship between racial and ethnic diversity and white voting behavior on racially relevant ballot initiatives, but that racial diversity does not have a consistent impact on voting on race-neutral initiatives.

OR a century and a half federal power was the bete noire of American libertarians. After James Madison and the First Congress wrote the fears of their age into the Bill of Rights generations of Americans learned to measure liberty by governmental noninterference. In the twentieth century, when an organized civil liberties movement made its initial appearance on the American scene, it did so in opposition to federal legislation. The National Civil Liberties Bureau, predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union, was the impassioned response of conscientious objectors and pacifists to the Espionage and Selective Service acts of 1917.1 Federal suppression of aliens and radicals during the first three decades of this century substantiated the assertions of those who attributed to centralized authority the most serious challenge to freedom.2 When the wartime and immediate postwar threats to civil liberties subsided, the ACLU recharted its course and launched a dramatic campaign of service to labor. Throughout the twenties it resolutely defended the rights of labor, organized and unorganized; several Union officials considered an attack on capitalism the corollary of protecting civil liberty.3 The Depression, understandably, predisposed them toward a reform administration. Before long, however, the New Deal reawakened their fear of a leviathan state which would manipulate the national emergency to justify repression. For men like Roger Baldwin and Arthur Garfield Hays the memory of the Espionage and Sedition acts and the Palmer raids was

Comme un million de papillons noirs by Laura Nsafou:How an Afrofeminist Picture Book Gave the Impetus to a Discussion about Inclusive Children's Literature in France Élodie Malanda (bio) The need for inclusive children's and young adult (YA) literature in France has only recently started being discussed in mainstream spaces. The absence of inclusivity in children's literature has been a topic1 in the main journal about children's literature in December 2019 but no study on ethnic diversity in children's books has been done, and no broad movement like #WeNeedDiverseBooks2 has emerged. The traditional French model of universalism implicitly erases all collective identity other than the French one, making it difficult to raise the question of the needs of minority groups. Thus, for a long time, the only voices advocating the need for more inclusivity in children's literature were the lone ones of individual blogging parents or librarians. This changed when, in September 2017, a young author of Congolese and Martinique descent, Laura Nsafou, published the picture book Comme un million de papillons noirs. With this story celebrating nappy, textured hair and showing mainly Black characters, the need for racial and ethnic diversity in children's and YA literature suddenly became a topic in French mainstream media. Before her fame as an author, Nsafou was already a well-established Afrofeminist blogger known as Mrs. Roots. Since 2013, her posts about the gender and race discrimination faced by Black women in France helped spread the ideas of Afrofeminism—an Afro-French feminist movement that fights against the oppression of Black women by men and by white women and claims the right for Black women to speak for themselves. Nsafou's picture book is deeply shaped by her Afrofeminist activism. Comme un million de papillons noirs tells the story of Adé, a Black girl who gets [End Page 164] bullied for her nappy hair and who, throughout the story, learns to love her hair and thus to accept herself. Despite being considered "unsaleable" by traditional publishing houses, the picture book is currently in its fourteenth printing and has received media coverage from major national newspapers like Libération, Le Nouvel Obs, Le Monde, the women's magazine Glamour, and the online newspapers HuffPost and Slate. Titles like "La diversité, grande absente de la littérature de jeunesse" (Amétis)—"Diversity, the big absentee in children's and YA literature"—pointed out the lack of diversity as the number one subject of the articles about Nsafou's picture book. It seems Comme un million de papillons noirs launched the interest of French mainstream media for the diversity issue in children's and YA books. This paper examines how one children's book served as the catalyst to grow broad discussions about inclusive children's literature in France. On the one hand, it shows how Comme un million de papillons noirs challenges the French understanding of universalism and how the narrative choices of Laura Nsafou succeeded in raising the attention of mainstream media to the lack of representation of Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) children in children's literature. On the other hand, it analyzes the social context of the book's publication, linking its success to social media activity, which has been changing the power relation between authors of color and the mainly white industry of French publishing. 1. French Universalism and the Impossible Discussion about Inclusive Children's and YA Literature The reticence of France to acknowledge the need for more ethnic and racial diversity in children's and YA literature is deeply rooted in France's self-concept as a country where everyone is equal and where no distinction of race, ethnicity, or religion is made. The first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a core statement of the French Revolution, declares: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good." This idea remains valid today: the first article of the current constitution (adopted in 1958) says that "France is an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It guarantees equality of all citizens before the...

Diversity in gastroenterology in the United States: Where are we now? Where should we go?

The analysis examines the effort to incorporate labor rights into the American conception of civil liberties and the opposition to that endeavor. It focuses on three Senators—Robert Wagner, Robert La Follette, Jr., and Elbert Thomas—and New Deal officials who conceived of the National Labor Relations Act as a cornerstone of the effort to achieve “economic justice” and defended the law against its critics. It examines the opponents, including the National Association of Manufacturers and an anticommunist alliance between southern Democrats and Republicans. An ideological counteroffensive recast the supporters of social rights as un-American opponents of free enterprise and defined civil liberties as protecting the individual from an expansionist state and labor bosses. The analysis demonstrates the multiple causes for the disappearance of ideological space for conceiving that protection from oppressive employers constituted a civil liberty and the displacement of labor rights by the “right to work.”

This article explores the issues of subordination and authority in the contemporary world of work as they are exacerbated by new forms of work-surveillance that track emotions and mental states of workers by means of artificial intelligence, predictive algorithms and big data. It discusses subordination in contemporary work arrangements, highlighting how new technologies and business practices expand hierarchy and forms of private government beyond the scope of the employment relationship. It explores some of the technologies and practices that magnify and expand managerial powers to unprecedented levels, by tracking and strictly monitoring workers’ emotional and mental states. It also highlights how collective labour rights represent the best counterbalance to restrain these practices and curb modern forms of private government in the workplace. It concludes by discussing how the distinction between the traditional functions of collective rights, the ‘civil liberty’ and the ‘industrial’ function is increasingly blurred, arguing that an expansion of the personal scope of collective rights is crucial in this regard. Workplace Surveillance, Artificial Intelligence, Predictive Algorithms, Big Data, Platform Work, Surveillance Capitalism, Subordination, Contract of Employment, Collective Labour Rights

Background: The United States is experiencing a demographic trend of increasing racial and ethnic diversity. While persistent racial and ethnic disparities in cancer mortality are well documented, little is known about the impact of racial and ethnic diversity on cancer outcomes in the United States. Purpose: We examined associations between the U.S. county-level racial &amp; ethnic diversity index and age-adjusted cancer mortality rates. We also assessed whether associations differed by geographic region, persistent poverty, and rurality. Methods: We used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 Racial and Ethnic Diversity Index, which estimates the chance that two people chosen at random will be from different racial and ethnic groups. The diversity index was calculated at the county-level and categorized as follows: less than 35% (lowest), 35.0 to 44.9%, 45.0 to 54.9%, 55.0 to 64.9% and 65.0% or more (highest). We described county- level sociodemographic characteristics according to the diversity index categories. We calculated mean and standard errors of the county-level age-adjusted cancer mortality rates per 100,000 from 2016-2020 (overall and by site for the top four sites for cancer mortality) across the diversity index categories. We used multivariable linear regression models to examine associations between racial and ethnic diversity and cancer mortality, overall and by cancer site. We also assessed models stratified by geographic region (U.S. Census regions), persistent poverty and rurality. Results: Counties with more racial and ethnic diversity had a younger median age, a higher proportion of college graduates, and were less likely to be rural. Cancer mortality rates per 100,000 were lower in the most vs. least diverse counties, overall (144.7 vs. 164.6), and for lung (32.5 vs. 44.8), and colorectal cancer (13.0 vs. 15.6). In adjusted models, the highest vs. lowest racial and ethnic diversity was associated with a 7.25 decrease in overall cancer mortality rates (95% CI: -10.5 to -4.0), a 6.55 decrease in lung cancer mortality (95% CI: -8.0 to -5.1) and a 1.49 increase in breast cancer mortality (95% CI: 0.7 to 2.3). The diversity index was not associated with colorectal cancer mortality or pancreatic cancer mortality in adjusted models. Inverse associations of diversity index and overall cancer mortality were strongest in the South Census region (b=-13.0, 95% CI: -17.5 to -8.4), in non-persistent poverty counties (b=-9.0, 95% CI: -12.4 to -5.5), and in rural counties (b=-8.6, 95% CI: -13.2 to -4.1). Conclusions: Greater racial and ethnic diversity was associated with lower overall cancer mortality and lung cancer mortality rates, although it was associated with significantly higher breast cancer mortality rates. Findings help elucidate whether and how social factors may differentially impact subgroups of the population to influence cancer mortality. This study addresses an urgent need to explore contextual factors that may shape racial and ethnic disparities at the population level. Citation Format: Kelly A. Hirko, Breanna Greteman, Sabrina Ford, Sarah H. Nash. County-level racial and ethnic diversity index and cancer mortality in the U.S. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 17th AACR Conference on the Science of Cancer Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; 2024 Sep 21-24; Los Angeles, CA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2024;33(9 Suppl):Abstract nr A071.