Race, Jobs, and the War: the FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46

Abstract

Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46. By Andrew Edmund Kersten. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Pp. ix, 210. Illustrations, notes, appendices, bibliography, $35.00.) Historians of recent America, such as Barton Bernstein, Richard Polenberg, Alan Brinkley, and William H. Chafe have disparaged President Franklin Roosevelt's Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC) as agency which, after its creation in June 1941, and its recreation in May 1943, provided the Roosevelt administration with democratic public relations but which, in reality, did little to end discrimination, preferring, when the going got tough, to sweep problems under the rug, thus deferring to and perpetuating local Merle E. Reed disputed that conclusion in Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement (1991), which looked at the FEPC from a national perspective, and Cletus Daniel also rendered a positive judgement, in his Chicano Workers and the Politics of Fairness (1990), which examined the work of the FEPC in the Southwest. Andrew Kersten re-enforces a positive view of the FEPC, although readers of his well-organized monograph loaded with juicy local midwestern stories will be left somewhat confused as to whether tight labor markets in some places, strong African American agency in other places, or the FEPC's hearings on complaints resulted in the hiring of African Americans as production workers in a number of plants where they had not worked before, except perhaps, as custodians. Kersten demonstrates that the significance of the FEPC's effort varied from community to community. By taking us to the local level and enabling us to understand the struggle for jobs there and particularly the role of local African American leadership in battling discrimination, Kersten makes his strongest contribution. In a most useful appendix, Wartime Hate Strike Data, he has tabulated work stoppages between June 1943 and December 1944 in which the FEPC participated in the settlement. (pp. 142-143) Executive Order 8802, Kersten shows, not directed to the goal of full participation in American life demanded by Asa Philip Randolph and other leaders of the March on Washington Movement. In Kersten's chapters, we always find African American voices pointing to the limits set by white racism on both New Deal liberalism and wartime patriotism. The FEPC could deal only with discrimination by federal agencies offering job training programs for war production and with prejudicial actions by employers and labor organizations of firms holding government contracts. Because of its origin in executive order, the FEPC, Kersten reminds us, was not able to subpoena, fine, or jail violators of its directives. Instead, the committee had to rely on what FEPC officials termed 'quiet persuasion,' hearings, and publicity. The committee kept an especially low profile in areas with high racial tensions,and no war contract ever canceled because of racial discrimination. (pp. 19- 20) The Midwest (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota and Missouri) witnessed about 30 per cent of the activities of the FEPC. …