Published by EH.NET (April 2000)
Andrew Edmund Kersten. Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest,
1941-46. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000. x + 210 pp.
$35.00 (cloth), ISBN: 0-252-02563-6.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Thomas N. Maloney, Department of Economics, University
of Utah.
Most discussions of anti-discrimination policy begin with the important
developments of the mid-1960s: the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the
issuing of Executive Order 11246 regarding contract compliance rules. In
Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46, Andrew
Kersten (Assistant Professor of History, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay)
examines the activities of the Fair Employment Practice Committee, an earlier
federal effort to reduce labor market discrimination, which operated from 1941
to 1946. Kersten wants to describe the activities of the Committee in the
Midwest and to persuade us that the Committee had an important impact on the
employment of minorities in war-related work. He succeeds in providing a
lively, readable, and well-documented history of the FEPC in the Midwest,
though his evidence regarding the impact of the Committee is not entirely
persuasive.
There were really two federal FEPC's. Kersten recounts the story of the
creation and demise of the first committee, and the rise of the second, in
chapters one through three. The first FEPC was created by President Roosevelt
through Executive Order 8802 in 1941. Executive Order 8802 was largely a
response to a threatened march on Washington scheduled for July of 1941. The
march was being organized by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters to protest discrimination in defense-related work. The first FEPC
produced an anti-discrimination publicity campaign and held a series of
hearings in late 1941 and early 1942. In the spring of 1942, Roosevelt denied
the Committee requested increases in resources and then gave the War Manpower
Commission (WMC) authority over the further operations of the FEPC. The head
of the WMC, Paul V. McNutt, was not sympathetic to the goals of the FEPC and
began to limit its activities, according to Kersten. As a result, a number of
FEPC officials resigned, and Randolph revived his March on Washington Movement
to protest these developments. Randolph's efforts were again successful, as
Executive Order 9346 (issued in May 1943) disbanded the existing FEPC, created
a new committee, and placed it in the Office of Emergency Management. This
new Committee had greater independence and greater (though still very limited)
resources, including twelve new regional offices. It also faced substantial
challenges, as tensions around racial discrimination in defense work were
growing more pronounced. By 1943, labor shortages were apparent in a number of
cities, yet some employers continued to pass over available, local black labor
and hired white workers from a distance.
In chapters four through eight, Kersten describes the activities of the new
Committee in the Midwest. His coverage of the region is comprehensive, though
he devotes particular attention to developments in Chicago, Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Detroit, and St. Louis. As Kersten recounts a litany of hearings
and meetings, a few prominent themes emerge. One is that, at least according
to employers, the hiring and promoting of African Americans was greatly
constrained by the attitudes of white workers. Employers' concerns on this
issue were certainly well founded in many cases, as theentry of black workers
into an all-white plant (whether prompted by FEPC activity or not) quite often
resulted in walkouts by the white work force. One of the most important
activities of the FEPC was helping to negotiate settlements in these cases (in
an appendix, Kersten provides a list of hate strikes in the Midwest that were
settled with the aid of the FEPC). More generally, Kersten says that the FEPC
provided advice and aid to employers who were seeking ways to integrate their
plants, in the hope of avoiding such walkouts.
A second major theme is that there was little the FEPC could do alone. Success
in promoting greater labor market equality was dependent on support from local
government, federal government offices in the city, and local activist
organizations. For example, in explaining why FEPC hearings in East Alton,
Illinois had no effect on the hiring practices of Western Cartridge, a large
munitions manufacturer in that city, Kersten says that "[u]nlike Chicago,
where the FEPC made measurable progress, East Alton lacked a strong civil
rights tradition, liberal employers, radical labor unions, and a local
government willing to help the committee complete its work" (p. 58). In
Detroit, success arose from close cooperation between the FEPC and the local
office of the WMC. In Cincinnati, the local offices of the US Employment
Service and the WMC supported segregation, according to Kersten, and the FEPC
had no substantial impact.
Given the importance of broad cooperation and unified effort, it is, of
course, very difficult to identify the specific effects of the FEPC itself.
Still, greater efforts in this direction by Kersten would have been helpful.
As it is, he provides very little that would allow us to tie particular
employment gains to particular actions by the FEPC. For example, consider the
FEPC's activities in Springfield, Illinois. Kersten reports that the FEPC
investigated complaints about defense contractors in Springfield in early 1942
and found black workers practically locked out of these jobs. In June 1944,
one FEPC official, Virgil Williams, returned to Springfield to check on the
situation. Williams found substantial progress in black employment in
Springfield, not only at defense plants but in a wide variety of
establishments. Kersten concludes that "cooperation among employers, civil
rights organizations, labor unions, and the FEPC made this [progress]
possible" (p. 55). All we know from Kersten's account, though, is that the
FEPC investigated, came away discouraged, and later investigated again. In the
case of Detroit, Kersten tells us that the WMC and FEPC jointly "broke the
color barriers at Republic Aircraft, Briggs, and Central Broiler" (p. 109),
but he does not provide any detail regarding the interaction of WMC and FEPC
agents with these firms. On the other hand, Kersten describes in substantial
detail the completely fruitless negotiations between the FEPC and Jimmy
Hoffa's Teamsters Local 299 in Detroit.
My point is not that the FEPC had no effect. I simply do not feel that Kersten
has provided much persuasive evidence on this issue, though such evidence may
exist. Indeed, without wanting to give special privilege to quantitative work,
I would suggest that William J. Collins' recent study of the correlation
across cities of black employment gains and FEPC activity establishes more
concrete and specific results concerning the impact of the FEPC. Collins also
makes an effort to separate FEPC effects from those of local NAACP chapters
and local labor market conditions ("Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production:
Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets," American Economic
Review 91:1 (March 2001), pp. 272-286.)
In his final chapter, Kersten describes the quick dissolution of the FEPC
following the end of World War II. The Committee had never been very popular
in Congress. Despite initial indications of support, President Truman quickly
moved to limit the activities and discretion of the FEPC, and the Committee
was shut down in 1946. Kersten argues that, despite its brief life, theFEPC
had a substantial impact on the shape of subsequent state fair employment laws
and on the federal policies of the mid-1960s (though here again more specific
documentation would have been useful). He also argues that the employment
gains the FEPC helped to generate largely persisted through the 1940s (and
Collins' evidence corroborates this).
It is encouraging that the progress of the early 1940s was not lost later.
Still, it is worth noting that the pace of improvement in black labor market
status slowed substantially by the 1950s. It is striking that the
breakthroughs of the war era had so little momentum. Employers no doubt
learned a great deal about black workers' abilities and about how to combine
black and white workers on the shop floor during the war. This new knowledge,
however, did not produce much in the way of measurable, ongoing progress at
the national level in subsequent years. Such broad improvement apparently
requires both the persistence of tight labor markets and continual vigilance
in policy enforcement. Kersten's book, while not without its weaknesses, does
the valuable service of describing how these forces came together to generate
black progress long before the better-known events of the 1960s.
Thomas N. Maloney is Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah.
His research focuses on racial inequality in the US in the early twentieth
century. His publications include "Migration and Economic Opportunity in the
1910s: New Evidence on African American Occupational Mobility in the North,"
Explorations in Economic History 38:1 (January 2001), and "Personnel
Policy, Costs of Experimentation, and Racial Inequality in the Pre-World War
II North," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30:2 (Autumn 1999).
Subject : I, T, X
Geographic : 7
Time Period : 9
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Citation: Thomas N. Maloney, "Review of Andrew Edmund Kersten Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941-46" Economic History Services, Apr 19, 2001, URL : http://www.eh.net/bookreviews/library/0340.shtml
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