John P. Davis: “A Black Inventory of the New Deal”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Davis was an outspoken critic of the New Deal programs put forward by Franklin Roosevelt to ameliorate the effects of the Great Depression. In his article “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” he surveys two years of New Deal efforts and their effects on black Americans.

Paragraphs 1–4

Davis sets the tone in the very first paragraph, stating clearly that his goal is to assess the impact that the Roosevelt administration’s early New Deal policies have had on African Americans. He then systematically evaluates key measures enacted by the government, showing how, in fact, they have had mostly negative effects on black Americans. Davis next cites government statistics demonstrating that the number of black families receiving aid increased during Roosevelt’s time in office. He argues that this is evidence that the administration’s policies have created more poverty among African Americans. The increase in the number of people receiving public assistance is not, in Davis’s eyes, a sign of growing government concern for the poor but rather the direct result of failed policy, particularly those programs aimed at relief for the rural poor.

Davis then turns to a lengthy discussion of the National Recovery Administration. The NIRA generated a wide range of programs aimed at providing direct relief to the public and stimulating the economy. The legislation had the support of many industrial leaders, including Gerard Swope, the president of General Electric, who helped to draft it. The National Recovery Administration, an administrative body created by the NIRA, monitored each industry’s development of standardized codes for wage rates, prices, and work hours. The idea behind the codes was that workers would achieve better wages and job security, while manufacturers within each industry would be able to compete fairly against each other.

Davis states in paragraphs 3 and 4 that the National Recovery Administration as yet failed to live up to its promises. He specifically mentions problems with the “code-making process.” During the 1933 code hearings in Washington, D.C., which Davis attended, it became clear that companies in the South were excluding black workers from the protective features of the labor codes. Southern manufacturers relied upon a racially based wage system, where black workers were paid less than white laborers for comparable work. Therefore, they vigorously fought the idea of national wage standards. As Davis points out, southern companies employed a variety of tactics to evade the codes. One early argument was for the existence of “occupational and geographical differentials”; southern interests used a vast array of statistics and figures to “prove” that black workers were less efficient than whites and that equal wages would result in massive layoffs and plant closures. Sometimes employers changed the job categories of black workers so that they were not covered by the codes. As Davis points out, these maneuvers were effective; the National Recovery Administration approved regional wage differentials in the codes, and because enforcement occurred at the local level, code violators often went unpunished even when they were caught. Thus, while the federal intent behind the codes was to eliminate racial bias in wages and hours for each industry, its implementation resulted in the continuation of “the inferior status of the Negro.”

The problem was not just with the implementation of the law, however. Davis notes that even with an increased wage rate, African American workers were still disproportionately affected by layoffs or the reduction of work hours. He cites the case of longshoremen, who might earn a high hourly wage but work very infrequently. Davis also comments on the problem of the rising cost of living; one of the by-products of the codes was that the prices for food and other necessities were set above market value. This increase in the cost of living disproportionately affected poor Americans, including African Americans. Davis also comments in paragraph 4 on the practices of “speed-up and stretch-out” in assembly-line manufacturing. Speeding up the line involved increasing the rate at which parts moved past a worker (forcing the individual to work more quickly), while stretching out called for assigning more tasks or machines to a given worker, thus adding to his responsibilities (and thus his output) while keeping his pay the same. Because both “speed-up” and “stretch-out” increased the productivity of workers, they reduced the number of workers needed; as Davis notes, African American employees were always the first to be let go. Thus the promises of gains for workers under the NIRA went unfulfilled for black Americans.

Paragraphs 5–7

Davis next turns his attention to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, another government agency created during Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation. Just as the NIRA created a new government entity, the National Recovery Administration, the AAA created the Agricultural Adjustment Administration to implement the policies outlined in the legislation. The act gave the government substantial authority over agricultural production and prices. For example, it allowed the secretary of agriculture to reduce the production of a given commodity or to remove acreage from production altogether, through the use of incentives. The goal of the program was to prop up the prices of agricultural products and thus help raise the income and buying power of farmers.

The vast majority of black farmers were sharecroppers, or tenant farmers who did not own their land but rather paid rent to the landowner. Sharecroppers would pay their rent either with proceeds from the sale of the crops they raised or with crop liens—loans against the value of future crops. The Great Depression brought sharply lower prices for most commodities, which translated into drastically lower income for these farmers, many of whom could no longer meet their rent obligations. As Davis points out, although the Agricultural Adjustment Administration’s goal was to improve the lot of farmers, it actually worsened their plight. The crop reduction program was a particular problem. Under the administration, the government paid incentives to farmers to keep part of their land idle. As Davis remarks in paragraph 5, “Although the contract with the government provided that the land owner[s] should not reduce [their] number of … tenants” under this program, many of them did. Uncultivated land meant fewer farmers were needed to tend to crops, and black sharecroppers were the first to be turned out.

Just as there were problems with local enforcement of the National Recovery Administration codes, corruption was rampant in the South in terms of implementing AAA policies. The government mandated that landowners pay a portion of the government incentive for crop reduction to its tenants, but many landowners simply kept all of the money for themselves. Local authorities refused to enforce the law, as Davis explains. This widespread abuse was one of the primary motivators behind the creation of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an organization of sharecroppers in Arkansas that sought to change government policies and step up enforcement. Davis uses an old frontier-era phrase, “root hog or die,” which means, in essence, that one must either work or starve.

Paragraphs 8–14

Davis then takes up the Public Works Administration (PWA), which was also created by the NIRA. The PWA was a job-creation program designed to put people to work building roads, dams, bridges, and other infrastructure. The program was headed by the secretary of the Department of the Interior, Harold Ickes, an advocate of racial equality. Ickes ordered that all PWA contracts include a nondiscrimination clause. However, just as was the case with the codes, southern interests found ways to circumvent the contractual language. Robert C. Weaver, one of Davis’s peers at Harvard and a member of Ickes’s staff, developed a quota system to aid in enforcement. PWA contract recipients would be required to hire a minimum percentage of black skilled workers based on the proportion of such workers in the local population. Davis notes several problems with this idea, including the tensions placed on unions. This was a significant problem; blacks were excluded from many of the skilled trade unions, and the government had to negotiate with local unions as well as individual contractors who employed black workers.

The PWA and other New Deal programs also funded public housing. Unfortunately, most of these housing projects were segregated, upholding the status quo of racial inequality in America. Davis criticizes two specific programs: the Subsistence Homestead projects and the Tennessee Valley Authority model towns. Part of the NIRA, the Subsistence Homesteads were designed to be communities based on the older American idea of the family subsistence farm, where families grew enough to sustain themselves but not to bring cash crops to market. Roosevelt’s version, however, located these communities near urban centers, so that homesteaders of the 1930s could hold a part-time job in the city while living in a modern home in a rural environment. Aimed at poor rural families, the homestead project had much to offer African Americans. However, the earliest communities were designated for whites only, angering many black activists. In particular, the Arthurdale project in West Virginia, mentioned by Davis in paragraph 11, aroused virulent protest from civil rights activists. Under pressure from Ickes and others, the administration developed several black homestead projects. Thus, as Davis notes, the Subsistence Homestead program perpetuated the Jim Crow segregation of the South.

Similarly, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) built segregated communities, including the model towns of Norris, Tennessee, and Dayton, Ohio. Roosevelt created the TVA to devise a regional development program for flood control and power supply in the Tennessee River basin. Part of the TVA’s development program included the creation of housing in planned communities based on a social vision similar to that of the Subsistence Homestead program. The TVA model communities were to be examples of self-contained, self-sustaining rural towns tied to cooperative industries. Norris, Tennessee, was one such community. As Davis notes, Norris functioned more as a “company town” for workers building the Norris Dam; the government supplied housing and power, ran the town store, and controlled all aspects of town life, not to mention providing the monthly paycheck. While the all-black Dayton communities were “ghettoes,” Norris was “lily-white,” designated as a whites-only town. To make matters worse, Davis remarks, the TVA hired relatively few blacks and had no plan for ameliorating the conditions of African Americans in the region. The TVA’s planned communities, to Davis, were examples of “utter planlessness.”

Paragraphs 15–18

In early 1935 Congress began to consider various options for a federal program of unemployment insurance and old-age pension, which would eventually become the Social Security Act of 1935. Davis refers to this debate, commenting that members of the Roosevelt administration proposed to exempt domestic and agricultural workers from the program. Treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau suggested excluding these workers in order to prevent the Social Security program from being underfunded. Because Roosevelt had insisted that the plan finance itself, this provision was included in the initial Social Security Act. As a result, vast numbers of African Americans were excluded from one of the most sweeping reforms in American history.

Following his dissection of the impact of New Deal programs on black Americans, Davis discusses how the black community has responded to this litany of injustice. In paragraph 16, he references the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns, which began in Chicago in 1929 but spread to many cities by the mid-1930s. These campaigns encouraged African Americans to boycott establishments that refused to hire blacks and generated public protests on the streets of many cities. The Garvey Movement, as embodied in the Universal Negro Improvement Association, had been around since World War I. One of the first organizations involved in black rights, the Universal Negro Improvement Association emphasized pride in African heritage and roots under the leadership of the Jamaican immigrant and activist Marcus Garvey. By the depression, Garvey’s organization had lost much of its popularity, but its message of racial pride found receptive ears in the mid-1930s. The National Movement for Establishment of a 49th State was a movement to create a separate, black state within the United States. Davis brings up these examples to show that African Americans were exerting their power and becoming increasingly intolerant of discrimination.

Having emphasized black separatism in paragraph 16, Davis goes on to highlight interracial protests. As the depression deepened in the 1930s, the Communist Party organized the growing masses of jobless Americans into Unemployed Councils, radical groups that employed a variety of tactics to demand relief. Bread riots, street demonstrations, and rent strikes were commonplace in cities such as New York and Detroit. These protestors were of various ethnicities, including Jewish immigrants as well as black Americans. Davis mentions the sharecroppers unions, specifically the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, an interracial group that had thirty thousand members by 1937. He also notes the interracial nature of labor activism. In the years leading up to the publication of “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” labor unrest had been increasing. In 1934 alone, two men were killed in the Electric Auto-Lite strike in Toledo, Ohio, a massive strike that left three dead, and the West Coast Longshoremen’s strike resulted in the killing of four strikers. As Davis points out, many of these struggles involved black and white workers fighting on the same side.

Paragraphs 19–22

At the end of his essay, Davis points to the future. He comments on the upcoming (May 18–20, 1935) conference at Howard University but indicates that the conference cannot act by itself. One can see the seeds of the National Negro Congress in Davis’s call for existing organizations from a variety of sectors (“church, civic, fraternal, professional and trade union”) to come together as a “mighty arm of protest.” He uses the All India Congress as an example of such an organization. The All India Congress Committee arose out of nineteenth-century calls for home rule in India and the later nonviolent protests and Indian independence movement led by the activist Mahatma Gandhi. Divided by caste and religious differences, India overcame such differences to achieve independence and serve as a model for other repressed groups. Davis pointedly states that African Americans are responsible for overcoming their own divisions and must take responsibility for solving the economic and social problems that face them.