Mary McLeod Bethune: “What Does American Democracy Mean to Me?”

Context

Two major historical developments formed the cultural backdrop for Bethune’s speech (which was less a speech and more a sort of script for her remarks as part of the broadcast panel). One was the ongoing Great Depression; the other was the threat of American involvement in war, a threat that would materialize when the United States entered World War II after the bombing of the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941.

The Great Depression began in 1929, marking the end of the Roaring Twenties, a decade of prosperity in the United States. Through the 1930s, the nation’s income dropped by half, while unemployment was a major scourge: At the height of the depression, some 25 percent of the total labor force was unemployed, but among black Americans the figure was as high as 50 percent, particularly in urban areas. During the depression, it was almost impossible for black Americans to find work. Many southern blacks had been able to squeeze out a living as sharecroppers, but when the price of cotton dropped from eighteen cents per pound in the late 1920s to six cents per pound in 1933, many sharecroppers were forced off their land. Worse, mechanical cotton pickers were replacing black labor. Many displaced black agricultural workers took refuge in cities, where they faced animosity from the white labor forces and labor unions, which saw the influx of blacks as a threat to whatever few job opportunities existed.

African Americans were initially suspicious of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, a package of legislation whose goal was to put Americans to work in an assortment of federal agencies. Indeed, provisions in these agencies perpetuated a pattern of discrimination against black workers, leading many to refer to Roosevelt’s New Deal as a “raw deal.” A good example of a measure that hurt African American interests was the 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act. At the time, most black farmers did not own their land but farmed as tenants, or sharecroppers. As a way of increasing farm income, the government paid farmers incentives to leave land fallow, which would decrease crop supplies and presumably drive up prices. Accordingly, southern landowners fired their black tenant farmers, as fewer crops meant that fewer farmers were needed. These kinds of problems led John Preston Davis to write “A Black Inventory of the New Deal,” a scathing indictment of Roosevelt’s programs published in May 1935 in The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His essay called on African Americans to forge their own solutions to their economic condition rather than relying on a government that had failed to help them. That month, disaffected black intellectuals and activists held a conference at Howard University, in Washington, D.C., during which most presenters attacked New Deal programs for their adverse impacts on African Americans. Frustrated blacks in Harlem had rioted in March that year, indicating growing dissatisfaction with the government’s ability to deal with African American poverty. In response to this sort of societal alarm, Robert Clifton Weaver, one of Bethune’s colleagues on Roosevelt’s Black Cabinet, published “The New Deal and the Negro: A Look at the Facts,” a defense of the Roosevelt administration’s efforts, in the black literary journal Opportunity.

By 1939, the year of Bethune’s radio remarks, African Americans were beginning to benefit somewhat from New Deal programs. Their income from public sector employment, for example, was almost as large as their income in the private sector. Some of this modest growth in black income came at the hands of the union movement. The chief obstacle for black workers had been the American Federation of Labor, which had supported discriminatory practices in the labor unions that were part of the federation. In 1935 the American Federation of Labor did grant a charter to the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a union made up almost entirely of blacks founded by A. Philip Randolph a decade earlier. But in 1936 a rival group, soon known as the Congress of Industrial Organizations, was formed, in part, to organize black as well as white workers. Aided by such organizations as the National Urban League and the NAACP, the Congress of Industrial Organizations organized new unions, such as the Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, the United Automobile Workers, and the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. Meanwhile, in 1937 the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters reached a landmark agreement with the Pullman Company, which operated the railway coaches on which black porters and maids worked.

African American workers and civil rights organizations took additional steps to improve the plight of black workers. The Urban League and the NAACP, for example, played a key role in the formation of the Joint Committee on National Recovery in 1933. The committee’s goal was to bring inequities in New Deal programs to the public’s attention, for example, by spearheading “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns to boycott businesses that operated in black communities but would not employ black workers in any but menial jobs. Pressure from the Citizens’ League for Fair Play forced the New York City Chamber of Commerce and other citywide organizations to promote the hiring of blacks in higher-paying retail jobs. In the rural South, black workers were joining such organizations as the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, a Socialist group, and the Alabama Sharecroppers Union, a Communist one. In Birmingham, Alabama, black workers were drawn to the League of Struggle for Negro Rights.

On the political front, African Americans were changing party allegiance. Traditionally they had supported the Republican Party, the party of Abraham Lincoln and emancipation. But during the Great Depression, black political affiliation began to shift as the Democratic Roosevelt administration appointed dozens of blacks to New Deal agencies. Many of these people joined to create the Federal Council on Negro Affairs, known informally as the Black Cabinet. As a member of the Black Cabinet, Bethune, who herself had been a Republican, championed Roosevelt’s programs. In 1935 hundreds of civil rights leaders joined to form the National Negro Congress with the goal of uniting some six hundred fraternal, civil rights, and church organizations under a single umbrella to improve the economic and social position of African Americans.

Despite some progress, the position of unemployed African American workers in the late 1930s remained tenuous. The nation was emerging from the depression, in part because of increased defense spending, which allowed white workers to return to full-time employment, but black workers were continuing to rely on public sector jobs and relief programs.

Equally important, though, were the war clouds gathering over the horizon. For several years Americans had been watching with unease certain developments in Europe as well as the Far East. One was the rise of Adolf Hitler, who seized power in 1933 as Germany’s chancellor. In the months and years that followed, Hitler consolidated his power. The Reichstag Fire Decree curtailed civil liberties; the Law against the Establishment of Parties made Nazi Germany a one-party state. Hitler eliminated his rivals within the Nazi Party during the “Night of the Long Knives” at the end of June 1934. Through these years, Hitler and his supporters launched their persecution of Jews, Communists, trade unionists, and political opponents. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended Germany’s participation in World War I, Hitler remilitarized the nation. He formed alliances with the Soviet Union, led by Joseph Stalin; Fascist Italy, which invaded Ethiopia in 1935; and imperialist Japan, which was flexing its muscles in the Pacific and invaded China in 1937. China fought back against Japan with help from the United States and the Soviet Union, which in turn joined the Allies in the fight against Germany. Hitler, in the meantime, merged German-speaking Austria with Germany and grabbed the German-speaking Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. Few were surprised when he launched World War II in Europe with the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.

Americans vigorously debated the question of American participation in the war. Isolationists and antiwar activists argued that the war was Europe’s war, and the United States had no business taking part. Others, including Roosevelt himself, knew that American entry into the war was inevitable. At the same time, Americans watched the rise of Communism in the Soviet Union. Many American intellectuals, disgusted with the apparent failures of capitalism that had led to the Great Depression, were drawn to the ideology of Communism and the Soviet Union. Prominent among them were black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson, who traveled to the Soviet Union and came to believe that the Communist state did not carry the same burden of racism that the United States did. Mainstream Americans, however, regarded Communism as an alien ideology and were growing to fear the might and influence of the Soviets.

Thus, when the panel of participants was formed to address the personal question “What does American democracy mean to me?” the overarching universal questions of American democracy—regarding its origins, its role in the world, its ideological underpinnings, its response to Fascism and Communism, and its future—were already topics of intense discussion throughout the nation. Mary McLeod Bethune articulated a response to this question from an African American perspective.