White Nationalism, the Working Class, and Organized Labor

[ogc163]

The uptick of open white nationalism since 2016 has rightfully alarmed the many millions of Americans who find racial violence repellent. The murder of Heather Heyer by white supremacists in Charlottesville, the rapid expansion of hate groups, the murder of two people defending an immigrant from an attack on the Portland light rail, the concentration camps on the border, and the gunning down of twenty-two people by an El Paso shooter emboldened by Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric are just a few examples of the return of naked racial violence. This white nationalism, or the belief that the United States should be a white-dominated state that keeps minorities in a distinctly subordinate position, has become part and parcel of the American right over the past several years, personified in Donald Trump, his advisor Stephen Miller, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the nation’s immigration enforcement agency. Racial revanchism has been a major, though not the exclusive, driver of the conservative movement as the twenty-first century has advanced.

The media has framed the white working class as central to this resurgence, often without much evidence. The connection between Trump’s election, the rise of white nationalism, and the disaffection of the white working class has become a near truism in major media publications. Yet the media has failed to question the truth of this. Many “authentic white working-class voters” in stories about Trump voters have later proven to be Republican operatives or part of organized right-wing groups. These same media organizations never seem to interview white working-class voters who did not vote for Trump. They are simply erased from the conversation.

There is no question that Trump had strong connections with at least some white working-class voters, with more union households voting Republican than in any presidential election since 1984.1 Most important, these votes came in the most deindustrialized parts of the country. But there is not much evidence at the present that the rise in white nationalism is an especially white working-class phenomenon. In terms of active participation, going to right-wing rallies, intimidating immigrants on the border, and joining fascist organizations, it is at least as much angry white middle-class and wealthy people as working-class whites. Working-class whites have moved increasingly away from the Democratic Party in recent decades, to great political consequence in 2016, while highly educated whites are slowly moving toward Democrats. But the fundamental category shift seems to be education, not income, as non-college educated but financially successful whites have also dramatically moved toward the Republicans. Moreover, data suggest that working-class whites believed Trump was significantly more economically liberal than the Republican Party as a whole.2 Yet, white nationalism definitely has some appeal in working-class communities and that its appeal is probably growing. Recent books, such as Jonathan Metzl’s Dying of Whiteness, demonstrate how racial resentment combined with economic instability and a sense of loss has led large swaths of the Midwest’s white workers toward an embrace of racial revanchism and an affirmation of gun culture. It has also led them to elect politicians who cut their own social services.3

However, the debate, so often reduced to “why don’t these workers vote their own interests,” is itself skewed. Thomas Frank, most famously among the many others who have explored this question, fails to understand that in fact we all have multiple and sometimes competing interests that motivate our choices and our actions. For many people, perceived racial self-interest is and has long been a powerful force.4 American workers often display some sense of class solidarity. But the question becomes to what extent those workers will prioritize that class consciousness over ideas of racial solidarity, religious concerns, homophobia, or beliefs in misogyny. At the polling booth, for example, a white worker may reject her union’s political endorsement because of her belief that abortion is a sin or because she hates immigrants. Or a Latina worker may be influenced by her union’s endorsement because the candidate supports immigrant rights.

 

[BigMoneyGrip]

Sounds good but those clowns in the working class who voted for trump in overwhelming numbers at the main ones who lost their jobs and are dying due to Trumps incompetence.. Let’s talk about it

 

[ogc163]

Economic Decline Rekindles White Nationalism

The economic desperation in many working-class communities contributes to the appeal of white nationalism. Having spent a great deal of time in the last decade in the small economically depressed town of Clarion, Pennsylvania, I have witnessed the level of hopelessness brought on by the closing of factories and the shift to low-wage jobs of the sort provided by Walmart. In Clarion, Confederate flags abound. Hopelessness and its consequences include the use of opioids, an embrace of gun culture, growing racial resentment, and blaming others for a wide range of problems. The Republican Party has capitalized on this desire to scapegoat others, adopting it as an electoral strategy in an impoverished county that went for Trump with over 70 percent of the vote.

The story of a town like Clarion is one that can help us connect deindustrialization with white nationalism. But it is only a piece of the story. What connects it—and what is especially dangerous given the economic position of the working class—is nostalgia, the most politically reactionary of all human emotions. What helps Trump make emotional connections to large swaths of the white working class is an imagined vision of the 1950s—one with a robust industrial economy in which whites ruled the racial roost, women knew their place in the home, and men could tell a racist joke without having their children or strangers admonish them. While this nostalgic narrative is mostly mythology, it contains enough economic truth to provide cover for the racism and misogyny that make up the rest of Trump’s appeal. For many white workers, nostalgic visions of the white dominance of American society very much include economic domination. This helps to explain the misplaced anger among whites over affirmative action programs that seem to give people of color a leg up, while in fact these programs just level the playing field a bit.

But other than the channeling of racism into the more organized networks of white nationalism—a notable development for sure—what is really new here? A brief review of the relationship between race and work in America helps elucidate the present and suggests the current phenomenon is not an aberration. The fundamental labor system of European colonialization of the Americas, from New York southward to Argentina, bound Native Americans and Africans into forced labor for European profits. New England’s unique history barring slavery after the American Revolution has obscured for generations of Americans the centrality of slavery to the nation’s founding. Moreover, many New England fortunes came out of the slave trade—from those made in textile production to those garnered by financing and marketing of the products of slavery and those who owned the ships involved in the transatlantic slave trade. While the nation’s foundational labor system was split between a slave South and a free-labor North after American independence from Britain, even among many anti-slavery northerners, the real problem with slavery was not what it did to black people, but how it affected their fellow whites. In short, they worried that slavery created a stratified society that led to an indolent wealthy class living off the work of African Americans, leaving no room for the middling white farmer and worker who made up the core of northern society. They looked at the poverty and political powerlessness of the poor southern white and saw a frightening world they believed the slaveholding class wanted to expand across the nation.

White Supremacy and the History of Organized Labor

After the Civil War, the organized labor movement began developing, with white supremacy at its core. As David Roediger and many historians following him have explored in depth, connections between work, citizenship, and whiteness have long been at the core of American working-class ideology.5 The first major national law spawned by the American labor movement was the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1882, which originated in the Workingmen’s Party of California and spread nationally. Western workers used violence to expunge from their workplaces the Chinese, culminating in the 1885 Rock Springs massacre, when Wyoming miners slaughtered at least twenty-eight Chinese miners.

While the Knights of Labor made tentative alliances with black workers, the Knights barred Chinese and “Hungarians”—a catchall term for eastern Europeans—workers from the union. The American Federation of Labor took a vociferous anti-immigrant stance for decades. A 1902 pamphlet titled “Meat versus Rice,” a racist rant against allowing Asian workers to compete with white Americans, was coauthored by AFL leader Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from England. Employers routinely used black workers as strikebreakers, knowing that racial animosity would undermine class solidarity. The antipathy of unions toward black workers and the exclusion of blacks from their ranks made African Americans skeptical of unions for many years.

The rise of industrial unionism in the 1930s did finally bring black workers into unions in large numbers, but they were often stuck in lower paid, danger-prone positions in factories. And they were largely excluded from leadership roles within their unions. The CIO’s attempt to organize the South in Operation Dixie after World War II washed up on the rocky shoals of white supremacy, with southern employers and politicians using race-baiting and anti-Semitism to taint the industrial federation as a bastion of Jewish organizers in support of civil rights. The indifference of most AFL-CIO leaders to civil rights after the merger of the two federations in 1955 did not suggest a change was to come.



Labor and Economic Restructuring

The relationship between race and the labor movement has changed over the past half-century. But that has often happened more at the leadership level than among the grassroots and it has coincided with large-scale economic restructuring that severely undermined the industrial working class, especially in those critical electoral states that went for Trump in 2016. There are three main reasons for this shift. First is the growth of public-sector unionism. With government employment long one of the few places African Americans could get relatively steady work, the rise of public-sector unionism by the late 1960s brought a lot of black workers into unions.

Second is the impact of immigration. Shifts in U.S. immigration policy and immigration law have had profound effects on the labor movement. In The Great Exception, Jefferson Cowie argues that, in part, the labor movement was successful in the 1930s because the working class was not fighting over immigration, which had been severely curtailed by the Immigration Act of 1924. A quota system, the National Origins Formula established in that law, placed the sharpest restrictions on non-Western Europeans.6 The Immigration Act of 1965, known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished the National Origins Formula, allowing greater numbers of non-Europeans to enter the United States. As a result, the American working class became incredibly ethnically diverse in the next half century.

There is no question that the rush of immigrants from Latin America and Asia after 1965 profoundly changed both the nation and the labor movement. Between 1970 and 2000, mass migration catapulted the Mexican-born population in the United States from 760,000 to 9,177,000. Many unions began to view this huge influx of immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, as a new constituency ripe for organizing to resuscitate a declining labor movement. Major campaigns, such as Service Employees International Union’s (SEIU) Justice for Janitors, announced a new era of immigrant organizing in America.

Third, deindustrialization followed by corporate wars against organized labor decimated the heart of the existing labor movement, turning unions such as the United Mine Workers (UMW) of America, the United Steelworkers (USW), and the United Auto Workers (UAW) into shells of their once powerful selves. Automation began replacing sizable numbers of union workers by the 1960s. The Border Industrialization Program, a 1965 Mexican program to create an industrial zone on the U.S. border to attract American companies with low wages, began the process of American companies outsourcing union jobs to lower wage countries. By the 1970s, a trickle became a flood. The so-called “Black Monday,” when the largest steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio closed in 1977, served as a national symbol of disappearing jobs. Deindustrialization received a new level of legal protection with the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, notably signed by Democratic president Bill Clinton. All of this decimated union membership and union power, with enormous political implications. Unions have been the only organizations in American history to channel the voices of working people into politics in a way to improve everyone’s economic situation. With so many unions eviscerated and with Democrats, the theoretical party of the workers that in the 1940s had brought unions to the center of government power, indifferent to the fate of workers, a vacuum was created. For some workers, that vacuum has been filled by white nationalism, anti-immigrant fervor, and racism.

 

[ogc163]

Deindustrialization changed what the union movement looked like, with government and service workers now making up a much larger percentage of the movement. The unions that have grown in recent decades are those that continue to invest in large-scale organizing and whose growth has been among workers of color, most notably the SEIU, today the nation’s second largest union.

The era of deindustrialization also came with wide-scale outsourcing and capital mobility, with corporations closing factories in the United States, only to reopen them in the Global South. Neither Democrats nor Republicans had any answers for unemployed industrial workers in the Midwest and Northeast except for cheap bromides about reeducation and suggesting that workers move to where the jobs are. What this did was open up the space for disaffected white workers to place blame for the problems in their lives elsewhere.

What white nationalists do is to interpret these economic, racial, and social changes in the United States as an apocalypse for whites. They focus on what once seemed like outdated forms of racial panic, such as “race suicide” or the idea that whites are being outbred by immigrants, an idea that had its day in the time (and the words) of Theodore Roosevelt. These notions allow working-class people to channel the very real anger they feel about their equally real economic dislocation, growing poverty, and hopelessness for the future. These resentments existed long before Trump came around to channel them. Long before Trump, there was plenty of evidence of anger and racism within white working-class communities that could twist into white nationalist sentiment. Thomas Sugrue’s discussion of how the Detroit white working class reacted to integrated public housing projects in Detroit at the height of the New Deal by voting out liberal New Dealers is just one of many examples of an underlying white nationalism that has long existed in the working class.7 Sociologists and anthropologists continue to depict this. For instance, Maria Kefalas’ 2003 study of white ethnic enclaves in southwest Chicago, Working-Class Heroes, provides a window into the bitterness and resentment of white ethnic workers waiting for someone to conduct their anger.8 Moreover, as Monica McDermott, among others, has shown, working-class whites have long maintained racist animus toward minority populations.9 Short of joining a specific group, embracing white nationalism or white supremacy is not an either/or phenomenon. It is a sliding scale of disaffection, anger, and hatred, all of which Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party have unquestionably tapped into. But these elements have existed in the white working class since its formation.

Even in these times of more racially progressive unions, the connection between organized labor and a nationalism that is not-so-subtlety coded white has long been obvious. Buy American campaigns are one example of this. Workers have routinely responded to globalization through demonizing overseas workers. UAW workers smashed Toyotas as a response to Japanese imports in the 1970s, but that did nothing to save their jobs. A few years ago—when the Bakery, Confectionary, and Tobacco Workers Union was in a fight with Mondelez (which now owns Nabisco)—the union created a racially tinged cartoon about capital mobility moving their jobs to Mexico. The cartoon made a brief mention of bad working conditions there, but otherwise resorted to portraying Mexicans as people in sombreros, effectively dismissing their needs as workers in favor of a Buy American campaign. This may be a minor example, but it demonstrates the continued power of nationalism over international solidarity at a time when the rapid growth of the Latino population is one of the powerful triggers of white nationalism.


Another example of the connection between a white-coded nationalism and the working class is union-branded clothing. While some unions have clothing that represents union colors, for many other unions, the clothing is as much an exercise in patriotism as it is in solidarity or union pride. Clothing for many unions is drenched in the American flag, bald eagles, and expressions of an aggressive Americanism that reinforces white-coded values in American society. This overly masculinized patriotism may be part of working-class culture, but it also speaks much more to white workers than to others. It is difficult to see the new unionists in home health care work or the middle-class members of teachers’ unions in this clothing. Again, this issue may seem minor but actually forces us to ask questions about the relationship between different sectors of the working class and ideas of American values. Are union shirts emblazoned with assertive expressions of a chauvinism that has so often excluded workers of color a tacit engagement with white nationalism? Or is sensitivity to these symbols part of a broader left that has turned away from overt signs of patriotism and embraced an internationalism and criticism of America’s behavior abroad that both divides it from the left of the New Deal era and from much of the contemporary white working class, a divide that the historian Michael Kazin has bemoaned?10 It at least suggests a part of the disconnect between white working-class culture and elite liberal culture that provides white nationalists another potential avenue into working-class support.

 

[ogc163]

What we ultimately face is a resurgent white nationalism that has at least the potential to draw in large numbers of angry white working-class people who voted for an openly white supremacist presidential candidate in 2016 in critical industrialized counties in purple states. Regardless of just how central white nationalism is to the state of the working class today, how do we as labor activists respond to the very real threat posed by white nationalism? What policies can we promote in the attempt to alleviate this problem?

First, we have to advocate for economic policies that raise the boats for all workers, regardless of race, and that also provide dignity for working-class people without a college education. Both political parties have completely failed to articulate anything useful for people in Flint, Michigan; Youngstown, Ohio; Clarion, Pennsylvania; and so many other places. As the Democratic Party seems to be slowly evolving out of its centrist neoliberal phase, new left-leaning ideas about employment and industrial policy are once again on the agenda. These new ideas include a government job guarantee, a universal basic income, a new generation of labor law, and other programs designed to lift workers out of poverty. These ideas provide a context in which to debate and articulate the future of the economy instead of looking nostalgically to a past we cannot recreate. The challenge now is creating a working-class economy for 2050, not 1950.

An economy that provides opportunity to the working class hardly guarantees white nationalism would not appeal to blue-collar whites. For many, it still will, as it has throughout the history of the American labor movement. But for many white working-class people, the perception of decline is not just outright, it is relative to people of color and to perceived erosions of white privilege. These imagined assaults on white privilege range from desegregated schools and jobs to affirmative action programs and the prevalence of Spanish as a language in the workplace and the community. Real hourly wages for workers without a college education have declined significantly since the 1970s and black workers have not made up wage gaps with white men, but the perception among large numbers of white workers is that they suffer because workers of color have taken their jobs.11 Given this dynamic, the best vaccination we have against white supremacy among workers is to give them the power to demand a better life for themselves and their families.

Second, we have to be forthright about both the historic and contemporary racism of white people, and not just white workers. We have to acknowledge that the future of the American labor movement is one of diversity and that there can be no compromise with white supremacy, nor can we countenance naked and cynical appeals to one section of the working class at the expense of others. Despite media portrayals of the working class as exclusively white, the real working class is by far the most diverse sector of the nation. In fact, at this point, the working class is close to majority nonwhite and is already a majority in many cities and some states.

Moreover, the face of the working class will continue to change, even if all immigration ended today. Rolling back the nation to its 1950 demographics is no more productive or possible than a return to its 1950 economy. Organizing again for worker power has to reject any semblance of white nationalism and fight for justice among the actual working class. All attempts to appeal explicitly to the white working class will not only reinforce their perceived special status as workers but also fail to organize the working class as it exists. If this means that some white workers will turn to racist organizations and violence, there is probably not much the labor movement can do to stop it. But we can fight for an economy and society that represents all workers. Any other option is both morally and politically bankrupt.

SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class research journals

 

[acri1]

I'm all for organized labor, but it's about time to let go of the myth that Trump's movement is particularly working class. I'm pretty sure Republican voters make more than Dem voters on average.

Race and and where someone lives (ie. urban or rural) is a much better predictor of Trump support. I agree 100% with the sentiment that labor movements need to be more inclusive though.

 

[MMS]

I'm all for organized labor, but it's about time to let go of the myth that Trump's movement is particularly working class. I'm pretty sure Republican voters make more than Dem voters on average.

Race and and where someone lives (ie. urban or rural) is a much better predictor of Trump support. I agree 100% with the sentiment that labor movements need to be more inclusive though.

the real question is why is this

 

[hashmander]

so the worse things get the more they cling to right wing ideas and politicians.

 

[DEAD7]

Organized labor in America is a tool of white supremacy... always has been.
Lefties/progressives want it to be one way(like in EU)... but...

 

[Piff Perkins]

This nation has largely been built on stopping black people from participating in or joining many segments of the working class that lead to success. This was easily achieved by simply banning blacks from working at various places via slavery and Jim Crow. But even decades after those practices, whites have always found a way to restrict black participation. After WWII, when countless GIs came home to working class jobs that took the United States economy to higher heights...black GIs were regulated to lower income jobs in many places. My granddad came home from the war and the best job he could find was shoveling coal at a major auto plant. He did it for decades, built a house, raised a family, and even managed to save enough money to pass down to his children and grandchildren. But his success pales in comparison to what whites achieved in higher paying jobs at the same auto company, or other companies/jobs.

People shocked that Trump won the white woman vote in 2016 miss the point of all this. Abortion, women's rights, etc are largely the rallying points for younger white women. As they get older and fully assimilate into white supremacy, via marrying white men, protecting it becomes their main priority. The success of their children is paramount to them. What better way to do that than support policies that benefit your race and hurt others. They knew what Trump would be, and gladly lined up. It wasn't until Trump threatened their own economic stability (trade wars and COVID) that white women began shifting left, in polling. If Trump had simply been a normal bigot instead of an unstable bigot, he'd be fine.

 

[saturn7]

Sounds good but those clowns in the working class who voted for trump in overwhelming numbers at the main ones who lost their jobs and are dying due to Trumps incompetence.. Let’s talk about it

These things are the results of decades of Neo Liberal policies. Both Dems and Repubs have a hand in this.

This video gives a good explanation. The Democrats abandoning blue collar workers also harmed blacks folks as well with the loss of skilled labor jobs due to NAFTA etc.

 

[ogc163]

A Different Viewpoint on Black and Labor relations from Jacobin

Interview by
Connor Kilpatrick

Bernie Sanders makes liberals say the darndest things.

The senator from Vermont spent the better part of 2016 pitching his “socialism” as a continuation of the best in the American reform tradition. And that meant embracing by name the domestic achievements of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Suddenly, however, some liberal pundits weren’t so sure about those legacies. The stubborn old socialist was looking back on the past through rose-colored lenses, they said. And hearing him champion the populist economic reforms of the good old days was enough to make them rethink the foundations of the Democratic Party’s most impressive legislative accomplishment: the New Deal.

Why would elite liberals become so ambivalent about the reforms that, with one brief interruption, helped hand their favored party control of Congress for sixty years? The same set of policies they long touted as the kind of “responsible” and “pragmatic” reforms that radicals could learn from?

The answer: racism. Only white supremacy, these chastened liberals argued, marshaling the work of some recent historians, made both the New Deal and the golden age of organized labor possible.

Just as Scandinavian social democracy was purportedly built on a foundation of ethnic homogeneity, so too did the New Deal prosper because of racial exclusion. And when black Americans began to demand their rights, the New Deal — and organized labor — imploded as racist white workers fled the Democratic Party for Ronald Reagan.

In its outlines, this story draws on a powerful left-wing critique of the New Deal — an unsparing exposure of social democracy’s contradictions that radicals from Leon Trotsky to Martin Luther King would have understood.

In the hands of today’s liberal intelligentsia, however, it functions somewhat differently. For them, the arc of twentieth-century politics shows that the Democratic Party’s turn away from economic populism is not the fault of its affluent elite, but of the still-unvanquished racism of reactionary white workers.

In the following interview with Jacobin editorial board member Connor Kilpatrick, Judith Stein explains why she disagrees. While other historians have neatly divided “race” and “economic policy,” Stein has focused on the connection between the two throughout her scholarly career. Her first book examined the Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey, as an exemplar of the black nationalism that permeated African-American political life from 1890 to the Great Depression.

She then moved to the New Deal era, when the wage worker became a central actor in black politics. Stein decided to focus on the steel industry — the only place (other than coal) where African Americans worked in both the South and the North.

This line of inquiry — the result of which was Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism — took her South, to Birmingham.

That examination of race and the decline of the postwar steel industry led to her next book, The Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, a study of the decisions that pushed the Democratic Party away from New Deal liberalism.

Contrary to today’s liberals, Stein argues that it wasn’t the racism of white workers that forced the Democratic Party to the right on economics. It was powerful political and business elites, who chose to abandon organized labor and turn the Party of Roosevelt into the Party of Clinton.

CK

Before we talk about the death of New Deal politics and the role of racism in undoing these movements for political reform, first we need to talk about how Jim Crow and disfranchisement were established in the first place.

JS

First of all, Jim Crow is different from disfranchisement. Disfranchisement meant raising the barriers to voting. They did that in a variety of ways, such as the poll tax, literacy tests, and Democratic Party control of registration.

The latest scholarship on disfranchisement locates its origins in the planters’ demand for labor control, which was challenged during the depression of the 1890s. J. Morgan Kousser proved this by going through the origins of these laws in each state legislature.

The first state was Mississippi in 1890. That’s one reason why people argue that they never had a Populist Movement in Mississippi. The last state was Georgia in 1908.

Kousser argued that the laws generally followed a defeat of the Populist Movement, so that they could get them through. After a loss, when the opposition was weaker — that’s when elites introduced the legislation.

And Kousser showed that the people who introduced the legislation were planters, not working people. They came from elite-dominated areas, not the poor white regions of the South.

Whether the poor whites were racists or not, they lacked the power to effect disfranchisement (which affected them as well). And poor white areas were often the only areas of opposition to the new laws.

CK

What were the challenges to planter rule that these elites were trying to put a stop to?

JS

It was the Populist Party, it was black Republicans. North Carolina, from 1894 to 1898, was ruled by a biracial coalition of Populists and Republicans. It was a coalition, because blacks preferred to remain Republican. Blacks and whites challenged planter rule.

The North Carolina coalition achieved a lot for blacks, as well as for whites. It was defeated in 1898 by the white supremacist Democrats, who used violence to win the election.

And in other states, even without achieving power, blacks and whites, separately or together, challenged planter rule.

CK

What exactly were they fighting over?

JS

Many whites left the Democratic Party for the Populist Party because Democrats were supporting high interest rates, and they were small farmers, who needed cheaper credit.

“We want government to regulate the railroads. We want the government to provide credit.” These were key issues for the Populists.

There was the famous Tom Watson [a Georgia Populist who later became a racist demagogue]. Watson famously brought his cohorts to defend a black farmer who was about to be attacked.

I’m not saying this happened every day, I don’t want to make Populists angels. All I mean to say is that there was a great fear among the Democratic elites that this popular uprising during the 1890s depression would displace them and rule the South.

They acted in every way possible. Violently when necessary, but in the long run they knew that they would have to permanently alter politics through the various disfranchisement measures.

CK

So it wasn’t internal tensions over race that destroyed the Populist alliance?

JS

No! People don’t understand that in the South in the 1890s, white elites openly advocated violence.

Responding to another Populist-Republican alliance in Louisiana, the Evening Judge, a newspaper in Shreveport, declared that

it is the religious duty of Democrats to rob Populists and Republicans of their votes whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself . . . The Populists and Republicans are our legitimate political prey. Rob them! You bet! What are we here for?

These techniques and violence led to a Democratic victory. The new governor was happy to have retained “control of affairs” in the hands of what he described as “the intelligence and virtue of the State” over “the force of brute numbers.”

CK

Did they actually kill anyone?

JS

Yes! They killed lots of people. Whites and blacks. In 1896, at the height of the political insurgency in Louisiana, twenty-one people were lynched, one-fifth of the total for the entire nation.

CK

Who exactly were the Democratic Party elites at this point who put down the Populists?

JS

They represented the planter class and the new industrial class. There’s a debate about how bourgeois the South was at the time. But most of the leaders were from the planter class, because they had the most to lose if blacks voted.

After all, if all your workers in the Black Belt counties are voting, that’s black-majority power, Reconstruction. They did not want that. That’s why they were the most antagonistic to free black voting.

And if you bring the story up to the 1950s — where was the white Citizens Council formed? It was formed in the Delta of Mississippi, where it was still five-to-one, black to white, where if you have a semblance of democracy, you would have black rule.

CK

Which would mean worker rule.

JS

Of course. It’s not that they disliked the color black. Slaves had been brought from Africa to work. This was labor control, basically.

CK

What about Jim Crow specifically?

JS

Jim Crow also originated as an elite phenomenon. Remember, Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court’s legalization of segregation in 1896, was about first-class railroad service.

Why did Jim Crow grow and flourish? First, it required black disfranchisement. Most of the Jim Crow laws came after disfranchisement, because you could never get Jim Crow if blacks were voting.

Second, most scholars believe that Southern industrialization undermined the agrarian-based system of social control and race relations. Industrialization also exacerbated sectoral competition for labor between agriculture and industry.

These social and economic stresses played out against popular challenges to elite rule in the 1890s. Segregation was the answer because it eased class and racial tensions in urban areas, it mediated competition between industry and agriculture, and it resolved political struggles by persuading whites to close ranks around white supremacy.

So, basically the origin of Jim Crow is not so much planter control, but urbanization. In the planter areas, the old form of labor control could work. You can control people using the old methods of landlord-tenant, landlord-worker.

In the city, as Frederick Douglass said of the urban slave, “He’s a free man, a slave is a free man.” Obviously he was exaggerating, but he was distinguishing between the tyranny of living on a plantation and the relative freedom that you have in the city.

In the cities, where you have freer blacks, segregation was considered a way of organizing society to minimize conflict. And of course, to make it impossible for blacks and whites ever to unite.

Blacks and whites couldn’t play checkers in the park — there was such a law in Birmingham. In order to unite in solidarity, you have to at least know each other. Segregation made that much more difficult.

CK

So Jim Crow, like disfranchisement, is also a response to the Populist Movement?

JS

Sure it is. The elites saw this as a way of creating order in the city. Obviously you have to have a racist society to separate black and white, but it was not atavistic. It was a modern way of organizing people on the basis of racial separation. Some of this happened in the North, too. In some of the steel mills in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, they had Eastern Europeans in one section, Italians in another, blacks in another. And this was all modern.

 

[ogc163]

CK

Let’s use that to talk about what’s going on in the North at that time. The Northern ruling class — what are they doing at this time? Are they trying to get the vote out of the hands of their workers?<

JS

To some extent they were. Throughout the nation, in the face of strikes and third parties during the two depression decades — the 1870s and 1890s — there was a general questioning of democracy.

But Northern elites couldn’t radically reduce the electorate because the machine bosses were too strong, and they protected workers and immigrants because they were the source of their power.

But they were able to tighten up residency requirements, which we still have, and institute other measures that made voting more difficult. Voter suppression was less radical in the North because workers and immigrants had more power than their Southern counterparts. But some of the Northern restrictions are still with us. Look at what just happened in the presidential primary in New York City. To vote in the April party primaries, one would have had to register in October 2015.

CK

So it seems to me the narrative is that the ruling class always wants control of the vote, as much as they can get, over the working class, North or South — and that they’ll exploit whatever social forms exist in a given area to do so.

JS

Right, but that doesn’t explain why disfranchisement was less radical in the North than in the South. The Northern and Southern orders were different.

The planters, especially in the depression of 1890s, had less room to maneuver and thus came down hard against challenges to their rule.

All of this is important because in the South, almost all of the black population, and half of the white population, at the class line, didn’t vote.

So what you get is elite voting where factions contested each other and the people were ignored. That’s what elite rule was, and it worked for a while.

CK

This is skipping a lot of history but let’s get to the New Deal’s relationship with the South, and with black workers.

The popular thesis today is that the New Deal could only be popular with white workers because, thanks to the Dixiecrats, it excluded black workers.

JS

If the New Deal was simply for whites, why did blacks switch from the GOP to the Democratic Party in 1934 and 1936, led by the working-class black districts? Were they stupid? Or did they see something in the New Deal that these people don’t?

One could argue that New Dealers compromised too much with the South, but that is not to say that men like Senator Robert Wagner from New York wrote laws for a lily-white majority. Moreover, the argument that these laws were simply racist because they excluded agricultural workers is wrong.

First, most social welfare laws everywhere initially excluded farm workers. Today, farm workers in New York have fewer rights than industrial workers. Then, the majority of sharecroppers in the South of the 1930s were white, not black. Did Southern legislators advocate minimum wages and pensions for white sharecroppers?

The South feared that the New Deal endangered their control over labor — black and white. After all, federal relief and jobs challenged their control over labor by allowing workers to avoid the plantation.

What the Southerners loved in the first New Deal was help for agriculture and cheap money. Although FDR did not challenge the Southern racial order, many white Southerners saw the New Deal and the CIO as such a threat.

When the coal miners organized in and around Birmingham and the union began to register black voters, elites conjured up images of Reconstruction.

CK

Blacks’ sudden shift into the Democratic Party came after decades of loyalty to the Republicans. What was going on in black politics then to make that possible?

JS

Well, in 1933 there was a big fight within the NAACP when the “Young Turks” wanted the NAACP to convert itself into a group to organize black workers.

Not only did W. E. B. Du Bois not like that, but Walter White, the head of the NAACP, didn’t like it either.

Most of the black radicals — I’m not talking about communists, but people like Abram Harris, an economist, E. Franklin Frazier, A. Philip Randolph, of course — thought that the old civil rights groups were not dealing with bread and butter issues, and that’s what people were interested in.

CK

So the issue, for this younger set, was the importance of class?

JS

Exactly. This was the fight they had with Du Bois.

Du Bois left the NAACP for many reasons. There was the fight with Walter White over DuBois’s nationalism.

But there also was an important rift between DuBois and some of his young admirers, such as George Streator.

Streator had gone to Fisk University, he loved Du Bois, and had started to work for [the NAACP magazine] the Crisis. Then he leaves to become an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Virginia.

He has a fight with Du Bois on just this issue. Du Bois argued that white workers are always racist. And Streator challenged his knowledge of white workers and challenged Du Bois’s notion that the black bourgeoisie was progressive by citing many instances of black middle-class opposition to unionization.

He told DuBois, “I am through with any doctrine of ‘racial solidarity’ as a way out.” DuBois’s hope in the 1930s was that cooperatives, led by the black middle class, could lead blacks out of the Depression.

This was not the kind of pious debate you hear today. Why? Because both of them thought the stakes were high. Your position on how blacks should organize was not a posture, it mattered to black people.

Even the Urban League moves left and gets interested in unionization — and the Urban League had been under complete corporate control in the 1920s.

In 1935, you also get the National Negro Congress, which wanted to be a left-wing equivalent to the NAACP. Its members thought the NAACP was an organization of preachers and teachers, whereas they represented the masses. There was some truth to their conclusion.

They said, in essence, blacks are workers. Our interests are with white workers, not with white capitalists, which had been the dominant trend in racial organization in the twenties, and since Booker T. Washington began to dominate black politics at the end of the 1890s.

CK

This all sounds familiar. Right now, black millennials generally support Bernie Sanders, while the older guard is saying, let’s stick with these enlightened capitalist-funded organizations.

JS

But the leftward movement was more powerful in the era of the Depression. Capitalists stopped contributing to the Urban League.

In the 1920s, the league used to agitate for more black jobs in corporations. But now, with the Depression, corporations were firing people.

It’s not that a light bulb suddenly went off in their heads, it was that the facts on the ground made it clear that their old ways had to change.

The insurgent movement was activist, it was potentially changing things, and it appealed to blacks who were interested in material issues.

Ralph Bunche was another one who at this point effectively said, “You know, every time we ask for a meeting on civil rights, no one comes. When we talk about material issues, everybody comes.”

People didn’t have jobs. A black man who was hired at the US Steel mill in Birmingham in 1937 was asked what he thought about discrimination at the mill. He responded that the only thing he was thinking about was that “I was making 37 cents an hour when I was making 75 cents a day on the farm.”

CK

But what about racism in the labor movement? Blacks had been excluded from unions, hadn’t they?

JS

First of all, the CIO was new. It was new because it included Eastern European immigrants and blacks, who had more or less been excluded from the old AFL.

But the notion that blacks were excluded from the CIO is ideology, not reality. Employers in the North and the South often told whites and immigrants (they were not the same then) to avoid the CIO because it was a “black” union.

And the pattern of unionization disproves the race-first mode of organizing. In Birmingham, first the coal miners, then the steelworkers, and finally the iron ore workers formed integrated unions — probably the only integrated organizations in the state of Alabama at the time.

I am certain that very few of the whites who joined with blacks were egalitarians, although measured by the Alabama standards of the time they probably were.

And in western Pennsylvania, it was only after the success of the steelworkers union in the late 1930s that white workers joined blacks in getting black teachers hired in the public schools and integrating swimming pools, theaters, and restaurants.

Egalitarian racial sentiment is often the consequence, not the cause, of unionization.

Let me give you an example: the Packinghouse Workers was another union organized in the thirties. The packinghouse workers had terrible race relations in Chicago because in a strike in the wake of World War I, the companies imported blacks as strikebreakers.

They broke the strike. So in the 1930s, the animosity between black and white was great.

What happened, and what made the union appealing to whites, was they knew that there were lots of blacks and if they didn’t have them, they weren’t going to have a union.

And for blacks, even though they had once been the company favorites, they recognized that they were also the first ones fired. The companies had “black lists” — literally.

As I said, often, good racial feelings are a consequence, not the cause, of unionization. Jim Cole, a black man who worked in the Chicago yards, was interviewed in 1938 by someone from the Federal Writers Project. He said:

I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raisin’ our pay, or settling grievances about anything, I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world gettin’ everybody who works in the yards together, and [breakin’?] up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro. We all doing our work now, nothing but good to say about the CIO.

 

[ogc163]

CK

This flies in the face of the narrative we hear from many labor skeptics today — that people must first purge themselves of racism before a successful revitalization of the labor movement is possible.

JS

The notion that you need perfect people before people will join unions flies in the face of the evidence.

It’s said by people who don’t really need a union. In other words, they don’t understand that people join unions for practical reasons.

I have used the phrase “the racialization of explanation” to explain this phenomenon. Especially in the era of Jim Crow, people often conclude that every time a union failed, it must be because of race.

That doesn’t make sense. Workers can be racist, but that is not necessarily the reason why a union fails. It’s only if you only see race and ignore everything else.

Labor historians have shown that context, geography, religion, gender, skill, ethnicity, and — yes — race all make solidarity contingent, not something that inexorably flows from economic conditions or the social relations of production.

The current “wages of whiteness” school reifies whiteness and makes it all-powerful, to counter a straw-man conception of Marxism that nobody even accepts anymore.

CK

But wasn’t it W. E. B. Du Bois who said that white workers received a “psychological wage” from their racial status, which kept them from joining interracial alliances?

JS

Du Bois’s phrase appeared in his Black Reconstruction, which was first published in 1935. Du Bois advanced the notion of a “public and psychological wage” for whites, to answer the old Werner Sombart question (“Why is there no socialism in America?”).

Why did white workers refuse to make common cause with black workers to make the revolution? Du Bois claimed that the agents of the divide-and-conquer strategy were those in power.

But in another piece, written in 1933, Du Bois was closer to Sombart’s claim that socialism “foundered on shoals of roast beef” — in other words, Americans were too prosperous for socialism. Here the “wages of whiteness” was simply conventional wages.

Since the question of agency is critical, which is it? And is Du Bois right? Immediately after those lines in Black Reconstruction, Du Bois characterized the “Negro” as “a caged human being, driven into a curious mental provincialism,” dominated by an “inferiority complex,” “one who did not believe himself a man like other men,” who “could not teach his children self-respect, and who sank into apathy and fatalism.”

Such a characterization justified Du Bois’s belief that only the “talented tenth” could produce black freedom.

But was his description of blacks correct? Much subsequent history disproves Du Bois’s findings.

If he was wrong on blacks, why was he right on whites? In short, Du Bois had great insights into blacks and whites, but he was not always right.

Given my problems accepting his formulation as a tool for understanding the post–Civil War South or the 1930s, it is even less likely to be useful in understanding contemporary history, whose dynamics Du Bois never experienced, much less studied.

CK

What was the labor movement’s relationship with the Civil Rights Movement?

JS

First of all, both the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement were diverse. But I can make some generalizations. Let’s start with the AFL-CIO and its leader, George Meany.

Unlike Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers, Meany did not support the March on Washington in 1963. Nevertheless, he was the muscle behind the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including the very important Title 7, banning employment discrimination.

The Civil Rights Movement, and blacks in general, did not have much weight in Congress, so labor played a crucial role in getting legislation passed. And where labor was weak, the churches stepped in.

One of the reasons that Meany was so insistent on Title 7 was that the law had evolved so that unions, but not employers, were liable for employment discrimination. Making employment discrimination illegal would place the blame on employers, whom labor leaders believed were the cause of discrimination.

In addition, it wasn’t just Reuther who gave money to Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963, the United Steelworkers in Birmingham gave $40,000 so that jailed demonstrators could be released. Claude Ramsay, head of the Mississippi AFL-CIO, worked very closely with Medgar Evers, the main civil rights leader in the state.

Having said that, it is also true that the hurricane of racism that enveloped the South in the late 1950s and early 1960s included many unionized white workers. This period halted some of the postwar progress that had been made and replaced the populists, who stressed economic issues, with the racists in state and local government.

Nonetheless, most union leaders in the South tried the best they could to promote black rights because they saw black voting as crucial to union success, as well as to their own liberalism.

There is no doubt that there were conflicts, generally over methods and the speed of black advancement. The conflicts escalated when the number of jobs was falling.

And some unions were better than others. The craft unions were less willing to change than the CIO industrial unions, which especially in the North had eliminated many of the discriminations of the pre-union era.

Even so, the unionized construction companies [strongholds of craft unionism] had better records on training blacks for skilled work than the nonunionized companies.

CK

Bayard Rustin said at some point in the early seventies that the labor movement was the most empowering institution for black people in America.

JS

Yes. I still think it’s true. In Birmingham in the thirties, the steelworkers, with the coal miners and the iron workers, were the only integrated institution in the whole city.

This is Jim Crow Birmingham. The unions were not perfect, but blacks had a vote in the election of their leaders and therefore they had a voice, and many of them were quite skillful in using it for their own advantage. Where else in Birmingham did they have that kind of power?

If you don’t understand the empowerment that being a member of a union brings, having a say in your work life, how important that is to a person who has no rights outside of the union, you don’t know what the Jim Crow South was. That is why these first black unionists were so enthusiastic about unions.

I interviewed a retired black worker, Willie George Phillips, from the wire mill in Birmingham, which was really black-run. “In the late forties,” he said, “we decided to elect a black as the chairman of the grievance committee,” which was really the main committee of the union.

I said, “So you thought it was about time that you elected a black to be chair?” He said no. “Every time we got a good white, they would promote him to be foreman. We knew they’d never promote a black.”

Here I had assumed that it was the times, that blacks were on the move, seeking higher position. No, there was a very practical reason, and it acknowledged the ongoing racism of the mill, their imperfect world. That will explain why black workers joined with people that we would say probably are a little racist.

And there were non-racial reasons to have a union. I once asked Jimmie Lee Williams, a black leader from the coke plant, what was his most important accomplishment. I thought he would say facilitating the promotion of blacks or registering blacks to vote, which he had done.

He said, “The best thing I ever did in the coke plant was getting air conditioning for the workers.” People who don’t work in a coke plant during a Birmingham summer need to expand their imagination if they want to understand this history.

There were two institutions where working-class people — I don’t care what the race was — could get leadership skills. One was the church, and the other was the union.

When I asked another retired black worker what he liked best about the union, he said, “I was on the pension committee.” Surprised, I said, “Why?” He said, “I got a chance to travel outside of Birmingham to other cities, and I had never traveled.”

CK

I think a lot of liberals just see it as, like, “Well, okay, being in a labor union — what does that really mean? Is it really that big of a deal?”

JS

Exactly. It establishes a rule of law. It protects you from arbitrary firing and makes whites subject to the contract, the law. If you cannot understand what this means, you lack an understanding of what the Jim Crow South was like.

CK

What happens to the New Deal order in the 1970s?

JS

Democratic losses among white workers began in the election of 1980. After the aberrant 1972 presidential election, the 1976 contest saw a return to class voting, North and South. There was much racial debate and divisiveness at the national and local levels in 1976, but it did not affect the voting. Whatever their racial views in 1976, most white workers did not abandon the Democratic Party.

Many whites, especially more affluent ones, left the Democratic Party in the South. But those who remained had characteristics similar to Democratic whites in the rest of the nation — older, Catholic, union member, blue-collar, working-class, less education, and less affluent — according to political scientists Richard Nadeau and Harold W. Stanley, who studied white Southern voting from 1952 to 1990.

During the 1970s white Southern Democrats learned to represent biracial constituencies. The addition of black voters and the departure of more affluent whites made white Democratic politicians more liberal than their predecessors on economic matters. The addition of new black Democrats added to the liberalism. Then in every region in 1980, Democrats lost votes because of the economy, the terrible economic conditions.

CK

What are some of those conditions?

JS

You have unemployment, you have inflation. If you look at the white working-class vote in 1980, first of all, there was less of it.

Then, every group, except blacks, gave a greater proportion of their vote to Reagan in 1980 than they gave to Ford in 1976. Suburban women, North, South — you name it. Catholic. Every group.

The big issue in 1980 was the economy. So you go back to race? That just doesn’t make sense to me. Still, the class dimension of the vote in 1980 remained. Carter was weakest and Reagan the strongest in the white suburbs and other affluent communities.

The South had been in play during the 1970s. But the Democrats did not offer white workers (or black workers) social democracy.

National Democratic leaders did not nurture a biracial, class politics. Democrats promoted black mobilization (and eventually black districts, to ensure racial representation), but not biracial unions, the surest way to anchor white Democratic voting.

Whites belonging to unions voted Democratic more than nonunion whites. But President Carter only perfunctorily supported the labor reform in 1978, which would have advanced the unionization of Southern workers, black and white.

The law was filibustered to death. Beginning in the late 1970s, when the Democratic Party embraced neoliberalism, it lost the capacity to convince workers that it could fix the economy.

Yes, some working-class whites in the South turned to the Republican Party, especially when it was the party of power in their city and county. But many more just stopped voting.

 

[ogc163]

CK

Did the white working class shrink as a percentage of the general population?

JS

No! They stopped voting.

CK

In some ways, I guess that’s not surprising. Carter was basically telling the working class to do more with less.

JS

Absolutely. Today it’s hard to recreate that, because Jimmy Carter devotes himself to ending conflicts throughout the world. But there was huge criticism of him.

Senator Edward Kennedy challenged him in the primaries, and the polls showed in 1980 that people voted for Reagan not because they were more conservative, but because they thought that Jimmy Carter was unable to manage the economy.

The Reagan people liked to argue that this was a conservative ideological victory, but the polling shows that they lost faith in Carter’s ability to fix the economy. It was like the 1932 election, when people voted for Roosevelt because Hoover had had three years to improve the economy, but failed.

Polling in 1984 shows that 60 percent of the electorate preferred Mondale’s ideas about helping the needy; 25 percent preferred Reagan’s. But they believed that the Democrats couldn’t manage the economy, and Reagan could. Up until that point, Democrats successfully claimed, “We are the party of prosperity. Republicans are the party of the Great Depression.” After 1984, that was not the case anymore.

CK

How much of the rightward turn in Southern politics is due to the fact that labor unions never had as much of a presence there?

JS

Sure, because after all, workers will imbibe the culture around them. That’s why in the South, there is a distinction between the voting patterns of white unionized and white non-unionized workers.

Typically, an oil-industry lobbyist opposed labor reform in 1978 because he feared that the law would unionize the South and “the South would go the way of Ohio . . . due to the political strength of labor.”

Ohio had once been a reliably Republican state but had become reliably Democratic because of unionization. The lobbyist feared the same thing would happen to the South.

CK

How did deindustrialization affect the South compared to the North?

JS

The South begins the period of deindustrialization with a weaker union base. Insofar as unions slowed job loss, Southern workers were more vulnerable.

But the composition of Southern industry — furniture, textile, garment, and other labor-intensive industries — exposed the region to cheap imports in the eighties, and then NAFTA in the 1990s, and China in the first decade of this century.

CK

How much of the Right’s rise in the South do you think has to do with the South becoming wealthier after World War II?

JS

The first Republicans in the postwar South came from the affluent areas; President Eisenhower carried Texas, Virginia, Florida, and other outer Southern states. Southern Republicans were mainly upper-middle-class people. This was a class, not race phenomenon.

Southern industrialization was dual. On the one hand, you have traditional manufacturing firms, textile, garment, furniture, metals. But then you get the new high-tech, often defense-related industry, in the suburbs around universities, which demanded a highly educated population. Many were Yankees who come to the South.

More recently, the new foreign auto transplants that populate the South have not changed the political situation much. First, they are nonunion, and workers understand the tenuous nature of their employment. Mercedes opened up a plant in Alabama in 1997, and a guy I know in Alabama said to me, “It’s harder to get a job in that Mercedes plant than to get into Harvard. And, if you ever were in a union, you will never get a job there.”

JS

They don’t want union people. If you show in your employment history that you worked in a plant that was unionized, you probably will not get the job. Many of the auto plants locate in white areas because they think blacks are more pro-union than whites.

CK

So let’s reconnect the situation of black Americans and the economy: how were black workers specifically hurt by deindustrialization and, later, NAFTA?

JS

Some people say, “Well blacks were never in manufacturing — it is only government and service jobs that had meaning for blacks. Thus, deindustrialization is a white phenomenon.”

That is false. There are plenty of blacks that worked in manufacturing in the South forever and in the North since World War I.

Indeed, A. Philip Randolph, in the midst of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when the question was how to transport boycotting blacks to their jobs, said, “Well the black steelworkers of Birmingham are so rich that they have two cars — they can help.”

After the adoption of the mechanical cotton picker and the rapid decline of agricultural jobs in the 1950s and 1960s, manufacturing jobs were the perfect outlet for black people off the farms.

And many did begin to work in textiles in the South, thanks to black workers’ struggle to take advantage of the new antidiscrimination laws.

But just as blacks were getting these jobs, the number of textile jobs began to decline because of Japanese and East Asian imports. The same thing was true in industries like steel.

CK

So deindustrialization and the rightward economic turn from the Democratic Party weren’t inevitable?

JS

We make less stuff than we used to, but that is not simply the result of globalization. Other countries make just as much stuff as they did in the past.

You’re not going to bring t-shirts back. You’re not going to bring shoes back. But we have trade deficits in high-tech manufacturing.

Since NAFTA went into effect, five million manufacturing jobs have been lost. Most of the trade treaties of the last thirty years were not about tariffs but about protecting US investment abroad.

This creates an incentive to offshore work. The US government has completely ignored currency manipulation, a big factor in the American trade deficit.

It is never a question of trade, but the rules of trade. What is permissible, and what is not, is a matter of government policy. And for all the talk about jobs by both parties, when it comes to trade deals, it is the corporations that have the most influence.

Political elites were willing to sacrifice jobs (although they would not put it that way) to national security during the era of the Cold War.

They also enabled economic elites to solve their industrial problems through foreign cheap labor in the 1990s and afterward.

In the 1980s, corporations struggled, but in the 1990s with NAFTA and then the entry of China into the World Trade Organization, corporations through offshoring were rejuvenated.

Together these policies produced deindustrialization, a primary source of worker alienation from politics.

Why Did White Workers Leave the Democratic Party?