Want a seriously detailed examination of the great role reversal in American politics, as the Democrats shifted from the party of segregation to the party of equal rights, losing the South but gaining its soul? Then check out “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered” by Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickle in Studies in American Political Development. Hat tip to “Poppa Paul” Krugman, whose own rap on the current state of affairs of state, “The Empty Quarters of U.S. Politics”, isn’t bad either, though I’d say that, like so many liberals, Krugman soft pedals the strong objections of many white working class voters to “welfare” (i.e., programs that help people who aren’t like them), which is why the Democratic Party keeps getting blindsided by Republican “counter-revolutions”, as in 1994 and 2010, for example. Because it’s easy to get blindsided when you refuse to open your eyes.
Afterwords
Liberals have long written the history of the American labor movement to exclude the fact that one of the primary goals of the craft, or “vertical” unions that formed the original American Federation of Labor (unions that organized workers by skill, such as carpenter or bricklayer or steamfitter), were attempts to form a monopoly on “good jobs” (always assumed to be in short supply) for a limited group and exclude everyone else. Nepotism was the most “natural” basis of exclusion of all, but beyond that was the ethnic group. By the early twentieth century, many unions were dominated by Irish Americans, the “No Irish Need Apply” rule turned upside down. But blacks were almost always excluded.
The first “horizontal” unions that organized all the workers in a single industry were brought about by the Congress of Industrial Organizations back in the 1930s. The CIO was formed by John L. Lewis, head of the United Mine Workers. There were very few blacks in the UMW, since few blacks lived in mining areas (usually mountainous), but Lewis, though the furthest thing from a communist, employed them as organizers, and communists, for all their faults, were committed to racial equality when it served their purposes. During the 30s, liberal southerners would sometimes tolerate the AFL, but never the CIO. After Brown v. Board of Education, all traces of liberalism, including the AFL, became anathema to all white southerners. It may not be a coincidence that the AFL and CIO combined in 1955.
After World War II, many blacks migrated out of the south and found jobs in unionized industries in the north, most dramatically in Detroit and surrounding areas with the United Auto Workers, led by the impeccably liberal Walter Reuther. It was the integration of the UAW that allows sentimental latter-day New Dealers like Thomas Frank and Michael Moore (and, I guess, Paul Krugman) to romanticize the role of “labor” as fighting for social justice for everyone, when, all too often, they were fighting for social justice for white people. I’ve discussed the phenomenon of “white socialism” in several posts.
