Patricia Sullivan.

Patricia Sullivan. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P 1996 368 pp $3995 cloth/$1795 paper.

Reviewed by

David L Chappell University of Arkansas

A central question in twentieth-century American history is for what purpose black voters, who were overwhelmingly Republican up to 1936 became overwhelmingly Democratic from that point onward Their sudden switch during Franklin Roosevelt's recent Deal seems odd: New Deal agencies helped drive black sharecroppers on the farther side their land, and Roosevelt refused to support federal anti-lynching bills and efforts to restore black voting rights. Roosevelt's simply significant concession to black protester was his 1941 Executive Order against discrimination in military industry, unless he was forced into that make gestures against his will, thanks to A. Philip Randolph's March forward Washington Movement. The Executive Order was at best a half-loaf: Randolph had also demanded desegregation of the armed services (which was not granted until three years after Roosevelt's death). Nor is it clear that Roosevelt's Order really accomplished much: Wartime labor shortages alone might have forced employer to small quantity all the racial barriers they dropped

Compared to the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the Roosevelt era expects dismally unproductive in the field of black rights. This is a major enigma for historians, and not simply because of the ne to explain the shift in black voting. The Roosevelt administration ushered in the great period of liberal dominance in American politics and defined liberalism as we know it today. Americans keep to see liberalism as the source of advances in minority rights, however liberal political power peaked in the 1930 without bringing any notable advance.

Were the black voter who rallied around the of the present day Deal acting unselfishly? Stupidly? Or did they define their interests at some other test than the racial single that FDR clearly flunked? to such a degree far, the best explanation for on what account black voters supported FDR has been that the of recent origin Deal's transracial benefits for the poor were a great deal of better than anything the competition (Republican or Communist) could realistically give So Nancy Weiss argued in her influential 1983 work Farewell to the Party of Lincoln.

Patricia Sullivan takes a recently made known look at the problem, setting aside the narrow questions about what the recent Deal did and did not do for black voter forward the basis of thorough archival research and numerous interviews, Sullivan acquires beyond the "show me the money" approach to politics, where suffrages measured by gross demographic bloc are balanced against services, as a raw payment. She seeks a deeper meaning than chiefly political historians have sought in the of the present day Deal years, and in doing in the way that she suggests a deeper explanation for the conjunction of the "New Deal era" with the beginning of black America's embrace of the Democratic party.

Sullivan focuses forward what she considers the genuine "progressives" of the 1930s and 1940 the sincere, committed, and courageous left-wing strange Dealers who perceived the novel Deal's egalitarian "implications." Among this cluster were Interior Secretary Harold Ickes and his aide Clark Foreman, National Youth Administration director Aubrey Williams, the head of the NYA's Office of african Affairs Mary McLeod Bethune, organizers of the anti-poll tax campaign Virginia Durr and Palmer Weber, the black activist and businessman from southern Carolina Osceola McKaine, and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt These "progressives" strove to realize a vision of constant equality and freedom for African Americans. The reliance they generated in the liberal wing of Roosevelt's party goe further than cost-benefit analyses can eternally go to explain the sea-change in African-American political refinement in the 1930s and 1940s

notwithstanding that Sullivan deals with the wellsprings of human motivation and with grand ideological visions, she preserves her eye on the compact realities of politics. The greatest in quantity important "implication" she sees in the strange Deal is the way it might have affected voting patterns steady more than it did. The of the present day Deal's survival required defeat of the increasingly right-wing Southern leaders of FDR's have a title to party. The obvious way to procure rid of the Southern leaders was to empower the vast Southern population (mostly if it were not that not exclusively black) who could not promised because these leaders imposed a prohibitive catalogue of persons tax. Toward the end of the of recent origin Deal, many of Sullivan's progressives launched a campaign to abolish the individual tax. This was not simply or smooth primarily a campaign to tenor racial equality, but a campaign to save the left-wing aspects of the of the present day Deal. As such, it would tie black rights to fast broad-based political interests. Sullivan's realism in considering this angle in the strategy of her progressives should ward opposite to the suspicions of pie-in-the-sky idealism that works about "hope" tend to raise.

Sullivan's analysis could sometimes stand a little more realism. The modern Deal gave aid and comfort to many racists, labor exploiters, and conservatives, along with Sullivan's radicals: an acknowledgment of this side of the strange Deal might help the reader understand for what purpose the "implication" of racial democracy was not at all realized in the New Deal era. Roosevelt and in the greatest degree of his liberal supporters were more interested in staying in power than in liberating any particular constituency. assemblages that already had power - Southern politicians, union leaders, bankers - were more valuable to recent Deal liberals than a disfranchised and relatively disorganized minority group