The dream part of American civilization, with its mass production, "non-entanglement in Europe," and jazz era ballyhoo about the "new capitalism" whose prosperity would be endless because its "exceptionalism" made it immune to economic crisis, came crashing down on everyone's head with the economic collapse in 1929.
Production had come to a near-standstill. The unemployed reached fantastic proportions - 17 million. Fully one-third of the nation - the President of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, had to admit - was ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad. It was also ill-paid when it did work, for the conditions of labor, with the introduction of the beltline in the 1920's, had worsened. It remained what Marx had described the English factory to have been - "a House of Terror," its barrack-like life made the more unbearable with a speed-up Marx had never witnessed in his lifetime. What, above all, President Roosevelt did not admit was this: the workers' disillusionment with capitalism was total.
No one any longer believed what the rulers told them - whether that concerned "peace, prosperity and progress," or the speed of the production line or racism. Along with the rest of white America, labor may have been blind to the Negro as the touchstone of American Civilization. But with the Depression in the early 1930's, labor experienced so profound a disillusionment with capitalist society, that it included the craft unions which along with color bar, used their skilled classifications to keep themselves isolated from the overwhelming majority of the labor force - the semi-skilled and unskilled. Along with the despotism of capital, craft unionism had to go.
New passions and new forces coalesced in the upheavals of the 1930's to give birth to the CIO. This was not simply a trade union organization that finally established industrial unionism in the United States. The speed with which this was done - 1935-1937 - when in Europe it had taken decades - brought it up to the state of organization of Europe's socialist trade unions. And, though each had spontaneously, arrived at a new method of struggle, the point is that the simultaneousness of THE SIT-DOWN electrified the world of labor and shook capitalism to its very foundations.
Everything was new about - the CIO39: For the first time, on a national scale, white and black labor had united to gain union recognition. For the first time, organized labor struck where it hurt capital most, in all the basic industries - rubber coal, steel, auto. For the first time, employed and unemployed did not work at cross purposes. On the contrary, the unemployed would often, along with another new phenomenon - women's auxiliaries - man the picket lines while the workers sat down inside. For the first time, control over the conditions of labor - the recognition of the union - predominated over all other demands, even of wages. Nowhere more than in America had the capitalist outcry about "the invasion of private property" produced a greater militancy than among the workers who insisted on sitting down at those machines they had always worked but never controlled.
The CIO changed the industrial face of the nation. It created a break also in the "nationalism" of the Negro.
Just as, during the first phase of "Nationalism," Garveyism, the Negro worker found himself opposed by his "talented tenth," so this time too. This time it couldn't find "fakery." Although it itself has nowhere enough capital or power actually to do the exploitation of labor and must satisfy itself just with the crumbs from capital's table, the talented tenth nevertheless easily fell into the argument that "the best friend" of the Negro is the capitalist. Many added that the "most prejudiced" among the whites is the laborer. There is nothing new about this argument; it has been passed around by the slavocracy from time immemorial.41
Not all the talented tenth and established Negro organizations opposed black labor making common cause with white labor. There were notable exceptions, the most outstanding being the Pittsburgh Courier. Both its editor, Robert L. Vann, and columnist, George S. Schuyler, in 1937, not only did the best reportorial job on the organization of the CIO and the movement toward white and black solidarity, but lashed out against established Negro leaders. Considering Schuyler's present reactionary stance, it is important to see how differently he spoke under the impact of the CIO:
"Nowhere were the 'educated' classes cooperating with the unions to aid the work of organization, save in a few notable instances and there by only one or two individuals . . . Their desertion of the struggling Negro workers in this crisis constitutes one of the most shameful chapters in our recent history. The new position Negro labor has won in this past year has been gained in spite of the old leadership. It has been won with new leadership; militant young men and women from the ranks of labor and grizzled black veterans of the pick and shovel and the blast furnace."42
It is true that, without the Negro, the CIO could not have organized the basic industries where Negro labor was pivotal. It is no less true that labor's unity was a fact that could never again be controverted, not even when the Negro once again strikes out on his own during World War II and presently.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 and the gearing of the American factories for war output very nearly wiped out unemployment - white unemployment. But nearly 25 per cent of the Negro work force remained unemployed in 1940. The very fact that, both South and North, the Negro had become urbanized and unionized only sharpened his sense of oppression as a national minority. The very potency within the trade unions made this ghettoization and unemployment outside the more frustrating. This time the great unrest among the Negroes did not go unheeded by the American Negro leadership.
A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized a March on Washington Movement. This all-Negro mass organization planned to mobilize 100,000 for its march on the nation's capital. Under its pressure President Roosevelt issued Executive Order No. 8802 which barred discrimination in war industries. While this small version Fair Employment Practices Act did stop the March on the capital, it did not stop the movement as an organization which then proceeded to transform itself into a Committee to End Jim Crow in the Army.43
Again, the winning of some of his demands only sharpened the Negro's sense of lacking all rights. In housing, especially, conditions became unbearable as more and more thousands of workers, white and Negro, moved into the industrial centers. Neither the CIO, which by now had about one and one-half million Negro members, nor the March on Washington Movement in a narrower field, had achieved what the Negro was fighting for - full democratic rights. They seemed impossible to achieve.
However, this time, far from either joining any "Back to Africa" movement, or taking the defensive when attacked by KKK and such racist elements, the Negro took the offensive. In the year 1943 there was an outburst of mass Negro demonstrations in New York, Chicago, Detroit. It was the year also of the first great wartime strike among miners which, inevitably, had a great number of Negro members. The American Negro took the offensive and showed great discrimination in what he attacked.
Something new occurred also in the sense that there were instances of white solidarity, especially in Detroit, where the CIO undertook to have white and Negro work in and out of the factory alongside of each other. Above all, none dared attack it as unpatriotic. None that is except the Communists.
At the beginning of World War II, the slogan of the American Communists was "The Yanks Are Not Coming." They tried duplicating the treachery of the Stalin-Hitler Pact by joining with the fascistic "America Firsters" - to Communists, anything at all which would keep America from entering the war on the side of the Allies was justifiable. If they opposed anything at all in the original organization of the March on Washington Movement, it was that it was not militant enough because it allowed itself to be led by A. Philip Randolph. All this was changed overnight when, in June, 1941, Germany invaded Russia. The imperialist war was now declared by these quick-change artists, who undeviatingly follow Russian foreign policy lines, to have become "a war of national liberation." They began demanding the immediate establishment of "a second front" - everywhere, that is, except for Negroes in the United States.
Now they began to attack A. Philip Randolph as a veritable "subversive" and the March on Washington Movement as being "too belligerent." By its fight for jobs for Negroes, said the Communist Party's Vice-Presidential candidate and Negro Leader, James Ford, it was "creating confusing and dangerous moods in the ranks of the Negro people and utilizing their justified grievances as a weapon of opposition to the Administration's war program . . ."
These "justified grievances" didn't seem to warrant, in the eyes of Communists, even so mild a program as that of the Pittsburgh Courier which had launched the slogan of the "Double V": "double victory for democracy at home and abroad." This, said the Daily Worker, in its special symposium on the Negro question in March, 1942, destroys national unity! "Hitler is the main enemy and the foes of Negro rights in this country should be considered as secondary."
Many a sympathizer of the Communists and what they had done on such cases as the Scottsboro Boys in the 1930's were taken aback. As George Schuyler put it: "Whereas at one time they were all for stopping production because of Jim Crow employment policies, low pay or bad working conditions, they are now all-out for the Government's policy of no wartime strikes and have actually endorsed labor conscription, i.e., human slavery. Everything must be done to save Russia even if Negroes' rights have to go by the board."
The Communists proceeded also to rewrite Negro history. Robert Minor, in "The Heritage of the Communist Political Association," discovered that "the abolition of nation oppression is a bourgeois-democratic reform" and therefore is achieveable within the framework of American capitalism so long as the "Negro people pursue the correct course - the Frederick Douglass course of full support of the war . . ."
Outside of the slanderous statement about that great Negro Abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, as if he uncritically supported the Civil War, the Civil War did finally turn into a revolutionary war which abolished slavery. It thus merited also the support of the international working class which was given by the International Workingmen's Association headed by Karl Marx. World War II, on the other hand, remained an imperialist war, as was evident by the type of support given it by American Communists. They came out (1) in support of the no-strike pledge by the trade unions, not to mention being for company incentive plans; (2) against any independent activities by Negroes for their rights either on the job, or in the army, or anywhere; (3) helping railroad the Trotskyists to jail under the Smith Act; and (4) vying with the D.A.R. in its "patriotism," that is to say calling "subversive" all who disagreed with them. Even the NAACP had become too militant for them.
(Above all, Frederick Douglass was a leader of the Abolitionist movement which did not stop its independent activity during the Civil War. Though he unequivocally supported Lincoln when he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, here is how he described Lincoln at the unveiling of the Freedmen's Monument to Lincoln: "It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man. He was pre-eminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men . . . You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his stepchildren; children by adoption, children by force of circumstance and necessity. But . . . we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.")
During the 1943 mass demonstration, the Communist Councilman Benjamin A. Davis appeared with Mayor La Guardia in Harlem and on the same platform spoke against the Negro outburst.
According to Earl Browder: "The immediate achievement in this period under the present American system of complete equality for the Negroes has been made possible by the crisis and by the character of this war as a people's war of national liberation." And just in case there was any illusion about the "complete equality for the Negroes" requiring any activity, the Negro Communist, Doxey A. Wilkerson, spelled it out for all as no more, and no less, than the "full support of the win-the-war policies of our Commander-in-Chief."
So eager were the Communists in their support of the Roosevelt Administration that they spoke not only of "war-time unity" but post-war plans. We don't mean those of the Cold War that they did not anticipate. No, in that same 1944 pamphlet, What The Negro Wants, Wilkerson wrote "To draft idealistic war plans for the Negroes . . . tends to divert much needed energy from the really urgent task of today: to win the war." Shades of the Bourbon South!
No wonder the Negroes by the thousands - for they had joined the Communist Party during the 1930's - tore up their Communist Party cards and were not again fooled by the new change in line that came with the Moscow Cold War which made the American Communists once again (for how long?) come out "for the Negro liberation."
39 Sitdown, by Joel Seidman, League for Industrial Democracy Pamphlet, New York City. See also THE CIO and the Negro Worker, Together for Victory, Congress of Industrial Organizations pamphlet, Washington, D.C.
40 Black Workers and the New Union, by Horace R. Cayton and George S. Mitchell, Univ. of N. Carolina Press, 1939; consult also Negro Labor by Robert C. Weaver, Harcourt, Brace and Co., N.Y., 1946.
41 In Caste, Class, and Race, the distinguished Negro sociologist, Dr. Oliver Cromwell Cox, analyzes how artfully the Southern "aristocrats" maintained their power through playing the poor whites against the Negro and vice versa. He adds; " It should be emphasized that the guardians of the economic and social order in the South are not poor whites; indeed, it is sheer nonsense to think that the poor whites are the perpetuators of the social system of the South. The fierce filibustering in the national Congress against the passage of an anti-lynching bill, or against the abolition of the poll tax; the hurried conference of governors to devise means of emasculating a Supreme Court decision for equal educational opportunities; the meeting of attorneys general for the purpose of side-tracking an anti-Jim Crow decision for railroads; the attitude of Southern judges toward Negroes in courtrooms - these are obviously the real controlling factors in the Southern order. The poor whites are not only incapable but evidently also have no immediate interest in doing of such things." (p. 577).
42 "Reflections of Negro Leadership," Crisis, Nov. 1937.
43 The War's Greatest Scandal! The Story of Jim Crow In Uniform, published by the March on Washington Movement.