Fear Itself (41 page)

Above all, it was a cluster of issues concerning labor markets and labor unions that began to divide the Democratic Party more decisively. The South relied on its advantage in labor costs to recruit investors to a poverty-stricken and job-starved region. Only by following a low-wage development strategy, its business and political leaders argued, could it begin to overcome the economic dominion of northern industry and finance.
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Its cotton, tobacco, and rice farming depended on subaltern labor, especially black labor, which was controlled by a mix of economic and political power, as well as by a pervasive threat of violence. The widespread system of sharecropping and tenancy was an intrinsic part of the racial order southern members were committed to defend.
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During the House debate that ultimately produced the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), setting minimum wages and establishing maximum hours, Representative James Mark Wilcox, a Florida Democrat, spoke about how “there has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor.” Observing that “the Federal Government knows no color line and of necessity it cannot make any distinction between the races,” he worried “that when we turn over to a federal bureau or board the power to fix wages, it will prescribe the same wage for the Negro that it prescribes for the white man,” and he remonstrated that such equality “just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it. . . . This bill, like the antilynching bill, is another political goldbrick for the Negro.”
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The White House proposed a labor standards bill after the NRA was ruled unconstitutional, thus eliminating federal supervision of labor market wages and hours. The Democratic Party’s 1936 platform promised a legislative response. Announcing “the time has arrived for us to take further action to extend the frontiers of social progress” on May 24, 1937, when one in three American workers was earning less than thirty-three cents an hour,
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President Roosevelt called on Congress to provide “A Fair Day’s Pay for a Fair Day’s Work.” His message to a special session of Congress announced the hope that “legislation can . . . be passed at this session of the Congress further to help those who toil in factory and on farm.”
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The bill followed a rocky path. Ultimately, thirteen months after this request, there was a bill to sign, but not before “one of the most desperately fought battles ever waged on the floor of congress.”
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Even as the New Deal ultimately won the ability to regulate labor markets, this struggle made clear that the radical moment was coming to a close. The new law appeared like a mere wraith of its predecessor, the NIRA, a substitute for its now-defunct labor standards.
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Though vastly less ambitious than that law, which had passed quickly with southern leadership and much enthusiasm, the FLSA elicited great controversy and episodes of southern defection.

The full extent of the proposed law’s troubles was not yet apparent when the Senate approved the measure, 56–28, on July 31, 1937, with southern and nonsouthern Democrats still voting much alike,
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but not quite with as much solidarity as prior New Deal domestic proposals had secured. Southern support depended on the introduction, once again, of agricultural exclusions that were equivalent to those that had characterized all prior relevant New Deal statutes, even though the president had advocated placing these workers under the law’s protection. Though not mentioned explicitly, domestic workers also were effectively excluded by virtue of the bill’s narrow embrace only of workers “engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.”
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Further, southern votes were forthcoming only after Alabama’s Hugo Black successfully moved to table an antilynching provision that had been proposed by New York Democrat Royal Samuel Copeland. With Republicans unanimously voting to keep the Copeland proposal alive, and with southern Democrats predictably voting to table, the provision, which was defeated by a 46–39 vote, could have passed had it garnered just four more nonsouthern Democratic votes. These members of the party sharply split. Those voting with their southern colleagues understood that if the antilynching amendment were to be included, the larger bill surely would go down to defeat as a result of southern defections.

Early in the Senate hearings, Gardner Jackson, chairman of the National Committee on Rural and Social Planning, a labor-oriented advocacy organization, forcefully told the Senate Committee on Education and Labor “that agricultural laborers have been explicitly excluded from participation in any of the benefits of New Deal legislation, from the late (but not greatly lamented) N.R.A., down through the A.A.A., the Wagner-Connery Labor Relations Act and the Social Security Act, for the simple and effective reason that it has been deemed politically certain that their inclusion would have spelled death of the legislation in Congress.” Continuing, he observed how, “in this proposed Black-Connery wages and hours bill, agricultural laborers are again explicitly excluded.”
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Still, many southern senators hesitated. They wanted farmers to be excluded not only from the minimum-wage parts of the bill but also from the limitation on hours of work, and they were concerned that the definition of agriculture was rather narrow. They also worried about the amount of discretion to set wages and hours the law would grant to a board of five. But they were reassured by modifications to the law. The final bill added exemptions on hours. It included the passage of an amendment, opposed by most nonsouthern Democrats,
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that enlarged the exclusion of farmworkers to encompass the predominantly black employees who engaged in packing or processing agricultural goods during the harvesting season. Furthermore, with southerners not wishing to cross FDR yet again after having defeated his Court-packing plan, and with the rejection of antilynching provisions, sufficient numbers voted for passage. But along the way, a vote to kill the bill by recommitting it, a motion introduced by the once more liberal Tom Connally of Texas, had been supported by half the southern delegation and had failed by a close 36–48 vote, a harbinger of more opposition to come on labor questions.
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There was indeed trouble ahead. A combination of southern skittishness and Republican opposition made it difficult for the bill to move ahead in the House. The Committee on Education and Labor reported the Senate bill on August 6, but its way to the floor was blocked by the Rules Committee. That committee was composed of ten Democrats and four Republicans. Half the Democrats were southern.
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With the Democrats split 5–5, the fate of the bill was placed in Republican hands. They joined the southerners in refusing to let the House consider the legislation. This was the first time the Rules Committee had successfully blocked a New Deal bill.

Nor would this be the last word. Addressing the country by radio on October 12, Roosevelt explained that he was calling Congress into special session. Still using the radical moment’s assertive language of “financial oligarchies,” he lamented how American workers had been “checked in their efforts to secure reasonable minimum wages and maximum hours,” and called for swift action.
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Despite the overwhelming majority his party commanded in the House, this effort failed. With the administration threatening to hold up a much-wanted farm bill, sufficient signatures for a chamber majority of 218 were obtained on a discharge petition on December 2 to circumvent the Rules Committee and get the bill to the floor. There, it ran into determined southern opposition.

A motion to recommit by New Jersey Republican Fred Hartley produced a debate dominated by southern voices. Among others, John McClellan of Arkansas remonstrated at the “raw deal” the bill offered agriculture as a result of its insufficient exclusions. William Whittington of Mississippi agreed. “If agriculture is to be exempt, surely industries engaged in producing, processing, distributing, and handling . . . agricultural commodities should be exempt,” he argued, adding that “the South cannot afford to pay unskilled labor the price it pays skilled labor.” Joe Starnes of Alabama bemoaned the “dictatorship” the prospective law would create. “I would rather raise my right arm to strike down another bureaucracy in its inception than to water with blood and tears the flowers which will blossom upon the grave of our democracy.” Wade Kitchens, of Arkansas, found the proposal to be “unworkable, un-American, impractical, and dangerous to our institutions,” clearly referring to southern institutions. The bill, he explained, “will destroy state sovereignty, state rights, [and] local self-government.” In turn, Hartley taunted the Democrats, noting how “the poorest paid labor of all, the farm labor,” had been excluded as a matter of “political expediency” because coverage of agricultural labor, as everyone knew, surely would doom the bill’s prospects.
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When he called the question, his motion to send the bill back to committee succeeded.

K
ILL
R
OOSEVELT
’
S
W
AGE
B
ILL
, the
Chicago Tribune
’s banner headline exulted. H
OUSE
R
EJECTS
D
ICTATOR
R
ULE OF
N
ATION
’
S
L
ABOR
.
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This 216–198 decision constituted the most emphatic rejection of a major New Deal economic proposal since March 1933. It was a remarkable vote. The cross-sectional New Deal coalition came apart. A majority of the votes to recommit, 133 of the 216, had been cast by Democrats. These members were overwhelmingly southern; some eight in ten from below the Mason-Dixon Line voted to recommit (most others were rural Democrats from the West).
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“The vote,” reported the
Los Angeles Times,
“evoked a triumphant roar of applause from the southern bloc.”
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The Fair Labor Standards Act did, in fact, become law in the spring of 1938. It established a minimum wage of twenty-five cents per hour for the first year following passage, thirty cents for the second year, and forty cents within a period of six years.
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It provided for maximum working hours of forty-four hours per week in the first year following passage, forty-two in the second year, and forty hours per week thereafter.
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The law also prohibited child labor in industries engaged in producing goods in interstate commerce.
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The process by which defeat was turned to victory is instructive. In producing an act “far removed from the President’s original request,” it starkly demonstrated the dangers the New Deal faced when it dared to stray beyond the tolerance of the white South, especially when challenges to the racial system, generating white racial anxieties, were beginning to increase.
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Arm-twisting coupled with the manifest success of primary candidates in the South who supported the bill, including Claude Pepper in Florida just days before the House voted in late May, clearly helped produce the comfortable margin of 314–97. More fundamental were the substantive reasons. Along the way, the legislation underwent significant change to win southern, especially border-state, support. The scope of the agricultural exemption widened greatly. In the original bill, the extent of the agricultural exemption had been vague, left to the interpretation of the proposed administrative board in Washington, but “as the bill progressed the discretion became more and more narrow and the specific exemptions became larger and larger.”
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Now including “farming in all its branches,” this classification incorporated every kind of work “in conjunction with faming operations, including preparation for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market.”
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Not only was the definition of agriculture broadened; so, too, was the understanding of who could count as a “person employed in agriculture,” a category that expansively included any individual involved in the ginning or baling of cotton when the services of that person were seasonal, a definition clearly tailored to affect southern black labor.
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Other key changes helped tilt the balance. The concern that Washington bureaucrats could impose conditions that might be unsupportable for the South was addressed by setting fixed wages and hours by law. Even more important, a process was fashioned to create differentiated minimum-wage rates through the appointment of industry wage boards that were empowered to take into account “competitive conditions as affected by transportation, living, and production costs.”
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Though not based explicitly on region alone, this provision made it possible to reassure the South that it could maintain a low-wage, competitive advantage.

Sectional differentials proved the final hurdle. When a conference was convened to fashion a common bill from the one approved by the House and the version that long ago had been passed in the Senate, the Senate’s majority leader, Kentucky’s Alben Barkley, later Harry Truman’s vice president, rallied southern support by promising that the final product would include regional guidelines, and he appointed both northern and southern conferees who supported them. When word initially came from the conference that these preferences had only partially advanced, eighteen of the South’s members in the Senate threatened a filibuster. “Faced with a filibuster, the conferees reopened consideration of differentials” and agreed on the industry board solution by a 10–4 vote (opposed by three Republicans and only one Democrat, Walsh of Massachusetts).
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The Fair Labor Standards Act constituted the last lawmaking victory of the New Deal’s radical moment. The tortuous legislative course of the wage and hour bill revealed a growing schism in the party, one that would become even more apparent in the 1940s. In many ways, it was a swan song to a time in the 1930s when the Democratic Party was transforming the ambitions and role of the government to tame capitalism and enhance economic security, and the prelude to ever-greater instances of southern defection from Democratic Party positions—a prelude, not yet the first act, because the labyrinthine history of the FLSA in 1937 and 1938 showed that so long as arrangements were made to tailor legislation to suit the region’s concerns, southern representatives in sufficient numbers still would go along, in spite of their reservations. After all, they had much to gain from maintaining a coherent and broadly unified Democratic Party majority. But it also signaled that when such arrangements would be deemed insufficient, especially as the racial challenge mounted, the South would be prepared to defect.
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