Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Through a combination of legislative history and roll call analysis, the paper explores how the southern wing of the Democratic party, the pivotal voter in the quasi-three party system during the New Deal/Fair Deal period, exercised a decisive role in shaping the institutional conditions--both favorable and unfavorable--under which the labor movement developed. When southern representatives approved policies in tandem with their nonsouthern Democratic colleagues, these became law, though
crucially bearing two concessions to the South: (1) the exclusion of persons employed in agricultural and domestic labor, the sectors in which African-American workers were most densely concentrated in the South, and (2) with limitations placed on the building of a national administrative apparatus to implement and enforce laws regulating national labor markets. When southerners dissented from labor policy favorable to union and worker rights, they exercised a veto on the modal Democratic party position. During the 1930s and 1940s, the South shifted from supporting to opposing the Democratic party's relatively pro-labor stance. We trace this trajectory, placing causal weight on the way tight labor markets during the Second World War facilitated the penetration of unions, some of which were racially integrated, within the South.