FDR Is Not a Good Model for the Current Democratic Party
Jim Crow is not something to imitate.
When Democrats lose, everyone in the coalition understandably tries to seize the opportunity to advance their own policies within the party. Progressives generally argue that if Democrats would embrace popular policy positions—universal health care, raising taxes on the wealthy, raising the minimum wage—voters would flock to them, and they would win every election by a landslide.
Sometimes, to illustrate this point, progressives will point to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt famously passed sweeping progressive legislation, including social security and worker relief programs. Voters rewarded him for this progressive program by electing him to office four times. That seems to bear out the equation; pass progressive legislation, never lose.
I support universal health care, raising taxes on the wealthy, raising the minimum wage, UBI, and legislating that the workers must own the means of production. And I think FDR did a lot of good things.
But I also think that if progressives are going to win, they need to understand the shape of the opposition clearly. And that means recognizing that FDR didn’t just win because he passed progressive economic policies. He also won because he allied with open racists and collaborated in the sweeping disenfranchisement of Black people.
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Make America Great Again (1930s edition)
FDR’s refusal to contest Jim Crow isn’t a secret. The Democratic party had been the party of Confederates and slaveholders during the civil war and Reconstruction. Post Reconstruction, as racial idealism collapsed and apartheid became the official policy of the US, the Republicans became more racist and the Democrats…also arguably became more racist. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was a disgraceful white supremacist who spent his professional life as a historian pushing neo confederate lies and as president resegregated the federal government.
In comparison with Wilson, FDR was a big step forward. He wasn’t openly hateful towards Black people, and (in a symbolic move that resonated powerfully after Wilson) he hired Black people to work in the White House.
Given his relative lack of personal animus, FDR’s foot-dragging on issues like Jim Crow and lynching (despite the consistent and principled advocacy of his own wife) is generally framed as a regrettable but necessary compromise. For example, here’s how PBS describes it:
The administration of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933-1945) was initially a continuation of the "gentleman's agreement" within the Democratic party that Northern Democrats would not interfere in race issues on the behalf of black Americans. To ensure the passage of New Deal legislation, Roosevelt could not afford to offend Southern Democrats by challenging the white supremacist system of Jim Crow.
However you soft peddle it, though, the conclusion is the same; FDR did not maintain his electoral majority solely by passing progressive legislation. He also kept his coalition together through white supremacy.
FDR was not a demagogue, and wasn’t a gutter racist like Trump. In 1941, under pressure from his wife and threatened with a march on Washington by Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph, FDR signed an executive order outlawing racist discrimination in hiring by government contractors.
This real move towards progress, though, doesn’t change the fact that FDR’s electoral strategy throughout his lengthy presidency had significant parallels with Trumpism. He promised government help to white people both through material aid and through white supremacist policies designed to ensure non white people did not benefit from social programs.
FDR, Candidate of White Supremacy
Trump’s promises to help white men materially are mostly either lies or boneheaded boondoggles, of course. That’s the big difference with FDR, who actually cared about (white) workers and pushed through a lot of legislation that materially helped them.
But the big similarity between Trump and FDR is a commitment to white supremacy as an electoral strategy. The continuity is instructive; it’s a reminder that white people have been voting for white supremacy for a really long time. Racism motivates white voters and has done so basically as long as there have been white voters in the United States.
I’m not arguing here for despair. Redistributive and egalitarian economic policies do have a constituency as well. More, while Black people’s voting rights are still brutally contested, they are much more solid than they were during the 1930s, and the US is much less white in general. Trump’s white supremacist messages are so strident in part because white supremacy is a less powerful electoral force than it once was. White people, men, Christians, the wealthy, and other people who are invested in traditional hierarchies are panicked, because they can see an America where their power erodes.
At the same time, though, I think it’s foolish and counterproductive to downplay the electoral appeal of bigotry. FDR did not demonstrate that progressive policies always win elections. He demonstrated that progressive policies have a constituency—and that white supremacy has a constituency.
There are lots of things I don’t like about the current Democratic party (pro policing, pro Zionist are two big ones.) But it’s incontrovertible that, on policy, Democrats currently are much less racist than FDR was. If nothing else, and solely out of self-interest, Democrats want more Black people to vote; FDR acquiesced to the mass disenfranchisement of Black southerners.
FDR’s racism wasn’t the sole reason he has such electoral success. But it’s certainly one factor. And it’s very much not something the Democrats today should embrace. Democrats, as a party that relies on Black voters, and as a party in a country where electoral politics are much more nationalized than they were in FDR’s day, can’t replicate the national progressive economic and regional racism strategy that succeeded so well for FDR. It wouldn’t work even if they wanted to try it, and they should adamantly should not want to try it, because FDR’s racism was cowardly and disgusting, and should be repudiated, not imitated.
There is no one weird trick to win all elections
FDR did a lot of good, and his long tenure seems to hold out the promise of a more unified and better functioning democracy. But it’s worth remembering that Make America Great Again is inevitably a white supremacist slogan, whether you’re pining for the (racist) retro 50s or the (racist) retro 30s. There has never been a time in the United States when racism was absent from national politics, and there has never been a permanent, impregnable coalition of antiracism. Racist backlash is powerful and has an enthusiastic constituency. I don’t think it’s an absolute majority, but it’s unwise to ignore or downplay its influence and power.
The Democrats are frustrating and imperfect, and it’s certainly possible that they could win more votes more regularly with better policies or better messaging. But fascism is an ideology which appeals to many people in the US, and always has. Promising better healthcare and higher wages is not going to sway people whose main political commitment is to preserving white supremacy and to out-group subjugation.
FDR appeased those assholes by letting them lynch and disenfranchise with impunity. Democrats today can’t, won’t, and should not make a similar bargain. That means we need to continue to fight. And that fight can’t just be to get Democrats to adopt better policies, because just adopting better policies is not in itself going to put an end to fascism. Any antifascist fight has to, at some point, involve confronting and fighting fascists—which FDR was willing to do abroad, but much less so at home.
I think it is good to offer historical perspective, and to appreciate the complexity of the past. I wonder if you overstate your case. When you write, "FDR’s foot-dragging on issues like Jim Crow and lynching (despite the consistent and principled advocacy of his own wife) is generally framed as a regrettable but necessary compromise. For example, here’s how PBS describes it . . . "
You imply that PBS is giving a friendly gloss to something that was more controversial at the time. But, my sense, is that the impression at the time was similar --that he was sympathetic to civil rights claims and foot-dragging based on political calculation.
I also have the sense that there was a clear trend towards the Democratic party becoming the party of civil rights (despite the large block of Southern Democrats) and that, while this process was slow, it was visible, and that it does make a difference to see a party moving in a good direction. I think about this article: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/14/what-todays-progressives-can-learn-from-1948-299749
"Admittedly, Truman found himself in an almost impossible pinch on civil rights. Though the issue had never mattered much in his earlier political career, he had appointed a commission to study it in 1947, and that commission had produced a report entitled “To Secure These Rights” that advocated an expansive program—anti-lynching legislation, the end of the poll tax, a permanent federal enforcement of fair-employment practices."
...
"Selling the plank against Truman’s wishes and at the cost of a Southern walkout was Humphrey’s responsibility. He was just 37 years old, younger than Pete Buttigieg and Stacey Abrams are [in 2020]. Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, he was just a couple of years into holding the only elective office of his life. He wondered if he was on a political suicide mission.
The eloquent words that Humphrey spoke on July 14 from the convention dais—his call for party and nation to “get out of the shadow of state’s rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights”—were carried nationally by radio and throughout the Northeast on brand-new television wires and have echoed down through history. Much less remembered is the moment on the podium just before a tremulous Humphrey began to speak, when he was reassured by Ed Flynn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx, “You go ahead, young man. We should have done this long ago.”
Flynn was just one of a number of big-city bosses—Jacob Arvey of Chicago, Dave Lawrence of Pittsburgh, Frank Hague of Jersey City—who delivered their compliant delegates to help pass the civil-rights plank in a floor vote, 651½ to 582½. (One Montana delegate split his vote.) Were they idealists? Hardly. They were worried that, without a surge of black voters in November, their machines would lose down-ballot races as Truman was being routed. For their part, ADA members like Humphrey had spent months prior to the convention persuading those bosses to join the civil rights push. Each faction ultimately recognized its need for the other."
This clarifying essay is so helpful at expanding and correcting the generalizations most of us grew up on.
My own take is that the US will not be over its history of slavery until there is general enthusiasm for reparations. Just thinking ahead.
We could start by replacing all the slave owners and slave traders (Jackson) on our paper currency. Including Franklin.
A funny memory you brought back is my late mother‘s habit of reusing envelopes she received in the mail. She would unseal the seams, turn them inside out and re-glue them to have a new envelope.
She said Eleanor Roosevelt did it!