Democratic Movements in America
Another reason is to correct injustices, either to the self (Progressives and labor) or to a larger community (civil rights). Finally, mostly in relation to the Progressive movement, there is a need to assert oneself in order to fulfill a void in identity and to forge a place in society. While analyzing such motivations are important, it seems to be more important to look at how movements deal with race, class, and gender as issues in fulfilling democratic potential. Taking into consideration such factors in determining the level of democracy in these movements, it is obvious that the civil rights movement trumps the other groups in fulfilling their promises. Along with the civil rights movement, this paper will look at the Progressive movement and the New Deal laborites under the lens of the above criteria for democratic movements.
Michael McGerr, in his book The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement, describes the Progressive’s racial policy as a “shield of segregation.” This is a reference to the question of whether white, middle class, educated reformers showed any concern whatsoever about the predominant racism in the United States at the turn of the century. McGerr addressed this inquiry with much skepticism as to the motives of Progressives in dealing with minorities. While the educated middle class was sympathetic to the plight of the lower class, their goal was not to ignite the flames of racial and ethnic hatred. The Progressive goal, according to McGerr, was to raise up the lower classes and bring down the upper classes to embrace middle class social values. In order to accomplish this, Progressive leaders all the way to President Theodore Roosevelt chose to siphon racial groups off of other lower class claims. The middle class saw this as a step toward preserving the sanctity of the races and preventing harmful social conflict from stopping the middle class social agenda. In the end, this “shield of segregation” was extremely undemocratic because of its prevention of participation and was characteristic of the Progressive approach to inclusion in the reform movement.
Lizabeth Cohen’s characterization of race in Making a New Deal was that of race as a means, not an end, for the labor movement. Cohen’s final chapter describes the success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in organizing Chicago laborers into stable unions. Ethnic laborers were encouraged to join unions in the CIO in order to both fight for their rights as workers and to maintain their ethnic roots. Cohen makes a point in this discussion to say that the labor unions used the maintenance of ethnic identity as a selling point for membership. Taking this into account, it can be said that Cohen’s inclusion of race into the New Deal labor movement is indeed not an end of a successful drive but a means toward the end of a unified front against abusive industrial practices.
In addendum to this, however, Cohen does bring up the point throughout her analysis that African Americans were never entirely brought into this movement. It seems instead that steps toward racial tolerance were small and far apart in coming, but were noticeable in retrospective studies of the labor movement’s attempt to organize African American laborers. Cohen traces these steps from these failures of the 1919 strikes in Chicago, which saw the catastrophic collapse of the labor movement, and the importation of African American workers to replace strikers. The resentment that African Americans drew from their seeming disloyalty to fellow ethnic and white workers still remained in 1939, but the small steps detailed by Cohen had allowed for a temporary truce and a unified face to the labor movement.
The most democratic of movements on racial inclusion was the civil rights movement in Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom. Several arguments for this statement are made clear in Payne’s analysis of the fight for civil rights in Mississippi. One argument was the breaking down of boundaries between African Americans in the South and whites in the North. As volunteers came from Ivy League schools and other universities in the more liberal North, southern African Americans first dealt with what Payne calls “worshipful servility.” It was not so much the positives in whites that older civil rights workers were worried with, but the negatives in themselves. Thus, the original relationship among whites and rank and file blacks was one of deference and resignation to the authority of whites. This changed over time and with exposure as African Americans en masse realized the superficiality of racial barriers from their own damaged past. Payne states, however, that it was still the white leaders who got the most attention from the media. Nevertheless, this relationship was one crucial step toward opening up the civil rights movement and making it successful and diverse.
The result of these relationships between blacks and white, along with the breakdown of prejudice within race (dark skin versus light skin), was that racial violence was not as commonplace and purposeful as in the past. Payne discusses early in his book the early history of lynching and racial violence in Mississippi up to two decades before his analytical focal point. This was to set the table for what would happen later: the early violence was widespread, focused on economic and “manhood” issues, and much more widely accepted. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, this violence became much more arbitrary and to the fringe of white supremacy, with economic sanctions a more likely reprisal against those African Americans who were exceeding their apparent role in Southern society. As blacks and whites started to see that the course was set for integration and public accommodation, seeing black faces behind counters and at restaurant tables became more acceptable and indeed encouraged interest in the movement. This, of course, would later sour in Payne’s eyes but the point is that the climax of the civil rights movement (the early 1960s) there was an extremely democratic and egalitarian process at work within the civil rights movement. All movements have growing pains but the civil rights movement used these pains for a greater good.
Having discussed race as a criteria for democratic movements, it is now imperative to look at an issue that is by nature more polarized than the other two criteria in this analysis. Gender involves deeper consideration of subtopics such as family structure, economic considerations, and individual relationships, and is a constant consideration in everyday life. The three analyses spoken about before in terms of race will now be viewed in terms of how women and men were involved in respective democratic movements and the equality or inequality of such relations.
In the Progressive movement, women of the middle class were heavily involved in communicating their social reform agenda to local and state governments as well as being involved in more extralegal protests. In the larger sense, women were attempting to change the relationship between men and women established by centuries of Western civilization, but specifically the values of the Victorian age. Female members of the Progressive movement wanted to eliminate the image of the passive female and take their share of rights, including the ability to initiate divorce and to control their bodies in terms of childbirth.
Prostitution and alcoholism were specific vices of men that female reformers felt epitomized their second class role in society. Carry Nation was the leader of this strike against masculinity run amok. Her brazen strikes against edifices of male domination showed the anger of middle class women and staked a time of change for women’s role in society. However, this was definitely not a classless revolution; lower class women and upper class women were again subjected to the middle class idea that women should adopt middle class values. The story of Rahul Golub told throughout McGerr’s book is proof of the unintentional effect of the middle class upon the other classes. Golub’s story of transformation based on the tenets of Progressive educational values illustrates that while the middle class was certainly fighting a noble fight for change, they were leaving the lower classes to incomplete reform structures and half hearted attempts at “association.”
While Progressive Era women were struggling with their identity, women involved in the labor movement during the New Deal were certainly aware of their roles. As the Depression wore on, women became integral to the economic efficacy of the American family as providers from the workplace and nurturers at home. Female laborers were common in the garment trade and industrial laundries, while becoming more prevalent in other industrial fields. Their role in the labor movement was not on the forefront but in the background of the unionization process. Auxiliary chapters of CIO affiliates were run by women and provided help in organization while maintaining their roles at home. Women were important to the machinery of the labor movement, but what they got out of the success of New Deal unionization was not pay equity or an increased role in society.
Cohen lauds these women as important to the movement but ultimately not the constituents of national labor organizing. Men, albeit of diverse ethnicity and background, were the sole beneficiaries of the union’s fight for higher standards and wages. Women were truly auxiliary to the larger movement in Cohen’s account. While most wives and daughters of laborers were involved in New Deal organization for industrial workers, they were not necessarily capable of choosing their role in the movement. They were relegated to roles of support and while many chose the amount of effort they put in to the movement, they eventually reached a glass ceiling of results for their gender. The limits were either to stay out of the movement and solidify their social roles as history dictated it or to be involved and maybe gain small concessions from the larger movement. The choice to enter was somewhat democratic but the machinery of New Deal labor was most certainly undemocratic.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s was relatively equitable in terms of gender involvement and leadership roles. Women were key to the functioning of voter registration, education, and lobbying at the local and national level. The reasons for this are explored by Payne and reveal that this movement was at the very least fair in its distribution of power. In terms of why women were so willing to participate in the movement, Payne speaks to the lack of threat that whites saw in black women. Reprisals against female civil rights activists would be scattered and not nearly as devastating as those actions take against male leaders like Medgar Evars.
As women came to the civil rights movement in Mississippi, they were capable of mobilizing a significant system of social relationships from churches and friendships. E. Frederick Morrow stated the feeling of male activists in choosing women as leaders by saying, “Select a campaign committee and select for a chairman a prominent person…preferably a woman-for they have a deeper sense of something-or-other than men.” While Payne does address issues of misogyny and sexism within the movement, these were far less important than the positives that women brought to the movement. This quote shows that women were highly valued within the movement and were key to the successes of civil rights in the 1960s.
The final pillar of democratic movements that must be analyzed is the role of class. Class can be defined in terms of cultural and economic terms, but for the purpose of this brief explanation, class will be seen as the combination of culture and economy in conjunction with democratic involvement. The issue of class spans across other considerations in democratic movements and, at the same time, is very acutely detail within each movement as part of reform agendas. The role of class in the Progressive movement, the New Deal union drive, and civil rights will be explored briefly here.
Class conflict was the main consideration of the Progressive movement and this proved to be the least democratic motivation of all the movements spoken of in this work. McGerr’s thesis states this in plain terms: “…progressives were radical in their conviction that other social classes must be transformed and their boldness in going about the business of that transformation. As they themselves had been changed, so others should be changed, too.” According to Progressive leaders and thinkers, the problems in America could be diagnosed as the problems of the upper and lower classes. Josiah Strong described this problem by speaking to the decadence of the upper class and the uncivilized nature of the lower class. He stated that, “The American family is out of gear in two strata….on the one hand is the stratum of the overwealthed (and) under controlled…on the other hand, is the stratum of the overworked (and) under-stimulated.” McGerr’s use of this quote is to show that middle class thought on upper and lower class values was not positive and drove the agenda of Progressives to change those around them.
This agenda, indeed, is not democratic because the impetus for change lies within one group and against others. The middle class were not trying to change other groups just for the purpose of improving society, but to stake claim to an identity of charity and moral superiority. Instead of saving the other classes from their own values and improving American society, the middle class fomented class warfare and formally divided races and ethnicities under the name of protection. McGerr describes the middle class reform movement as “profoundly impressive and profoundly disturbing” and proves the latter far more than the former.
Cohen’s analysis proves to be a clear dichotomy between the industrial labor class and the industrial capitalist class. The development of the labor union story begins in 1919, when the ability of the upper class and government to subject laborers to their standards for pay and work conditions was overwhelming. The development of warfare capitalism and attempts by chain stores to co-opt the role of ethnic community institutions showed both the blurring of class interests and the rise of lower class consciousness. The blurring of class interests came with the rise of chain movie theaters and grocery stores that brought ethnic communities to the prepackaged, standardized world of the middle class.
While this blurring occurred, the lower class learned to take advantage of welfare capitalism and, leading into the Depression, to organize to protect their rights. For example, laborers learned to take advantage of stock options by selling them quickly and recouping the worth in liquid assets. This showed the rise of lower class consciousness at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s. However, the fact that this dichotomy existed did not allow for much democratic involvement. Workers had to choose between staying outside of the union system and being guilty of siding with industry or being involved in a large union bureaucracy that could help industrial laborers but would also be laborious to operate within. While workers could choose one or the other, their livelihoods were based on the work of thousands of others who were dedicated to a general cause with thousands of variations and biases. Cohen’s analysis shows a process that was democratic in its admission of workers but undemocratic in its dealings with other classes and in its goals of unity without regard to individual identity.
Class conflict within the civil rights movement was less noticeable with the significance of racial concerns within the movement, but strained considerably the bonds of local political movements. One example of this strain was the complaints of Mississippi leaders like Ella Baker, who were concerned over the middle class mood of the NAACP and other national civil rights groups. This concern was obviously in relation to the lack of connection between the lower class elements of the local political movements and the educated, national figures of the NAACP. Baker was more concerned over the ability of activists to use their own devices and to utilize existing local networks instead of worrying about a quick rise to national prominence that would sacrifice the values of activists in Mississippi. Such considerations, along with the obvious connection of higher class values and superiority to white supremacy, are discussed by Payne. Class, however, is the least of consideration overall in the civil rights movement and indeed once white supremacy was dealt within large by movement activists, the only worry over class was class within the black community. This worry was not pressing on the minds of many African Americans in the movement, allowing this movement to be successful and generous in its democratic opportunities.
The civil rights movement, because of its manner of dealing with race and gender, proves to be the most democratic of movements in the first half of the 20th century. Payne’s account of African Americans struggling together for their ability to protect their rights and liberties shows a true account of the democratic process at a local level. The New Deal labor movement is slightly less democratic in nature than the civil rights movement, on account of the dichotomy of capitalist-laborer relations that did not allow for much deviation. Cohen, though, did feel that while the movement was not as democratic as it could have been, it certainly was more democratic than the labor environment of 1919. Finally, the Progressive movement has been shown to be the least democratic of movements that have been studied in this paper. The issue that is most pervasive in showing the lack of democracy in the reform movement is that the middle class was not showing moral responsibility for others nor were they seeking to make grand changes to protect rights and liberties of individuals. The middle class was selfishly seeking an identity, a place within a society that for a long time in the past and, unbeknownst to them, to the present would be divided between haves and have nots. This analysis shows that the key to understanding democratic movements anywhere is in their answers to the questions of racial, gender, and class roles in society.
