For Democracy and a Caste System? World War II, Race, and Democratic Inclusion in the United States

Scholars of American politics often assume World War II led to liberalized white racial attitudes in its aftermath, in turn prompting a liberal shift in the federal government’s position on civil rights. This conjecture is generally premised on the existence of an ideological tension between a war against Nazism and the maintenance of white supremacy at home, particularly the southern system of Jim Crow. A possible relationship between the war and civil rights was also suggested by a range of contemporaneous voices, including academics like Gunnar Myrdal and civil rights activists like Walter White and A. Philip Randolph. However, while intuitively plausible, this relationship is generally not verified empirically. The common flaw shared by much of this research is the lack of empirical evidence for either position, particularly lack of attention to public opinion polls from the 1940s. This paper is a compilation of three condensed chapters from my dissertation. Using both survey and archival evidence, I argue the war’s impact on white racial attitudes is more limited than is often claimed, but that the war shaped and constrained the Executive branch’s civil rights agenda in ways institutional scholars have generally ignored. The evidence is presented in three parts: First, I demonstrate that for whites in the mass public, while there is some evidence of slight liberalization on issues of racial prejudice, this does not extend to policies addressing racial inequities. White opposition to federal antilynching legislation actually increased during the war, especially in the South. Second, there is some evidence of raScial moderation among white veterans, relative to their counterparts who did not serve. However, the range of issues is limited in scope. Third, the war had both a compelling and constraining impact on the Roosevelt administration’s actions on civil rights. The war increased the probability of any change at all occurring, but in doing so it focused the civil rights agenda on issues of military segregation and defense industry discrimination, rather than a more general anti-segregation and job discrimination agenda. In summary, World War II had myriad impacts on America’s racial order. It did not broadly liberalize white attitudes, but its effect on the White House was a precursor to the form of “Cold War civil rights” that would emerge in the 1950s. ∗This version prepared for the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism’s Graduate Workshop Series, September 18, 2013. Author contact: smw2150@columbia.edu. Thanks to Ira Katznelson, Robert Shapiro, and Robert Lieberman for helpful feedback. This project has also benefited from many comments and suggestions by participants at the Columbia University American Politics workshop, the Columbia-Princeton-Yale graduate student historical working group, the annual meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association and American Political Science Association, and the University of Tampere’s Institutions in Context workshop. 1 White Attitudes in the Mass Public “Some people are prejudiced, but if a man is good enough to fight for his country, he should be allowed to vote.” —Packing house clerk, Chicago1 “”No! Absolutely not!!” —Cabinet maker, Louisiana2 These conflicting sentiments – drawn from verbatim responses given to NORC interviewers asking about whether black soldiers should be given ballots while fighting overseas – illustrate the complexity of World War II’s implications for civil rights and America’s racial order. This tension – a war fought for democracy or a war fought to preserve the American status quo? – is reflected by a range of scholarship, some suggesting the war shifted white attitudes in the liberal direction and some suggesting white Americans did not perceive the war’s aims in this manner at all. Both accounts, however, generally neglect the survey evidence which might serve to assess such claims. The relationship between the war and civil rights in public attitudes is also mostly ignored by a small but important strand of recent research examining the growth of civil rights liberalism in the 1940s. This paper marshals the available survey evidence to provide the best possible assessment of whether World War II led to liberalized white racial attitudes in the public as a whole. I examine six issues of racial prejudice, as well as one policy areas: whether the federal government should intervene in state lynching cases. I argue the war did not coincide with widespread liberalization of white racial attitudes, a finding that contradicts casual claims found in recent scholarship on the relationship between war and American politics asserting that it did. White opposition to federal antilynching actually increased during the war, especially in the South where it reached a height of 71 percent by the end of the decade. In contrast to this policy issues, however, there were slight decreases in white racial prejudice. Whites became somewhat more likely to say African Americans should have the same chance at a job, that black blood is biologically the same is white blood, and that black people are as innately intelligent as whites (albeit only outside the South 1National Opinion Research Center, “Should Soldiers Vote! A Special Report Based on a Spot-Check Survey,” Report No. 18, January 1944, 4. 2Ibid.