The Backlash: The Turn Against the New Deal and the Civil Rights Struggle

• In Event: White Backlash and State Violence

Abstract

Southern Democrats played a decisive role in the passage of the New Deal, making sure to shape its provisions in ways that would reflect their region’s majority interests (primarily by preserving the color line). Despite this, not long after its passage, Southern Democrats turned against the New Deal. Explanations to this flip-flop of stance have primarily centered on how the New Deal reshaped the economy and the labor market bringing about the fear that these new changes to the economy would eventually result in dismantling the color line.
By conducting a historical investigation which includes a discourse analysis of the congressional debates surrounding the first Fair Employment Practice Committee bills (FEPC) (1945-46), this paper aims to contribute to this literature by revealing the legal path opened by the New Deal and the ways in which it imperiled the preservation of the color line. As such, I demonstrate how the New Deal, by demonstrating that well-conceived and enforced legislation can succeed in changing social mores, bolstered a new emerging legal approach that postulated law as a force of social change (as opposed to the former conception of law which held it as a mere reflection of social mores). Such a development in the legal field, which relied on the incorporation of new theories derived from the field of social psychology and attitude research, opened the way for using the legal framework to dismantle the color line. This development and the backlash it caused among Southern Democrats, I argue, had grave implications in setting the stage for the particular trajectory the civil rights struggle has afterward taken.

Author

• Tamar Hofnung, University of California Berkeley