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Journal of Policy History 14.4 (2002) 431-438



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Hot War, Cold War, and Civil Rights

Kenneth L. Kusmer


Daniel Kryder. Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State During World War II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 301. $30.00.
Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 330. $39.50.

In recent years, historians of World War II and the Cold War era have broadened their focus, looking beyond the traditional, hotly debated subjects of global power politics, nuclear weapons, and anti-Communism to embrace such topics as urban change, regional development, gender issues, and race. Daniel Kryder's Divided Arsenal and Mary L. Dudziak's Cold War Civil Rights significantly advance our understanding of how federal policymakers perceived and responded to what was, at the time, the most controversial of these issues: race relations.

For both authors, "race" is synonymous with black-white relations. Before 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had successfully managed the political balancing act of incorporating into the New Deal coalition both the segregationist South and the sizable black population of northern cities. African Americans benefited substantially from New Deal relief programs, but Roosevelt made no effort to interfere with the denial of civil rights in the South or with the long-standing policy of racial segregation in the armed forces. American participation in World War II, however, upset traditional patterns of race relations. It led to renewed migration of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North, to racial conflicts both in and around Army training bases in the South, and to [End Page 431] renewed black militancy as blacks sensed that wartime conditions gave them added leverage in the struggle for racial equality.

All of this forced a reappraisal of federal policy on race issues. The first, most famous example of this was Roosevelt's 1941 Executive Order 8802, establishing the temporary Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC) after labor leader A. Phillip Randolph threatened a march of thousands of African Americans on Washington to protest the exclusion of blacks from defense industry jobs. Kryder sees the establishment and activities of FEPC as part of a larger pattern of events that involved the Roosevelt administration in the volatile race issue during the wartime crisis. He theorizes that the FDR administration's racial policies were the product of two factors: the need to mobilize resources to win the war and the need for FDR and the Democratic party to win elections. Promoting change in the racial system was never a policy objective, according to Kryder, although some modest reforms did occur as an indirect result of the administration's pursuit of its two main objectives. Typically, just prior to elections FDR would make well-publicized black appointments (such as William Hastie as a special aide to the Secretary of War in 1940) and initiate modest policy changes designed to appeal to his (northern) black constituency. Such actions would then be followed, after the election, by return to a piecemeal, "complaint-driven" response to racial problems. So, for example, the strengthening of the internal power of FEPC to deal with discrimination in war industries in mid-1942 was followed, in January 1943, by the postponement of hearings on the railroad industry and, several months later, by return to a policy emphasizing "adjustment over confrontation" (98).

Divided Arsenal is a wide-ranging, informative, but unevenly developed study. Too often, Kryder's assessment of FEPC policies reverts to bland generalizations, drained of specifics, about "confrontational public hearings and hostile directives issued to employers" (95). When he does discuss specific FEPC cases, he makes little use of local primary sources and often ignores secondary sources dealing with racial conditions in specific cities or industries. Studies of race relations in Chicago and Detroit could have provided an urban context lacking in Divided Arsenal. Likewise, while acknowledging that "union efforts . . . to bar black workers from new factories and occupations directly caused hundreds of complaints to the FEPC," Kryder makes no attempt to explore the...

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