A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican by David Hamilton Golland (review)

David Hamilton Golland’s biography of Arthur Allen Fletcher (1924–2005), the influential black Republican who was the architect of the Revised Philadelphia Plan and the “‘father of affirmative action enforcement,’” reads like an American political tragedy (p. 1). Established in 1967 and revised in 1969, the Philadelphia Plan was designed to integrate segregated building construction trade unions through mandated hiring goals in federal contracts. As the government official most responsible for the revised plan, Fletcher also laid the foundations for the expansion of affirmative action initiatives during the early years of President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.

Golland provides a thorough and at times plodding account of Fletcher’s life and what it tells us about the history of the Republican Party’s relationship to its African American loyalists, especially those, like Fletcher, who were major advocates for civil rights. Other scholars have mined this fraught history, particularly from the 1930s to the 1970s, but A Terrible Thing to Waste: Arthur Fletcher and the Conundrum of the Black Republican makes the party’s betrayal of its commitment to racial egalitarianism deeply personal and surprisingly vivid. This is the power of biography. The climax arrives near the middle of the book in chapter 4. “After nearly three years with the Nixon administration” as the assistant secretary of labor from 1969 to 1971, Fletcher “had redefined and enforced affirmative action and become a national figure.” “Politically, however”—and this is a dangling-on-the-edge-of-a-cliff use of the word however—“his utility to Nixon and the Republican Party was to support a very important lie the party was telling the nation: that it still stood for racial equality. By allowing Fletcher to enforce the Philadelphia Plan—within limits—the Nixon administration could say that it was continuing and expanding the civil rights initiatives of the previous administration even as it was actually curtailing civil rights policies in other areas” (p. 161).

Golland interlaces the biography with scenes from the fierce battle for the soul of the party waged between its conservative and liberal wings. And while the history of conservative ascendancy is by now well-trod territory, with a number of excellent studies on what that transformation meant for African Americans, Golland adds to the literature by bringing that narrative well into the 1980s and 1990s.

Described by Golland as “‘loyal to a fault,’” Fletcher’s Job-like belief in the party of Abraham Lincoln is stunning (p. 163). The second half of this well-researched book follows Fletcher’s struggles to return the party to the principles of racial egalitarianism, to stop the steep decline in the percentage of the black vote garnered by Republicans, and, especially as the chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under President George H. W. Bush, to encourage a healthy pattern of collaboration between African American leaders and the GOP on issues of mutual interest. None of these efforts were terribly successful. By the 1990s the GOP could barely claim more than 10 percent of the national black electorate. Healthy collaborations between liberals and conservatives have become vanishingly rare, and American politics overall has suffered with African Americans relegated to one-party voters.

In a dramatic shift, new black conservatives who did take prominent roles in Republican administrations in the 1980s and 1990s were required to denounce affirmative action as a veritable job qualification. Thus, Fletcher became the last Republican, black or white, to defend the initiatives he helped create and was relegated to the status of the most important Republican civil rights activist of whom many people have never heard. He realized too late that the party had left him behind; too much of American history has left him out.