Farewell to the Party of Lincoln

Black Politics in the Age of F.D.R

Nancy Joan Weiss, Nancy Weiss Malkiel

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691101514, 9780691047034
• eBook ISBN: 9780691218007
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This book examines a remarkable political phenomenon--the dramatic shift of black voters from the Republican to the Democratic party in the 1930s, a shift all the more striking in light of the Democrats' indifference to racial concerns. Nancy J. Weiss shows that blacks became Democrats in response to the economic benefits of the New Deal and that they voted for Franklin Roosevelt in spite of the New Deal's lack of a substantive record on race.


By their support for FDR blacks forged a political commitment to the Democratic party that has lasted to our own time. The last group to join the New Deal coalition, they have been the group that remained the most loyal to the Democratic party. This book explains the sources of their commitment in the 1930s. It stresses the central role of economic concerns in shaping black political behavior and clarifies both the New Deal record on race and the extraordinary relationship between black voters and the Roosevelts.

CHAPTER I ◾ The Election of 1932

Robert L. Vann had had enough of the Republican party by 1932. Vann was the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most widely-read Negro-owned papers of its day. He had taken a leading role in the “colored division” in every Republican presidential campaign of the 1920s, but his efforts had never been adequately rewarded. As the decade progressed, he had become increasingly disillusioned with Republican racial policies and personally disappointed with the party’s failure to grant him the federal appointments to which he aspired.

Vann’s loyalty to the Republican party finally broke over the Pennsylvania gubernatorial election of 1930. In the primary, and later in the general election, Vann actively backed Gifford Pinchot, a Republican reform candidate who ran against the regular Republican organization. Although Pinchot lost Philadelphia, the stronghold of the Republican machine, he carried every ward in Pittsburgh and won the governorship by so narrow a margin that Vann could claim that the black vote had tipped the balance of power. But a thank-you note from Pinchot was Vann’s only reward; control of black patronage in the state went not to him, but to Judge Edward W. Henry of Philadelphia, which had a black population four times the size of Pittsburgh’s.¹

Vann had little prospect of recognition as a Republican leader on either the state or national level and, by 1932, was ready to defect to the Democratic party. The first indication that the Democrats might welcome him came from Michael L. Benedum, a wealthy white oilman who had contributed generously to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign and who saw the conversion of the black vote as a potential means of swinging Pennsylvania into the Roosevelt column. On the advice of his black butler, Benedum met with Vann. Why should blacks stay with a party that never rewarded their loyalty? Benedum asked. Surely their historic debt had long since been repaid.²

At Benedum’s suggestion, Vann approached Joseph F. Guffey, a Democratic leader in Pennsylvania and one of the strategists for Roosevelt’s presidential campaign. Vann made the contact indirectly. At his request, Eva DeBoe Jones, a black manicurist, told Emma Guffey Miller during a manicure that Vann would like to see her brother Joseph. The two men met at Mrs. Miller’s home. Guffey found Vann “bitter against the Republican leadership.” He learned from Vann that blacks “were beginning to realize that their vote was connected with their economic condition.” To Guffey’s way of thinking, “it was an opportunity” to be taken advantage of.³

Guffey was impressed by Vann’s insistence that he could help the Democrats win the black vote in Pennsylvania and persuaded Roosevelt’s top political lieutenants, James A. Farley and Louis McHenry Howe, to organize an active campaign among blacks. The result was the creation of the Democratic National Committee’s Colored Advisory Committee, of which Vann was one of four principal leaders.⁴ In his first public speech as a Democrat, “The Patriot and the Partisan,” Vann exhorted blacks to emancipate themselves from blind allegiance to the Republican party. He delivered the address before a capacity audience at the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cleveland on Sunday afternoon, September 11. Vann told his listeners that blacks had misread the history of the Republican party. Although the party had been born out of the political issue of slavery, Republicans had never shown any real concern for blacks. They had used the race issue when it had served their advantage, but once the party “had built itself to the point of security,” it had turned its back on blacks. In recent years, Republicans had actively discouraged Negro support. Blacks were beginning to see “the difference between blind partisanism and patriotism.” They were beginning to select “the party which they believe will guarantee them the privileges to which any patriot is entitled.”⁵

"I see in the offing a horde of black men and women throwing off the yoke of partisanism practiced for over half a century,” Vann declared. “[I see them] casting down the idols of empty promises and moving out into the sunlight of independence. I see hordes and hordes of black men and women, belonging to the army of forgotten men, turning their faces toward a new course and a new party.” Then came the dramatic peroration: “I see millions of Negroes turning the pictures of Abraham Lincoln to the wall. This year I see Negroes voting a Democratic ticket.”⁶

The Hoover administration gave blacks ample reason to turn their backs on the Grand Old Party. In a nation beset with economic crisis, blacks were disproportionately afflicted. In Baltimore, for example, where Negroes constituted 17 percent of the city’s population, they made up 31.5 percent of the unemployed in March 1931. In Chicago, which was only 4 percent black, blacks accounted for 16 percent of those out of work. The same was true in other cities. By 1931, the National Urban League reported, the displacement of Negroes from their jobs “to reduce unemployment among whites" seemed to be “an accepted policy.” And, as long as whites were out of work, the chances of blacks being rehired by private employers were slim. In the somber assessment of the League’s industrial relations director, T. Arnold Hill, “At no time in the history of the Negro since slavery has his economic and social outlook seemed so discouraging.”⁷

The economic burden of the Depression was reason enough to question the wisdom of continuing the Hoover leadership. Equally compelling was what many blacks saw as the President’s “grossly unsatisfactory” racial policy—a “record of disregard and disrespect for his colored brother.”⁸ Incident after incident had made it clear to black Americans that there was “a fundamental difference between the party of Lincoln and the party of Hoover.”⁹ Even before Hoover’s election in 1928, his reputation had been suspect among many Negroes. As secretary of commerce, he had had charge of the relief efforts following the flood of the Mississippi River in 1927. To no one’s surprise, there was discrimination in the administration of flood relief. More serious, Negroes in the refugee camps were treated like prisoners and were usually released only to the landlords on whose plantations they had previously been employed. The NAACP undertook a well-publicized investigation and charged Hoover with indifference to the plight of the black refugees and failure to take corrective action.¹⁰

The Republican convention in 1928 had made clear Hoover’s political objectives, for it was there that he had embarked on a policy of encouraging lily-white Republican organizations in the South. Throughout his administration, the desire to cultivate white Southerners helped to shape his response on racial issues. Black leaders complained that Hoover really had no racial policy. He ignored black concerns such as racial violence and disfranchisement. He had a mediocre record on black appointments, and some of his principal white appointees were known to be anti-Negro.¹¹ Worse than Hoover’s neglect of blacks were the actions that blacks interpreted as deliberate slaps at the race.

One of these actions—primarily symbolic—involved the segregation of the Gold Star Mothers. Congress had authorized the mothers and widows of American servicemen buried in Europe to travel there to visit their graves. In 1930, with the pilgrimage set to begin, the War Department chose to send the black women on separate ships. Despite protests by the NAACP and the black press against the segregation, the policy remained in force, and the majority of Negro Gold Star Mothers declined to make the trip.¹²

The action with more significant political repercussions was Hoover’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court in 1930 of John J. Parker, a circuit court judge in North Carolina.¹³ The American Federation of Labor launched a vigorous campaign to block Parker’s confirmation on the grounds of his decision in the case of the United Mine Workers v. Red Jacket Coal and Coke Company in 1927, which upheld the use of injunctions against labor unions and recognized the validity of yellow-dog contracts. The NAACP undertook its own campaign against the Parker nomination on the grounds that he was anti-black. In 1920, while running for governor of North Carolina, Parker had reportedly spoken out in favor of the continued disfranchisement of blacks. “The Negro as a class does not desire to enter politics,” Parker was quoted as saying. “The Republican party of North Carolina does not desire him to do so. We recognize the fact that he has not yet reached the stage in his development when he can share the burdens and responsibilities of government.”¹⁴

The race issue was one of the factors responsible for the Senate’s rejection of the Parker nomination. The NAACP’s lobbying could be correlated with important votes against confirmation, and the victory encouraged the Association to mobilize blacks to vote against pro-Parker senators in the elections in 1930. There it was more difficult to find evidence that black opposition was decisive—of the four senators the NAACP targeted, two won reelection, and the two defeats involved other issues. But campaigning against Parker gave blacks a taste of the possibilities of organized political power.¹⁵

As the election of 1932 approached, even the staunchest black Republicans were prepared to admit disappointment with Hoover. But it was quite another thing to be ready to move into the Democratic camp. “Four more years of [Hoover] as a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue. The Election of 1928
• Chapter I. The Election of 1932
• II. New Deal or New Bluff?
• III. Organizing a Special Interest Group
• IV. The Rise of Black Democratic Politicians
• V. The Battle for Antilynching Legislation
• VI. Eleanor Roosevelt
• VII. The Black Cabinet
• VIII. A Climate of Racial Conservatism
• IX. The Election of 1936
• X. Why Blacks Became Democrats
• XI. Race in the Second Roosevelt Administration
• XII. The Election of 1940
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• A Note on Sources
• Index