Black Republicans and the Transformation of the GOP. Joshua D. Farrington
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were given buyouts that revolutionized American agriculture, and ethnic whites were appointed to some of the most powerful positions in the country, Reynolds argued, “blacks got an invitation to go on welfare…. The New Deal confined us to a period of dependency.” Similarly, acclaimed author Zora Neale Hurston believed that the New Deal “was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes” by making African Americans “dependent upon the Government for their daily bread.” Though out of step with most African Americans, black Republicans like Reynolds and Hurston did not oppose the New Deal out of callous disregard for the plight of the poor, but out of a genuine concern that accepting economic relief was not in the long-term interest of black advancement.26
Their opposition to the New Deal additionally did not mean black Republicans were not progressive when it came to civil rights. Betty Hill, a wealthy black Republican organizer from California, feared that Roosevelt had “fooled” many African Americans into settling for government scraps, but she was also a civil rights pioneer in the West who served seventeen years as chair of the Los Angeles NAACP and led the campaign to end discrimination against black nurses in state hospitals. Her activism, which included assuming the presidency of the California Republican Women’s Committee, helped push California’s GOP establishment, including Governor Earl Warren, into supporting an active civil rights agenda by the 1940s. Hill was not alone among Republicans in powerful positions within the NAACP, and, until her death in 1960, could count two of the national branch’s chief representatives, Clarence Mitchell, Jr., and James Nabrit, Jr., as fellow Republicans-in-arms.27
While black Republicans like Hill were deeply skeptical of the New Deal, issues of economic policy were secondary to their focus on civil rights. Robert Church was leery of government relief, but his philosophical disagreements with federal expansion were rarely discussed in his public remarks or private correspondence. While this may have been a deliberate strategy not to alienate himself from poor blacks, his inattention to poverty also reflected the centrality of social and political equality to his vision of black progress. Indeed, as the GOP began to lose African American voters in the New Deal era, black Republicans like Church adopted even more militant positions on civil rights. Concede welfare to Democrats, they reasoned, but pressure the GOP to become the party of civil rights by supporting fair employment, open housing, desegregation of the military, and protection of voting rights. Though this was a daunting task in a party with constituencies that included corporate interests and western states with few black voters, black Republicans believed it was better than the alternative, as southern racists remained a dominant bloc within the Democratic establishment, preventing even liberals like Roosevelt from endorsing legislation as fundamental as an anti-lynching law.
Black Republicans’ relationship with labor, a Democratic constituency that became intertwined with the civil rights movement during Roosevelt’s presidency, was more complicated than their opposition to welfare. Because of their positions in and relationship with business management, black elites had a history of opposing collective bargaining. Perry Howard and other black Republicans worked as lawyers for the Pullman Company, for example, and vocally opposed A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters in the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, however, more militant Republicans like Robert Church recognized the fusion between African Americans and labor. Church and other leading black Republicans endorsed the right of collective bargaining, even opposing the Republican-sponsored, anti-union, Taft-Hartley bill. Younger black Republicans saw unions, unlike welfare, as a positive force that ensured black jobs and promoted self-sufficiency. Though Church, Grant Reynolds, and other black Republicans would become close friends with independent labor leaders, particularly Randolph, rank-and-file black union members still looked skeptically at those whose loyalties linked them with a generally anti-labor party.28
As the presidential election of 1936 neared, both parties saw black voters as a valuable swing vote. For the first time in party history, Democrats sent black delegates to their national convention and invited an African American to speak on the floor. The Republican convention featured a marked increase in black delegates, who were given leading spots on the Credentials and Resolutions Committees. Black delegates on the Credentials Committee even succeeding in seating South Carolina’s Black-and-Tan delegation over the state’s Lily-White faction, concluding a multiyear dispute. Roscoe Conkling Simmons was given a high-profile spot on the floor to deliver a speech seconding the presidential nomination of Alf Landon, a racially progressive governor of Kansas who opposed Lily-Whites, condemned lynching, and called for an end to discrimination in federal employment.29
On the campaign trail, Republicans spent twice as much as Democrats in their efforts to woo black voters. Younger, more assertive African Americans like Francis E. Rivers were assigned prominent roles in the campaign. Light complexioned with blue eyes, Rivers had degrees from Yale and Columbia Law School, and was described by a peer as carrying himself “as one might imagine British nobility would.” His daily lunch routine included ordering a “martini, made with Tanqueray gin, up, with a twist.” Though distinctly upper crust, Rivers saw himself as a “New Negro,” no longer drawn to Abraham Lincoln, and in the early 1930s, Harlem voters elected him to the New York State Assembly on the basis of his unequivocal advocacy for civil rights. In 1936, Rivers was named director of the RNC’s Colored Voters Division’s eastern campaign, where he produced pro-Landon films featured in black theaters and sponsored a thirty-city tour of Jesse Owens, fresh from spectacular victories at the Berlin Olympics.30
The biggest hurdle Rivers faced among African Americans was his party’s failure to offer a meaningful alternative to New Deal relief. Without their own program to sell, black Republicans focused on highlighting discrimination within Roosevelt’s agencies. A well distributed statement signed by Rivers and sixty-five other black Republican leaders, including Roscoe Conkling Simmons, Oscar DePriest, Robert Church, and Perry Howard, provided a laundry list of examples of inequality within the New Deal, hoping that disgust over discrimination would outweigh support of its benefits. Some black Republicans also challenged the New Deal on ideological grounds. Rivers warned that Democrats sought to reduce the African American to “‘an unemployable,’ whom it will treat like the American Indian was treated, and confine the colored man on modern reservations of relief.” Perry Howard proclaimed, “Capital is in the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is the poor man’s party,” a sentiment that served Democrats more than it did his own party.31
Despite one of the most aggressive campaigns among black voters in the party’s history, the Republican message often fell on deaf ears. Though black Republican criticisms of discrimination within the New Deal may have been technically accurate, and in line with their broader attack on institutionalized racism, millions of African Americans viewed its programs as a source of jobs, food, and shelter. On election day, black voters moved solidly into the Democratic column, with over 70 percent nationwide casting their ballots for Roosevelt. However, the GOP still had a strong presence among middle- and upper-class African Americans, who cast a slight majority of their votes for Landon. Indeed, 70 percent of the men and women listed in the 1937 Who’s Who in Colored America, a biographical anthology of black America’s elite, still identified themselves as Republicans.32
It is important to note that widespread African American support for Roosevelt in 1936 did not reflect equivalent support of the Democratic Party. Many black voters could be accurately described as “Roosevelt Republicans,” or those who, as the NAACP noted, “voted for Roosevelt, in spite of the Democratic party,” whose prominent southern wing continued to protect Jim Crow. Indeed, the late 1930s and 1940s were a period of unparalleled black voting independence and fluidity. In his now classic treatise on race relations, An American Dilemma (1944), sociologist Gunnar Myrdal suggested that “it is not certain whether the Northern Negro vote will remain Democratic, but it is certain that it has become more flexible and will respond more readily to the policies of the two parties toward the Negro.” Polls in the late 1930s and 1940s indicated that black registered voters were split 40-40 between the two parties, with the remaining 20 percent self-identified as independent. In the words of Florida’s Progressive Voters’ League, a black organization that endorsed both Republicans and Democrats, “We believe in the principle of ‘men and measures,’ rather than blind allegiance to any one political party.”33