The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    When Affirmative Action was White

    By NCD on Fri, 11/30/2018 - 7:24pm |

    We had a recent discussion on the programs of the New Deal, how 'race neutral' the legislation was, passing with strong support from the southern Jim Crow states. This fact leading to some suspicion as to it's intended impacts on minority populations.

    Was it, in fact, a progressive policy primarily aimed at whites, not generally disenfranchised blacks? The book below argues the New Deal and programs like the GI Bill not only were not race neutral, they actually increased the economic and educational inequality of blacks and whites, in effect, they were "affirmative action" for whites. In the book the author argues that the gap created has not yet been remedied (2006).

    Now, the Trump administration, seeks to terminate established affirmative action programs and policies started in the latter part of the last century.

    This book is When Affirmative Action Was White, by Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, at Columbia University.

    From the book's introduction:

    When Affirmative Action Was White is one result of this endeavor. It reveals how policy decisions dealing with welfare, work, and war during Jim Crow’s last hurrah in the 1930s and 1940s excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans. It also traces how inequality, in fact, increased at the insistence of southern representatives in Congress, while their other congressional colleagues were complicit. As a result of the legislation they passed, blacks became even more significantly disadvantaged when a modern American middle class was fashioned during and after the Second World War. Public policy, including affirmative action, has insufficiently taken this troubling legacy into account.

    From a review:

    The G I Bill even though this was a federal program the administrative duties and distribution of funds was handled and left up to the individual states on page 114 "To be sure, the G I Bill did create a more middle-class society, but almost exclusively for whites.Written under southern auspices, the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow. Its administration widened the country's racial gap. The prevailing experience for blacks was starkly differential treatment." An individual example of this differential treatment can be found on page 139 read "The case of Reuben Thompson of Rome, Georgia," And on page 140 "these impediments were not confined to the South. In New York and northern New Jersey suburbs, fewer than 100 of the 67,000 mortgages insured by the G I Bill supported home purchases by non-whites".

    Comments

    Thanks NCD. The discussion was cut off prematurely. It is frustrating.


    by rmrd0000 on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 11:21am

    No, the discussion had been bludgeoned to death, and you refused to consider actual research by an SSA historian, Larry DeWitt, in a piece of research published 5 years after this book:

    https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n4/v70n4p49.html

    Rewriting the same comments doesn't help to dissect the truth.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 5:37pm

    Not bludgeoned yet! Your link is a written by an employee of the Social Security administration, obviously a defensive bias would be involved in his essay. It is meant to be defensive.

    He does mention:

    Because Title II was the only exclusively federal program in the 1935 act, all of its policies were federal with no state administration or policy involvement. The Title I and Title III programs, by contrast, were state-administered and partially federally financed, so there was both state and federal policymaking involved, and conflicts over federalism and related issues arose in those programs. For example, initially the Roosevelt administration proposed a federal standard that the welfare payments under Title I should be sufficient to provide "a reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health." Some Southern legislators found this language potentially threatening to economic and social arrangements in their region. Much of this concern may well have been racially motivated,

    Katznelson is an eminent scholar, past President of the American Political Science Association, and the Social science Research Council, and has had positions at Columbia University, and Cambridge University.

    From the book, When Affirmative Action was White:

    By fashioning legislation that kept farmworkers and maids out, they made old age insurance—the part of the bill that would be managed by a national bureaucracy—less all-encompassing than what the administration had proposed. In contrast, in the social assistance parts of the bill that created aid to dependent children (ADC) and help for elderly poor people, the primary categorical forms of assistance offered by the Social Security Act, they made the legislation less national. These were federal programs whose costs were to be shared between the federal government and the states; even more important, these policies would be decisively shaped and administered by the individual states, which were granted a great deal of discretion in setting benefit levels.

    60 Southern members successfully resisted pressures to nationalize responsibility for ADC. Rather, by eliminating federal “decency and health” clauses in committee hearings, and by guarding against more than a minimal federal role on the floor of the House and Senate, they succeeded in keeping ADC’s key contours, organization, and supervision in the hands of state governors, legislators, and bureaucrats. Though they failed to get Congress to agree to pick up the whole bill for the poorest states, the bulk of which were southern, they did manage to pass a program of assistance to poor families that left all its key elements in local hands.

    Consider the situation in Georgia. Of the nearly 24,000 white and 23,000 black children eligible for aid in 1935, the state offered funds to only a small fraction. There was a huge disparity by race. Drawing on both a Social Security survey and an account by the State Department of Public Welfare, Swedish demographer Richard Sterner found that “14.4 per cent of white eligibles but only 1.5 per cent of the Negro eligibles” were funded.

    The other main form of categorical help created by the Social Security Act was assistance to the elderly poor, individuals, as most states defined the need, who earned “insufficient income to provide reasonable subsistence compatible with decency and health.” Because most blacks were not eligible for old age insurance, this aspect of the new law was vital to their well-being. Here, as with ADC, the states, not the federal government, set benefit levels, ascertained eligibility, and administered the program. Here, too, the staff making these decisions in the South were entirely white. The degree of black need and the exclusion of most African Americans from other benefits put a significant amount of pressure on this program. In the main, southern states managed to contain it.

    Unemployment insurance, which composed the third key element of the bill, combined both strategies.66 Here, the administration plan was rather more to the liking of southern members of Congress than the main alternative, a bill advanced by Ernest Lundeen of Minnesota. Unemployment insurance required access to continual and secure work before getting laid off. Further, once shaped by the committees on Ways and Means in the House and Finance in the Senate, the bill excluded domestic and farmworkers from its protective reach, and it located control over eligibility and benefit levels in the hands of the states. The National Urban League strongly advocated the alternative bill proposed by Congressman Lundeen because it included “farmers and domestic workers and personal service workers.”

    The old "send it to the sovereign states ploy" which they still use.

    Katznelson concludes that FDR had to deal with the southern bloc a "paradoxical combination of white supremacy and progressivism" with the New Deal and WW2 and every major thing he did. Aspects of the New Deal, some touched on above, advantaged whites in many states, not only the south, but in the north also. There is not question that southern senators objective was to create and sculpt the programs to benefit for their voters, who were almost exclusively white at the time, And to maintain white dominance socially, politically and economically.


    by NCD on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 9:20pm

    So you have the well-qualified respected Katznelson disputing the original contention that FDR was a racist who intentionally denied Social Security for blacks as a sop to attract Southern votes, and that these changes were counter to his original plan and his own lobbying.

    I'll let that sink in a bit, as the only real issue I care about is the nasty slur that FDR was an uncaring racist only interested in politics. Fact Check: Wrong, 5 Pinocchios.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 2:53am

    DeWitte wrote a book about Social Security in 2007

    He didn’t find the need to update resources in the rehashed article written for the SSA in 2010.

    https://books.google.com/books?id=sX8TAQAAIAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=Naacp

    It is magical thinking to believe that racial bias was not a factor in black exclusion from Social Security, the GI Bill, and limits on where blacks could purchase homes. Southern Democrats played a role in these decisions.

    The NAACP criticized the law in real time: 

    ——————

    The law's unemployment insurance also excluded many professions that were dominated by women and people of color. Speaking to the latter, Charles Houston, an NAACP official, criticized the law as "a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of negroes to fall through."

    ——————

    https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/social-security-act

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 10:46am

    Nobody said FDR was a racist. History and our politics is complex, and not often as "upright or pretty" as high school textbooks, movies, or articles by government historians.

    FDR was not a Stalinist, but he had to ally with Stalin to stop Hitler.

    He had to ally with the Jim Crow south to pass progressive measures. They made sure it's benefits were skewed away from blacks.

    The book notes from the late 30's to the early 50's, unlike for whites, black infant mortality went up, black life expectancy went down, and black incomes went down compared to white incomes. Blacks were left out of the post-war boom. Federal social programs of the era can be shown that they helped whites more than blacks, and even hurt the black community.

    The point is the great progressive era was limited by the southern senators. The same senators blocked the 1938 Wagner Act and 3 other legislative attempts at the national level, (which FDR supported), for a federal ban on lynching. That doesn't mean FDR supported lynching,

    Racism is still a strong current in American politics, and a reason why today, progressive programs like "Medicare for all" will be a very hard sell in southern states and for those politicians who come from those states.


    by NCD on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 10:49am

    Thanks again NCD. There is an attempt to avoid the structural racism in place that forced blacks into menial jobs and excluding those jobs from Social Security.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 10:55am

     There is an attempt to avoid the structural racism in place that forced blacks into menial jobs and excluding those jobs from Social Security.

    By who here on Dagblog? Sounds like Mr. Strawman again.

    Edit to add: don't you realize that when you say something like this, implying someone here thinks this, it's an insult to the whole club here? If you have an issue with an exact something one person said, address that and the person directly. Don't preach as if some anonymous person here doesn't get it. We get it. That's why you get the flak, you do that consistently. We get it and then we move on to more nuance. If you don't want flak, you've got to actually address the actual points people here make. I would suggest if you want to speak to the general, you are not doing it correctly, as most would read statements like you made above as hinting that someone here thinks that.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 11:45am

    Ho Hum. The argument is that Southern Democrats had no impact on the initial Social Security Act. Do you agree?

    I don’t accept lectures on race from a person who accepts blackface.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 11:49am

    I don't and didn't see anyone here arguing that.They were arguing that FDR and executive branch designer's intent for the program, from its inception, was not intentionally planned as racist. And that the rollout stage was planned to "discriminate" against all workers without a paycheck out of necessity. Manipulations for winning over southern senators came afterwards,  racism was not inherent in the original plan for the program.


    by artappraiser on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 3:05pm

    No, your argument that you linked to is that FDR's New Deal excluded blacks on purpose, including Social Security, seemingly something that FDR would have to approve of.

    https://atlantablackstar.com/2015/02/04/9-ways-franklin-d-roosevelts-new...

    The SSA article notes several caveats to the facile interpretation on Social Security that i've noted elsewhere - a) that including farmers in the middle of the depression 1935 was a logistical nightmare, b) that the south was less of a bloc than later time (e.g. Kentucky had different goals than Alabama or Louisiana), c) many poor people at the time were against losing money then for dubious promise of money decades later, and farmers were the poorest of the poor with mass hunger. I additionally noted that social security expanded to cover these gaps within 20 years, and the 2nd great migration meant that a huge number of uncovered blacks were working in covered occupations within a few short years.

    To say that Southern Democrats had no effect or racism had no effect would be silly, and it's documented some ways they did. But that's not the whole picture.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 3:10pm

    Thank you, for acknowledging Southern Democrats had an impact. Given the time, do you believe that Southern Democrats would have voted for a bil that included blacks?


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 5:45pm

    Why are we even discussing this?


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 6:07pm

    DeWitt argues Southern Democrats didn’t care if black agricultural workers were included. I find that unreasonable.

    Edit to add:

    A Washington University paper on the effects of excluding blacks from Social Security quotes historian John Hope Franklin 

    ——- 
    When the Social Security Board was established in 1935, provisions were made for old age assistance and unemployment benefits in a large number of categories. Since agricultural and domestic workers were excluded, however, a tremendous proportion of the Negro population failed to qualify for the benefits provided by the act. Even in the program of old age assistance, there was a tendency to grant lower sums, especially in the South to aged Blacks than to aged Whites. (1980, p. 396)

    ————

    https://csd.wustl.edu/Publications/Documents/WP16-17.pdf

    There was bias, and it was intentional.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 7:03pm

    We are discussing this because the same racist mentality is still present, and exploitable by the GOP, to a very significant extent.

    Bernie can list all the progressive programs he can think of, and they will not pass unless the South/states rights bloc is on board (as during the great depression).

    Speculation on this line: we won't get "Medicare for all" anytime soon, short of a crisis/collapse in the health care system, particularly in rural areas. If that happens, and Democrats gain power, they had better use it, and fast.


    by NCD on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 8:14pm

    I don’t understand the resistance to the reality that federal programs at the time were all racist. Blacks were drinking from segregated water fountains, Blacks had to use separate bathroom facilities. The GI Bill, etc was discriminatory, but good old Social Security was unbiased. Southern Democrats openly voiced their opposition to blacks receiving federal benefits. The NAACP at the time pointed out the discrimination. The only person allowed to testify before Congress was from the NAACP. Yep, nothing to see here. 


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 10:46pm

    ...and the GOP has shown they would "privatize" SS and Medicare, and suffocate Medicaid with red tape.....huge SS/Medicare "piggy banks" the GOP has not yet gotten political control of.....to turn over $$ to private interests, businesses which will be big political donors for GOP campaigns.

    That doing this would injure their base they don't care, the core base is locked in voting "white", at least until the GOP crashes the economy.


    by NCD on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 11:33pm

    1) you dismissed my SSA source as "defensive", but of course he was responding to years of attacks on this matter, trying to clarify things - others have agendas too - Katznelson is promoting a couple big controversial points in this & his followup book - but all are pretty respected writers - where does data and arguments and historical reality line up? We can both read - figger it out. I don't suggest it's unclouded - most things aren't completely A or B (or C or D). I found the Title II argument persuasive, but if you think southern whites still resisted even though the feds and not them would be paying for it, along w his other evidence, well, i've nothing more.

    2) it's amusing you're invoking Bernie as "racism is why we can't have nice things", cuz Bernie was arguing class was the unifier all tru the election, not racism. Medicare for all is resisted because of "teh Blackz" and not anti-gov hatred? I don't have any problem assigning voter suppression to racism and anti-Dem "win at all costs", but I'm not riding the racism train as the answer to all questions. I don't think that's a winning train for the party going forward either, nor a useful single-variable paradigm to solve complex problems.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 1:22am

    Trump and his Republican Party are riding it. The nation has been answering, or dreading, the sound of that train's whistle,  since it's founding.


    by NCD on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 1:24pm

    Trump began as a Birther. He calls black football players SOBs. He criticizes black female reporters. His supporters love it. No racism here, obviously.

    edited to correct to Birther


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 2:31pm

    Trump was a birther? Wow, I'm sure that comes as a surprise to everyone here. Thanks for exposing us to these little know facts. Obviously you're the only one here who reads. You've proved everyone here who argued that there is no racism among Trump supporters wrong. Great job genius.


    by ocean-kat on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 2:44pm

    I’m surprise d that you were unaware. It was in the newspapers, on the internet, and on television.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 3:11pm

    But not on the pinup board at Kroger, so didnt see it.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 4:24pm

    The New Deal was of course much more than Social Security.

    There were over a dozen major laws on minimum wages, maximum hours in a work week, working conditions, when and where unions could be formed.

    Like the early Social Security law, agriculture and domestic workers were left out of the New Deal, Fair Deal labor laws of the FDR years, mid to late 30's. Why? Southern legislators demanded jobs where most blacks were employed were excluded.

    From the book:

    The history of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937 proved comparable to earlier New Deal laws......Florida representative James Mark Wilcox explained:

    "There is another matter of great importance in the South, and that is the problem of our Negro labor. There has always been a difference in the wage scale of white and colored labor. So long as Florida people are permitted to handle the matter, the delicate and perplexing problem can be adjusted; but the Federal Government knows no color line and of necessity it cannot make any distinction between the races. We may rest assured, therefore, that when we turn over to a federal bureau or board the power to fix wages, it will prescribe the same wage for the Negro that it prescribes for the white man. Now, such a plan might work in some sections of the United States but those of us who know the true situation know that it just will not work in the South. You cannot put the Negro and the white man on the same basis and get away with it."

    Martin Dies of Texas, later famous for his demagogic investigations of Communist activities, articulated the same concern, stating that a “racial question” was embedded in the bill because under its minimum wage provisions, “what is prescribed for one race must be prescribed for the others, and you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man.”


    by NCD on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 2:37pm

    Ah makes me think: In the book is there any suggestion that you have the tiny origins of red rural bitterness against big gummint  in the urban-mindedness of the New Deal? Being slanted towards manufacturing and revving GNP/production in sin city and not in god's country?  Where some started to feel they waz robbed and the sinning city mice got all the benefits? (Except for certain special programs meant to remedy that like the TVA and trying to bring electricity to rural areas. I guess the nice gummint camps for Oakies depicted in Grapes of Wrath weren't enough of a sell? Then all of a sudden you also got all those gummint agents telling ya how to farm properly as if they know better...)


    by artappraiser on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 3:42pm

    Whites got the biggest benefit from the New Deal. Is your argument that Social Security harmed white Southerners? Blacks were screwed in the initial formulation of Social Security, as was noted by the NAACP at the time.


    by rmrd0000 on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 5:41pm

    There was 50% black unemployment in 1933. Unemployment among sharecroppers was undoubtedly worse, as was the typical takehome pay. (only 10% or so of blacks had their own land). So I'm still wondering here the hell black sharecroppers were supposed to get the extra money to pay into social security to cash out in 20-30 years, especially since sharecroppers were often dealing in a non-cash economy, crops picked for debt at the (exploitive) local store, lodging, etc.

    Social Security is an income-based co-pay system. Without income, you got nada - 13% or whatever it was at that time of nothing. Without money to spare, you got pain - money you need now goes to a doubtful retirement. These are the people: https://mashable.com/2015/12/24/black-migrant-workers/ - what makes you think Social Security was the answer to their prayers in 1933/5?

    Year          White Men          Black Men
    1910             49                       34
    1920             54                       46
    1930             60                       47
    1940             62                       52
    1950             67                       59
    1960             67                       61

    (and yes, that's a pretty amazing near-doubling of black life expectation rom 1910 to 1960)

    By  1900,  the  mean  holdings  for  black  farm  owners  in  land,  buildings,  machinery,  and  livestock  was  $779,  compared  with  $2140  for  whites,  in  1910,  $1588  compared  with  $3911.  During  the  next  two  decades,  despite  severe  rural  economic  problems,  black  proprietors  owned  between  42  percent  and  35  percent  of  the  average  real  estate  of  whites.  This  propor­tion  held  during  the  1930s  and  1940s.  

     


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 4:24pm

    Racism doesn’t explain everything but it explains a lot. The contracts were lop-sided. Public sentiment was against hiring blacks. The argument made before Congress by NAACP official Charles Houston was that the setup of Social Security was biased.

    http://historicalthinkingmatters.org/socialsecurity/0/inquiry/main/resources/34/

    Sharecroppers were working for free. The bill can’t escape the taint of racism.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 4:45pm

    At birth, the federal government reported, life expectancy for blacks lagged that of whites by ten years in the period between 1939 and 1941. By 1947, the gap had grown to eleven years.

    The records of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, which had insured more than 2 million blacks between 1911 and 1935, revealed an excess mortality as compared to whites of more than 40 percent for men and 70 percent for women.

    Only a small number of black doctors secured hospital affiliations. Despite a higher birth rate than whites, the size of African American families lagged, the result of often astronomically disproportionate infant and maternal mortality rates.

    At the time, the national standard stipulated 4.5 beds for each 1,000 people; for blacks, the number hovered between 1.5 and 2.5 in the region’s largest, best-equipped cities. In Atlanta, where blacks had access to fewer than four hundred of the city’s nearly two thousand beds, some three hundred were in a horribly substandard city hospital for the indigent. The South badly lagged behind the national standard specifying there should be no less than one doctor for every 800–1,000 individuals: Virginia and Louisiana had the best ratios, at 1 for every 1,200; Mississippi the worst, at 1 per 1,800. Nationally, there was only 1 black physician for 3,100 people. But the southern ratio of black doctors to black residents was vastly worse than these averages: 1 to 7,100 in Georgia; 1 to 8,600 in Louisiana; 1 to 12,000 in South Carolina; and an astonishing 1 to 18,000 in Mississippi.

    above from Katznelson's book, 2006.

    See my comment right below from yesterday on the exclusions of black occupations from federal minimum wage, 40 hour work week, ability to legally join unions and federal requirements for safety in the workplace. 


    by NCD on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 4:55pm

    NCD, you are not nuanced. Social Security was open to all who qualified. Social Security was not racially biased. The criteria set up by the government did not intentionally set up a system that was racially biased. The fact that racial bias factored into who was able to be employed in the workplaces that were eligible for Social Security did not mean the program was race-based. Now do you finally understand? Racism played no role in the different access to the early years to Social Security. The program happened in a vacuum.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 6:55pm

    Blacks loved to work so much they didn't want 40 hour work weeks, the federal minimum hourly wage, weekends off, safe working conditions OR Social Security, with one doc per 10,000, the chance they'd live long enough to collect was nil.

    And even if they could register to vote, they loved work so much they'd never bother.


    by NCD on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:31pm

    Wow, NCD. We are both nuance-deficient. I guess were not smart, educated, or knowledgeable.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:39pm

    beautiful, when in doubt just blab and through out a bunch of unrelated "facts".

    Please tell me for the love of God how a dirt farmer making maybe $2K a year is going to put away enough in Social Security to fund his retirement, or why if black life expectancy is 50 it makes sense for him to put away money in a retirement program that kicks in at 65. I know it's really horrid the federal government didn't make this craptastic deal available to all black folk during the depression when they could have used knowing things could be worse.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 7:47pm

    So we help create a permanent underclass?

    Regardless of rationale—race or efficiency—the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security reinforced the semblance of a caste system of labor in the South and Southwest. Absent a government safety net, minority workers had to work at any wage available, until they dropped. The Social Security Act thus deferred to regional officials who preferred a status quo Jim Crow to a modern welfare state, as did much of the nation. Of utmost concern to Southern officials was the prospect that federal programs would “change the racial situation” with regard to White employers and Black workers. “A truly national labor system threatened to erode the ability of plantations to hold on to low-paid field-workers” (Katznelson, 2013, p. 385)

    https://csd.wustl.edu/publications/documents/wp16-17.pdf

    Edit to add:

    Although problems enrolling farm workers and domestics may have loomed large in the early years of Social Security, this is not a convincing explanation for their exclusion from a government pension. After all, these groups were folded into Social Security during the early 1950s when the South had not changed appreciably with regard to the nature of low-wage work. Indeed, the Social Security Bulletin reported in 1939 that several European nations—Great Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Austria—had encountered similar problems in enrolling farm workers yet had contrived creative ways to enhance the economic security of their farm workers (Blaisdell, 1938). In other words, had not Treasury Secretary Morgenthau expressed objections by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its concerns for employer prerogatives, these excluded groups would have likely been enrolled in the initial cohort of covered workers.

    from the above pdf

     

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:49pm

    maybe it did help create an underclass but not the one you are talking about

    (maybe France did, too the protests have moved from France’s poor rural regions to the banks of the Seine)

    Maybe that's the way the world was going then, couldn't keep em down on the farm no more.

    Rural southern blacks had enough of Jim Crow, did a mass migration, I heard tell. In Oklahoma, everybody with any gumption moved to California, I heard tell, hoping to leave losing behind....


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:05pm

    [...] When the Great Depression hit North America in late 1929, the consequences were disastrous for the farmers of the Midwest. After record harvests the previous year, and facing oversupply throughout most of the ​1920s, demand all of a sudden dried up for most foodstuffs, while Europe imposed quotas and embargoes and Argentina and Australia swamped the markets with their exports.  Another record grain crop in 1931 was harvested with little hope for its resale, domestically or as export. The price of Chicago wheat fell hard and fast from $1.40 per bushel in July 1929 to 49 cents – a fall in value of about two-thirds in just two years. 

    Immediately after this, a second disaster hit: what became known as the Dust Bowl was a severe drought across the USA that began in 1933 and severely affected the economic social and political landscape of the US, arguably to this day.  Prices doubled from the depths of the original crash, rising above a dollar by mid-1934. By 1937, 21% of rural families were on emergency government relief. Almost one in ten farms changed hands in 1933, half of those voluntarily.This was the America of John Steinbeck and his epic 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. It was not until the advent of the Second World War, ten years after the initial stock market crash, that economic output in the US recovered its pre-1929 levels [....]

    from Agricultural markets and the Great Depression: lessons from the past


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:16pm

    Wow, this nuance stuff is hard. I was talking about the black underclass created by the racism and segregation of the 30s, but we are taken to a Wiki about the rural Populist Republican areas with opioid deaths. Perhaps, nuance is telling me that the groups are identical. My non-nuanced brain leads me to point out that drug problems in blacks in the rural South or urban North with drug problems are treated as criminals. The opioid crisis impacting rural whites is treated as a public health epidemic. No nuance. Racism. Both groups should be treated equally, but they aren’t. I was talking about the creation of a black underclass and nuance pulls me to address other things first. Isn’t that the same situation when Social Security was created? We’ll get to your problem in twenty years.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 10:51pm

    Wow, yes, Germany 1939 had solved a lot of problems with its underclass. (Austria was of course by then part of Germany, as was Czechoslovakia and Poland - France could have just waited). I hear Mussolini not only made the trains run on time, he made sure the Social Security payments flow too.

    Back in reality, distances in America are much much greater and population densities much less (and the south for one had a crap train system, but out west of the Mississippi rural handling of biweekly payments and disbursements would have been much more the nightmare.

    No response on short black life expectancy?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 1:52am

    Nice dodge ignoring Great Britain and Sweden included agricultural worker and focusing only on the Axis countries.

    Regarding the lost funds that came into the black community by the exclusion. A sample agricultural workplace was used to extrapolate (from the pdf)

    ———-

    The vesting period from 1937 through 1939 provided 441,745 beneficiaries with a total of $25,652,000 in benefits, or $58.07 per year for that brief period. Subsequently, a monthly benefit would have been paid, the amount calculated according to a formula that advantaged low-wage workers over their higher earning compatriots. The vast majority of agricultural and domestic workers would have been eligible for the minimum Social Security benefit of $20.00 per month, had they been included (Cohen & Myers, 1950, p. 4). Assuming the excluded numbers in Table 2 and accounting for the differences in payments as per vesting from 1937 to 1940 and averaging the period when excluded agricultural and domestic workers were included under amendments of 1950 and 1954, an estimate of the value of denied benefits is possible, displayed in Table 3. The total value of benefits for excluded agricultural and domestic workers totals $618.24 billion in 2016 dollars, not an insignificant figure.4

    ————

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 7:54am

    Ah, but I didn't dodge it - I pointed out population density - which applies to UK & the habitated/farmed parts of Sweden. But you're too busy trying to score points to notice. 6-8% of Sweden is arable, with total farming land now only ~630 square miles. (largely uninhabited Norrland occupies 3/5 of the country). Add to that both UK & Sweden went heavily industrial in the 19th Century, so didn't look much like Oklahoma or Kansas or Mississippi (less than 30% of Swedish workforce was on farms in 1939), which with about 5.5 million people in 1935 - less than Illinois and Texas and Ohio and California and New York and Pennsylvania ... - that means maybe 1.6 million farmers total.

    But to repeat, why does it make sense for guy with life expectancy of 50 to invest in an insurance that pays out at 65?


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 9:17am

    There was a bigger population density when Social Security expanded.

    100% of blacks didn’t suddenly drop dead at age 50. Your argument is one used by Conservatives today to encourage privatization of Social Security. Blacks die before they receive benefits.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 9:23am

    So when Social Security expanded, they included more of the population (which was also moving to the cities & into factories) - so your point is what, they were right to wait?

    And of course 100% don't die at 50, only 50% on average. But most blacks died by 65 - expect 80% at least, especially for the hard-worked agricultural sector. So maybe 20% or 1/5 of blacks lived to see retirement benefits, maybe less. Still sounds like a crap retirement plan.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 10:01am

    It was the best available at the time. 


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 10:04am

    How is an 80% chance you're pissing away retirement money "the best available"? I'm talking about an 80% you reach 65, so start to spend your banked retirement over 20 or 30 years. Money you get to spend for 2 days, a month, a year, 3 years, 5 if lucky before you croak? That's just simply dumb. You're better off putting the cash under a mattress or in the bank (assuming the bank was finally covered by FDIC, which at those amounts it would be).

    *AND* - how the fuck is a barter system for sharecroppers going to do any of this anyway? So you got to keep part of your acreage as food, and you got some (overcharged) supplies from the company store, and now the government will want you to estimate its value in dollars and hand over 6% of that value even though you have next to 0 cash?

    Best available at the time? Sure as fuck not for dirt poor farmers in the middle of a crisis. It was a joke then & for years after. Not for other professions, maybe not for blacks who owned their own land, but for the 7/8 without, yeah, wasn't attractive in the slightest except as some kind of symbolic something.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 10:28am

    See below


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 11:00am

    The southern politicians of the period wanted the feds money as their states were in desperate financial condition. They were hugely supportive of getting fed money.

    The biggest racists, like Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, were among the enthusiastic supporters of the New Deal, and economic recovery acts. As time went on however, they wanted better control in distribution of the money at the state level, just like Republicans want today with Medicaid etc.

    Blacks too got some real help in the early years, under temporary programs like the National Recovery Act, the first time in history they had ever been financially helped on a federal basis, and they supported FDR, Democrats.

    However, as the 30's went on to federal legislation on labor - minimum wage, 40 hour week, which workers had union rights, safe and healthy working conditions, jobs that blacks did, agriculture and domestic, were excluded due to southern racist demands in Congress, and the black community and leaders were angry and rightly felt blacks were being taken advantage of. When Truman, in '48, had a civil rights plank in his platform the Democrat Party split, and Strom Thurmond ran on a states rights, pro-lynching platform, and yet Truman pulled off a narrow victory.


    by NCD on Sun, 12/02/2018 - 7:59pm

    This is scandalous bullshit - no, he wasn't "pro-lynching" - Strom Thurmond was the leading figure to demand justice for Willie Earle - the last official lynching in South Carolina. The trial itself was awful, as 31 people were put on trial and they sat with their families, while no defense witnesses were called yet still the jury found them not guilty. But that was the last time. In 1950 the death penalty was mandated for lynching. Thurmond was a progressive at that time, including improved services & conditions for blacks, but also against miscegenation & integration & later ended up opposing much of Civil Rights - awful through and through, but certainly not as heinous as "lynching" (put in quotes because it comes across too nice as just quickly stringing someone up, when they beat and stabbed Earle for an hour before hanging him).

    https://www.postandcourier.com/columnists/hicks-column-south-carolina-ha...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Willie_Earle

    And back to the issue of the "Southern Bloc", again it wasn't nearly as unified as people keep contending:

    Just days after the 1948 Democratic National Convention, the States' Rights Democrats held their own convention at Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham, Alabama on July 17.[10] While several leaders from the Deep South such as Strom Thurmond and James Eastland attended, most major Southern Democrats did not attend the conference.[11] Among those absent were Georgia Senator Richard Russell, Jr., who had finished with the second most delegates in the Democratic presidential ballot.[11]

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strom_Thurmond#Early_career


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 4:28am

    You get the award for the day of presenting "some surprising things I did not know." All very interesting, PP.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:05am

    Scandalous! A rapist who sent a black man to the electric chair on flimsy evidence

    https://www.thenation.com/article/was-strom-rapist/


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:06am

    We had a recent discussion on the programs of the New Deal, how 'race neutral' the legislation was

    I don't believe we had that discussion. The discussion I recall dealt specifically with SS. I don't think anyone who claimed SS was not racist believes that none of the New Deal programs were racist. Nor does finding some New Deal programs racist mean that they all were racist.


    by ocean-kat on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 6:06pm

    I remember it like this: the "discussion" was with Mr. Straw Man @ Dagblog. It's just that Mr. Straw Man was saying all this bad stuff we couldn't see and it seemed like he kept changing the subject, too.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 7:18pm

    Strikes me that Katznelson's title might be an extremely effective way to frame the issue. Mho.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 7:21pm

    True. His more recent book is "Fear Itself", a play on FDR's "we have nothing to fear..."

    Reading it now, Katznelson's point seems to be the country has been running mostly on fear since the 30's, a "national security state" that only expanded after WW2.


    by NCD on Sat, 12/01/2018 - 9:26pm

    I note that at least with the GI Bill, we're no longer focused on the least sure of Katznelson's contentions.
    However, the excerpt from a review is strange. "Written under southern auspices, the law was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow. Its administration widened the country's racial gap." - uh, it was designed for vets, and as a whole did nothing to compensate for the inequalities that kept blacks from serving, nor did it stop structural housing & education discrimination that prevented blacks from making use of this benefit, but that's quite different from "deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow".

    =====
    The G.I. Bill is hailed as a measure that created and defined post-war prosperity, while it's pretty undeniable that Blacks couldn't and in practice & effect didn't share in that huge national stimulus, including colleges expressly prohibiting their attendance, the lack of colleges available, to blacks in the south, the unwillingness of banks to give loans to blacks and otherwise utilize supposed benefits, and certainly we're familiar with redlining as a way of keeping blacks out of white neighborhoods (also meaning housing that was often a better household-prospering investment), and the figures show only 100 black families using

    12 million Americans (9% of the population) were in the military in World War 2, presumably eligible for GI benefits. Only a half a million Black Americans served out of 13 million total due to segregation & the slow acceptance of blacks in the military, so less than 4%. Again, both due to the fall in American farming & the increased mobility from both the war and urban (northern) factory jobs, the 2nd wave of black migration quickly made any exceptions in Social Security irrelevant, especially with the SS expansion & fixes by 1955 (and I still have trouble seeing how much depression era-battered sharecroppers would have saved or been able to pay under SS). But the Chicken in Every Pot of the GI Bill was much less than a half a chicken for every Black Pot, even as the Korean War extended these unequal benefits.  Of course this can be explained simply as being for veterans, but when you're denied entry going in and denied benefits going out, and it's game-changing legislation, it's a huge unequalizer, including the lack of career advancement at the time.

    VOA: Jack Jones joined the U.S. Navy in 1956. He says, "When I first came in blacks were relegated to service type tasks where you did cleaning, serving officers their food and doing their rooms. But by the time I got out African-Americans were all the way from the top down to the bottom. We had several admirals and a bunch of captains."

    It was a huge giveway to that "by our own bootstraps" greatest generation, a giveaway that largely passed Black Americans by. Of 67,000 GI Bill mortgages in New York & northern New Jersey, only 100 went to non-whites. Only 72 colleges in the south accepted blacks at bachelors level or beyond, where "no accredited engineering or doctoral programs were available for blacks", and these small schools had trouble admitting the huge number of applicants. Black college attendance still went up from 1% to 3.6% - a helpful jump, but comparatively small.
    But Americans don't see the GI BIll as "socialism" or "entitlements" - they've been taught that they earned it, and the propaganda now is that any military pay or Veterans benefits are holier than pay and retirement and health benefits for any non-military members. I think there's a bigger thread lurking here, that of the split between the America that owes its prosperity to military benefits and those who don't, which can inform a great deal of hostility towards "those who don't work", military participation splits that track the racial divides, etc. Like all of these questions, it's not complete on its own, but I think it gives a useful lens on things.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 4:22am

    PS - as the mortgage ref testifies, there was plenty of racism and segregation and denial of services in the north, though typically they were earlier in dealing with it. The last Ivy League school to deny blacks was Princeton, changing in 1947. Blacks were ghettoed off in most major norther cities. Unions had patterns of keeping blacks out of better jobs, and of course non-union hiring was rife with prejudice.

    Another tidbit: "School segregation in the North was also a major issue.[62] In Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, towns near the Mason–Dixon line enforced school segregation, despite state laws outlawing the practice of it.[62] Indiana also required school segregation by state law.[62] During the 1940s, however, NAACP lawsuits quickly depleted segregation from the Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey southern areas.[62] In 1949, Indiana officially repealed its school segregation law as well.[62] The most common form of segregation in the northern states came from anti-miscegenation laws.[63]". Seems the north was about 15-20 years quicker.

    So it's likely that it wasn't just those damn southerners who put in blocks to racial progress, though they were by far the most outspoken.


    by PeraclesPlease on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 5:32am

    New Deal Background, northern progressives dropped confronting white supremacy, the South reigned supreme in Congress, from Fear Itself, The New Deal and the Origins of Our Times, by Katznelson:

    "During the 1920s, Alabama’s Oscar Underwood and Joseph Robinson of Arkansas led the Democratic Party in the House; Senate Democrats were led by Claude Kitchin of North Carolina until 1923, then by Finis Garrett of Tennessee. With no realistic threat to segregation on the horizon, southern members often allied successfully with western Republican progressives led by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and George Norris of Nebraska....

    Over the arc of an entire half century before the New Deal, every effort in Congress to protect black rights failed, A turn-of-the-century endeavor to reduce southern representation as African-Americans were purged from voting rolls and an attempt to pass federal anti-lynching legislation in 1922, a year marked by fifty-seven such killings, were particularly notable. With that bill “displaced by the indifference of its friends and the strategy of its enemies,” who successfully mounted a Senate filibuster, race disappeared from the agenda of national politics. Congress would mount no other efforts to deal with the deepening of Jim Crow and the persistence of lynching before the New Deal began.

    By March 1933, the issue, at least on the political surface, no longer seemed to exist......southern racial confidence seemed safe. FDR....,.won large majorities in every segregated state but Delaware. With Congress also swinging dramatically in a Democratic direction, the 1932 election was an all-too-often-overlooked watershed that thrust the South into a pivotal lawmaking position.

    In Congress, southern members held three trump Cards: uncommon longevity, disproportionate numbers, and a commitment to racial hierarchy more passionate than that of their opponents....."


    by NCD on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 5:35pm

    You’re doing a great job. 

    Edit to add:

    The argument that Southern Democrats would not have blocked a Social Security.bill that benefited blacks is in the same category as the argument that the Civil War was not about slavery.


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 8:35pm

    Thanks. Only in America would one discover that the nation's greatest progressive era was enthusiastically promoted under the tutelage of racists.

    The Great Depression helped of course, but the legislators involved had confidence the programs and money wouldn't threaten the continued oppression of their minority population.  And FDR had no choice but to cater to their demands to move the nation, at least the white part of it, away from the economic abyss.

    I see McConnell, (R- Kentucky) (and most all current Republicans), and the core GOP base,  as made of the similar stuff.

    I know Bernie had major rallies in Kentucky over the last year, attacking Trump and the GOP, but 5 of 6 congress critters were just elected there, Republicans, and the poorest eastern counties (predominate white) run 80+% GOP.


    by NCD on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 8:59pm

    Only in America would one discover that the nation's greatest progressive era was enthusiastically promoted under the tutelage of racists.

    Who here do you think is disagreeing with that? Who here do you think is surprised by that discovery? What argument by who do you think you are countering with your posts?


    by ocean-kat on Mon, 12/03/2018 - 9:04pm

    Don't recall anyone ever mentioning any of the points Katznelson makes above.

    These are "the origins of our time", as KN  says. A historian comments cited in the 2013 "Fear Itself" book says the book "makes us think in an entirely new way about the New Deal." It was certainly a revelation to me in it's unglamorous clarity of the politics and unconstrained racism of the period.


    by NCD on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:03am

    Making us think in entirely new ways is great. Being completely defensible in all of these matters is another thing. Katznelson's new lenses on matters if a great conversation opener, but like any theory, not everything fits into it without severe mangling & breakage. Even your term "unconstrained racism" is objectionable - of course there were constraints or there wouldn't have even been benefits for Blacks at all, or integration in the military or.... It was a power play between different factions, and as I've suggested, the Southern bloc was strong but not as large or impenetrable as portrayed. If there hadn't been a huge national/international economic crisis followed by WWII, it's likely that FDR & others would have stared them down a bit better, but there were long lines of hungry people & they were trying to get things working again, and bucking local control wasn't going to speed things up or get controversial acts approved (as someone noted, the legislation struck down by the Supreme Court was from heady early days when they thought they could pass anything and sent some sloppy work in - blaming the reection of badly written legislation on "racism", for example, would be misleading.

    And as I noted above, the GI Bill as a huge social subsistence handout that effectively went to whites only is a huge argument against our "greatest generation/pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps" national myth. That still doesn't say it was entirely crafted to exclude blacks - many things can be explained by cultural blindness & the prevailing practices of the time, though I'm willing to look at specific examples - but inarguably it had that effect. And many of the people now who have the "I've got mine, you get yours" attitude directly or indirectly benefited from this huge act of government largesse. Including being overly impressed with & influenced by the military and military solutions, which is a far cry from "blind faith" as Lulu frames it.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 4:35am

     "I've got mine, you get yours" attitude 

    Strikes me that's what tribalism gets ya, vs. "common good". Common good does not mean kumbaya you must love your brother, rather, it means if you just set aside your support of tribe for a minute or two, maybe you can pool enough people whereby the hugeness of the pool gets a majority all the same thing for a lower "price".

    This goes to me praising the title When Affirmative Action was White. Where "affirmative action" thinking is the problem, it's tribalism, tribe vs. tribe.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:16am

    P.S. Lately, I just keep thinking that a lot of this shit about government and institutional racism would go away if the Census and like, college entrance applications would stop asking the race question. Just because it helps me see how absurd some of these arguments are some time. Meanwhile, more and more people start doing 23 and Me and find out they are really "other" and start doing it on their own, answer "other". Done, over, can't talk race anymore with government programs. And then pollsters and politicos can no longer judge vote results by race: enormous change right there.

     Then we will move on to the next stage, class and ideological tribalism, hah. Who is going to make the rules about who can post on "Black Twitter" and who can't? Will you have to submit a portrait photo and have it judged as to how dark your skin is before you're allowed to be part of the group?

    Deconstructing history is a very useful practice. But in the end, it's not now and never will be. History doesn't repeat itself exactly the same each time.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:31am

    Not indicating race can hide societal ills. It would obscure health care disparities and bias in the judicial system, for example.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 9:42am

    gotta start somewhere. I am going to take the liberty of doing what you often do and change the subject. I'm under the impression you have been appointed to speak for all people with black heritage on Dagblog. So can you let me know what's "the black position" on

    • global warming
    • civilian control of the military
    • small business preference
    • who should be allowed to legally immigrate
    • farm subsidies
    • the Fed's control of interest rates
    • private school vouchers
    • trade with China
    • government confiscation of private property for the common good
    • single payer vs. national health
    • buying jobs and economic activity by giving big companies tax benefits to locate
    • gasoline taxes and electric car subsidies
    • Iran nukes
    • recent FDA rulings
    • federal protection of endangered species
    • Saudi Arabia
    • tax exemption for religious institutions
    • localities spending tax dollars on subsidizing professional sports
    • drinking alcohol
    • vegetarianism
    • and last but not least: Kanye West

     


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 10:07am

    As if on cue, an article in the NYT noting the bias in jury selection in NC courts detected by looking at race

    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/04/opinion/juries-racism-discrimination-...

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 11:03am

    I'm under the impression you have been appointed to speak for all people with black heritage on Dagblog.

    You repeatedly make this charge. Given support for things like blackface, do you really think this is a friendly site for black bloggers?

    Why do you think there aren’t more black people who post at Dagblog?


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 11:32am

    I don't think there are any Asian Americans posting here. Why is that? Do you think we hate Asian Americans even more than we hate African Americans? I don't think anyone here posted support for blackface. People here are just trying to have nuanced intellectual discussions of issues, even controversial issues. Frankly, you don't seem to do that. You don't look at the arguments people post and address them.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:09pm

    I don't think anyone here posted support for blackface.

    Let me just say I agree with this statement. Why bother to do that? Because unfortunately, there's no other way to combat straw manning within the context of long nuanced discussions. It's not easy to produce links to prove something that wasn't said. It's one of those when did you stop beating your wife? type of things.

    Pushing simplistic political action memes and looking for dittos, call and response: "amen brother": not my favorite thing. I don't just fully admit to that, it may be one of the rare few things I'll advocate for. Because: it's tribal. wink


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:08pm

    Defending artistic freedom that allows blackface is supporting blackface.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:09pm

    She repeatedly says that I say tat I speak for all blacks. It is tiresome charge.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:33pm

    Perhaps, but what does that have to do with my comment? All it does is provide more evidence that You don't look at the arguments people post and address them.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:41pm

    I turn out to be the only black voice on most cases. My comment is a response to that fact. If there are black voices suggesting that Social Security wasn’t biased, for example, she is free to quote them. I’ll counter with opposing views from sources other than tweets.

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 2:00pm

    Your view is important in itself and helps those of us who aren't black .


    by Flavius on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 2:33pm

    Thx. Just remember, I’m not speaking for all blacks

    Kanye is on his own.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 3:22pm

    Well then use language and rhetoric that makes it clear you are speaking only for yourself.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 2:28pm

    In your opinion.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 3:20pm

    Uh, because we have about 8 people who post regularly on Dagblog, and blacks make 13% of the population, so 1 out of 8 is about right.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 3:28pm

    So I really do speak for all blacks. Great!


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 3:50pm

    We probably only have about 6 who post regularly so blacks are over represented. The question then becomes what is it about dagblog that makes it so popular with black folks?


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 5:17pm

    History is the record of the consequences and outcomes to societies, nations and people of the often inscrutable genius, folly, crimes, compassion, ignorance... inherent in human nature....

    Human nature doesn't change much. It is held in limits by "societal norms". 

    The methods and motivations leaders have or use to steer a society towards new "norms" are worthwhile to be aware of. On the negative track, these can be lies, hate, racism, greed, demagoguery. History shows these techniques have changed little since ancient times.


    by NCD on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 10:20am

    "The argument that Southern Democrats would not have blocked a Social Security.bill that benefited blacks" -  nobody argued that - the SSA article only noted other reasons would have been more likely/had more effect as to the federally run Title II program of Social Security, including the complexity of dealing with ongoing payments from & to dispersed small farmers in the middle of a huge global crisis, and that it excluded *Yuge* numbers of whites at the time as well. (State-run programs had much more likelihood of local Southern interference). But thanks for twisting yet again.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 2:38am

    Not twisting, just reacting to the reality of the time when Social Security was created. I understand the power of white supremacy. You mentioned the South Carolina anti- lynching law above. I couldn’t remember hearing about convictions or trials in South Carolina based on the law. Not surprisingly, the law was used to convict more blacks than whites.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/06/08/lynching-law-has-unintended-results/1a85bf5c-b25c-4eef-8137-968d8a1b64b9/?utm_term=.04bd5757bd04

    Blacks weren’t magically excluded from government programs. The exclusion was a feature not a bug. As NCD, notes we continue to see ongoing attempts to keep blacks in their places via the judicial system, voter suppression, failure to fund education, etc.


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 7:50am

    Ironic - I was actually going to write about the danger of overreaching lynching laws (such as in India where women are regularly raped by gangs, and if they then act in a group for revenge, they'd be charged rather than their abusers.

    Tuskeegee's numbers show 1 year of 3 lynchings and maximum 1 after 1949 -
    http://archive.tuskegee.edu/archive/bitstream/handle/123456789/511/Lyching 1882 1968.pdf
    though a) that can easily be incomplete (I saw higher figures elsewhere), and
    b) they might specify lynching as specifically with a rope or vigilante justice, rather than the more
    gang violence definition of the current law.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:04am

    The 1930s, when the Social Security Act was passed had an increase in lynchings. The 1930s were also the time that activists like Mary McCloud Betune became active. Again, it is hard to give cover to the treatment of blacks.

    Indian courts may have gotten their idea from courts in the United States.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:38am

    Indian courts may have gotten their idea from courts in the United States.

    Red herring nonsense. PP was pointing out how rural prosecutors in India go around strict laws where the rural culture has not acclimated to the 21st century and continue to enforce old tribal ways instead. We send in the Feds when that happens, they don't do that enough yet, afraid of "civil war" results.

    And furthermore courts in India are modeled on the British system.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 10:22am

    I think we all agree about the reality of the time. The vast majority of white people were racist at the time. But that reality doesn't mean you can blame everything that happened on racism. I could claim FDR opened combat roles for blacks in WWII because he was racist and wanted more black people killed in the war. It's a fact that opening up combat roles for blacks resulted in more black men dying than would have happened if they continued to be restricted to support roles. I could cite the racist reality of the times as evidence. But it would be a bullshit argument.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:03pm

    World War II was the classic “Double V” for blacks.

    https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-african-american-soldiers-saw-world-war-ii-two-front-battle-180964616/

    Blacks wanted access to Social Security. Given the times, racial bias in excluding blacks makes more sense than happenstance. The public was unwilling to grant federal funds to blacks. State run programs purposely limited payments to blacks. Blacks had to fight for access to everything. I don’t accept that Southern Democrats would have been quiet on the issue. Your ridicule does not change my opinion.

    Edit to add

    Frances Perkins was the Secretary of Labor under FDR

    She details problems getting Southern states to give proper payments to precursors of Social Security

    https://www.jstor.org/stable/41841218?read-now=1&seq=5#metadata_info_tab...

    (you will have to register with (JSTOR)

    Doubt thatthings changed for Social Security 

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 3:27pm

    Certainly  US white politicians in the 30s were racists. And were sufficiently anti semitic to applaud the the State Department's   forcing the return to  Hamburg of  a  ship load of would be Jewish refugees in Miami harbor.

    And Juliet's family scorned Romeo  and in "West Side Story-just rescued from a gang bang by Officer Krupke-  unsurprisingly her sister pleads  with Maria "Stick to your own kind" . .

     And the deciding comment dooming my  proposal was the Wellesley educated mother 's  " I can't imagine how anyone could  marry a Catholic." (Probably along with other very good reasons. But let's not go into that)

    While the White House  guardian of woman-kind darkly threatens of  invasions by Mexican rapists.

    And here in Dagblogland  methinks the quality of attention is somewhat strained  when  we're requested to give a fair hearing to those from outside our own little tribe whether intruding  from Goldman Sachs,  Planned Parenthood or Ducks'  Unlimited  

     


     


    by Flavius on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:07pm

    FWIW I've always felt it was nasty elitism to dis duck stamp art collectors, their money is just as good as anyone else's.

    Edit to add: that said, their numbers are dwindling mightily as of late and the market collapsing because of that. Few millennials even want Audubon birds, much less duck stamp art. Majority rules mass culture and billionaires are starting to follow that most carefully....


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:15pm

    We're smart, educated, knowledgeable, and tough on everyone. Not just outsiders who disagree. I had a long very contentious discuss of trans gender issues some months ago where I felt I was attacked by a few people  when I didn't follow the traditional liberal line. I didn't have any problem with it. I stuck to my views and debated the issue. Anyone can come here and do that. They just have to know what they're talking about and make good arguments to support their views. If some one doesn't know what they're talking about and can't support their views they will be torn apart here. Doesn't matter whether you're and outsider or an insider.


    by ocean-kat on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 12:22pm

    On differences of opinion I tend to think of Saki's on bear hunting. Or at least its' aftermath,if any.

    "One does occasional  wish that the animals were a bit more successful ."

    Or of an anecdote phoned in to Steve Post on WBAI's   annual laugh day.

    Sam and Jake heading up the Taconic.  Dressed warm,guns ready for a day of shooting.

    Then turned around ,disappointed. The sign said   bear left.


    by Flavius on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:09pm

    Good piece on Eleanor Roosevelt on civil rights vs. the FDR administration and subsequent administrations.


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 1:15pm

    From JFK docs @ SSA.gov history pages, my underlining, including that less than 1% of the aged population was receiving SS benefits in 1940

    SPECIAL MESSAGE TO THE CONGRESS ON PUBLIC WELFARE PROGRAMS--FEBRUARY 1, 1962

    To the Congress of the United States:

    [....] But the times, the conditions, the problems have changed--and the nature and objectives of our public assistance and child welfare programs must be changed, also, if they are to meet our current needs.

    The impact of these changes should not be underestimated:

    --People move more often--from the farm to the city, from urban centers to the suburbs, from the East to the West, from the South to the North and Midwest.

    --Living costs, and especially medical costs, have spiraled.

    --The pattern of our population has changed. There are more older people, more children, more young marriages, divorces, desertions and separations.

    --Our system of social insurance and related programs has grown greatly: in 1940 less than 1% of the aged were receiving monthly old age insurance benefits; today over two-thirds of our aged are receiving these benefits. In 1940 only 21,000 children, in families where the breadwinner had died, were getting survivor insurance benefits; today such monthly benefits are being paid to -about 2 million children.

    All of these changes affect the problems public welfare was intended to relieve as well as its ability to relieve it. Moreover, even the nature and causes of poverty have changed. At the time the Social Security Act established our present basic framework for public aid, the major cause of poverty was unemployment and economic depression. Today, in a year of relative prosperity and high employment, we are more concerned about the poverty that persists in the midst of abundance [.....]


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:19pm

    Tomorrow: "JFK was a racist"


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:19pm

    Well it all depends on how you apply the r word, but other than that, why not get this over with now. White privilege, it's somewhere in these docs, I'm sure. No argument. He's a white privileged elite male. It's 1962. He's working with the system he has, which is white male privileged, rather than out on the streets protesting the racial situation, he's actually "colluding" with the system. So I'm sure there's stuff here that is going according to white culture and white practices and thoughts at the time. And "collusion" with Southern Dems to get it passed, without looking it up, I'm pretty sure. No argument. Like doh. I'm also sure whatever happened it was rigged to be easier for whites to access until blacks figured out how to access to their supposed benefit.*

    *See Senator Pat Moynihan for the rest of the story?


    by artappraiser on Tue, 12/04/2018 - 8:44pm

    Response to PP above

    Social Security was an option at the time tat was denied to black agricultural workers.

    The options without Social Security was work til you drop after age 65, depend on paltry welfare, or rely on family and charity.

    Why were options so limited? Racism.


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 12/05/2018 - 11:06am