Totally OT, but when I saw in person the MLK sculpture in DC, having been carved into the white stone, it had a look of those at the counter in the Billy Jack movie who were pelted with flour.
"Like with most issues concerning minorities, FDR didn’t really care ..."
I quite appreciate these articles, but this is a rather artless and glib summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's record on race -- and it happens to be, in the specifics of the case, spectacularly inaccurate.
FDR comes in for major criticism for the forced incarceration of Japanese-Americans. His civil rights record is far from unblemished.
BUT, this article does a grave disservice to the readers of this website, and our posterity by spreading inaccuracies and through fatal omissions of relevant fact.
Chief among these: Absolutely no reference to Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, "Prohibiting Racial Discrimination by Government Defense Contractors."
The link provided does mention EO 8802 -- but not before repeating the glib exaggeration that Franklin D. Roosevelt cared not at all about the status of nonwhite Americans. In the retelling at the link, FDR "caved" finally and issued an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination by government defense contractors.
It is lamentable that pressure had to be brought to bear. But pressure was, and it succeeded, and in fairly short order. This was no 100 years after Appomattox to see Jim Crow disassembled.
It was an intense few weeks in the early spring of 1941 as the "lights were going out across Europe," and as the people of China and Korea lived under the horrors of Japanese imperial occupation.
A fairer view would be that Roosevelt not only caved, he listened and reacted. Would the same crowd have gotten half of that from Herbert Hoover had he won in '32 or Alf Landon in '36? Surely not. Maybe Wendell Willkie would have after 1940, but "what-ifs" ("counter-factual propositions") are not properly the subject of rigorous historiography.
This is all very much *not* to say that FDR was a "man of his time" who must be understood in the "context of his time." FDR was very much *not* a man of his time -- he was an outlier, by a Duchess County mile.
FDR was a born-rich Democrat from a New York family of Southern sympathies, who, radicalized by the Progressive Era and inspired to complete the progressive work left undone after the failure of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, was far, far more open to listening to -- and prioritizing -- the concerns of women, non-whites, non-Protestants, non-rich, non-management, non-Easterners than any person of power other than Abraham Lincoln since the founding of the Republic. FDR took the meeting. And he should get credit for it. The other White House residents, with perhaps the exceptions of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, wouldn't have let them in the gate.
FDR was no saint, and has much to explain about his unequal treatment of Asians and Jews during his administrations.
But, the fact set we have shows, at the very least, that the conclusion that FDR had no interest in the welfare at all of Blacks, is just plain wrong.
The cause of labor, and the cause of dispassionate historiography without fear or favor, gains nothing at all -- is damaged -- by glib, overbroad generalizations of the type foisted upon an innocent reading public in the article above.
"...but he didn’t want the bad publicity, so he caved and ordered the end of hiring discrimination on government defense contracts. This opened up a lot of jobs to African-Americans during World War II and helped build the Black middle class that would do much to push forward the freedom struggle after the war."
In an article focused on the March, is it really necessary to cite the EO by name and number? Nothing you've said suggests that what was summarized here and detailed in the link is either wrong or misleading. It just sounds like you're annoyed that the article isn't instead about how wonderful FDR was (and sure, in many ways he certainly was).
Uh, no. That throw away line, plagiarized from the source link, it's just a cheap shot. Not backed up by fact. Just a cheap shot.
I don't know about you, but I don't like that kind of fact-free bullying. I don't stand for it. And yeah it annoys me. I totally said that FDR was no fucking hero on every possible issue. But I did say and I thought quite clearly, that would annoyed me is that it was a fact-free cheap shot.
Speaking of cheap shots, how do you plagiarize yourself? oO Loomis wrote the article in the link as well the one here.
As you admit, FDR needed to be pressured to act, which to me suggests minority civil rights were not a priority for him until he had to make it one. You also bring up his deficits in treatment of Asian and Jews. That he was better than others might have been doesn't show that he *did* really care about minorities, just that he wasn't overtly hostile to their rights, as half the country was. He did credit FDR for what he did, and the invaluable effect it had. That's not fact-free bullying.
So again, I don't see anything substantially different between what Loomis has written and what you claim he omitted. The only difference is that he didn't sing FDR's praises in articles that weren't about FDR. But carry on.
Self-plagiarism is indeed a thing. You defined it very well -- it's citing yourself as a source. This is a particularly damning example, the sum of the supporting evidence provided to that reader that FDR cared not at all for racial minorities is that the author made the same unsupported assertion in a previous article.
These are the same people who would have called him “Martian Luther C**n” and a “communist” back in the day. Hell, they probably would have cheered at the news of his assassination.
Now they twisted his words cover to mask their white supremacy with an facade of “color blindness” while they use his nonviolent activism to guilt trip the left into inaction.
Ta, Erik. I would much rather learn real history than fake, thank you, although it doesn't help with our Union enrolling us in the entirely wrong CBO. Solidarity forever.
Let's also celebrate all the women who were so important in organizing the march and many of the unions. Women such as Anna Hedgeman, Dorothy Height, Rosa Parks, Pauli Murray, and Daisy Bates.
Many of the Civil Rights leaders of the 1960s and before were quite sexist, which is why no major speaker at the March was a woman, so it's important to include them now.
I think the problem is that we've never taught comprehensive history to the marjority of students. Also, you have to have a curiosity and desire to know more than you were taught in school. History was one of the subjects I would devour. Teach me a little, and I was desperate to learn more. Most of the books I buy as an adult are history books.
We really need to do better in schools. History is important for context and comparison to how we live today. I saw a meme recently stating that This is the guy to thank for the 8 hour/day, 5 days per week work schedule with a picture of Henry Ford. The top comment was "this is the guy we should hate". When actually, it's one of the few things that should be admired about Henry Ford (who was a terrible, racist person). Before that change, it was mostly 12+ hours per day and 6 days per week. History matters, context matters. If we taught the subject better, we'd probably have different results re: politics today.
> what is often forgotten or downplayed in the memory of this event is the central role economic issues played in it.
excuse me, "economic issues" only matter when it is poor white people in the former Confederacy and I guess also parts of the Rust Belt, and I have this on no lower an authority than the somehow 45th President Of The United States Of America, Yes North America, No I Don't Know Who Let Him In Either
My father, rest his soul, was a proud UAW member for decades, literally to the end of his life. Walter Reuther was nearly a household saint with us. One of the best Christmas presents I ever gave my dad was a biography of Reuther.
Totally OT, but when I saw in person the MLK sculpture in DC, having been carved into the white stone, it had a look of those at the counter in the Billy Jack movie who were pelted with flour.
"Like with most issues concerning minorities, FDR didn’t really care ..."
I quite appreciate these articles, but this is a rather artless and glib summary of Franklin D. Roosevelt's record on race -- and it happens to be, in the specifics of the case, spectacularly inaccurate.
FDR comes in for major criticism for the forced incarceration of Japanese-Americans. His civil rights record is far from unblemished.
BUT, this article does a grave disservice to the readers of this website, and our posterity by spreading inaccuracies and through fatal omissions of relevant fact.
Chief among these: Absolutely no reference to Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, "Prohibiting Racial Discrimination by Government Defense Contractors."
The link provided does mention EO 8802 -- but not before repeating the glib exaggeration that Franklin D. Roosevelt cared not at all about the status of nonwhite Americans. In the retelling at the link, FDR "caved" finally and issued an executive order that prohibited racial discrimination by government defense contractors.
It is lamentable that pressure had to be brought to bear. But pressure was, and it succeeded, and in fairly short order. This was no 100 years after Appomattox to see Jim Crow disassembled.
It was an intense few weeks in the early spring of 1941 as the "lights were going out across Europe," and as the people of China and Korea lived under the horrors of Japanese imperial occupation.
A fairer view would be that Roosevelt not only caved, he listened and reacted. Would the same crowd have gotten half of that from Herbert Hoover had he won in '32 or Alf Landon in '36? Surely not. Maybe Wendell Willkie would have after 1940, but "what-ifs" ("counter-factual propositions") are not properly the subject of rigorous historiography.
This is all very much *not* to say that FDR was a "man of his time" who must be understood in the "context of his time." FDR was very much *not* a man of his time -- he was an outlier, by a Duchess County mile.
FDR was a born-rich Democrat from a New York family of Southern sympathies, who, radicalized by the Progressive Era and inspired to complete the progressive work left undone after the failure of the ratification of the Treaty of Versailles, was far, far more open to listening to -- and prioritizing -- the concerns of women, non-whites, non-Protestants, non-rich, non-management, non-Easterners than any person of power other than Abraham Lincoln since the founding of the Republic. FDR took the meeting. And he should get credit for it. The other White House residents, with perhaps the exceptions of Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, wouldn't have let them in the gate.
FDR was no saint, and has much to explain about his unequal treatment of Asians and Jews during his administrations.
But, the fact set we have shows, at the very least, that the conclusion that FDR had no interest in the welfare at all of Blacks, is just plain wrong.
The cause of labor, and the cause of dispassionate historiography without fear or favor, gains nothing at all -- is damaged -- by glib, overbroad generalizations of the type foisted upon an innocent reading public in the article above.
"...but he didn’t want the bad publicity, so he caved and ordered the end of hiring discrimination on government defense contracts. This opened up a lot of jobs to African-Americans during World War II and helped build the Black middle class that would do much to push forward the freedom struggle after the war."
In an article focused on the March, is it really necessary to cite the EO by name and number? Nothing you've said suggests that what was summarized here and detailed in the link is either wrong or misleading. It just sounds like you're annoyed that the article isn't instead about how wonderful FDR was (and sure, in many ways he certainly was).
Uh, no. That throw away line, plagiarized from the source link, it's just a cheap shot. Not backed up by fact. Just a cheap shot.
I don't know about you, but I don't like that kind of fact-free bullying. I don't stand for it. And yeah it annoys me. I totally said that FDR was no fucking hero on every possible issue. But I did say and I thought quite clearly, that would annoyed me is that it was a fact-free cheap shot.
Speaking of cheap shots, how do you plagiarize yourself? oO Loomis wrote the article in the link as well the one here.
As you admit, FDR needed to be pressured to act, which to me suggests minority civil rights were not a priority for him until he had to make it one. You also bring up his deficits in treatment of Asian and Jews. That he was better than others might have been doesn't show that he *did* really care about minorities, just that he wasn't overtly hostile to their rights, as half the country was. He did credit FDR for what he did, and the invaluable effect it had. That's not fact-free bullying.
So again, I don't see anything substantially different between what Loomis has written and what you claim he omitted. The only difference is that he didn't sing FDR's praises in articles that weren't about FDR. But carry on.
Self-plagiarism is indeed a thing. You defined it very well -- it's citing yourself as a source. This is a particularly damning example, the sum of the supporting evidence provided to that reader that FDR cared not at all for racial minorities is that the author made the same unsupported assertion in a previous article.
https://www.scribbr.com/plagiarism/self-plagiarism/
These are the same people who would have called him “Martian Luther C**n” and a “communist” back in the day. Hell, they probably would have cheered at the news of his assassination.
Now they twisted his words cover to mask their white supremacy with an facade of “color blindness” while they use his nonviolent activism to guilt trip the left into inaction.
If only.
Ta, Erik. I would much rather learn real history than fake, thank you, although it doesn't help with our Union enrolling us in the entirely wrong CBO. Solidarity forever.
Wow..Great history lesson. Thank you!!
If the history you learn is simple, it's probably wrong. Thanks for pointing out all the blank pages in the common history about the March.
Let's also celebrate all the women who were so important in organizing the march and many of the unions. Women such as Anna Hedgeman, Dorothy Height, Rosa Parks, Pauli Murray, and Daisy Bates.
Many of the Civil Rights leaders of the 1960s and before were quite sexist, which is why no major speaker at the March was a woman, so it's important to include them now.
I’m proud to say once again that I was there. The March is the forgotten part. The speeches in the rally are remembered.
Rustin was also gay, which worried a lot of the sexually conservative Civil Rights elites.
---------------
Yes because they were such pillars of propriety while cheating on their wives.
Great info! I always learn something new and that is always a good thing.
One day people will look back on us and they will not judge us favourably. It is on us that after 160 years we're STILL having to fight this fight.
Thank you, Erik. This is brilliantly written and very enlightening.
I think the problem is that we've never taught comprehensive history to the marjority of students. Also, you have to have a curiosity and desire to know more than you were taught in school. History was one of the subjects I would devour. Teach me a little, and I was desperate to learn more. Most of the books I buy as an adult are history books.
We really need to do better in schools. History is important for context and comparison to how we live today. I saw a meme recently stating that This is the guy to thank for the 8 hour/day, 5 days per week work schedule with a picture of Henry Ford. The top comment was "this is the guy we should hate". When actually, it's one of the few things that should be admired about Henry Ford (who was a terrible, racist person). Before that change, it was mostly 12+ hours per day and 6 days per week. History matters, context matters. If we taught the subject better, we'd probably have different results re: politics today.
> what is often forgotten or downplayed in the memory of this event is the central role economic issues played in it.
excuse me, "economic issues" only matter when it is poor white people in the former Confederacy and I guess also parts of the Rust Belt, and I have this on no lower an authority than the somehow 45th President Of The United States Of America, Yes North America, No I Don't Know Who Let Him In Either
"live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Undoing and distorting this idea is precisely what MAGA and Trump are about.
My father, rest his soul, was a proud UAW member for decades, literally to the end of his life. Walter Reuther was nearly a household saint with us. One of the best Christmas presents I ever gave my dad was a biography of Reuther.