FDR's Original Green New Deal Did Present Challenges to Jim Crow

by Paul J. Baicich and Richard A. Walker

Paul J. Baicich is a bird conservationist and coauthor of three books on North American birdlife. He was a delegate to the founding convention of DSA in 1982, an active member and officer of the International Association of Machinists (LL796), and is currently chair of Our Revolution in Howard County, Maryland.

Richard A. Walker is a professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley and director of the Living New Deal, which is documenting and mapping the legacy of the New Deal, especially its public works.

With President Joe Biden’s victory last November, the year 2021 has drawn comparisons to the situation faced by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) as he entered office in the midst of the Great Depression, and calls for reviving parts of the New Deal have been heard from many quarters. This is not idle speculation, because today’s challenges of inequality, injustice, unemployment, and global warming are so grave that they can only be met by sweeping federal policies comparable to the New Deal of the 1930s.

For example, in his 2020 presidential campaign, Senator Bernie Sanders pushed a plan for spending $171 billion for a Civilian Climate Corps. By late April of this year, Senator Ed Markey and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — leading proponents of a Green New Deal — had also unveiled their ambitious plan for a Civilian Climate Corps that would employ a diverse group of 1.5 million young people over five years.

Recruits would work on projects to address climate change (land, water, and energy conservation), community development (schools, clinics, parks, and social services), and environmental justice (impacted communities would provide half the recruits and receive half the projects). In the meantime, President Biden included a Civilian Climate Corps as part of his own American Jobs Plan (AJP), looking to provide perhaps $10 billion over ten years to drive the program. A new Civilian Climate Corps continues to be one of the programs that progressives in Congress are pushing to include in the $3.5 trillion spending bill that is expected to be put into final form and voted on next week.

Why did these politicians hit on the model of Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) for their Civilian Climate Corps? There are four good reasons. First, the CCC was the most popular of FDR’s programs — with the men who served, the local communities that benefitted, and the general public. Second, the CCC employed more than 3 million young men from 1933 to 1942, saving them from despair and their families from destitution. Third, the CCC gave recruits the opportunity to do useful work, learn self-discipline, develop job skills, and acquire basic education (many were illiterate). Fourth, the CCC was the “greenest” of the New Deal programs, working across the country to repair a century of rampant deforestation, soil exhaustion, and pollution.

At the same time, the CCC’s record on race and gender has often been criticized. Women were excluded entirely and African American men were often passed over by racist recruiters. There was a lack of people of color in most skilled and supervisory positions, and CCC camps were mostly segregated. These failings of the original CCC would almost certainly will not be repeated today, given social changes over the last century.

Still, the record of the original CCC deserves a closer look, as a matter of historical accuracy and of political urgency. On the one hand, there’s a need to address a set of misleading and ahistorical — but unfortunately widespread — arguments that portray the New Deal as fundamentally racist. Not only is that a profoundly misleading depiction of the New Deal; it’s an argument that could well be deployed in the future to weaken support for anything echoing the New Deal — including the idea of a new Civilian Climate Corps — even though those kinds of bold federal initiatives are essential to the welfare of all working people in this country.

This article is an attempt to assess the record of the CCC on race — both the facts of the case and the context of government and civil society in Jim Crow America. In our view, the failings of the CCC were due less to inherent flaws in the program than to the overwhelming facts of life of the 1930s.

In brief, the CCC began under a clear antidiscrimination rule; fell into line with segregation under external pressure and internal capitulation; bettered its performance with African Americans over its life; and did relatively well by other people of color. By the end, it had provided jobs for hundreds of thousands of young African Americans and other men of color, affording them with much of the same benefits as white people. Overall, the CCC was flawed — but it was better than the country it served.

Read entire article at Jacobin