“The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas”: Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941–1945 (2024)

The legislative chamber was filled with many more people than usual. Hundreds of observers sat in the audience, and scores of others stood stiffly in the back of the room, two to three rows deep. A civil rights bill outlawing job discrimination had been introduced a few weeks before, igniting one of the fiercest political controversies in recent memory. Critics of the measure had worked patiently for weeks to stage a public hearing, and earlier in the day they had taken advantage of the chance to testify, raising a litany of complaints. Now the time had come for their leader to make a definitive statement. He spoke carefully and expanded on the criticisms that his colleagues had made earlier. It was a strong performance, culminating in the most potent and resonant charge of the day. The law, he prophesied, would essentially impose “quotas” in hiring and promotion. Its passage would spell doom for the free market and meritocracy: “It means the end of honest competition, and the death knell of selection and advancement on the basis of talent.”1

It is easy to guess that the foregoing scene must have unfolded on Capitol Hill during the mid-1960s, when civil rights took center stage in national politics. It would seem even easier to guess the identity of the critics. Surely it was southern Democrats, uttering whatever artful rhetoric they thought would help the Bourbon elites preserve their flagging control over the political and economic life of the South. In fact, historians familiar with the period will correctly recall that Sen. Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat, raised the charge of quotas in the 1963 congressional debate over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, eventually compelling Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat, to deny explicitly that the law would require racial quotas or racial balancing. But neither guess would be correct. The hearing had taken place years earlier, not in Washington, D.C., but in Albany, New York. There were no southern Democrats in the packed New York State Assembly Chamber that day. Instead, it was the Republican state senator Frederic Bontecou, ringleader of a rank-and-file revolt of gop legislators, who rose to read aloud a lengthy letter written by Robert Moses—park commissioner, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, and the fabled power broker of New York. At stake was the passage of the Ives-Quinn bill, a fair employment practices (fep) bill that mandated equal treatment in public and private employment. In his letter Moses furnished opponents of Ives-Quinn with potent new language in which to frame their criticisms. Others before him had argued that the bill would lead to “proportionate” representation, but Moses was the first overtly to invoke the specter of “quotas.” It was February 20, 1945.2

This article presents a political and legislative history of the Ives-Quinn Act, the first of more than two dozen fep laws adopted by northern states before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With only a handful of exceptions, historians have largely overlooked Ives-Quinn, mainly because it eventually passed by a bipartisan majority. The little that is known comes from Richard N. Smith's biography of Thomas E. Dewey. Smith's brief discussion of the episode hints at a hard-fought, divisive, wide-ranging battle that included opposition from the New York State Chamber of Commerce, the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, and park commissioner Robert Moses, who expressed fears of quotas. The historian Paul D. Moreno has added the observation that “large numbers of conservative upstate Republicans” defected from the eventual bipartisan majority. But important questions remain unanswered. How widespread was opposition to Ives-Quinn, especially among business interests and conservative Republicans? What terms did Moses, Pegler, and other critics in the Empire State use in objecting to the bill? Since the bill mandated nondiscrimination, what was their basis for expressing fear of quotas? Did the episode have a larger significance?3

The persistent obscurity of Ives-Quinn and other fep laws in northern states stems partly from the lingering assumption that the postwar struggle over civil rights was simply a matter of shepherding reluctant southerners into a “liberal consensus” about civil rights that prevailed elsewhere in the country. A nationwide backlash against civil rights, it is said, did not materialize until the advent of affirmative action, busing, and other color-conscious policies, whose embrace by Democratic elites irreparably shattered the New Deal coalition and enabled Republican elites to forge a new electoral majority out of the shards.4

But recent historical scholarship has raised serious questions about the central thrust of the consensus interpretation. In their studies of the postwar United States, and particularly of the urban North, Arnold R. Hirsch, Robert O. Self, Nancy MacLean, and Thomas J. Sugrue find dramatic evidence of racial tensions within the New Deal coalition (notably between white, working-class ethnics and African Americans) that long antedated the unraveling of liberalism in the late 1960s. Sugrue's work on Detroit illustrates with exceptional clarity how a “grass-roots rebellion against liberalism” originated during the 1940s and 1950s “from within the New Deal coalition itself.” The resistance of northern, working-class ethnics to the racial integration of their neighborhoods and workplaces suggests that the “‘silent majority’ did not emerge de novo from the alleged failures of liberalism in the 1960s; it was not the unique product of the white rejection of the Great Society.” Rather, backlash was the “culmination” of “simmering white discontent” that had begun decades earlier.5

These now-familiar divisions within liberalism, which slowed the postwar progress of civil rights in the urban North, are evident as well in the history of Ives-Quinn. But a different, albeit complementary, story emerges from a close look at the primary sources. This article examines how the Ives-Quinn bill originated, who fought over it, how they couched their arguments, and why the bill ultimately prevailed. Drawing on legislative transcripts, government publications, local newspapers, constituent letters, and private memoranda and correspondence, it presents evidence that the most unified and significant opposition to Ives-Quinn came, not from within the liberal coalition, but from a racially conservative coalition of industrial, commercial, legal, and retail interests; rural (and to a lesser extent suburban) whites; and the Republican legislators who represented them. The latter coalition waged a protracted campaign against fep legislation at every step of the legislative process—from the time when job discrimination surfaced on the legislative agenda at the outset of the war to early 1945, when the coalition fomented a major, if short-lived, insurgency against liberal gop leadership.

Governor Dewey's belated endorsem*nt of the bill and intensive grass-roots mobilization by racial liberals ultimately propelled Ives-Quinn to passage, handing northern racial conservatives a stinging defeat. But not before they made seminal contributions to the most resonant elements of a rhetorical stance whose origins historians continue to trace either to southern demagoguery in the congressional fight over the Civil Rights Act in 1963–1964 or to the white backlash against affirmative action in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At least twenty years earlier than commonly thought, new ground in the political history of civil rights was broken. Even as racial conservatives in wartime New York State professed their belief in the principle of equal treatment, they also minimized the scope and severity of discrimination; argued that discrimination would wither away if left alone; claimed that existing laws were sufficient to any problem that might exist; trumpeted the effectiveness of educational and voluntary methods over enforceable legislation; and warned ominously that attempts to legislate tolerance would heighten color consciousness and lead to preferential treatment in the form of racial and religious quotas.6

The political impetus for the passage of antidiscrimination legislation in employment did not materialize overnight. The battle over the Ives-Quinn bill was the culmination of a policy sequence that began in early 1941, when the ideological problem posed by the conflict looming overseas was growing increasingly visible. The country might soon be marching against a fascist enemy overseas, but how could it legitimately denounce doctrines of racial supremacy abroad if it countenanced segregation and discrimination at home?7

That question proved most inconvenient for the Roosevelt administration, as the impending confrontation stimulated both patriotism and militancy among many African Americans. Black newspapers such as the Pittsburgh Courier gave voice to their ambivalence, calling for a double victory. As one of its readers explained, “The first V [stood] for victory over enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.” Such declarations could not be blithely ignored by the administration. As early as 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt pledged a renewed commitment to egalitarianism. Yet he was reluctant to go much beyond rhetoric. The very next year A. Philip Randolph, head of the all-black Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (bscp), threatened to lead a massive March on Washington to protest racial segregation in the defense program. The march could embarrass the United States on the world stage, but fdr was reluctant to respond too sympathetically lest he anger powerful southerners in Congress and alienate his military chiefs. In a compromise gesture, he established a Fair Employment Practices Committee (fepc) to monitor discrimination in war-related industries. But he took pains not to grant the fepc any enforcement power. Whatever gains it achieved would come more from the energy and creativity of the field staff than from any official stamp of authority.8

Like national leaders, those of wartime New York sought to contain mounting demands for social change through policies that were more symbolic than substantive. Thousands of African Americans were beginning to move to the Empire State, settling in cities such as New York, Buffalo, Albany, and Rochester and seeking work in a resurgent economy fueled by more than $21 billion in defense spending over the course of the war. When three state assemblymen from Harlem introduced legislation in 1941 calling for fair employment, Gov. Herbert H. Lehman established the New York State War Council Committee on Discrimination in Employment (cde) to deal with complaints of job bias. After intense lobbying by unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (cio), he also signed a law barring discrimination by defense contractors. For a fleeting moment, it seemed that the cde could serve as a robust instrument of change. But like Roosevelt's fepc, Lehman's cde did not possess formal enforcement authority. With few strong tools to elicit compliance, it was forced to focus primarily on educating members of the public about their new responsibilities under the law.9

The new cde, under the leadership of Industrial Commissioner Frieda S. Miller, concentrated on educational outreach to employers. But employers reacted ambivalently. When the cde published a handbook entitled How Management Can Integrate Negroes in War Industries (1942), Mark A. Daly, vice president of the Associated Industries of New York State, seemed impressed. No doubt satisfied that the handbook recommended only gradual, voluntary steps, he offered to send out fourteen hundred copies to his membership, which included General Motors, Bethlehem Steel Company, Corning Glass Works, Otis Elevator Company, ibm, and Pfizer. “Your booklet is a most comprehensive statement covering one important phase of a very difficult problem,” Daly wrote approvingly to Miller. “I am sure every employer will welcome an opportunity to read it.” In contrast, A. E. Crockett, a top official at Rochester's Industrial Management Council, expressed doubt that eliminating discrimination required any special effort at all. His personal observation suggested that it was fast receding of its own accord. Crockett cited the example of a local school whose graduates commanded a “premium” among local employers: “out of 37 men of Italian race in [the] June, 1941 graduating class at Edison Tech all but three are employed.” Of course, pockets of discrimination lingered, but “substantial progress” had been made and would continue to be made: “after a while it will be nearly gone, if not entirely so.”10

Crockett's observation was belied by the number of times that the cde sought to “adjust” complaints of discrimination through informal conference between aggrieved parties and those accused of discrimination—304 cases in 1942 and 435 in 1943. The field staff faced immense difficulties in resolving such complaints, since there was little the committee could do in the face of delay, obstruction, or rank noncompliance. Several committee members expressed growing dissatisfaction with the “painfully slow rate in getting results” and asked Lehman to strengthen the cde. Within months, he signed additional legislation. Miller quickly announced that she would interpret the new law as a legitimate basis for issuing administrative orders to defense contractors. “If appeal and persuasion should fail to convince holders of war contracts that they should hire an applicant on his merits, regardless of his race, color, creed, or national origin, such employers will be served with a formal order.” A cde report later specified that such an “order may require the submission of monthly or bi-monthly reports of pertinent employment data to the Industrial Commissioner; it may order the employer to cease and desist from the practice of certain discriminations based on race, creed, color or national origin; or it may direct the employer to take affirmative action to correct discriminatory refusals to hire.”11

Miller's threat to issue administrative orders that proscribed or prescribed action did not require any radical revisionism on her part. As a longtime labor official, she reached for the regulatory tools most familiar to her. Such administrative orders had been commonplace in labor relations since the Wagner Act, which conferred cease-and-desist authority on the National Labor Relations Board (nlrd) as well as the power to order offending companies to take “affirmative action including restitution” to compensate individuals who had been victimized by their unlawful activity. Many state labor boards, including the one in New York, enjoyed the very same powers. Only a few years later, in 1944, Rep. Thomas Scanlon, a Pennsylvania Democrat, introduced a bill that called for the creation of a permanent federal fepc with nlrb-style powers over job discrimination (including the authority to order “affirmative action”). Hence, when Miller began to invoke analogous administrative powers in late 1942, she was merely extending a regulatory model prevalent in industrial relations to the area of civil rights.12

Miller's announcement nonetheless marked the zenith of the committee's fortunes. Miller issued her first order in October 1942 against Brewster Aeronautical Corporation, but whether she had misconstrued her authority would remain an unanswered question as the cde entered a period of uncertainty. Lehman soon resigned his office to head the U.S. Office of Foreign Relief and Rehabilitation Operations. Miller resigned as well. The attorney Thomas E. Dewey won the election to replace Lehman in November 1942, but only after months of delay did he name President Alvin S. Johnson of the New School as Miller's successor. The reorganization of the committee, coming at a moment when it seemed increasingly clear that the Allies would prevail against the Axis, raised a thicket of vexing issues. The larger mandate of the committee, Johnson observed, would vanish with the end of the war, as would the war contracts over which it had specific jurisdiction. Even if the cde survived, it had no independent authority to enforce the law. A new commission would be necessary. Johnson worked intensively with committee members to draft a legislative proposal creating a permanent, stand-alone commission with centralized jurisdiction over public and private employment, as well as the administrative authority that Miller had begun to exercise. Johnson's proposal never emerged from committee. Maneuvering to become the gop presidential nominee, Dewey sought to avoid a confrontation over fair employment by introducing a bill creating a study commission that would make recommendations during the following legislative session. The New York Times on March 18, 1944, called Dewey's bill an “admitted substitute” for Johnson's proposal, but the substitute bill passed easily, creating the New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination (tcad). Eight members of the cde resigned in angry protest.13

The resignations effectively marked the end of the cde. The beleaguered committee had been formed as a symbolic gesture at the outset of the war years, and it left a mixed legacy. On the one hand, it had not demonstrably improved the economic prospects of racial minorities—not nearly as much as proponents had hoped. A comprehensive 1946 study by Robert C. Weaver, director of the Negro Manpower Service in the War Manpower Commission, concluded that black wartime gains were “occasioned principally by economic necessity.” On the other hand, it represented a major stride forward on the road to the passage of Ives-Quinn. The committee had found ample evidence of discrimination, Miller had imagined a new regulatory setup, and Johnson had given it legislative definition. But was legislation the best way to handle discrimination? The experience of the cde had thrown the question into high relief. How it would be addressed was a matter for the tcad to resolve.14

Irving M. Ives seemed an unlikely guardian of civil rights. Except for a short tour of duty in France and Germany during World War I, he had spent most of his life in central New York. In 1930 he was elected to the New York State Assembly as a Republican from his native Chenango County and quickly rose to become majority leader of the lower house. Ives later won election to the U.S. Senate, where he became known for his consistent liberalism on civil rights. When Ives was elected chairman of the new tcad on June 19, 1944, however, there was little in his personal background or political record to indicate that he would lend his name to a strong antidiscrimination bill or become the central legislative figure supporting it.15

The first meeting of the tcad went smoothly. Most members of the commission—a bipartisan roster of legislators as well as representatives of business, labor, civil rights, and religious organizations—seemed ready to approach the process in good faith, making a point of ordering copies of Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, published earlier in the year to great fanfare. There were only faint murmurs of discontent. Not surprisingly, Frank S. Columbus of the railroad brotherhoods—long a bastion of racial exclusion—took a strong position against what he called “‘must’ legislation” (a mandatory law with enforcement mechanisms). It was Mark A. Daly, executive vice president of the Associated Industries of New York State, who made the most unexpected revelation. In 1942 Daly had considered discrimination a “very difficult problem,” but in a startling turnabout he now doubted whether it existed. “I cannot conceive of any man discriminating against a Negro if he is skilled.” Daly called for the tcad “to make a preliminary study to distinguish between discrimination and what might be termed sensible, logical selection and placement of employees.” But most commissioners repeatedly agreed with Ives that “what is necessary in this state is some form of fepc.” The only disagreement concerned emphasis. What kind of balance should be struck between education and enforcement?16

Johnson, who had been elected vice chair, privately pressed Ives to adopt the cde proposal for a permanent commission with the power to enforce the law. In time, Johnson's vision would prevail. By November the tcad had decided to recommend the establishment of a new commission with administrative enforcement power. To raise public awareness and solicit public input, Ives and other commissioners embarked on a draining series of hearings across the state. For eleven days after Thanksgiving, often traveling by train at night, they heard testimony from witnesses in Albany, Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, and New York City. Each hearing lasted all day. The public response was astounding. More than two hundred political, community, religious, and civic groups sent representatives to give statements and make suggestions. The verbatim transcript of the hearings, printed in three volumes, ran in excess of fifteen hundred pages.17

But as extensive as they were, the tcad hearings were as politically uneventful as the deliberations of the commissioners themselves, particularly in contrast to the rancorous clash in Congress earlier in the year. There, southern Democrats had wielded their formidable rhetorical talents in a failed bid to consign the federal fepc to fiscal oblivion. Malcolm C. Tarver, a Democratic representative from Georgia, assailed it as “one tentacle of a devilfish” that created entirely new problems for the country; it “promote[d] disunity where none had existed before.” Jamie L. Whitten, a Mississippi Democrat, noted that 61 of 106 staff persons at the fepc were black. Such a disparity seemed clear evidence to him that the intent of the committee was not to “prevent unfair discrimination against Negroes. … What they wanted, what they have done and are doing is to discriminate in favor of the Negro.” Samuel F. Hobbs, an Alabama Democrat, charged the fepc with racial proportionalism: “according to the fepc, if there are in a community 10 Negroes out of each 100 persons, then 10 percent of those employed in each category of employment must be Negroes.” The shrewdest speakers sought to expose unintended ironies. Ed Gossett, a Texas Democrat, told his colleagues about a job ad in a Dallas newspaper that had openly solicited black applicants for a good position in the paper industry. Unbelievably, the fepc had struck down the ad as unlawful. Gossett pounced: Why should the committee be given federal funding to harm people it was meant to help?18

The hearings over which Ives presided were tame by comparison. To be sure, there was no absence of public disagreement between liberals and spokesmen for the business community. Leaders of cio-affiliated unions spoke out forcefully on behalf of the bill. Michael J. Quill, president of the Transport Workers Union, warned that if a bill with “teeth” did not pass, “labor will have to organize and see that the Legislature is changed.” In contrast, business lobbyists saw no need for enforceable legislation, extolling the virtues of voluntary policies and claiming that if left alone, discrimination would inevitably fade away. Agreeing that discrimination was a moral blight, one employer in Buffalo nonetheless felt “convinced that the best—yes the only effective—method of combating this evil is through persuasion, education, and good example.” Crockett, from the Industrial Management Council in Rochester, sought to minimize the problem as he had two years earlier in his letter to Miller. “I personally know of no discrimination,” he said, “and I do know that the spirit of tolerance that was spoken of so frequently at Albany does exist in a larger measure than it ever existed before. We have moved ahead since this war began, and I believe the effects will be lasting.”19

But notwithstanding the objections of a few thick-skinned business spokesmen, there was a broad consensus about the pervasiveness of discrimination. Scores of witnesses stepped forward to offer their personal testimony. A representative of the Albany branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) told tcad commissioners about the difficulty that African Americans experienced when seeking jobs in the retail and teaching sectors. She hoped that the tcad proposal would pass before her son came home from serving overseas. “My boy, like the thousands of other Negroes, Jew, and Catholic boys, will expect a better America for which they have sacrificed and fought, when he returns.” A rabbi related a firsthand story about a steel mill manager who turned down twenty-two Jewish boys for employment. Members of the Italian Civic League in Rochester reported “many instances” of discrimination against Americans of Italian descent. Thurgood Marshall of the naacp sought to make certain that the connection between job discrimination and the war effort was not lost on anyone, quoting a passage from Justice Frank Murphy's ruling in the Hirabayashi decision. “Distinctions based on a color and ancestry,” he intoned, “are utterly inconsistent with our traditions and ideals. They are at variance with the principles for which we are now waging war.”20

If most participants in the hearings agreed that discrimination was the central problem, they also agreed with the Myrdalian diagnosis that discrimination stemmed largely from prejudices lodged deeply in the “heart of every American.” “Let us always bear in mind,” Ives constantly reminded his audiences, “that discrimination in itself is not the disease, it is a symptom. … the disease is prejudice.” But few participants believed that discrimination could be ended only—or even most effectively—through educational outreach and moral suasion. That discrimination stemmed from prejudice did not obviate the need for government regulation. “We do not believe education alone can solve the problem,” said Louis Hollander, president of the New York State cio. Education would be effective only if there was a cost to noncompliance. In fact, participants' knowledge that enforcement action was a real possibility might strengthen informal methods. “If you have no law, education itself will not do it.” The only disagreement among supporters of the bill was about whether the tcad proposal went far enough. Some witnesses worried that the bill did not have enough teeth and would lead to interminable foot dragging by accused parties. Others focused on arcane but important questions of regulatory design, particularly the provision giving judges the authority to try cases appealed from the commission de novo. That “practically invites appeal,” said one participant; it could virtually “nullify” the “effective operation” of the proposed commission, suggested another. Still others wondered whether the commission would be more useful if it could initiate investigations without waiting for a complaint.21

The tcad transmitted a final report to the Assembly on January 29, 1945. The centerpiece was a recommendation to create a new regulatory commission whose powers had been anticipated by Miller and given substance by Johnson. The new commission would have a strong educational component, but it would also enforce the law by receiving and handling complaints. Complaints would first be addressed informally by bringing the parties together in a private conference and seeking to reconcile their views through persuasion and mediation. Only if informal methods failed would the commission hold a public hearing to assess the validity of the complaint, subpoenaing witnesses and records if necessary. If it determined that discrimination had occurred, it could direct the offending party to “cease and desist from such unlawful employment practice and to take such affirmative action, including (but not limited to) hiring, reinstatement, or upgrading of employees, with or without back pay, or restoration to membership in any respondent labor organization.” To protect the rights of everyone involved, such orders were subject to judicial review.22

The next day Ives joined with the Democratic senator Elmer F. Quinn to introduce tcad's proposal to the legislature. But now dissent was spilling into the open. News reports noted that opposition was brewing upstate. tcad's final report, indeed, had been sprinkled with irate footnotes. Daly had contributed a lengthy footnote that reiterated his long-standing misgivings about the proposal even as he endorsed the ideal of equal treatment. Like “every other right-thinking citizen” and “every intelligent executive in industry,” he was opposed to “any discrimination because of race, creed, color or national origin or ancestry.” But he was strongly convinced that “there is sufficient law on the books” to address any lingering discrimination that did exist. There was no need for more laws.23

But supporters could easily find reasons for optimism. The bill had benefited from a lengthy and public gestation, reducing its vulnerability to charges that it was the brainchild of wild-eyed agitators wanting to plunge the state precipitously into a social experiment. Perhaps more important was the unbending determination of the main sponsor to see his bill passed. At the outset, Ives had known “little about the problem and felt that the proper solution must lie largely in a broad program of education.” But it had become apparent to him over the months that discrimination “not only has existed, but does exist” and constitutes a “fundamental contradiction in our American Way of Life.” The experience had opened his eyes to the full scope of the problem and steeled his resolve to find a sensible solution. Ives considered tcad's legislative proposal, which combined informal methods with administrative enforcement, to be “moderate, reasonable, and workable,” and little would dissuade him from trying his utmost to see it become law. “I mean business on this thing,” he declared.24

The suddenness and ferocity of the public resistance to Ives-Quinn must have surprised almost everyone, Ives most of all. If critics had once sought to frame their concerns in reasonable terms, they now abandoned any pretense of moderation. A bill they opposed had landed on the docket, and it had the potential to pass. It was no slapdash improvisation, but rather the product of careful, consensual, and bipartisan reflection. The time for restraint had come and gone, and harsher language was needed.

The source of the flare-up was no surprise. Frank Columbus of the railroad brotherhoods predictably asked legislators to vote against the measure. But organized business unleashed the most damaging line of attack. Diverse segments of the business community—manufacturers, merchants, and the corporate bar—joined to praise the intent of the bill but prophesied that all manner of terrible consequences would erupt if it were adopted. Businesses and jobs would flee the state in droves. The proposed law was “hysterically conceived,” in the words of the West Side Association of Commerce in New York City, and it would “intensify rather than eliminate any discrimination which exists.” Julian Myrick of the New York State Chamber of Commerce warned legislators that the law would give “disgruntled” employees the leverage to “blackmail” employers by threatening to complain at every possible opportunity. The resultant concern on the part of employers could lead to the “enforced employment of undesirable persons.” No comparison seemed too outlandish or out of bounds. The law would fuel a “burning resentment” that would exacerbate intolerance and “tend to foment … the possibility of race riots, pogroms, and the evils associated with the Ku Klux Klan.” A spokesman for the Commerce and Industry Association said the law would “work against those whom it was intended to benefit,” implying darkly that a kosher butcher would be forced to hire a gentile.25

Supporters did not sit on their hands helplessly. Although organized labor could not match the coherence of the business community—with the state Federation of Labor showing decidedly less enthusiasm than cio-affiliated unions—it rallied to the cause of fair employment, as did the naacp, the National Urban League (nul), the American Jewish Congress, and dozens of other liberal groups. Ives himself spoke out, reiterating his conviction that discrimination was a clear and present threat to American democracy as it sought to repel fascism overseas. The only question for him was whether the state would continue on a path of “drifting and indifference” or declare a fresh start and “establish a new agency to handle the most important phase of the discrimination problem—discrimination in employment.” He noted that the proposed agency would be no leviathan; it would stress education and informal methods first, relying on enforcement mechanisms only when absolutely necessary. Ives had apparently struck the right tone. A serviceman overseas wrote to tell Ives that he and his crew mates had read the full text of Ives's speech and had come away impressed: “If this war is against anything, it is a war against racial prejudices, discrimination, and bigotry.”26

Not all liberals felt as Ives did. A debate that raged across the editorial page of the New York Times revealed some doubts. The debate had been shrewdly orchestrated behind the scenes by Charles C. Burlingham—admiralty lawyer, judicial reformer, and “New York's First Citizen.” A widely respected, headstrong Democrat, Burlingham quickly concluded that the “remedy [provided by Ives-Quinn was] worse than the disease.” The chief problem was the reliance on administrative enforcement. To justify their new jobs, commissioners would face implacable pressure to find discrimination wherever they looked. Only the judiciary could remain independent and impartial. “I prefer the Courts to the Bureaucrats,” he pronounced.27

Burlingham had launched the debate with the publication in the New York Times of a letter signed by notable liberals, including the attorney Whitney North Seymour and the reformer Oswald Garrison Villard. Most of the signers had agreed very reluctantly to lend their names, but the letter criticized Ives-Quinn in no uncertain terms. It lauded the goal of reducing prejudice and discrimination but charged that Ives-Quinn set up a “costly machinery” and “inquisitorial process” that would prove useless, since the true motivations for employment decisions were impossible to discern. Moreover, the law would lead workers to exaggerate the extent of discrimination and management to conceal their prejudices: “prejudice will become a commodity to be bootlegged.” The reference to Prohibition, however maladroit and strained, captured the essence of their objection. “It is as impossible to destroy prejudice and discrimination by law,” Burlingham's group wrote, “as it is to control opinion or morals. It is far wiser to rely on the force of slow but steadily growing public opinion, guided and developed under the leadership of fair-minded men and women of every race, color, creed, and national origin.”28

The letter jolted liberals, but only because such views were rare among them. Far more typical were the sentiments expressed by Jack R. McMichael, executive secretary of the Methodist Federation for Social Service. In a rejoinder to Burlingham, McMichael conceded that “racial prejudice cannot be eliminated by legislation alone, since prejudice is largely a matter of emotional attitude.” But he pointed out that prejudice and discrimination were not identical, and the latter was the appropriate target of government policy. “Discrimination … is not primarily a matter of internal unbrotherly feelings but of external unbrotherly actions—the proper and effective sphere for legislation with teeth.” The counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (aclu), Osmond K. Fraenkel, questioned the sincerity of critics. “Pious hopes and crocodile tears will accomplish nothing.” What was needed was administrative action, which was more efficient than the courts because commissioners would acquire specialized expertise in handling the cases. Another inter-faith group of liberals—including most prominently the attorney Robert S. Benjamin, the jurist Charles B. Sears, and the attorney Charles Evans Hughes Jr.—published a letter calling public opinion a “weak reed” on which to rest hopes for equal treatment in the postwar period. Only new legislation would suffice.29

By contrast, there was near unanimity among conservatives that Ives-Quinn would bring ruinous consequences on the Empire State. The Wall Street Journal expressed admiration for the goal of the bill but doubted whether “the evil to which this bill addresses itself can be effectively dealt with by any kind of statute; we are convinced that the bill is too loosely drawn to escape stirring up more friction and bad feeling than it could ever allay.” Writing under the pseudonym Henry Stuart Clark, the conservative author and economist Henry Hazlitt lambasted Ives-Quinn. “The so-called anti-discrimination bill now before the Legislature of this state,” he wrote, “seems to me far more likely to stir up racial antagonisms, to encourage blackmail against employers, and to undermine industrial discipline and production, than to solve the problem that it is ostensibly intended to solve.” He pointed to the example of the Wagner Act, which he claimed prevented employers from firing incompetent, insubordinate, and troublesome workers. Ives-Quinn was similarly extremist: “[It] represents the method of zealots, who can never think of any way of curing an evil except by coercion. The bill may undo what years of education and tolerance have done and could still do.”30

As a clash of ideology unfolded on the op-ed pages, Republican legislators, working closely with the business lobby, wasted no time setting out to undermine the bill in the legislature—and with good reason. The gop controlled the Assembly by a margin of 94–55 and the Senate by 35–21. If public opinion could be inflamed against the bill, it could fall easily to defeat. The same hope fueled Republican and employer demands for a second round of public hearings. When the bill came under consideration by the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Frederic Coudert Jr., a Republican from Manhattan (New York County), submitted a petition signed by seven business groups calling for another chance to present their views. The New York Post roundly denounced the move as “Republican filibustering,” but Coudert claimed that passing such a controversial measure without “objective public consideration” could jeopardize whatever chance of success it might have. Although the board of directors of the Associated Industries had unanimously voted their opposition to Ives-Quinn and Daly had advised his membership not to testify in 1944, Daly now somewhat disingenuously claimed that employers “did not have enough advance notice at all of the details of the bill” and “could not commit themselves publicly concerning a bill which they had not studied and analyzed.”31

Coudert's petition touched off what the New York Times characterized as a “large-scale revolt against the demand of Republican legislative leaders.” Party leaders who held or aspired to statewide office, such as Dewey and Ives, took a liberal stance on fair employment because they needed to compete for minority votes in statewide elections, but most gop members faced different electoral circ*mstances. Led by Sen. Frederic H. Bontecou, a Republican from Poughkeepsie (Dutchess County), and Assemblyman William M. Stuart, a Republican from Steuben County, February's insurgency took strongest root among rank-and-file Republicans who represented upstate districts where few members of racial or religious minorities resided. Such districts were largely conservative and Republican, and their ideological tenor was clearly reflected in local papers, which consistently expressed doubts about Ives-Quinn. “Discrimination … is based on prejudice,” wrote the Niagara Falls Gazette in a passage that borrowed shamelessly from Burlingham's letter, “and it is just as impossible to destroy prejudice as it is to control opinion or morals.” Stuart's criticisms of the measure—he considered the bill “in itself discriminatory”—were prominently featured in upstate newspapers. Those objections could reflect poorly on the critics of Ives-Quinn, but a report in the Watertown Times sought to distinguish “upstate Republicans” from the “bourbon Democrats” of the South. Members of the gop were not “in favor of discrimination as such.” “They are, however, hard-headed, sensible, ‘up-country’ Yankees, proud of their heritage of independence.”32

The stance of political elites upstate reflected the ideological convictions of their constituents. There was no single grass-roots organization coordinating the dissent of upstate whites, and few constituent letters have survived. But some upstate residents did write individually to gop officeholders before and after the passage of Ives-Quinn, and the letters expressed a strong opposition to protecting civil rights through legislation. A resident of Elmira worried that the bill would lead to “legalized blackmail” against employers, whom he considered the “Forgotten Men” of American politics. Unscrupulous workers would threaten to file costly, if baseless, complaints in order to extract concessions from their employers. A manufacturer based in Olean thought that Ives-Quinn would “create a great deal of bad feeling and will tend to cause race riots.” The employer pointed to his workers as the main source of the problem. During a recent labor shortage, he had wanted to employ black workers, but he claimed that his employees “to a man” threatened to “walk off the job” if African Americans were hired. When he asked his workers why they felt so strongly, he was told that they simply refused to “use the same toilet facilities and locker rooms” as a black man. A self-identified Republican wrote Dewey from the hamlet of Batavia in western New York, denouncing Ives-Quinn as a “lousy piece of work.” Though he and his brother had both been enthusiastic supporters of Dewey in the 1944 presidential election, he was “disappointed” to see the governor taking a “page out of Roosevelt's book.”33

While centered in the villages and hamlets of upstate New York, grass-roots hostility to the bill was not confined to them. Some of the most intense feelings emanated from the suburban areas surrounding New York City and even Manhattan itself. A resident of Freeport, on the suburban fringe of New York City, was angry that racial minorities might succeed in writing racial preferences into the law. “The only unfortunate thing,” he wrote,

is that a lot of us Americans were not lucky enough to be born a member of one of these minority groups, who high pressure you into putting over the Ives bill while our sons were away! These people were only interested in putting themselves in a favored position via kangaroo courts, Soviet style, regardless of their habits or behavior as individuals! There has been less general discrimination here than any place else in the world, the Ives Bill is an insult to all Tolerant Americans the state over!

A self-proclaimed Dewey supporter from Richmond Hill in the New York City borough of Queens could not fathom why the governor would back a law to benefit blacks when “it is the decent young white men who are winning this war for America and Americans, not the disease-infested Negroes.” One resident of New Rochelle in Westchester County thought that the law could only have been passed to “intimidate the white people of this state.” A resident of Manhattan objected to Ives-Quinn because it would force whites to come into contact with blacks. “I know girls who have had to give up their jobs because they got sick from the smell of them.” “Instead of smoothing down the distinctions which promote discrimination,” wrote another city dweller, “it accentuates them.” Still another thought blacks should pull themselves up by their bootstraps: “If politicians and busy-bodies will only leave the Jews and colored alone they will find their rightful level just as we Irish did.”34

With his control over the party breaking down, Dewey abandoned his low profile and publicly threw his full weight behind the bill. The decision won him kudos from the New York Herald Tribune, but the intervention did not decisively settle matters. By mid-February, conservative and upstate Republicans had succeeded in their call for a hearing. They hoped to use the hearings as a high-profile stage to present united opposition from powerful and influential business groups, elevating public concern to a point where party leaders would at least agree to strip the bill of enforcement provisions. But the stakes were high for everyone else as well. The Harlem-based Amsterdam News saw the hearing as a chance for liberals to demonstrate their support, exhorting readers to “Back [the] Proposed State fepc!” Victor Bernstein of the New York City daily pm agreed, calling for a “march on Albany.” Bernstein expressed confidence that his call would be answered. “Coudert wants a hearing,” he wrote. “Let him hear.” A favorable hearing could actually help a different Republican, Ives, who had been weighing a U.S. Senate run. It would validate the stance he had taken and enable him to present himself as a fair-minded leader in a statewide election. Dewey had the most to lose or gain. If the hearing derailed the bill entirely, it would severely damage his credibility and widen the breach between him and the gop rank and file; it would also weaken his standing in the national party and cede control to Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio and the conservative wing. But if the hearing went well, he could further consolidate his control of the state party and claim national leadership on the question of civil rights; it might also boost the overall political fortunes of the Republican ticket in the next presidential election. All eyes turned to Albany.35

Every seat on the floor and gallery of the Assembly chamber was filled. The audience— estimates varied wildly from 300 to 1,000—was packed two to three rows deep against the walls. Employers had a perfect chance to make their arguments on the most visible stage they had thus far enjoyed. Gustave Michelson of the New York Board of Trade spoke first. Like most other Americans, he said, employers considered freedom from discrimination a laudable goal, but Ives-Quinn would “unduly emphasize differences” and “pit race against race, color against color, creed against creed.” Daly, following Michelson, compared Ives-Quinn to the ineffectual Volstead Act. The only real consequence of the bill would be to put “just one more nail in the coffin of New York business as it continues losing the competitive struggle with other states.” When his turn came, Whitney North Seymour of the New York State Bar Association maintained that Ives-Quinn was “bound to create prejudice where it does not now exist” and that it established a new and dubious “civil right” that directly conflicted with the “traditional right of the employer to use his own judgment in selection of his employees.”36

If most critics reiterated familiar themes, the park commissioner Robert Moses made the most original contribution to their rhetorical arsenal in a letter prominently read aloud by Senator Bontecou. Moses had long rejected governmental regulation of discrimination. At the New York Constitutional Convention of 1938, he had railed against a proposal that would have amended the state constitution to outlaw discrimination. “You cannot legislate tolerance by constitutional amendment or statute,” he had warned.

Now he went even further. It was not only impossible to protect civil rights through legislation; it could lead to a perverse and unanticipated outcome: If the bill passed, a logic of proportionalism would guide employment decisions. Other critical voices had made similar arguments on the floor of Congress. Most recently, Senator Taft had charged that a permanent federal fepc would force “every employer to choose his employees approximately in proportion to the division of races and religion in his district.” Moses cast the criticism in new, provocative language, arguing that a legislative assault on discrimination would lead to “quotas”:

The most vicious feature of this proposal is that it will inevitably lead to the establishment of what in European universities and institutions, from the Middle ages to World War II, was known as the “numerous clauses,” that is, the quota system under which Jews and other minorities were permitted only up to a fixed number proportionate to their percentage of the total population. … An honest employer harassed by the system proposed to be established here will either ask the State Commission against Discrimination to fix the various religious and racial quotas which will satisfy them, or he will be forced to establish quotas of his own based upon the anticipated point of view, the practices and the decisions of the new commission. How can such an outrageous and intolerable situation benefit the members of any minority group? It means the end of honest competition, and the death knell of selection and advancement on the basis of talent.37

Moses had a subtle but alarming message to convey. Fearful of administrative scrutiny from the new agency, an employer would either preemptively engineer his work force to reflect the makeup of the local population or ask government officials to dictate the proportions acceptable to them. It did not matter to Moses that Ives-Quinn mandated nondiscrimination. Nor did he point to specific language in the bill that gave rise to his concern about proportional representation. For him and his fellow conservatives, using legislation to guarantee the equal treatment of racial and religious minorities—rather than relying on “education, moral suasion, conference” and other informal means—would itself lead to “quotas” plain and simple.

Moses did not pluck the word “quota” out of thin air. The political discourse of the state had run thick with charges of quotas since the advent of a long-smoldering controversy over attempts to limit Jewish admissions at colleges and universities. As early as the 1910s, Columbia University administrators—years before their more illustrious counterparts at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—had begun to take steps to reduce the representation of Jewish students, whose presence was seen as driving the sons of New York's Protestant elite to pursue higher education in schools far outside the city limits. By 1921, Columbia had lowered the percentage of Jewish students to 22 percent of the student body (from a high of roughly 40 percent), prompting concerns about quotas.38

The controversy was reignited in early 1945 when local newspapers began publishing stories about a private report of the American Dental Association (ada) that seemed to recommend the imposition of racial and religious quotas in admissions to dental school. The author of the report had allegedly observed that the student body at Columbia's dental school—and other schools in New York—was “made up overwhelmingly of one racial strain” and suggested that the school would enjoy greater influence if it admitted a student body that was a “more balanced picture of the citizenry of the Nation.” A minor uproar ensued. There could be little doubt which social group the author had in mind. The phrase “one racial strain … means Jewish students,” said someone who had read the report. pm's Albert Deutsch blasted the report as a “brazen attempt to impose a racist policy” akin to the “numerus clausus policy” that was historically prevalent in “anti-Semitic areas of central Europe.” Predictably, school administrators issued strong denials. Though his critics remained doubtful, Willard C. Rappleye, dean of Columbia's dental school, was especially forceful. “We have no quota, never had one, and never intend to have one.” The controversy gained national visibility when Rep. Emanuel Celler, a Democrat from New York, spoke out against the ada report on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives and found himself in a face-to-face confrontation with a fellow Democrat, Rep. John E. Rankin of Mississippi. Leaping to his feet and shaking his fist, Rankin complained that Celler used the “Jewish question” to badger his colleagues and then went on to defend the prerogatives of the ada: “Remember that the white Gentiles of this country also have some rights.” The very next day a group of educational leaders, including representatives of the National Educational Association, sent a telegram to fdr requesting the establishment of a national fair educational practices commission to help eliminate “quotas and other forms of racial and religious discrimination in nation's colleges.” A member of the group, Alonzo F. Myers, chairman of the Department of Higher Education at New York University, denounced quotas as a “Nazi practice.” By the time Moses sent his letter to Bontecou, charges and denials of quotas had been garnering headlines for three weeks. Though he was not particularly active in Jewish communal life, Moses surely had not missed the extensive press coverage of the incident.39

Moses chose his words well, and he made certain that the indictment of quotas would have national resonance. In addition to providing the letter to Bontecou, Moses personally sent a copy of his letter to Westbrook Pegler, an influential columnist for King Features Syndicate. Pegler had a talent for spotting evocative language, and he immediately seized on “quotas” to excoriate Ives-Quinn. Days after Moses sent his letter, Pegler published a nationally syndicated column studded with angry denunciations. After running through the standard criticisms, it ended with a characteristic fulmination. “Far from erasing such taboos,” he wrote, “this law would emphasize origin, creed, color and race and result in the Hitlerian rule of quotas by which Jews in schools and the professions were restricted in proportion to their number in the entire population.”40

Such charges were so potentially damaging that they attracted a preemptive refutation by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York, who sent his aide Reuben Lazarus to the Albany hearings to read a prepared statement. In a display of his keen political instincts, La Guardia reassured anyone listening that Moses had overreached in his criticism. The bill “does not give preference to anyone because of race, creed, color or religion.” It required only employment or promotion on a merit basis: “[Ives-Quinn] does not compel an employer to employ quotas or to employ a less efficient person because of race, creed, color, or religion, but it specifically prohibits discrimination solely on these grounds.” La Guardia conceded that educational approaches were highly effective. But he remained convinced that guaranteeing the protection of civil rights without “provid[ing] the machinery for its enforcement would be a mere mockery.”41

La Guardia's ringing endorsem*nt foreshadowed a parade of witnesses who defended Ives-Quinn in the most aggressive terms. While business spokesmen had mounted a unified front and shown great discipline—rarely deviating from the same basic objec-tions—they were overwhelmed by force of sheer numbers. Representatives of more than two hundred groups had braved the winter weather to come forward and testify, and supporters reportedly outnumbered opponents by a margin of 8–1. The strongest witnesses included Thurgood Marshall of the naacp, B. F. McLaurin of the bscp, Reginald A. Johnson of the nul, Stephen S. Wise of the American Jewish Congress, John F. Brosnan and Stephen S. Jackson of the New York State Catholic Welfare Committee, Rev. Wayne White of the Methodist Federation for Social Service, and Louis Hollander of the New York State cio. The hearings went on for twelve hours, ending only at two in the morning. Surveying the scene before him, one legislator opposed to Ives-Quinn was reportedly heard muttering, “You can't bust your head out against this stone wall.”42

His lament proved correct. The hearings backfired against Bontecou, Stuart, Coudert, and the rank-and-file insurgency they had briefly led. If there had ever been a chance that Dewey, Ives, or other party chieftains might lose their nerve in the face of overwhelming public opposition to the bill, it ended abruptly in Albany on February 20. Precisely the opposite had occurred. Racial conservatives had committed a strategic mistake by misreading the willingness and ability of liberal groups to mobilize a massive and unprecedented show of support for Ives-Quinn. A day after the hearings, Bontecou and Stuart knew they been out-organized, calling their foes a “brilliantly organized minority.” It was a backhanded compliment, but they publicly conceded that the bill would probably pass without any weakening amendments. The concession did not stop them from working behind the scenes to attach a rider to Ives-Quinn that would subject it to a public referendum, but none of their attempts succeeded. Within weeks, Ives-Quinn cleared the Assembly by a margin of 109–32 and the Senate by a margin of 49–6.43

The votes confirmed patterns that the most perceptive political observers had identified weeks earlier. Every Democratic legislator voted for the bill, but the Republican delegation was divided in both chambers, with the split more pronounced in the Assembly than the Senate. (The former was apportioned according to population, the latter by county.) Naysayers fit a common profile; they had typically won their last election by a healthy margin, and they tended to represent sparsely populated, predominantly rural counties with little industrial activity and few racial or religious minorities. Hardly any of their constituents stood to benefit from the protection that Ives-Quinn offered, certainly not enough to make a difference on election day. Not all Republican legislators representing such counties cast ballots against the Ives-Quinn bill—Ives himself was the most prominent example—but the vast majority of opponents of his bill (all Republican) represented such counties. (See table 1.) In aggregate, nonmetropolitan counties were less populous, less dense, more rural, less industrial, and took in proportionately fewer defense dollars than metropolitan counties. Nonmetropolitan counties were, in aggregate, overwhelmingly represented by Republicans, and most such nonmetropolitan gop legislators voted against Ives-Quinn. Of the 59 legislators sent by nonmetropolitan counties, only 3 belonged to the Democratic party. More than half, or 54 percent, of the Republican delegation from such counties opposed the bill, compared to only 11 percent of the Republican delegation from metropolitan counties. It was no coincidence that Bontecou and Stuart were popular politicians from archetypal nonmetropolitan counties. By contrast, Coudert, despite his key role in building up the revolt, ultimately voted for Ives-Quinn; he had narrowly won election from his Manhattan district in 1944.44

The bipartisan majorities might have grossly understated the extent of Republican opposition. “Man after man has told me that he is voting against his convictions,” wrote Coudert to Moses, but nothing could be done in “face of terrific minority and executive pressure.” No further correspondence about the vote seems to have survived, and it is impossible to know whether others concurred with Coudert's representation, or whether he was simply trying to console a powerful ally who had cast his lot with the losing side. But Coudert's judgment about the underlying causes of the outcome seemed right to most close observers, including the New York Herald Tribune, which likewise asserted that the governor's leadership and “exceedingly strong community support” made the crucial difference. Without Dewey's unequivocal backing and the dramatic show of political force in Albany, it might have taken much longer to pass Ives-Quinn. As it was, Dewey signed Ives-Quinn into law on March 12, 1945.45

“If this bill passes, my guess is that in his mellow fifties my son, if he is the man I hope he will be, will look back on the arguments advanced against it in his young manhood with a tolerant, understanding, forgiving, even if slightly incredulous eye, and wonder how people could ever have thought like that.” So wrote the attorney Robert P. Lane to his friend Charles Burlingham, one day after the climactic hearing in Albany.46

Lane's guess was not borne out. In the decades after the passage of Ives-Quinn, despite progress toward the achievement of formal equality, his son would have noticed the deployment of strikingly similar rhetoric. Critics of fair employment found it useful to profess a strong belief in racial tolerance but continued to oppose fep legislation on the grounds that it would promote preferential treatment, lead to racial quotas, and exacerbate racial divisions. Such cries did not simply slide into political obscurity. Through-out the 1940s and 1950s, racial conservatives uttered them regularly in battles over fep legislation in the states of the urban North. If the Empire State was not exactly typical, it was far from exceptional. In 1949, when the Minnesota state legislature was considering an fep proposal modeled on Ives-Quinn, Otto F. Christenson of the Minnesota Employers' Association wrote a lengthy and shrewd communiqué to the Minnesota League of Women Voters. Christenson strenuously objected to the fep proposal, expressing the concern that the “law is discriminatory in itself.” “It gives the minority special privileges,” he wrote, “because only those of the minority will file complaints.” In 1951, as the Ohio legislature was considering an fep law, Ray Suter of the Ohio Chamber of Commerce warned at a legislative hearing that a “quota system” would “necessarily eventuate from the passage of fepc.” Such fears and anxieties were so widespread that racial liberals constantly found themselves having to guard against them, as La Guardia did in his letter to Albany legislators. A 1949 pamphlet disseminated by a liberal Pennsylvania group promoting fep legislation sounded almost defensive: “The law does not compel an employer to hire Negroes, Mexicans, Italians, Catholics, Jews, or members of any other group. … The law does not require an employer to hire a certain percentage of any group. There is no quota plan in any Fair Employment Practices law. It does not grant special privileges to any group.”47

That liberals were forced to contend with such rhetoric from business groups, conservative Republicans, and rural whites across the urban North in the 1940s and 1950s does not accord easily with conventional perspectives on the history of civil rights. According to an ideologically diverse range of authors, charges of racial quotas and preferential treatment originated in southern discontent over the Civil Rights Act but then coalesced into a nationwide backlash against civil rights in the late 1960s with the advent of such racially attentive policies as affirmative action and busing. That backlash is said to have fatefully shattered the class basis of the New Deal coalition and made it possible for Republican elites after Barry Goldwater's 1964 candidacy to embrace racial conservatism and forge a new electoral majority that included aggrieved whites from all across the country. Indeed, Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall argue compellingly that backlash rhetoric had by the 1980s become the cornerstone of a new and powerfully coherent ideological stance that gop elites were using to occupy the moral high ground in debates over civil rights. Racial bigotry was unequivocally wrong, Republicans had begun to insist. Everyone should have the equal opportunity to compete on her or his own merits. But nothing, in their view, fanned the flames of bigotry, violated equal opportunity, and undermined meritocracy more egregiously than liberal programs of affirmative action in employment and education.48

It is difficult to dispute that racial resentments were at the heart of the electoral realignment that began after 1964 and came to full fruition during the Reagan-Bush years. But the political and legislative history of Ives-Quinn, as a chapter of the black freedom struggle in the North, suggests that the balance of continuity and change in the politics of civil rights is far more complex than the consensus interpretation admits. The kind of language associated with white backlash did not originate in the mid- to late 1960s. In the Empire State, it was first spoken in the waning days of World War II. Nor did Republicans only belatedly discover the political utility of talking about quotas and preferential treatment. Even in a state known for the strength of liberal sentiment—one that later gave rise to Rockefeller Republicanism—conservative Republicans were among the first to attack civil rights legislation on precisely such grounds. The rhetoric of backlash in wartime New York State did not emanate exclusively from discontented constituencies within the New Deal coalition. If homeowners' associations were literally on the front lines of resistance to the integration of white, working-class neighborhoods in the postwar urban North, then talk of racial quotas and preferential treatment—leavened with a professed commitment to racial egalitarianism—was pioneered by chambers of commerce and manufacturers' associations along with rural (and to a lesser extent suburban) whites. Of equal significance, the objections emerged in response to a policy that was quite different from the one that elicited similar objections decades later. Ives-Quinn called strictly for equal treatment; there was nothing racially attentive about the statute or any of the legislative proposals leading to its passage. Ives-Quinn epitomized a color-blind, individualized model of social regulation. Yet it provoked much the same hue and cry as affirmative action would years afterward. This article, which joins a growing body of historical research that puts the North at the center of the postwar struggle for civil rights, makes it possible to appreciate more fully the intricate pattern of continuity and change that characterizes the period.

Herein, then, lies the broader significance of what might otherwise seem a minor skirmish over a statute that Herbert Hill, the longtime naacp labor secretary, considered the strongest specimen of a largely ineffectual species of legislation. The controversy surrounding Ives-Quinn marks a historically significant moment in American racial politics. It did not merely prefigure the shape of things to come; it gave rise to critical aspects of racial politics that are mistakenly regarded as emerging decades later. Well before the advent of affirmative action, business groups, Republican legislators, and rural whites in wartime New York State joined forces to oppose a color-blind law, fashioning and disseminating key elements in a powerful new language of resistance. Subsequent battles over fep laws in other northern states were quickly overshadowed by bus boycotts and sit-ins in the South. But battles over state fep laws would also keep the new language alive in northern politics until the late-1960s, when it would be grafted onto the conflict over affirmative action. Justice Louis Brandeis was not wrong to call the states laboratories of democracy, but the history of fep laws in northern states such as New York suggests that the states can also serve as incubators of conservatism and reaction. When northern, working-class ethnics began to search in the late 1960s for words to express their disgruntlement with affirmative action, when Republican presidents such as Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan sought to capitalize on such feelings, there was no need to invent a new lexicon of racial resentment. Nor was it necessary to reach toward Dixie, though Dixie had been busy. The words had already been invented. They were strangely familiar, and they were close at hand.49

Figures and Tables

1

Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138 before the Assembly Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee (Albany, 1945), 25–26 (Kheel Center, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.); New York Times, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 15.

2

Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138; New York Times, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 15. On Robert Moses, see Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (New York, 1974). On the congressional clash over Title VII, see Hugh Davis Graham, The Civil Rights Era: Origins and Development of National Policy, 1960–1972 (New York, 1990), 106–10, 150; John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Culture, and Justice in America (Chicago, 1996); and Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action (New York, 2004).

3

Richard N. Smith, Thomas Dewey and His Times (New York, 1982), 443–48, esp. 446; Paul D. Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933–1972 (Baton Rouge, 1997), 111. See also Sidney A. Fine, “Expanding the Frontiers of Civil Rights”: Michigan, 1948–1968 (Detroit, 2000); Eric Ledell Smith and Kenneth C. Wolensky, “A Novel Public Policy: Pennsylvania's Fair Employment Practices Act of 1955,” Pennsylvania History, 69 (Fall 2002), 489–523; William J. Collins, “The Political Economy of State-Level Fair Employment Laws, 1940–1964,” Explorations in Economic History, 40 (Jan. 2003), 24–51; Duane Lockard, Toward Equal Opportunity: A Study of State and Local Antidiscrimination Laws (New York, 1968); Anthony S. Chen, “Republican Elites, Employer Mobilization, and the Passage of State Fair Employment Practices Legislation in the North, 1945–1964,” working paper no. 2004-004, 2004, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy <http://www.ford-school.umich.edu.libproxy.ucl.ac.uk/research/working_papers.php> (Oct. 27, 2005).

4

Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom, America in Black and White: One Nation, Indivisible (New York, 1997); Alan Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984); Graham, Civil Rights Era; Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action; Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness; Thomas B. Edsall and Mary D. Edsall, Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics (New York, 1991); Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, 1989).

5

Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York, 1983); Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton, 2003); Nancy MacLean, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Cambridge, Mass., forthcoming); Thomas J. Sugrue, “Crabgrass-Roots Politics: Race, Rights, and the Reaction against Liberalism,” Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), esp. 551–52; Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996), esp. 268. See also Thomas J. Sugrue, “Affirmative Action from Below: Civil Rights, the Building Trades, and the Politics of Racial Equality in the Urban North, 1945–1969,” Journal of American History, 91 (June 2004), 145–73. For a valuable critique of consensus historiography, see Gary Gerstle, “Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” ibid., 82 (Sept. 1995), 579–86.

6

My larger project aims to offer a new explanation for the origins of affirmative action policies in employment, from the 1940s to the 1970s. It traces how conservative resistance to the passage of enforceable fair employment practices (fep) legislation frustrated liberal hopes of creating a centralized regulatory system that relied on administrative agencies to enforce equal treatment of individuals in employment. The gradual defeat of liberal hopes paved the way for a fragmented court-based system of which affirmative action forms a small but controversial part. See Anthony S. Chen, “From Fair Employment to Equal Employment Opportunity and Beyond: Affirmative Action and the Politics of Civil Rights in the New Deal Order, 1941–1972” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2002).

7

Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, 2000); Philip A. Klinkner and Rogers M. Smith, The Unsteady March: The Rise and Decline of Racial Equality in America (Chicago, 1999), 136–201; Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 187–237; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory: Politics and American Culture during World War II (New York, 1976), 147–220; Richard Primus, The American Language of Rights (New York, 1999), 177–233.

8

James G. Thompson quoted in Ronald Takaki, Double Victory: A Multicultural History of America in World War II (Boston, 2000), 20; New York Times, Jan. 7, 1940, p. 29; Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten’ Years of the Negro Revolution,” Journal of American History, 55 (June 1968), 90–106; Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,” ibid., 58 (Dec. 1971), 661–81; Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein, “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement,” ibid., 75 (Dec. 1988), 786–811. On the federal Fair Employment Practices Committee (fepc), see Merl E. Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946 (Baton Rouge, 1991); John H. Bracey Jr. and August Meier, “Allies or Adversaries? The naacp, A. Philip Randolph, and the 1941 March on Washington,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 75 (Spring 1991), 1–17; and Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II (New York, 2001), 1–132.

9

Karl Drew Hartzell, The Empire State at War: World War II (New York, 1949), 67, 88; New York Amsterdam News, March 1, 1941, pp. 1, 17; ibid., March 8, 1941, pp. 1, 24; New York Times, March 30, 1941, p. 39; New York State War Council Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Report: March 1941 to July 1944 (Albany, 1944), 3–21, in Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, part 13, series A, ed. John Bracey Jr. and August Meier (microfilm, 21 reels, University Publications of America, 1992), reel 1, frames 161–79; Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Minutes, April 16, 1941, folder 28, box 2, Frieda S. Miller Papers (Schlesinger Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.); Frieda S. Miller to Defense Employers, Sept. 10, 1941, ibid.; Max Goldfrank to Herbert H. Lehman, April 10, 1941, Chapter 478, 1941, Bill Jacket Collection (New York State Library, Albany).

10

John A. Davis, How Management Can Integrate Negroes in War Industries (Albany, 1942); Committee on Discrimination in Employment, “Report for the Month of December 1942,” folder 28, box 2, Miller Papers; New York Times, Dec. 28, 1942, p. 18; Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Report: March 1941 to July 1944, 28, in Papers of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, part 13, series A, ed. Bracey and Meier, reel 1, frame 186; Associated Industries of New York State, pamphlet [1945], folder 54: Associated Industries of New York State, box 207, series 4, Thomas E. Dewey Papers (Department of Rare Books, Special Books, and Preservation, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y.); A. E. Crockett to Miller, Nov. 1, 1941, folder 28, box 2, Miller Papers.

11

Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Minutes, Jan. 13, 1942, folder 28, box 2, Miller Papers; Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Report: March 1941 to July 1944, 22, 49–76; Frieda S. Miller, memorandum [April 1942], Chapter 677, 1942, Bill Jacket Collection; Channing H. Tobias to Lehman, May 7, 1942, ibid.; New York Times, May 8, 1942, p. 19; Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Report: March 1941 to July 1944, 24. The figure for complaints investigated in 1942 covers March–December, not the whole year.

12

New York Times, Feb. 22, 1935, p. 14; ibid., May 15, 1937, p. 6; Congressional Record, 78 Cong., 2 sess., Jan. 17, 1944, p. 297; hr 3986, 78 Cong., 2 sess. (Jan. 17, 1944), in U.S. Congress, House and Senate Bills and Resolutions (microfiche, Congressional Information Service). The introduction of the term “affirmative action” into national political discourse is usually traced to a 1961 executive order by John F. Kennedy. See Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness, 60–61.

13

New York Times, Oct. 5, 1942, p. 14; ibid., Aug. 5, 1943, p. 36; ibid., Aug. 6, 1943, p. 14; Alvin S. Johnson to Paul E. Lockwood, Aug. 23, 1943, folder 1, box 20, Alvin S. Johnson Papers (Archives and Special Collections, University of Nebraska, Lincoln); Committee on Discrimination in Employment, Report: March 1941 to July 1944, 87–98; New York Times, March 10, 1944, p. 32; ibid., March 18, 1944, p. 1; ibid., March 26, 1944, p. 44; ibid., March 30, 1944, p. 20; New York Amsterdam News, March 25, 1944, p. 8A.

14

Robert C. Weaver, Negro Labor (New York, 1946), 78–96, esp. 92; New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Report of the New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination (Albany, 1945), 22. But see William J. Collins, “Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production,” American Economic Review, 91 (March 2001), 272–86.

15

“Ives, Irving McNeil,” available at American National Biography Online; New York Times, Feb. 19, 1930, p. 14; ibid., Jan. 26, 1940, p. 1.

16

Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944); New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination, “Minutes,” June 19, 1944, pp. 2–5, esp. 4, 5 (New York State Library); ibid., Aug. 7, 1944, p. 4; ibid., Sept. 11, 1944; New York Times, June 20, 1944, p. 34. On the railroad brotherhoods, see Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).

17

Johnson to Irving M. Ives, July 10, 1944, folder: Discrimination—Employment Background Material, box 181, Irving M. Ives Papers (Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University); Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Public Hearings Starting November 27, 1944 (3 vols., Albany, 1944) (New York State Library); New York Times, Nov. 23, 1944, p. 29; ibid., Nov. 28, 1944, p. 21; ibid., Dec. 4, 1944, p. 15; ibid., Dec. 5, 1944, p. 24.

18

Congressional Record, 78 Cong., 2 sess., May 26, 1944, pp. 5027, 5040–41, 5049, and esp. 5027, 5029, 5030, and 5045–46; New York Times, Feb. 28, 1944, p. 12; ibid., Feb. 29, 1944, p. 34; ibid., May 25, 1944, p. 7; ibid., May 27, 1944, pp. 8, 18; ibid., June 11, 1944, p. 5; ibid., June 21, 1944, pp. 11, 20; Washington Post, Feb. 29, 1944, p. 3, ibid., March 7, 1944, p. 8.

19

New York Times, Dec. 5, 1944, 24; Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Public Hearings Starting November 27, 1944, I, 442, 288–305, esp. 298.

20

Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Public Hearings Starting November 27, 1944, I, 107, 330, 339, III, 1265–83, esp. 1266; Hirabayashi v. United States 320 U.S. 81, 110 (1943).

21

Myrdal, American Dilemma, xlvii; Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Public Hearings Starting November 27, 1944, I, 5, 60, 109, 184, 232, 452, II, 656–57; New York Times, Dec. 4, 1944, 15; ibid., Dec. 5, 1944, p. 24

22

Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Report of the New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination, 80–81.

23

Assembly Introductory 833, Jan. 30, 1945, box 182, Ives Papers; New York Times, Jan. 29, 1945, p. 1; pm, Jan. 29, 1945, p. 11; New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 3, 1945, p. 1; Temporary Commission against Discrimination, Report of the New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination, 29.

24

Irving M. Ives, “Why I Favor a Permanent State Commission against Discrimination as Recommended by the New York State Temporary Commission against Discrimination,” folder: January 29, 1945 Ives Statement in Chamber, box 188, Ives Papers; New York Times, Jan. 29, 1945, p. 1.

25

New York Times, Feb. 1, 1945, p. 15; ibid., Feb. 12, 1945, p. 32; ibid., Feb. 15, 1945, p. 17; pm, Feb. 12, 1945, p. 9; Chamber of Commerce of the State of New York to Members of the Senate and Assembly, Feb. 10, 1945, box 1–5, Charles C. Burlingham Papers (Harvard Law School Library, Harvard University).

26

New York Times, Feb. 7, 1945, p. 19; ibid., Feb. 8, 1945, p. 14; ibid., Feb. 13, 1945, p. 8; ibid., Feb. 14, 1945, p. 15; Charles C. Burlingham to Allen Wardwell, Jan. 9, 1945, box 1–4, Burlingham Papers; pm, Feb. 9, 1945, p. 2; Vernon O'Rourke to Ives, March 16, 1945, folder: Correspondence: I–P, 1945, box 175, Ives Papers.

27

New York Times, Oct. 5, 1937, p. 6; ibid., June 8, 1959, pg. 1; Washington Post, June 10, 1959, p. A16; Burlingham to Wardwell, Jan. 9, 1945, box 1–4, Burlingham Papers. See also George Martin, ccb: The Life and Century of Charles C. Burlingham, New York's First Citizen, 1858–1959 (New York, 2005).

28

Burlingham to Mr. and Mrs. John Kingbury, Feb. 13, 1945, box 1–4, Burlingham Papers; New York Times, Feb. 13, 1945, p. 22.

29

New York Times, Feb. 15, 1945, p. 18; ibid., Feb. 20, 1945, p. 18; ibid., Feb. 21, 1945, p. 18.

30

Wall Street Journal, Feb. 9, 1945, p. 6; New York Times, Feb. 28, 1945, p. 20.

31

John S. Mearns, ed., The New York Red Book: 1945 (Albany, 1945), 46, 110; New York Times, Feb. 8, 1945, p. 14; ibid., Feb. 14, 1945, pp. 1, 15; pm, Feb. 14, 1945, p. 12; ibid., Feb. 18, 1945, p. 12; New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 14, 1945, pp. 1, 16; “Anti-Discrimination Bill Faces Upstate Opposition,” New York Post, Feb. 7, 1945; ibid., Feb. 13, 1945, p. 5; ibid., Feb. 15, 1945; Monitor, 31 (Jan. 1945), 6–7, series 7, Records of the Associated Industries of New York State (Department of Special Collections and Archives, University at Albany, State University of New York, Albany); Board of Directors, Associated Industries of New York State, Minutes, Nov. 28, 1945, series 1, ibid.

32

“Let's Proceed Slowly on This Subject,” Niagara Falls Gazette, Feb. 19, 1945, in Thomas E. Dewey, Scrapbooks [1935–1954] (microfilm: roll 32) (Rhees Library, University of Rochester); “Upstate G.O.P. May Oppose Racial Bill: Majority Leader Ives Issues Statement Urging Measure—C.I.O. Favors Proposal,” Watertown Times, Feb. 13, 1945, ibid.; “Albany Is Stirred by Racial Measure: Upstate Republicans Fighting Bill Resent Dictation on Those They Can Employ,” Watertown Times, Feb. 16, 1945, ibid. See also Newburgh News, Feb. 7, 1945, ibid.; “Discrimination Bill Draws Criticism: G.O.P. Assemblyman Says It Would Create More Hatred,” Schenectady Union Star, Feb. 10, 1945, ibid.; “Racial Bill Conference to Be Held: G.O.P. Assemblymen Are Asked to Parley on Ives Plan,” Binghamton Press, Feb. 10, 1945, ibid.; “The New Volstead Act,” Troy Morning Record, Feb. 22, 1945, ibid.; “Go Slow on This So-Called Anti-Discrimination Law,” Ballston Journal, Feb. 22, 1945, ibid.; and “Anti-Discrimination Bill is Clumsy, Dangerous,” Ogdensburg N.Y. Journal, Feb. 26, 1945, ibid. For notable exceptions, see “An Equal Chance to Work,” Stamford Mirror Recorder, Feb. 22, 1945, ibid.; and “The Anti-Discrimination Experiment,” Ithaca Journal, Feb. 26, 1945, ibid. On the partisan allegiances of the black electorate, see Nancy J. Weiss, Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of fdr (Princeton, 1983); and Paul Frymer, Uneasy Alliances: Race and Party Competition in America (Princeton, 1999).

33

Garth A. Shoemaker to Dewey, June 25, 1945, folder 3: 1945 Discrimination Commission, box 200, series 4, Dewey Papers; W. H. Kieser to Dewey, April 18, 1945, folder 47: Anti-Discrimination Bill, January–June, box 219, ibid.; Roy M. Mason to Dewey, March 12, 1945, ibid. See also Marguerite D. Troupe to Ives, Feb. 5, 1945, folder: Correspondence, I–P 1945, box 175, Ives Papers.

34

R. L. R. Parker to Dewey, June 25, 1945, folder 2: 1945 Discrimination Bill, July–December, box 200, series 4, Dewey Papers; M. Patterson to Dewey, June 21, 1945, folder 47: Anti-Discrimination Bill, January–June, box 219, ibid.; Lillian G. Morrisey to Dewey, March 10, 1945, ibid.; New Yorker to Dewey, May 3, 1945, ibid.; E. Kendall Gillett to Dewey, Feb. 19, 1945, ibid.

35

Press Release [from Thomas E. Dewey's office], Feb. 16, 1945, folder 3: 1945 Discrimination Commission, box 220, series 4, Dewey Papers; New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 19, 1945, p. 16; New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 10, 1945, pp. 1, 12B; pm, Feb. 15, 1945, p. 11; New York Times, Feb. 14, 1945, pp. 1, 15; ibid., Feb. 16, 1945, p. 21; ibid., Feb. 17, 1945, p. 26; ibid., Feb. 18, 1945, sec. I V, p. 10; New York Post, Feb. 16, 1945, p. 5. On pm, see Paul Milkman, pm: A New Deal in Journalism, 1940–1948 (New Brunswick, 1997).

36

New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 24, 1945, p. 1; pm, Feb. 1, 1945; Albany Times-Union, Feb. 21, 1945; Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138, 5–6, 13–14, 35–37.

37

Robert Moses quoted his own 1938 statement in his 1945 letter to Frederic Bontecou. Robert Moses to Frederic Bontecou, Feb. 17, 1945, folder: Legislation 1945, box 25, Robert Moses Papers (Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, N.Y.); Congressional Record, 79 Cong., 1 sess., Feb. 5, 1945, p. 782; pm, Feb. 6, 1945, p. 10; Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138, 25–26; New York Times, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 15; New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 30. Smith noted that Moses “feared ‘quotas’” but did not cite the Bontecou letter or the hearing transcripts in his notes. See Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, 446, 662–63.

38

On anti-Jewish quotas at the pinnacle of the Ivy League, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (New York, 2005), esp. 87.

39

New York Times, Feb. 7, 1945, p. 19; pm, Jan. 30, 1945, p. 12; New York Times, Feb. 8, 1945, pp. 21, 17; ibid., Feb. 9, 1945, p. 32; ibid., Feb. 10, 1945, p. 24; ibid., Feb. 11, 1945, p. 31; ibid., Feb. 13, 1945, p. 19; ibid., Feb. 27, 1945, p. 17; New York Post, Feb. 13, 1945, p. 21.

40

Moses to Bontecou, Feb. 17, 1945, folder: Legislation 1945, box 25, Moses Papers; Vivian Schatz to Moses, July 26, 1945, ibid.; William F. Buckley Jr., “Rabble-Rouser,” New Yorker, March 1, 2004, pp. 46–53; New York Amsterdam News, May 9, 1942; Albany Times Union, Feb. 27, 1945; Troy Times Record, Feb. 27, 1945. On Pegler, see David Witwer, “Westbrook Pegler and the Anti-union Movement,” Journal of American History, 92 (Sept. 2005), 527–52.

41

Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138, 62–63; New York Times, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 15; New York Amsterdam News, Feb. 24, 1945, pp. 1, 12B. On Fiorello La Guardia's stance on civil rights, see Dominic J. Capeci, “From Different Liberal Perspectives: Fiorello H. La Guardia, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Civil Rights in New York City, 1941–43,” Journal of Negro History, 62 (April 1977), 160–73.

42

Hearing on Assembly Introductory 883 and Assembly Print 1138, 35–42; New York Times, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 15; pm, Feb. 21, 1945; New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 21, 1945, pp. 1, 30; New York Post, Feb. 21, 1945, p. 5; Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and His Times, 447.

43

New York Times, Feb. 22, 1945, pp. 1, 24; ibid., Feb. 28, 1945, p. 1; ibid., March 6, 1945, p. 1; New York State Bar Association to His Excellency, the Governor of the State of New York, and Members of the Legislature, Feb. 26, 1945, box 1-6, Burlingham Papers; Journal of the New York State Assembly, 168 sess., Feb. 28, 1945, p. 880; Journal of the New York State Senate, 168 sess., March 5, 1945, p. 751.

44

U.S. Census Bureau, County Data Book (Washington, 1947), 272, 276–77; Mearns, ed., New York Red Book: 1945, 45–46, 106–10, 565–82; Journal of the New York State Assembly, 168 sess., Feb. 28, 1945, p. 880; Journal of the New York State Senate, 168 sess, March 5, 1945, p. 751.

45

Frederic R. Coudert Jr. to Moses, Feb. 23, 1945, folder: Legislation 1945, box 25, Moses Papers; New York Herald Tribune, Feb. 22, 1945, p. 24; Wall Street Journal, March 13, 1945, p. 6; Smith, Thomas Dewey and His Times, 447.

46

Robert P. Lane to Burlingham, Feb. 21, 1945, box 1–6, Burlingham Papers.

47

Otto F. Christenson to Minnesota League of Women Voters, Nov. 21, 1949 (Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minn.); Ohio Committee for Fair Employment Practice, “Some Questions and Answers on fepc” [1950], folder 1, container 1, Records of the Ohio Committee for Fair Employment Practice Legislation (Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio); “Committee Hearings on fepc,” April 18, 1951, folder 27, container 2, ibid.; State Council for a Pennsylvania Fair Employment Practices Committee, “Business Looks Ahead to Fair Employment Practices” [1949], General Pamphlet Collection (Urban Archives, Temple University, Philadelphia, Penn.). For editorial and opinion pieces from a 1951 battle over fep legislation, see Colorado Committee for Equal Employment Opportunities, Taking Stock: A Final Report on the Campaign for a Fair Employment Practices Law for Colorado (Denver, [probably 1951]), 67–76.

48

Graham, Civil Rights Era, 106–10, 150; Skrentny, Ironies of Affirmative Action, 177–221, esp. 209; Anderson, Pursuit of Fairness; Edsall and Edsall, Chain Reaction, 145, 165, 172–97; Carmines and Stimson, Issue Evolution, 190–91.

49

Herbert Hill, “Twenty Years of State Fair Employment Practice Commissions: A Critical Analysis with Recommendations,” Buffalo Law Review, 14 (Fall 1964), 22–69. For the most sophisticated econometric analysis, see William J. Collins, “The Labor Market Impact of State-Level Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1940–1960,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 56 (Jan. 2003), 244–72. For Louis Brandeis's metaphor, see New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann, 285 U.S. 262, 311 (1932). I borrow the metaphor of incubation from Thomas J. Sugrue, “All Politics Is Local: The Persistence of Localism in Twentieth-Century America,” in The Democratic Experiment, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, 2003), 301–26, esp. 312. On white working-class recentment against affirmative action, see Dennis A. Deslippe, “‘Do Whites Have Rights?’ White Detroit Policemen and ‘Reverse Discrimination’ Protests in the 1970s,” Journal of American History, 91 (Dec. 2004), 932–60.

Author notes

He is currently on leave to participate in the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California, Berkeley.

This research was supported by a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California, the National Science Foundation, and the Rackham School of Graduate Study at the University of Michigan. The author would like to thank Brian Balogh, Paul Frymer, Kevin Gaines, Risa Goluboff, Rick Hall, Jerome Karabel, Michael Katz, Howard Kimeldorf, Matt Lassiter, Clarence Lo, Glenn Loury, Nancy MacLean, Jeff Manza, Isaac Martin, Rob Mickey, Sid Milkis, Richard Primus, Michael Schwartz, Harvard Sitkoff, John Skrentny, George Steinmetz, Lisa Stulberg, Maris Vinovskis, Margaret Weir, and anonymous JAH reviewers for their helpful suggestions and encouragement. Special thanks to Tom Sugrue for his insightful comments, David Nord for his strong and thoughtful editorial guidance, and Susan Armeny for her careful and thorough copyediting.

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