Behind The Backlash by Kenneth Durr
If you were born in Baltimore etc..... this is really a good read!!!

White Working-Class Politics in Baltimore, 1940-1980

Exploring the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime...shows how legitimate economic, social, and political grievances convinced white working-class Baltimoreans that they were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks.

Chapter 1

A Contentious Coalition

In early 1944 John Cater submitted some verse written by coworkers at Baltimore's booming Westinghouse defense plant to the Baltimore Evening Sun. The paper published the piece, even though Cater disavowed authorship. It was a good thing he did. "Beloved Baltimore, Maryland," written from the point of view of the thousands of migrant defense workers who had flocked to the city for the duration, was a vitriolic attack on everything Baltimorean from its architecture—"your brick row houses should all be torn down"—to its economy. "You make us pay double for all you can sell," the piece concluded, "but after the war you can all go to hell." The Evening Sun received more than a thousand angry refutations. A postal worker dragged two bulging bags full of letters into the Sun Building's lobby, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a contribution of his own. Weeks later "Beloved Baltimore" was still the most popular topic of conversation around town.[1]

This incident, characterized by Life magazine as "The Battle of Baltimore," was less a fight between enemies than a quarrel between partners in a strained, but strong relationship. The coalescence of the New Deal coalition at large, a process also achieved amid the tumult of wartime, was equally contentious. Natives and newcomers, old-world ethnics and southern Protestants, all came into conflict but ultimately formed a political alliance under the Democratic umbrella. This rift between the New Deal coalition's white working-class constituents was fleeting, but there was a much deeper divide between them and the blacks and middle-class liberals who were also integral to the New Deal Democratic coalition, one that was temporarily bridged but never closed during the war years and the four decades afterward.

The Great Depression laid the groundwork for the New Deal order, based on agreement among urban and rural working whites, blacks, and middle-class liberals that grassroots political activity and an activist state could create a more economically equitable society. But in Baltimore, it was not until World War II that a viable coalition came together. Among the uproar, overcrowding, inflation, and anger, key institutions took shape and fragile alliances were formed. Machine politicians began to respond more to ethnic and working-class concerns and less to old-stock business leaders, liberal political groups—chief among them the NAACP—flourished, and industrial unionism became entrenched in Baltimore's workplaces.

This political transition was driven by three broader shifts. First, working-class Baltimore's "new immigrants" of Eastern and Southern European heritage gained political influence that began to rival that exerted by German and Irish ethnics and native-stock whites. Second, Baltimore's black working people, long restricted to unskilled, low-paid work, began to get better jobs—with and without government help. Finally, although many of the southern migrants who worked in Baltimore's war plants returned home as quickly as possible, many more did not. Instead, southern whites stayed to become members of Baltimore's postwar white working class.

The wartime boom made Baltimore, a relatively placid and culturally southern city, look more like a smoky, congested northern industrial city. Its politics also came to resemble that of other post-New Deal industrial cities. In presidential, state, and local politics a "New Deal" coalition of working-white, black, and liberal voters emerged, although each group understood the legacy of the New Deal differently. The most vocal of Baltimore's grassroots New Deal activists, urban progressives, CIO-affiliated laborites, and black civil rights leaders considered the war a political opportunity. Their conception of "New Deal Democracy" included not only the extension of blue-collar workplace rights but also the expansion of rights for blacks in the community and on the job. For Baltimore's white working people, however, the tumult of wartime was fraught with hazards. They welcomed the economic security that industrial unionism and wartime wages brought but resisted social initiatives that seemed to threaten the blue-collar community.

Economy and Society

Baltimore's roots were in commerce rather than industry; as late as 1881 there were still only thirty-nine manufacturers in the city.[2] By the turn of the century there were two hundred, but within a few years, as the nationwide tide of mergers swept the city, outside corporations bought up local firms and Baltimore became known as a "branch plant city."[3] Nevertheless, by the late 1930s municipal leaders touted an "industrial community" closely resembling its northern counterparts.[4] Iron and steel dominated the economy. Sparrows Point, owned by the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, was the city's largest single employer, sprawling over two thousand acres where the Patapsco River met the Chesapeake Bay.[5] Although the garment industry sweatshops downtown were closing fast, the textile industry remained Baltimore's second largest employer in the 1930s. Mills built in Hampden, north of the city center, still produced cotton duck as they had for a century.[6]

The transportation equipment industry was more robust. Bethlehem Steel had shipyards at Sparrows Point and along Key Highway in South Baltimore. Maryland Shipbuilding and Drydock was on the southern edge of the harbor.[7] Glenn Martin, built in 1928 at Middle River, eleven miles northeast of downtown Baltimore, was quickly becoming the largest single airplane factory in the world. General Motors (GM) opened plants in Southeast Baltimore in 1934.[8] Electrical equipment manufacturers like Westinghouse and Locke Insulator contributed to the city's industrial diversity. The largest of these was Western Electric, built in 1929 at Point Breeze, just inside the city limits on the northern edge of the bay.[9]

Baltimore's population was as diverse as its industry. A leading destination for nineteenth-century German immigrants, the city more closely resembled Cincinnati and St. Louis than predominantly Irish Boston or New York.[10] These old-stock immigrants had to compete for jobs with blacks much earlier and on a greater scale than those in northern cities where the black populations were smaller. Dependence on the port for employment made these unskilled laborers especially vulnerable to market fluctuations, and in hard times native and immigrant workers exploited racial tensions to force blacks out of work and to protect their jobs.[11]

Baltimore had a southern segregationist inheritance that was, if anything, heightened by what one historian has called the "assertive self-consciousness" of its black populace, 90 percent of which was free before the Civil War.[12] As Jim Crow descended on the border city, skirmishes between white and black labor heightened its effects, so that by the 1910s segregation was more pronounced in Maryland than in any other border state.[13] Up to the 1890s, when an influx of black southern migrants began, there had been few exclusively black neighborhoods in the city. After the turn of the century blacks began leaving overcrowded and disease-infested alleys, displacing whites in upper west central Baltimore, and by 1910 half of the city's blacks lived there. Whites petitioned the mayor to "take some measures to restrain the colored people from locating in a white community"; this resulted in a 1913 ordinance that made segregated housing legal in Baltimore. So effective was white Baltimore's effort that it set precedent for legislation in other cities.[14] This sanctioned black area, twenty-six blocks centered on Pennsylvania Avenue, became a booming black metropolis by the 1930s.[15]

When Eastern and Southern European immigrants arrived at the turn of the century, ethnic working-class neighborhoods coalesced around the harbor. Outlying industrial suburbs included Brooklyn, on the southern edge of the harbor, and Sparrows Point, far to the east.[16] Fells Point, Baltimore's eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century shipping and shipbuilding center, occupied the northeastern edge of the harbor along with Canton.[17] Up a gentle hill to the east was Highlandtown, a largely German community.[18] Pigtown, in the near southwest, was named for its early packing houses. South Baltimore lay just below the city center, and to its east Locust Point jutted into the harbor.[19] Only Hampden, home to Protestant textile millworkers, was largely untouched by the new immigration.[20]

It was at Locust Point that the new immigrants disembarked. Some boarded the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and headed west. Others, especially the Poles, ferried across the Inner Harbor to Fells Point.[21] A few got off the boat at the foot of Hull Street, walked a few blocks, and spent the rest of their lives in Locust Point.[22] Over the next fifty years many of the Poles moved farther east into Canton and Highlandtown; others resettled in South Baltimore and Brooklyn.[23] Italian immigrants gathered in a neighborhood on the near east side that became Baltimore's "Little Italy" before gravitating west in later years.[24] Czech, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Greek enclaves also took shape in South and East Baltimore.

The Catholic Church lay at the heart of these ethnic enclaves.[25] The oldest parishes were Irish and German. A few remained that way, but others, like St. Leo's, which became the center of Little Italy, adopted the nationality of its new congregation.[26] The church served as a bulwark for both the existing social structure and the immigrant community. As these immigrants arrived, Baltimore's James Cardinal Gibbons lauded Catholicism's "tremendous power for conservatism, virtue and industry" among working people.[27] In the 1920s and 1930s Baltimore's Catholics shared Archbishop Michael Curley's faith in the "Catholic Ghetto," emphasizing self-sufficiency and disdaining secular individualism. Curley encouraged them to maintain their ethnic traditions and resist "forceful, improper Americanization."[28]

A building boom accompanied this influx of white ethnics, helped along by the institution of ground rent. Under this system, homes were bought and sold but landowners kept the "ground" and charged rent. This cut initial purchase costs, making housing more affordable for working-class people: Canton resident Bronislaw Wesolowski paid a mere $750 for his four-room row house in 1910.[29] Of the forty thousand homes built in the 1880s and 1890s, most were the two-story, narrow red brick row houses that came to typify Baltimore's working-class neighborhoods.[30] White working-class Baltimore prospered in the 1920s. Home ownership rates rose, families bought radios, and a few could even afford cars. Social and political clubs multiplied and ethnic institutions flourished as working people enjoyed rising living standards.

But trouble began near the end of the twenties. Unemployment increased, the economy slipped, and by late 1930 the full effects of the Great Depression had set in.[31] As the number of unemployed grew, private relief agencies joined church and community organizations to meet the needs of the jobless. By the end of 1933 their efforts had failed: one in six Baltimore families was on public relief. Blacks suffered the most, but ethnic Baltimoreans were also hard-hit. Nine percent of the city's population, foreign-born whites received 19 percent of the relief, and the insensitivity of city fathers was instructive.[32] Baltimore's conservative, business-oriented Democrats had long cultivated the ethnic vote with little difficulty. But the depression, the New Deal, and World War II hastened the decline of that system.

The Machine, Labor, and the New Deal

Maryland, like its border counterparts, has been called a "three party state" in which a weak Republican Party vied with two wings of a sharply divided Democratic Party.[33] Up to the 1930s these two wings included Protestant "Bourbon" Democrats in the eastern and southern parts of the state and business-led machine politicians in Baltimore. Customarily, according to one historian, the latter bought the votes of ethnic and working-class citizens "with a drink or a dollar bill."[34] The Democratic machine controlled both city and state politics from the 1870s to the 1910s, dispensing patronage and making policy in conjunction with civic and business leaders.[35] An interparty quarrel in 1919 let a Republican into the mayor's seat, but a two-party system never took hold because in segregationist Maryland the Republican Party was widely considered the party of blacks.[36]

As the citywide Democratic machine deteriorated, district bosses became increasingly powerful. William Curran, who grew up in Southeast Baltimore, ran what has been described as an "all-weather constantly functioning organization" in the 1920s.[37] But when he abandoned Southeast Baltimore for upper-class Roland Park, it signaled trouble for the Democrats. Curran was a Catholic, but he was also a well-known and well-compensated criminal lawyer at home with the old immigrant and native-stock businessmen who dominated Baltimore's Democratic Party. He deeply disliked organized labor.[38] In the 1930s Curran shared power with district boss Howard Jackson, who fit the pro-business, southern segregationist mold even more closely.

As the depression set in, the outlines of the national New Deal coalition began to be discernible in Baltimore, but because the business-allied Democrats had a lock on city politics, the pattern first appeared in Republican votes. In 1934 gubernatorial candidate Harry Nice, despite his Republican affiliation, exploited the popularity of the New Deal by promising a "New and Square Deal for All" and campaigned against the machine rather than the Democratic Party as a whole. Nice cut substantially into the incumbent's Baltimore margins and took office to the strains of "Happy Days Are Here Again." The Republican got crucial support from ethnic defectors in the city's eastern working-class wards.[39]

In the presidential races, Baltimore's move to New Deal Democracy was clear. In 1928 the most heavily Catholic wards backed Al Smith, but Protestant working whites supported Herbert Hoover and gave him a slight edge.[40] In 1932, however, Franklin Roosevelt carried Baltimore's white working-class wards by comfortable margins.[41] Four years later the city gave Roosevelt a more decisive victory: turnout was heavy and his margins exceeded even those in other industrial cities like Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.[42] Most important, in 1936 FDR got the black vote in one city ward and did very well in others that had always voted Republican.[43] Overall, from 1930 to 1936 the nature of Baltimore's electorate changed. Working-class ethnics and black voters who had often stayed home were now turning out for "New Deal" candidates, be they Democrat or Republican.[44]

In 1938 Thomas D'Alesandro, a former Curranite with his base in ethnic East Baltimore's Little Italy, broke with the old guard to run for a congressional seat.[45] Distancing himself from the district bosses and their business allies, D'Alesandro waged a pro-labor, pro-New Deal campaign and won.[46] By the 1940 presidential election the shape of the city's New Deal coalition was clear. FDR got 65 percent of the black vote, 96 percent of the ethnic vote, and 97 percent of the vote from people living in substandard housing.[47] A year earlier, conservative Democrat Howard Jackson had retained the mayor's seat by a slim margin. But World War II provided the opportunity, and organized labor the effort, that broke the conservative hold on Baltimore Democratic politics.

In 1939, despite three years of CIO activism, the Baltimore Association of Commerce continued to boast that the city's "labor was notably conservative in its relations with industrial management."[48] In a sense, Baltimore combined the best of two worlds: the heavy industry of the North and the low wages of the South. Since the late nineteenth century the city had been home to dozens of AFL craft union locals, but the Red Scare and the open-shop drive of the early twenties sent them all into sharp decline.[49]

During the 1930s organized labor's dominant institution was the conservative, AFL-affiliated Baltimore Federation of Labor (BFL). There were some outposts of labor militancy, particularly in the garment and maritime trades, but the BFL generally took an accommodating approach toward labor-management relations. Few of the "new immigrants" and even fewer blacks found acceptance in the ranks of its affiliated unions.[50] Organizers who began working in the steel, shipbuilding, automobile, and electrical industries after the founding of the CIO in 1936 met with stiff employer resistance.[51] Some Baltimore employers, such as Bethlehem Steel and Western Electric, were anti-union stalwarts nationwide. But even General Motors, which recognized its Michigan workers after the Flint Strike, held out against the Baltimore Autoworkers until 1940.

Up to Pearl Harbor, Baltimore's reputation as an open-shop town was well founded. Stiff employer resistance had its effect, but labor activists blamed the Baltimore workers themselves for lagging behind other industrial cities in unionization. "In Baltimore," one organizer complained in 1937, "people crawl. Nothing moves, and the earth is still flat." The editor of the independent journal, the Baltimore Labor Herald, concurred that "nothing encouraging ever seems to happen in Baltimore."[52] By the time the nation began mobilizing for war, industrial unionism had scarcely a foothold in Baltimore.

White Workers for the Wartime Boom

Glenn Martin and Bethlehem Steel started taking defense orders even before the European war broke out in the fall of 1939. Although recent construction had doubled the plant's capacity, Glenn Martin had a $110 million backlog by 1940. At the same time Baltimore's shipyards had $80 million worth of orders to fill.[53] Industrial expansion swelled payrolls across the city. Glenn Martin's workforce expanded from 3,500 employees in 1939 to a 1943 peak of 53,000.[54] Bethlehem Steel's Fairfield Shipyard, established near Brooklyn to build Liberty Ships for the U.S. Maritime Commission, opened in 1941 with 350 workers. By the end of the year it employed 10,000.[55] Baltimoreans considered defense work a blessing—one called working at Fairfield "wonderful." Albert Arnold worked seven-day weeks his first year there, making $54 per week to more than double his previous income.[56] Fairfield's employment peaked at 46,700 in October 1943.[57] Few reached the gargantuan proportions of Glenn Martin or Fairfield, but nearly all local industries expanded for wartime production. At the end of 1939 manufacturing employment in Baltimore stood at 150,000. By May 1942 it had jumped to 251,000 with four out of five workers in war industries.[58]

Jim Crow's hold on Baltimore ensured that white migrants would fill most of these jobs: employers, state and local employment services, and the Baltimore Federation of Labor were equally uninterested in helping blacks into any but the most menial jobs.[59] The director of the Maryland Employment Service told an investigating congressional staffer that although there were lots of potential black workers in the city, "Baltimore is an old, conservative city with certain traditions to uphold."[60] Denied entrance to the State Employment Service's main office, blacks were directed to an annex where only common laborers were hired.[61] Glenn Martin asserted that the white mechanics at Middle River would walk out if blacks got high-paying production jobs and thus confined its black employees to a small plant in Canton.[62] Martin, like other Baltimore industrialists, felt no responsibility for solving the city's "social problems."[63] Local businesses were also reluctant to employ women in nonclerical work.

The combination of racial discrimination and industrial boom transformed Baltimore socially. Companies began advertising in southern states, and the Maryland Employment Service assured its counterparts in the South that it would take workers trained there.[64] Baltimore's population grew from 859,000 in 1940 to 1,250,000 by late 1942.[65] Within another year, about 150,000 to 200,000 migrants had arrived, and most were from the mountain South: Virginia, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Tennessee, in that order.[66] Many of the migrants came to stay, but others soon left, unable to find housing. Still more grew disillusioned by working conditions, transportation problems, and cold weather. More than 3,000 war workers quit their jobs and left Baltimore each month during 1942. Others "shopped around" for better work, making turnover a major problem.[67]

In Baltimore as in other industrial cities, scarcity of housing was the biggest wartime crisis. Builders erected more private homes than ever before but resisted building low-income rental housing. The federal government and the city built projects like Brooklyn Homes, which provided five hundred apartments near Fairfield Shipyard. The Farm Security Administration set up trailer camps at Middle River and Fairfield.[68] Many of the new defense workers moved into old blue-collar neighborhoods. South Baltimore was an especially popular destination since it was closer to the shipyards and had more rental property available than East Baltimore. In January 1941 South Baltimore's weekly paper, the Enterprise, reported that "thousands of workers are pouring into South Baltimore plants daily." One merchants' group, hoping to keep war wages in the community, lamented that apartments were "virtually unknown" and home owners had little room to spare.[69] One common solution was for property owners to subdivide their homes and businesses into apartments and become absentee landlords.[70]

Crowding was the rule. In Brooklyn, for example, thirty men employed at Fairfield Shipyard shared four rooms, sleeping in shifts, and one toilet.[71] The first newcomers established "home base," friends and relatives joined them, and migrant enclaves sprang up. In South Baltimore's "Kentucky Colony" one landlord rented out fifty-six rooms in five row houses to more than twenty-five families—over one hundred people in all. The heads of these families, men like Luzell Nettles and Israel Elkins, worked at Fairfield Shipyard and Revere Copper and Brass.[72]

Migrants from the mountain South were subject to discrimination rooted in a tenacious "hillbilly" stereotype. South Baltimore merchants wanted their money, but most other residents wanted them gone. Some locals resented the high wages they were making.[73] More disliked the leisure activities on which they spent those wages. A Lutheran minister expressed both attitudes when he said that "they are here to make money and have a good time."[74] "This part of town had a bad name," one second-generation Italian woman recalled later; "the bars were lousy … all kinds of carryings-on and tearing things up."[75] "Lousy" or not, the bars were also becoming increasingly unfamiliar places to Baltimore natives. During the war, the city's jukeboxes were mostly stocked with hillbilly tunes strange to urban ears.[76]

Working-class home owners were especially distressed at the toll the influx took on their neighborhoods. A South Baltimore woman felt that migrants "didn't give a damn because they were just here for the wartime moneymaking," with the result that "South Baltimore eventually became rundown, beat up." Others saw this as the point when their neighborhoods began to go downhill.[77] Some of the criticism reflected the biases of the observers. Heavy turnover at the plants was reflected in the neighborhoods, and although signs on each floor of the Kentucky Colony buildings said "Don't throw garbage into the sink," a visiting journalist found the apartments "surprisingly clean." Similarly, in Baltimore County, residents apprehensive about the newcomers reported a crime wave that police could not confirm.[78]

Despite the stereotyping and the hostility from both sides exhibited in the flap about the poem "Beloved Baltimore," most migrants were clearly industrious. One West Virginia native, a ship carpenter at Bethlehem Steel's Key Highway Shipyard, claimed to support his own family of eight, his brother's family of four, and his mother on his wages. He also sent money home to pay off debts.[79] Few could make their earnings go as far. Too often, those expecting "a pot of gold" in Baltimore found instead a high cost of living that consumed most of their earnings.[80]

Migrants resented their hostile reception and longed for respect. Harry Isner, a carpenter from Elkins, West Virginia, appeared before the U.S. House Committee Investigating National Defense Migration in July 1941. During his testimony a congressmen interrupted to expound on the possibility that Isner could be out of work in both Maryland and West Virginia after the war: "He will be floating, like a good many others in the country." Isner respectfully cut the congressman off and said, "well my intentions are, if I can do so, to buy me a home and locate here permanently, if I can get some money ahead."[81]

White native Baltimoreans were only temporarily ambivalent about the southern newcomers. In early 1944 the Baltimore Evening Sun concluded that they had been "praised and criticized, but ultimately accepted as part of the local scene."[82] More important, both southerners and Appalachians lived under a distinct color line, as did Baltimore's ethnic working people.[83] A new white working class had united with surprising ease because in the neighborhoods and on the job, everybody was white. But this was not the case at the polls.

Mobilizing Workers and Votes

Before World War II about 35,000 union members lived in Baltimore, most of them affiliated with the AFL. By November 1942 the ranks of organized labor had grown fourfold, not counting the company unions established at Glenn Martin and Western Electric.[84] The city and state CIO fought hard for these gains, but ultimately the war made the difference.

The most difficult of the CIO's unionizing drives was at Sparrows Point. Bethlehem was the cornerstone of "little steel" and notoriously anti-union. The Steelworkers Organizing Committee (SWOC) had low expectations, sending only two men to organize one of the largest steel plants in the world.[85] Residents of the company town stood to lose homes as well as jobs and viewed the effort with trepidation, so most of SWOC's support came from ethnic Southeast Baltimoreans and blacks consigned to the mill's dirtiest and lowest-paying jobs.[86] Most of the steelworkers, according to Brendan Sexton, one of the organizers, were southern whites who were "anti-black, but not violently so."[87] Accordingly, the company tried to use race to its benefit, warning white workers that they could lose their jobs to blacks if the CIO got into the plant.[88]

By 1940 the CIO was trying mightily to get into Bethlehem Steel and Glenn Martin because they were huge plants dependent on defense contracts—and federal law mandated that government contractors must bargain in good faith with unions. A strong company union at Glenn Martin helped fend off the CIO challenge, but Bethlehem, its Employee Representation Plan outlawed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), resorted to more repressive measures. The company used Pinkerton agents, armed "special police," and even local law enforcement officers against SWOC.[89] Even the FBI cooperated, planting an agent in a Highlandtown row house to monitor a SWOC organizer's activities.[90]

The next year Sparrows Point and the Bethlehem shipyards—including the mammoth Fairfield Shipyard—recognized the CIO under the multiple pressures of continuing worker militancy, mounting defense orders, and threats of federal intervention. GM and Westinghouse did likewise.[91] At Glenn Martin, though, the United Autoworkers (UAW) found it difficult to recruit from among the mostly southern white workers.[92] The aircraft plant was a prize sought by the International Association of Machinists as well as the UAW. It was also fiercely defended by the company union. The UAW got an NLRB election in June 1943, but only 40 percent of workers voted CIO whereas 42 percent voted "no union."[93] In September the CIO finally prevailed with 49 percent of the vote, but its hold remained shaky throughout the war.[94] The election won, it still faced "the job of making union people of the people in that plant."[95]

By the war's midpoint, a liberal leadership had begun to coalesce in Baltimore. It included officers of the state and local CIO, middle-class whites, many of them associated with the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), and civil rights leaders affiliated with the NAACP and the Urban League. Together, they helped make Baltimore politics New Deal politics.

The city's CIO unions banded together to form the Baltimore Industrial Union Council in July 1937. The Maryland and District of Columbia Industrial Union Council was organized shortly afterward.[96] Both groups, recognizing that industrial unionism owed its existence to New Deal support, were avowedly political in orientation. By 1939 the AFL and the CIO routinely mobilized to promote progressive national and state legislation. The city and state CIO councils pushed for wages and hours bills at the statehouse which, despite vigorous efforts, were defeated.[97] But in a few short years organized labor had become a formidable political force. The state CIO's per capita income was a little over $5,000 in 1942, but within a year it had increased 250 percent, and the state CIO mobilized working voters with its own edition of the CIO News and a weekly legislative report.[98] Wartime mobilization promised more potential working-class support for liberal causes, yet it also posed a challenge: how to transmit the growing union ranks into votes. Concerned that just such a development might disrupt politics as usual, the Maryland legislature passed a "Declaration of Intentions" law requiring all prospective voters to register one year prior to voting, a measure designed to disenfranchise the thousands of war workers in the state. The CIO fought back and in the fall of 1943 launched a massive campaign to register war workers for the 1944 elections.[99] The institution that thrust organized labor most forthrightly into liberal politics was the CIO Political Action Committee (PAC). In 1943 the state CIO began creating arms of the PAC in Maryland's congressional districts, beginning with the Third Congressional District covering much of working-class Baltimore. One of the first things that district CIO-PAC officials did was meet with Congressman D'Alesandro, Baltimore's New Dealer.[100] They also sought help from the Baltimore chapter of the Union for Democratic Action. In 1941 anticommunist activists, intellectuals, and trade union officials formed the national UDA.[101] The Baltimore UDA was founded the next year by a similar coalition. Important members included noted liberals affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, government officials, and labor leaders. The group sponsored a series of public meetings aimed at bringing government, business, and labor together to discuss Baltimore's wartime problems and enthusiastically supported the CIO's Declaration of Intentions Act campaign, providing printed materials and working with unions and other civic organizations to help spur registration.[102]

In segregationist Baltimore, the issue that most clearly distinguished the emergent liberal coalition was its support for civil rights. Leading the push was the Baltimore branch of the NAACP. Founded in the 1920s, the Baltimore NAACP languished until the mid-1930s, when energetic leader Lillie M. Jackson emerged from the city's black middle class and mobilized African Americans around antilynching and "don't buy where you can't work" campaigns to make the Baltimore NAACP one of the most powerful branches nationwide. Jackson's daughter established a dynasty by marrying Clarence Mitchell, a Baltimorean and a national NAACP leader. A second center of power in the black community was the Murphy family, which published the Baltimore Afro-American, one of the nation's leading black papers. For the next forty years, black Baltimore's political strength would depend on the state of the alliance between these two families.[103]

Civil rights activists, like labor leaders, saw the war as an opportunity to bring about social change. In 1942 local NAACP official Dr. J. E. T. Camper led a march on Annapolis to pressure the state to enforce equal opportunity in employment and housing.[104] The Baltimore Urban League, run mostly by whites, was less confrontational and worked effectively behind the scenes to open up jobs and training programs to blacks.[105] One small, but ultimately consequential, victory was gaining the abolition of a municipal ordinance requiring segregated toilet facilities in industries.[106]

The chief objective of all these liberal groups, both black and white, was to turn out the vote. The first test of the new activist coalition came in the 1943 mayor's race. The incumbent Howard Jackson, sensing trouble, had entered into an alliance with old rival William Curran, guaranteeing Jackson all the votes that the Baltimore machine could muster. His opponent, Republican Theodore McKeldin, forged close ties with civil rights groups, ran hard against Jackson's "greedy political machine," and won.[107]

It took a Republican—although not the Republican Party, which never really operated as such in Baltimore—to break the old-line Democratic hold on the city. Blacks who had changed parties to vote for FDR and the New Deal in 1936 switched back to vote for the racially progressive McKeldin. Three black wards that had voted 54 percent for FDR that year went 71 percent for McKeldin in 1943.[108] More significant, Baltimore's ethnic and working-class whites broke with the Curran machine and reversed parties to back the liberal candidate. Voters in white working-class wards 1, 23, and 24 voted for McKeldin by a margin of 63 percent, higher even than more reliably Republican outlying middle-class precincts.[109] The importance of the switch is underscored by the fact that although McKeldin beat Jackson decisively, every other Republican candidate lost by a substantial margin.

The major test for labor came the next year, when Franklin Roosevelt ran for a fourth term. Although the Declaration of Intentions Act remained on the books, and city and county election boards made registration as difficult as possible for war workers, the Baltimore City CIO-PAC, established in April 1944, worked hard to get out the working-class vote.[110] There was an early morning rush to the polls by war workers in East and South Baltimore, but turnout overall fell from 85 percent in 1940 to 65 percent in 1944.[111] Roosevelt's margins were also smaller in 1944, but working whites gave him 70 percent of the vote and Baltimore's blacks went three to two for FDR.[112] Although middle-class voters in outlying precincts voted decisively against him, Roosevelt got a plurality in Baltimore and swung Maryland to the Democrats.[113]

Although demographic and social shifts meant that it was only a matter of time, it was a twist in machine politics that made the 1944 election the pivot on which the Baltimore Democratic Party swung from old line to New Deal. The district controlled by Boss Jack Pollack was becoming majority black, and alert to changing political realities, he broke decisively with the Curran-Jackson machine and allied with the liberals. Curran responded with increasingly strident attacks on the New Deal, hastening the end of his influence. From that point on, factional bosses who relied on the support of labor and ethnic groups took control over Baltimore's Democratic politics.[114] Previously white working-class votes could be bought cheaply, but the liberal organizations demanded legislation instead of favors, ensuring that statewide, Bourbon-Baltimore Democratic coalitions would become increasingly hard to maintain.[115]

After the 1944 election the president of the Baltimore Industrial Union Council crowed that "the newly won strength that labor has gained by exercising its political rights will now be used to push a program of fully expanded industry, an end to race bias and security at home and the achievement of a lasting organization of world peace."[116] Such overarching rhetoric foundered on the details: local events suggest that a more modest assessment may have been in order.

Race, Housing, and the Limits of Liberalism

Baltimore's working-class whites and blacks may have increasingly been partners on the tally sheets, but they voted in different precincts and working whites preferred it that way. At the highest levels of political and intellectual leadership, Alan Brinkley has observed, World War II marked a period of transition between the reform liberalism of the early twentieth century and the rights-based liberalism that succeeded it.[117] But that was a transition that Baltimore's blue-collar residents were not prepared to make. They supported government efforts to cushion the effects of the free market and modestly redistribute wealth at the polls, but their actions at home and on the job demonstrated that they did not share the racially inclusive liberal vision extolled by social progressives in civil rights and labor organizations.

During the war years blue collarites steadfastly resisted New Deal efforts that even remotely threatened white neighborhoods, and since the residential boundaries established in the 1910s remained largely intact, the battle lines were drawn over public housing. Projects for both white migrants and blacks were proposed by the city and opposed by citizens, but in each case outcomes were quite different, demonstrating precisely where white working-class Baltimore drew the lines of both inclusion and exclusion.

In June 1939, when the city unveiled a federally sponsored project for white families to be built on a Southeast Baltimore site known as "Area D," civic groups from working-class Southeast Baltimore mobilized to oppose the project and found themselves in conflict with a leadership that invoked the New Deal in the name of racial inclusion. A liberal city councilman and a CIO official praised it at a Board of Estimates hearing, but the crowd of three hundred "roared its disapproval."[118] In another confrontation, a proponent's characterization of the project as "a New Deal measure" infuriated opponents from a Czech neighborhood.[119] Nevertheless, there was not enough clamor to stop Area D, and in 1940 the first white migrant war workers moved in. One of the most potent arguments during the controversy had been that despite assurances to the contrary, blacks might be allowed in; but they were not, and that made all the difference.[120] Baltimore residents never succeeded in blocking a single white housing development, and by 1943 there were seven large-scale projects in the city.[121] By mid-1943 over twenty thousand separate units of war housing for whites had been constructed in Baltimore, much of it with federal assistance, but wartime housing for blacks had yet to be built.[122]

Blacks suffered disproportionately from Baltimore's wartime housing crisis. From 1940 to 1942, 33,000 blacks came to Baltimore, half of them from rural Maryland and half from the South. The newcomers squeezed into the ghettos, where rents shot up and housing deteriorated. One 1942 study estimated that the city's black population—then at about 20 percent of the total—was packed into 2 percent of its residential space.[123] But white Baltimoreans steadfastly opposed any relief.

When, in the summer of 1943, a plan for a federally financed black housing project at Herring Run near the Area D site was proposed, citizens mobilized again but this time more effectively. In July, in front of a crowd of eight hundred hostile whites, Mayor McKeldin cautiously backed the plan, but, caught between two key constituencies, he disavowed any responsibility, claiming that final authority rested with the federal government.[124] The Baltimore CIO joined the NAACP and the Urban League in backing the Herring Run plan, but it came at a price since local politicians were much more attentive to white working-class concerns than to the arguments of organized labor.[125] "Politicians with whom we had developed friendly relations took the occasion to launch bitter attacks against the leadership of the CIO," one labor official complained.[126] This contention at the top deepened into a split between the leadership and the rank and file. The leadership of Local 43 of the CIO's International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers (IUMSWA) endorsed the housing plan, but one of its members suspected that Washington was only courting black voters for the 1944 presidential election.[127]

Three city councilmen led the opposition, but among the more vocal opponents to the Herring Run plan were white home owner association leaders, Catholic priests, and even a rabbi.[128] One influential adversary was Lutheran minister Luke Schmucker, who had previously condemned white migrants at the Area D project for not being "interested in anything but making money." But the black housing threat led Schmucker to portray the migrants in a different light. Noting Herring Run's proximity to the Area D site, he complained that "middle class defense workers" would be set upon by blacks "in the streets, in the cars and buses, in the stores and movies, and even in the schools."[129]

The debate over Herring Run took place in the midst of escalating racial tensions nationwide. In Buffalo, a nearly identical controversy was raging spearheaded by priests representing their Polish and Irish Catholic parishioners.[130] In Los Angeles, white sailors had recently attacked Mexican American zoot-suiters, and only a month earlier, three days of rioting in Detroit left twenty-five blacks and nine whites dead.[131] A number of citizens who wrote angry letters to McKeldin had Detroit on their minds. Most expressed anxiety over property values and personal safety. Some explicitly blamed integrationists for racial tensions, agreeing with one man who warned that "it would not take much to set off another Detroit episode in Baltimore City."[132] The Baltimore NAACP applauded McKeldin's "courageous leadership" on the issue but spoke too soon.[133] Housing for Baltimore's black defense workers was not destined for a white area: McKeldin bowed to the greater pressure and settled on a site at Cherry Hill, insulated from Brooklyn and South Baltimore's white neighborhoods by water.[134]

The Color Line on the Shop Floor

Wartime exigencies brought an even more concerted challenge to racial segregation in industry. In early 1942 about nine thousand blacks worked in Baltimore's war industries; a year later there were twice as many, and by mid-1944 forty thousand black defense workers were on the job in city plants. By the end of the war companies that had once excluded blacks were advertising in the Afro-American, although according to the Baltimore Urban League's Alexander Allen, it was "the economics of the situation" more than Roosevelt's "fair employment" Executive Order 8802 that finally cracked Baltimore's segregated shop floors. "Some companies just ran out of workers to hire," he recalled.[135] The big CIO unions backed increased opportunities for blacks, but a public posture in favor of civil rights was easier to assume than enforce.[136] Total exclusion gave way fairly easily, but the white rank and file resisted working closely with blacks and tried hard to prevent them from taking skilled positions. One black member of Local 43 of the IUMSWA warned leaders of the state CIO that "if you are just going to give lip service and do nothing, you are going to be sorry."[137] The largest CIO union in wartime Baltimore, IUMSWA was also the most vulnerable to conflicts between natives and southerners, blacks and whites.[138]

Before the war, native Baltimoreans had used southern stereotypes to denote undesirable labor. A 1938 organizing flyer condemned "plow-jockeys and bean-pickers" willing to toil for low wages. These sorts of workers, the flyer said, constituted a menace to "bona-fide union men."[139] By 1940, however, the union was using southern images to appeal to, rather than to shame, workers. One leaflet, advertising a pipe fitters' department meeting, featured a sketch of an overall-clad worker, pipe wrench in hand, uttering "recken I'll be there."[140] Three years later, candidates for union office appealed to the Appalachian "ex-coal miners" at the Fairfield Shipyard and publicly sympathized with the controversial 1943 coal miners' strike.[141]

In the shipyards, so many workers were southerners that Baltimore natives may have realized that they had little choice but to get along. Still, white workers felt less pressure to coexist with blacks. African Americans were limited to maintenance or unskilled jobs that kept them away from whites, who, in turn, displayed a firm resistance to any further encroachments, regardless of CIO rhetoric.[142] Bethlehem's Sparrows Point Shipyard is a case in point. According to the U.S. Employment Service, Sparrows Point was "an old established plant" with many senior employees—a marked contrast to the turbulent Fairfield Shipyard with its large, undisciplined, mostly southern-born workforce.[143] If experience had been a determining factor, then Sparrows Point would have been peaceful. Instead, an attempt by black workers to surmount barriers of skill set off racial conflict.[144]

In late July 1943 fifteen blacks were admitted to a training school for riveters at the Sparrows Point Shipyard. The news soon spread to the riveting department, and after white riveters walked out in protest, the company removed the blacks from the class. When eight hundred black employees gathered to demand that the company resume the training, management—with approval from union leadership—complied. Meanwhile, white riveters marched through the yard gathering support. Thousands of whites ended up encircling a group of black workers who had to be escorted out of the yard by police. State police and federal troops stood by for eight days; the shipyard workers did not return to work until the company and the union pledged to adhere strictly to seniority in promoting riveters.[145]

IUMSWA leaders were convinced that a violent race riot had been narrowly averted at Sparrows Point. But one union official denied that the membership was in any way responsible. Instead, he said, "non-union men," both black and white, were "the chief agitators."[146] Civil rights leaders, on the other hand, had long known that racial tensions in Baltimore's shipyards were high; the NAACP observed that "the union was not as vigorous as it should have been in aiding the colored members."[147] Whites attacked labor from the opposite side. One of the most powerful arguments the UAW's opponents used at Glenn Martin was that the CIO would allow black workers on the shop floor.[148] One Machinists Union leaflet went further, exploiting the sensitive issue of skilled work for blacks. "If you want a negro boss," the flyer said, "vote for the CIO and get him."[149]

As economic necessity put more blacks in Baltimore's workplaces, white workers became even more determined to enforce the boundaries between skilled "white" work and unskilled labor. By the end of the Great Depression there were few of the company unions left that had been so ubiquitous in the 1920s. Wartime mobilization dislodged Glenn Martin's company union, but still the one at Western Electric hung on. There, as part of an effort to forestall CIO organizing, the Point Breeze Employees Association (PBEA) mobilized southern, ethnic, and native whites against workplace integration. It was so effective in accomplishing both that it ultimately triggered a federal plant seizure.

Before the war, Western Electric had a workforce of 2,500. At its wartime peak it employed nearly four times that number.[150] In late 1941 the company began hiring black workers and segregating its restrooms to comply with the Baltimore plumbing code. In early 1942, after the Urban League got the plumbing code changed, the company desegregated its washrooms. Meanwhile, as the proportion of black employees in the plant rose from 2 to 29 percent, whites became increasingly embittered.[151]

The precipitating event occurred in August 1943, when a black woman was promoted to a supervisory position and twenty-two white women working under her walked out.[152] In response, leaders of the Point Breeze association took up the issue of the desegregated washrooms, circulating petitions and threatening to strike.[153] In October the membership authorized a strike, but the PBEA agreed to postpone it until a December War Labor Board hearing. The War Labor Board backed the company, the union struck, and President Roosevelt ordered the army to take over the plant that produced critical communications cable. When the army finally left in March 1944, Western Electric's restrooms were effectively resegregated, although the company and the government described things differently.[154]

A complex of issues underlay the Western Electric strike, but most important the PBEA was using race to shore up its support. Both the Machinists and the United Electrical Workers had been trying to organize the plant, and at the time the NLRB was investigating the PBEA's reputation as a "company union."[155] Also, as a committee of black employees pointed out, although the union made the integration of facilities the ostensible strike issue, the factor of skilled employment was definitely involved.[156] By making a black woman an inspector, Western Electric had violated the same tacit agreement restricting blacks to unskilled positions that Sparrows Point Shipyard had.

The PBEA had relatively little difficulty getting white workers to draw the line between themselves and their black coworkers. Few other local defense plants had integrated restrooms, and white workers reported being taunted by neighbors who called the plant "nigger heaven." Some whites were also convinced that "the policy of the company [was] to coddle the negro in order to court government approval" and that supervisors favored blacks at whites' expense.[157]

It was easy to blame southerners for the racial strife at Western Electric. One worker accused black women of calling some employees "poor white trash," and during the War Labor Board hearing one army official complained that the "philosophy of legal customary segregation in the South seems to pervade the whole atmosphere of these Western Electric discussions." Segregation could not be challenged in the South, he said, but "when one of these questions arises in the North where there has been a lot of immigration of southerners, we are too prone to want to yield to their sentiments and attitudes."[158]

Although women precipitated the strike, men conducted it. When picket lines formed, they were almost exclusively male. In addition, most of those who crossed the lines were older workers whereas those who manned the lines were younger. Older workers were more likely to have been Baltimore natives, and younger workers were more often migrants.[159] When the army reopened the plant, though, those remaining out were mostly skilled workers, fewer of whom are likely to have been newcomers.[160] This suggests that although southerners readily joined the PBEA's effort, they were relatively quick to desert it. Though initiated by the local union leaders, the strike depended on southerners for critical support. But while the migrants were willing to help others enforce the color line, they declined to do it alone.[161]

When it came to race, the PBEA represented the prevailing attitudes of many white Western Electric workers. Few were moved by the strident condemnations of the Baltimore CIO and its insinuations that they were being manipulated.[162] Furthermore, white determination to enforce the color line can only have been strengthened by the left-led United Electrical Workers' strident denunciations.[163] Good unionists who happened to be Communist Party members were sometimes tolerated in wartime Baltimore, but Western Electric's workers never gave the UE a hearing, despite its persistence.[164] Not surprisingly, the UE had tried hardest to organize Western Electric's blacks: its only full-time organizer there was a black man.[165]

It is telling that the strike at Western Electric was touched off by women. By the war's end, 38 percent of Baltimore's industrial workers were female and the number doing war work had shot up 97 percent from 1940 to 1944.[166] As early as September 1942, Western Electric's workforce was 35 percent female, and by the end of the war over 55 percent were women.[167] Most of this increase came as women replaced draftees or transients, and although some were Baltimore natives, plenty of wartime working women were migrants themselves. Many of these women, like their male counterparts, agreed with the assessment of "Beloved Baltimore" and left town at the war's end. But about half—including a Louisiana man who helped write the poem, yet later married a Baltimore woman—made their peace with the city and its residents and became part of the postwar white working class.[168]

What Was Left Undone

By 1945 Baltimore, like its counterparts in the industrial North, was home to a strong industrial union movement, a growing civil rights community, and a political system increasingly sensitive to the power of ethnic and black working-class voters. In addition, the wartime economic boom provided southern and ethnic blue collarites with their first, albeit limited, taste of the plenitude on which the postwar New Deal order was premised while giving black working people a foothold in the industrial economy. But between working whites, blacks, and urban liberals, intractable problems remained. Baltimore's blue collarites had rewarded the Democratic Party as much for what was left undone as for what it accomplished.

Although New Deal legislation delivered little in terms of civil rights, President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802, issued well after wartime pragmatism displaced New Deal fervor, marked a decisive first step toward the rights-based liberalism that would hold sway in postwar America. In response, urban liberals, labor, and civil rights progressives most responsible for mobilizing urban voters formulated a vision of racial inclusion that was sharply at odds with that held by urban white workers. White working people had seemingly attained long-sought economic rights and political representation. Liberal leaders in Baltimore as elsewhere, therefore, sought to use the economic growth and expansion of the federal government that began during the war as a platform on which to build a new, more inclusive social order.

Working-class whites were much less ambitious. For them, the New Deal order promised social security rather than social change. And despite the rhetoric of equality nominally embraced by the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, the workplaces and especially the neighborhoods of Baltimore's white working-class voters remained unaffected by racial change. Liberals seemed to have delivered much and demanded little, and working whites found few reasons to waver in their loyalty to the party of the New Deal. But in the postwar years, as the programmatic liberalism began to emphasize civil rights over economic rights, keeping this contentious coalition together would require a real commitment to racial equality, one that Baltimore's working whites were not prepared to make.  ¶ 10:58 AM