Books on Race Relations
The Social Politics of FEPC.
by Louis Coleridge Kesselman.
The University of North Carolina Press. 253 pp. $3.50.
All Manner of Men.
by Malcolm Ross.
Reynal and Hitchcock. 314 pp. $3.50.
America Divided.
by Arnold and Caroline Rose.
Alfred A. Knopf. 342 pp. $3.00.
Three more books have been added to the cascade of volumes in the field of human relations. All Manner of Men and The Social Politics of FEPC deal with legislative attempts to prevent discrimination in employment; America Divided is an over-all view of religious, ethnic, and nationality cleavages in the United States today.
Louis Coleridge Kesselman is a young political scientist (now on the faculty of the University of Louisville) whose curiosity about how pressure groups operate in a democracy led him to make a case study of the National Council for a Permanent FEPC. A one-man research team, limited in time and resources, Kesselman had to rely largely on the files of the National Council and a few interviews with key figures—principally Anna Arnold Hedgeman, the first executive secretary of the Council. Kesselman traces the recent history of the fair employment practices movement, beginning with Roosevelt’s Executive Orders 8802 and 9356, forced by A. Philip Randolph’s threat of a march on Washington, and continuing with the National Council’s heart-breaking struggle to get financial backing and other support. Leaders and supporters bickered and clashed; Kesselman portravs Randolph as a prima donna with too many other irons in the fire, too stubborn to compromise, and too rigid to coordinate or be coordinated. The Council was amateurish in its lobbying and unable to get behind its campaign such key groups as the NAACP, the Urban League, the American Federation of Labor, the CIO, and the major Jewish organizations (Catholic and Protestant church groups were apparently more helpful).
One wonders whether, at the time, better organization, greater financial and moral support, and better leadership could have produced a Federal law; and whether the National Council’s efforts did not later bear fruit in President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights and the Democratic party’s civil-rights plank. Kesselman does not consider these questions.
Kesselman is open to attack at a number of points: when he charges inadequate support by groups that should have been concerned, when he criticises Randolph and praises Anna Hedgeman, and especially when he argues that Randolph and the Council should have reached a compromise with the Communists for strategic reasons. But criticisms unduly emphasized would blur Kesselman’s real contribution. His book suggests the value of other case studies: of, for example, the campaign to secure DP legislation, which resulted in a fiasco; or of the campaigns for state FEPC’s, where findings could guide those in many states who are pressing for such legislation.
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All Manner of Men is the story of the wartime FEPC, told by the man who headed it. It is written with nostalgia and with essential kindness by a man who has made a great psychological investment in fair employment. Our hearts warm to him as the best kind of Yankee liberal. But he is no deep political analyst, no penetrating seeker of cause and effect; those who tire of messages of brotherly love will impatiently turn, even if with a huzzah or two, from a book in which we read: “The will to be bold in this matter . . . that is what we all must find. When the North and South have exercised it together, then we will be again a truly united nation, diverse in peoples, powerful in single purpose.”
In America Divided, Caroline and Arnold Rose have tried to do too much, and have produced a hasty conglomeration of good and bad. In 342 pages they try to deal with American minorities, past and present; the position of minorities under American law, and their position in political, economic, and social life; group identification and morale; organization and disorganization of minority communities; physical and psychological differences among races and nationalities; the psychology of prejudice; and trends in intergroup relations. Any one of these topics alone merits a full-scale volume.
It is never quite clear for whom the book has been written. The preface speaks of its use by students, and many parts of the book are written at about a high-school level; but simple language alternates with rather sophisticated terminology.
The most serious weakness of the book is that its backbone is the material on the Negro, which Arnold Rose has presented far more effectively in previous works; and the rest has to be filled in with scanty, inadequately documented, impressionistic material on Mexicans, Indians, Jews, Catholics, etc. The important line between subjective value-judgments and research evidence is not always carefully drawn. The authors have been courageous and forth-right in stating their position on many issues, but courage is no substitute for scientific caution.
One begins to feel uncomfortable before the plethora of books on interracial, interreligious, and intercultural problems. Apparently one no longer has to “sell” publishers on books about prejudice. But the time has certainly now come for far greater care in publication. We would all be grateful for less material but more carefully gathered, assessed, and analyzed.
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