For the pure heck of it, and inspired by the nifty airport novel The Forsight War, I am mucking about with some chapters of a novel that will never see the light of day.
A History professor from Howard University get spat like a pumpkin seed back to Washington DC in 1933. Hilarity ensues as he helps America prepare for WWII.
To make it interesting, he his Black.
So we may presume Negroes are of a special concern to him. So what could FDR have done in they years 1933 to 1941 to advance the cause of Black Americans? So far, I have Negro soldiers (in the traditional Black Regiments) being advanced to Lieutenant. Other than that I am at a loss.
What could be done? Heck, I do not even know what should have been done first.
Your serious thoughts on a silly question, please.
1933 would have been a very opportune time to try new things.
Mr. Roosevelt could have pulled a few more strings to get a federal antilynching law passed. Maybe by putting the heat on some Southern Democratic senators who were weak on the race question (ie: not total firebreathing white supremacists). He could perhaps have coerced his VP, Texas’ cantankerous “Cactus Jack” Garner, into rounding up the Dixiecrat dogies. He could have pushed (quietly…quietly) for a clause in the National Recovery Act that forbade discrimination on grounds of race/color/creed. He could have promoted a positive public image of African-Americans, say, by allowing Marian Anderson to sing on the National Mall 6 years earlier (she didn’t do that till '39 IRL), or inviting W.E.B. Du Bois to lunch at the White House. My gosh, in those days, anything would have helped.
Keep us posted on developments. I visit the early '30s often and would like to meet your professor friend.
He could have done something about Lynching. It wasn’t an OUTRAGEOUS idea, to anyone but a handful of Dixiecrat Senators, that the Feds needed to do something. FDR could have done something significant here no ifs, ands or buts IMO
More controversially:
In ’46 Truman pushed forward and introduced an aggressive civil rights legislative package that included an anti-lynching law, an anti-poll tax law, desegregation of the military, etc., but his own party killed all of his proposals and it is why they ran Strom Thurmond against him for President.
To say that this was post-War and it would have been harder for FDR in the middle of the Depression to put even a watered down version of this package through – well I would completely agree. Would I say “absolutely impossible” though? No I don’t think so – FDR would have had to work and compromise and he still might have failed. But it is not ridiculous to think that he might have at least taken a shot at something similar – it was worse timing but he was a better salesman, more in control of the Party and had more political capital than Truman.
I think this is a fair and balanced portrayal of FDR and Eleanor – who needs to be in the discussion of FDR and Civil Rights, FTR she embraced a civil rights agenda which accepted segregation and championed equal opportunity.
Thank you both, Doug I have sent you a second chapter. I hope you like it. Let me know if you can tolerate a larger dose. The rest is on the machine at work.
He could have demonized and vilified the Klan and led a federal attack on them as subversives, while subtly making the point that it was their racist values that made them subversive.
The guys in the pointy hats had been a fairly mainstream group up as recently as the 1920s. So by 1933 they were not yet completely off the reservation.
Further, I question what could have been done in 1933 to make people like my grandfather play nice with Blacks. At this benighted era we might simply be shooting for reducing the level of abuse.
I’m not sure how appropriate an attack on the Klan of the 20’s and 30’s to support equal rights for African Americans would be. I may be wrong, but wasn’t the Klan of that time focused more on the Jewish, Catholic and Immigrant threats to America? I don’t doubt that it would fight against protections for African Americans, but attacking the Klan for its racist tendencies, in an era when racism was seen as something that could only be directed against “colored” persons might make it seem more acceptable to other types who can be just as reactionary and bigoted as any Klansman.
I know it’s small potatoes, but I’d hope the protagonist would be able to convince the US to allow the S.S. St. Louis to dock and disembark it’s passengers.
On a more serious point - how much scrambling of external affairs would this professor be causing in spite of his efforts. If he’s trying to prepare the US for WWII, does he want to try to prevent Chamberlain from supporting the giving of the Sudatenland to Hitler, for example?
Likewise, would he want to try to support Trotsky, over Stalin, in the Soviet Union? Or, going the other way, would he be better advised to consider trying to establish a detente with Stalin?
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There are three major sources of lynching statistics. None cover the complete history of lynching in America. Prior to 1882, no reliable statistics of lynchings were recorded. In that year, the Chicago Tribune first began to take systematic account of lynchings. Shortly thereafter, in 1892, Tuskegee Institute began to make a systematic collection and tabulation of lynching statistics. Beginning in 1912, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People kept an independent record of lynchings.
These statistics were based primarily on newspaper reports. Because the South is so large and the rural districts had not always been in close contact with the city newspapers, it is certain that many lynchings escaped publicity in the press. Undoubtedly, therefore, there are errors and inaccuracies in the available lynching statistics.
On Q1 & Q3 Yale says
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According to the Tuskegee Institute figures, between the years 1882 and 1951, 4,730 people were lynched in the United States: 3,437 Negro and 1,293 white.
The largest number of lynchings occurred in 1892. Of the 230 persons lynched that year, 161 were Negroes and sixty-nine whites.
To not totally highjack some plot points might revolve Joe Louis who was the biggest Black star, maybe after Louis Armstrong maybe not, of the era and was in his pimetime in the time in question – other ideas might revolve around the Lindbergh kidnapping and/or Judge Carter … maybe Al Capone put away earlier or the St. Valentines Day Massacre prevented
According to Freakonomics, lynchings were actually at an all time low in the 1930s even as the Klan was at an all time high in membership. (The bloodiest era of lynchings was very late 19th/very early 20th centuries.)
FDR would need to do something to convince folks like Eisenhower and Patton that blacks were capable soldiers. (Patton was notoriously racist, even though he requested black soldiers for the 101st [later saying they were good soldiers as individuals but just not intelligent enough to protect themselves]).
A key problem with blacks in the early 1930s was image. Have you ever seen the comic strip pages from the 1930s? Even mainstream comics like Gasoline Alley had some just incredible charicatures of black people, complete with big white lips (Al Jolson had a smash hit in black face just a few years before, and blackfaced “coon singers” were still to be found in nightclubs) and “Lawd have Mercy I’se afeared of ghosties!” dialogue. Alberta Hunter and Eubie Blake had been shot down for funding for a B’way musical in the 1920s because it was a “Negro romance” and they were told by white would-be backers that Negros didn’t have romance.
To Southerners and urban northerners this reinforced the already negative images. To most of the country, where the people had never known black people, this was their only perception of them.
If I were a 1933 time traveler and wanted to help blacks I’d somehow start a massive PR campaign to raise the image of black people in popular culture, make mainstream Hollywood films about well educated blacks (if not as the main characters then at least as supporting players) or movie biopics of Frederick Douglass or Booker T. Washington or even Bert Williams would have helped raise consciousness about blacks as intelligent and industrious people would have done much in 1933. FDR could use influence and government money to get the entertainment industry to comply.
If that didn’t work I’d take Eleanor hostage and make her queen of my new all black kingdom. (Oh wait, that’s Griffith, not sci-fi… never mind.)
Maybe you could start an agitprop film series about black Africans heroicaly struggling against the evil fascist incursions by Italy, and whatnot. You could branch out into a relief/public relations campaign, kinda like with China.
If you wanted to really mess with organizations like the KKK, perhaps you could infiltrate them when agent provocateurs, and make it look like they’re getting financial backing from fascists, or staging really vile, public terrorist attacks (Like a bunch of costumed “Klansmen” shooting up the U.S. Capitol Building, or car-bombing WPA offices with the public claim that they were trying to “fight socialist influences” or something) to turn public opinion against them.
Maybe one plot point you might want to cover is why the protagonist is farting around with a problem that will eventually solve itself, and not do something that has far more potential for good, like killing a certain Adolf Shickelgruber. I know this has already been done to death, but people would indeed wonder why Shicklegruber wouldn’t be Target No. 1 on any time traveller’s hit list. I know I’D put the bastard down like a rabid dog.
Well the Saint Louis docked. Mrs. Roosevelt has pushed for a number of charities to help European Jews to leave sooner than they did in our timeline.
“Still, people are reluctant to leave their homes, not as many are willing to come as we hoped,” Tom reported grimly.
The central moral question is “Why not just stop the war?” Well, because it would make for a darn short book, that’s why.
So we are approaching from the angle that in order to get to the postwar era, an era very close to the American ideal, the world had to go through war. We will try to make the war shorter and more painless, but by 1933 (we assume) war is unavoidable.
If we zap old Adolph, he might be replaced by a leader just as bloodthirsty by less inept.
Even worse, can we let Pearl Harbor happen? If it does not, how do we get to the European War? With no European War, who will stop the Germans?
If you’re looking for a radical idea, Huey Long was a major political figure in the south in 1933. And Long was notable for being very enlightened on racial issues (he saw class not race as the big divide). Long was a Roosevelt supporter in 1932; it could have been possible for the two men to have remained allies. An agreement that Long would have a free hand in the internal affairs of the southern states would have kept him happy with an expanded power base and the feeling that he was Roosevelt’s eventual heir in 1940. Long, as a southern populist, would have been able to do more to stop anti-black prejudice in the South than an “outsider” would have.
Worse yet—what if he’s replaced by someone more inept and less bloodthirsty, and Stalin starts eyeing a Europe that doesn’t look like it could fight off a Soviet “liberation” from the scourge of capitalism?
Other characters to introduce: Joseph Kennedy, the Warner Brothers/Zanuck/Goldwyn (LA was becoming a major threat to D.C. at the time), Hayes (of the Hayes Code), etc… Also you’re in Harlem Renaissance era, so include W.E.B. DuBois (too bad you couldn’t start in 1928, when DuBois’s daughter Yolanda married poet/writer Countee Cullen in one of the biggest social affairs of the Harlem Renaissance- unfortunately Cullen was flamingly gay and there was much drama that occurred as a result), Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson (who was already an admirer of Soviet Russia, which could definitely work its way in), Eubie Blake, etc… (Since Dubois and Blake both lived to be ancient, a zoom ahead to a generation later could be interesting as well.)