Democratic Attitudes Towards Jim Crow In 1944? A Cartoon View

The wikipedia article on this film states that it was produced and distributed by the United Auto Workers. I doubt that the UAW had much of a presence in the south in 1944, and I suspect this film was rarely seen by audiences in states that had Jim Crow laws. I would be interested to know if the Jim Crow caboose made it into the Life spread.

Is anyone else having deja vu? I swear I’ve seen almost exactly this post before (same animated short linked, same surprise at the Jim Crow reference), and I thought it was here, although I can’t find it on a quick search. Might have been quite a while back, and maybe the discussion happened in comments –I’m vaguely recalling a Donald Duck short also being referenced?

Wouldn’t be Boing Boing. I just searched Edge of The American West, which is the sort of place I might have mixed up with here on that topic, but that doesn’t seem to be it either. Not important, anyway, it’s just going to nag at me.

@LizardBreath: I had a bit of that feeling too. It’s at some hack site “Lawyers, Guns & Money” that doesn’t even use the Oxford comma in their name.
Also turns up here.

1944 seems very early for the Dems to dissociate themselves from Jim Crow – four years too early, at least – and very early indeed for them to hang it on the Republicans, let alone Thomas Dewey personally. Fascinating.

Wikipedia on Dewey (T.) is good value:

Speech after speech was filled with empty statements of the obvious, such as the famous quote: “You know that your future is still ahead of you.” An editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal summed it up:

No presidential candidate in the future will be so inept that four of his major speeches can be boiled down to these historic four sentences: Agriculture is important. Our rivers are full of fish. You cannot have freedom without liberty. Our future lies ahead.

“No presidential candidate in the future”, eh? Hmm.

In 1944, the Ds still remembered being out of power for generations preceding 1932, so different factions of the D coalition were willing to tolerate the occasional poke in the eye, at least as long as it was only messaging. FDR presumably couldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or Voting Rights Act through. Actual substance would presumably have provoked a revolt of Southern Ds, but messaging they could tolerate.

That said, there was a black vote in at least some Southern states, even in 1944. In Louisiana, blacks, at least New Orleans blacks, were part of the coalition the Longs built. Even the Longs did not, however, do much about extending the black vote in rural Louisiana, presumably because that would have lost too much of the Bubba vote to make the extra black votes worthwhile. But in New Orleans, the only sizable anti-Long bastion, they needed as many votes as they could get, from wherever they could get them, and blacks were willing to vote against the local anti-Long machine because the local machine wasn’t giving them anything anyway. The Longs’ rural white voters didn’t seem to care about the Long machine trawling for black votes in New Orleans. New Orleans was Sin City, with all sorts of horrible things going on there that decent Protestant people found abhorrent. As long as their political machine didn’t give the local blacks any ideas, getting New Orleans blacks to vote Long was the least of the iniquities going on in Sin City.

I assume that’s why the Jim Crow car was allowed in this cartoon. The Ds were going after pockets of black voters throughout the country, but messaging only, no substance, so the Bubba part of their coalition didn’t mind the messaging. It helped them win and didn’t actually threaten white supremacy in the South..

If the South was still solid Democrat, then wouldn’t the battleground for national victory have been increasing the urban vote in the North and wouldn’t motivating the black vote resulting from the Great Migration have been a good play? Adam Clayton Powell Jr was elected to the House for the first time in this election.

@14 & 16 The labor march that A. Philip Randolph called off was in 1941. It was called off because of FDR’s Executive 8802 forbidding discrimination in employment by private defense industries having contracts with the federal government. This was right after Hitler’s invasion of Russia but more than six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor when the German declared war on the US..

Since there was still considerable prejudice among white workers the CIO launched an anti-racism campaign among its own union membership in which the Almanac Singers, of whom Woody Guthrie (a devotee of Joe Hill’s little red songbook), and Josh White were very active.

Here is an interesting link: http://wordsandimagesbycynthia.com/2014/09/11/interlude-extra-the-labor-canteen-eleanor-roosevelt-and-race-relations/

Joe Hill was referred to in Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag (1927) and featured as a legendary figure in Sandburg’s book-length poem “The People, Yes” (1936), which contained the line “Don’t mourn for me but organize.” During Popular Front era, the Communist Party USA and the CIO also appropriated Joe Hill in their union organizing activities.

Of course, those riding the Jim Crow car have to sit in the back of the train.

There’s the obligatory awful Japanese caricature, of course, not that that’s a distinction between the parties at the time (as far as I know).

There’s something charming about the Dewey train’s beat-down nature compared to the ultra-modern War Machine it races. Ironically, it’s been argued that one factor in Truman’s surprise victory over Dewey in the election after this one was that the Dewey team released a major newsreel advertisement for movie theaters, the Truman campaign threw one together at the last minute to match it, and Dewey’s came off as too slick by comparison to the more relatable Truman ad.

Many of the train’s cars are initially hard to parse, because the label alone doesn’t indicate “This is a plank in the Republican platform!” but rather “This paltry car represents the low level of Republican support for this thing”. For example, “Social Security” is represented by a presumably homeless man on a park bench, symbolizing “inadequate Social Security”, not “Social Security: Boo!”. From this, it occurred to me that the “Jim Crow car” has a weird plausible deniability if shown to racist voters: “You see, just like the ‘unemployment insurance’ is shown to be a bunch of apples, the ‘Jim Crow’ car is dilapidated because the segregationist policies of the Republicans are pathetic and won’t accomplish real segregation.” Okay, that’s a huge stretch on my part, but you do have to perform a kind of mental gymnastics to parse the iconography, in part because a huge element of today’s debate is about whether (for example) unemployment insurance is inherently a terrible thing that enables laziness or whatever. Thus, in a modern context, “My opponent’s train has a car devoted to the dole!” (Dole brand fruit!) could be an attack.

Relating to the Louisville editorial’s point and the irony of it (I mean, “our rivers are full of fish” is actually a substantive and verifiable assertion, unlike the content of today’s speeches): I was struck by how relatively-detailed this film was on economic policy, going so far as to describe the opponents’ positions and supporting arguments for those positions, albeit with bias and in a nightmare sequence. Today, the axis of discussion is pretty much “Less government” versus “Government is okay sometimes”. I guess neither party had anything like a libertarian mindset, so it was all about getting government to work properly, not about whether that’s possible.

An amusing moment at the end which almost seems like a Simpsons one-liner: Big business is offered a number of perks from Democratic policies, and small business is only offered “protection from big business”.

Why does the villain repeatedly blow smoke in the face of a man he wants to remain asleep? Is it some kind of soporific drug? I assume that smoke in my face would wake me up, but maybe it has the opposite effect, and night house fires are even more dangerous than I thought.

@22 “I was struck by how relatively-detailed this film was on economic policy, going so far as to describe the opponents’ positions and supporting arguments for those positions, albeit with bias and in a nightmare sequence. Today, the axis of discussion is pretty much “Less government” versus “Government is okay sometimes”. I guess neither party had anything like a libertarian mindset, so it was all about getting government to work properly, not about whether that’s possible.”

Indeed, lack of cynicism relative to today is very striking. Thank you John Holbo for posting this. I will just mention, for anyone who didn’t notice, that the words and music are respectively by Yip Harburg (lyricist of “Over the Rainbow”) and Earl Robinson (author of the song “Joe Hill”), both subsequently blacklisted.

Eric at 23: You did! That is, you blogged about and linked the cartoon here, without referring to it by title. That’s the post I was thinking of.

Eric at 23: You did!

That is a relief, of a kind.

Bruce: Ah, I hadn’t thought of the idiom. That makes sense.