2

TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS

Education and the Unfinished Project of American Social Democracy

On June 22, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more colloquially known as the GI Bill. The policy that most comprehensively reflected FDR’s social democratic vision during World War II, the GI Bill became law just six months after Roosevelt’s State of the Union address that January calling for an Economic Bill of Rights. The expansion of social democracy in the GI Bill, which went well beyond the cash payments of previous veterans’ programs, is illuminating. The law was passed in part to navigate the massive problem of integrating sixteen million veterans into a demobilizing economy in which there would be serious competition for jobs and housing. The intention, however, was also clearly to provide both economic security and additional economic opportunity for veterans.1 As the name suggests, the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act was premised on expanding security for male breadwinners, who in turn would provide for the women and children in their families. Further, the implementation of the GI Bill, which allowed southern white supremacists the discretion to deny full benefits to Black veterans, was also racially discriminatory, and the benefits accrued disproportionately to white families. Nonetheless, the social democracy of the New Deal and the two decades after World War II ushered in a time of rising expectations of greater social and economic rights for most working Americans. Policymakers, union leaders, and civil rights activists all sought new, sweeping possibilities: the right to a job, broad access to healthcare, and high-quality, truly universal public education.

After World War II, indeed, the expansion of the social safety net continued. These efforts included an expansive investment in housing in 1949 and an expansion of social security in several different amendments to the law in the 1950s. The overall project of American social democracy, however, was left unfinished. Despite the very real possibility of a meaningful jobs guarantee at the conclusion of World War II—what Senator Robert Wagner (New York) and other social democrats hoped could be Roosevelt’s final legacy—the full employment guarantee was stymied by Republicans and southern Democrats who would only consent to a watered-down version of the law.

This chapter highlights the place of education in this story. From its subordinate position in FDR’s Second Bill of Rights, public education would grow in the postwar years into an increasingly prominent aspect of the social democratic project. When policymakers from the state to the federal level talked about education in this era, they increasingly connected it to the idea of economic “opportunity.” The use of the word opportunity to describe education has a long history in the United States. Advocates of enhanced state funding to smooth over unequal local spending invoked the terminology of “equal educational opportunity” in the 1910s and 1920s, for instance. But “opportunity” in that language referred to a broader view that included both greater economic reward and greater democratic citizenship.2

The GI Bill represented the harbinger of a policy shift toward a more conscious embrace of the link between education and economic opportunity. Though the law included many economic guarantees—all as compensation for servicemen’s contribution to the war effort—we mainly remember the GI Bill as the first major federal foray into public education in the post–New Deal era. In addition to preventing returning GI’s from flooding the labor market (a reminder that the federal government’s focus on economic security prominently featured jobs), the authors of the bill also recognized the growing complexity of American society and workers’ needs for more education.3 The GI Bill, importantly, was also constructed to fund veterans’ higher education or job training just about anywhere they chose, ensuring a wide range of economic opportunity through access to new capabilities.

Still, as the ideals set forth by Harry Truman’s President’s Commission on Higher Education (1949) show, support for the civic and political capability of public education played a major role in policymakers’ arguments for expanding access to education too. The advance of this notion continued in the 1950s. Indeed, it is illuminating that Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court decision that gave the death blow to the notion of “separate but equal,” revolved around both political capability and equal economic “opportunity” in public education. The robust set of economic rights FDR envisioned in 1944, especially the right to a job and the right to healthcare, were not to be. This failure, occurring at the same time Americans increasingly viewed education in terms of economic opportunity, set an important precondition for the rise of the education myth. Later, reform-oriented political figures, especially Democrats, could argue that opportunity through education would do what the unfinished project of New Deal–era social democracy had failed to do: ensure all Americans had a chance at economic security.

Self-Evident Economic Truths

In his State of the Union address on January 11, 1944, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed a “Second Bill of Rights,” representing the culminating moment of the administration’s vision for a robust social democracy. There has been so much written about the legacy of the New Deal and the Roosevelt administration at this point that it can be difficult to grasp just how revolutionary the years from 1933 to 1945 were. But the New Deal represented the political ascent of decades of efforts by working people and middle-class reformers to deal with the class conflict and widespread poverty brought on by industrial capitalism. Indeed, in the 1920s and 1930s, and especially after the onset of the Great Depression, the key efforts to expand American social democracy revolved around industrial democracy and economic security. These were driven by the efforts of working people to organize, and workers fought for these aspirations more than they sought increased opportunity through access to education.4

Though the early years of Roosevelt’s presidency focused on an assortment of measures to stop the nation’s economic chaos, by 1935, the New Deal found a firm and coherent reform footing, seeking to discipline the power of the wealthy, using Keynesian stimulus to build broad consumer demand in the economy, and empowering workers to build democracy in the workplace.5 FDR signed into law numerous policies ensuring meaningful economic rights: for working people to form unions and collectively bargain, a guaranteed minimum wage, and provisions for old age and poverty. Examining the Wagner Act (1935) shows just how dramatic the departure was. In fact, the law pointed out that collective bargaining rights were essential for the nation’s economic security:

The inequality of bargaining power between employees who do not possess full freedom of association or actual liberty of contract and employers who are organized in the corporate or other forms of ownership association substantially burdens and affects the flow of commerce, and tends to aggravate recurrent business depressions, by depressing wage rates and the purchasing power of wage earners in industry and by preventing the stabilization of competitive wage rates and working conditions within and between industries.

Further, by deeming it an “unfair labor practice” to fire a worker who was involved in organizing a union, the law tacitly asserted that workers had a right to their job.6

Finally, if not a consensus, powerful forces in the Roosevelt administration advanced the idea that every American should enjoy the right a job: the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) under Harry Hopkins as early as 1934 sought to directly create jobs for the unemployed and worked from the assumption that every American deserved a job. The Works Progress Administration (WPA), created in 1935 and also administered by Hopkins, dramatically reduced unemployment and created a growing bloc of congressional representatives who supported the notion that government take an active role in ensuring Americans had jobs.7 By the early 1940s, the National Resources Planning Board (NRPB), an institution within the executive branch, articulated perhaps the single most coherent call for a postwar social democracy that would guarantee full employment, economic prosperity, and a generous social safety net.8

The version of social democracy advanced in the 1930s and 1940s had its limits. To push legislation through a Congress in which southern Democrats held key committees, the administration had to accommodate Jim Crow, leaving out domestic and agricultural workers from the Social Security Act, for instance, and implementing housing programs through New Deal agencies like the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in ways that severely disadvantaged African American workers. It is also the case, however, that most African American voters enthusiastically supported the New Deal, as the programs offered direct employment to Black workers and from the election of 1936 on, African Americans overwhelmingly voted Democrat.9

Indeed, the social democratic achievements of the 1930s widened the expectations of many policymakers, union leaders, and civil rights activists for broader economic rights. By 1944, Roosevelt, under attack from reactionary Republicans and southern Democrats, sought to deepen the state’s commitment to economic security for all Americans by connecting it to national service during wartime. This second—economic—bill of rights, he hoped, would build on earlier advances to reinvigorate the social democratic trajectory of the United States.

Why were these new rights necessary? Because, FDR argued, as “our industrial economy expanded,” the original constitutional rights alone “proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.” After a decade of reforms to make working Americans more economically secure, the president argued that “these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident.”10

As FDR’s call for a Second Bill of Rights indicates, the New Deal was a project designed to strengthen the fabric of American democracy. As had been Jefferson’s vision of a nation in which every white family enjoyed economic independence, and as Lincoln sought a nation in which slavery was eradicated so all Americans could enjoy the fruits of their labor, so too did Roosevelt project a stronger nation of American citizens who could, having their needs met, pursue happiness.

FDR clearly saw public education as part of the project of strengthening American democracy. As he put it in an address to the NEA in 1938, “The only real capital of a nation is its natural resources and its human beings. So long as we take care of and make the most of both of them, we shall survive as a strong nation, a successful nation and a progressive nation—whether or not the bookkeepers say other kinds of budgets are from time to time out of balance.” Though he invoked the words human capital, he used this term in a very different form than it would be used later by economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker: “No nation can meet this changing world unless its people, individually and collectively, grow in ability to understand and handle the new knowledge as applied to increasingly intricate human relationships. That is why the teachers of America are the ultimate guardians of the human capital of America, the assets which must be made to pay social dividends if democracy is to survive.”11

The GI Bill: Security and Opportunity

Roosevelt, as early as December 1941, called for vocational education for returning veterans, and the administration had authored a modest version of a bill to provide employment and education to returning veterans in 1943. The version was limited, however, because FDR sought to expand economic security for everyone, not just GIs. His call for the right to a job, universal healthcare, and other rights in the January 1944 speech was accompanied by the call to make every worker part of the war effort by drafting them into national service.

Roosevelt’s broader push for economic democracy was stymied by conservative opposition, however, and Congress instead passed a comprehensive GI Bill that would only serve military veterans. This push came from the American Legion, which had been publicizing the struggles of veterans returning from combat.12 The legion, a historically conservative force in the United States opposed to radicalism, got to work drafting for Congress a capacious set of benefits in late 1943.13 Conferring with representatives from the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), Association of Land Grant Colleges, the NEA, and the American Council of Education (ACE), a committee led by the legion’s former national commander, Harry Colmery, put together a bill by the end of the year. The legion sought primarily to compensate GI’s for the interruption of their livelihoods by service in the war.

Thus, while FDR’s comprehensive call for social democracy did not gain traction in Congress, a more robust version of his veterans’ policy—what historian Harvey Kaye has called “history-making”—garnered support even from Republicans and southern Democrats, particularly after the legion’s grassroots efforts to push legislators in both houses to pass the bill, and Roosevelt signed it into law.14 The GI Bill ultimately provided veterans the right to reemployment if they gave up a job to serve, unemployment compensation, education, and loan guarantees for homes and farms. In its provisions, one can clearly see a more limited version of the Second Bill of Rights. Indeed, the bill was popularly understood as a set of rights, too. As a 1944 Veteran’s Guide to the GI Bill put it, veterans were “entitled” to loans for housing, farms, and business; reemployment; education; life insurance; and tax relief.15

And, in fact, the new guarantees reached a massive number of Americans. Within a decade, about four million Americans had used the home loan provisions either under the GI Bill or other housing programs that survived, likely because of the GI Bill, to serve nonveterans.16 Further, just as it had been in FDR’s proposed Second Bill of Rights, the GI Bill’s provision of education was only one aspect of a broader program to help servicemen. The rationale for providing it stemmed in part from the idea that education could help soldiers adjust psychologically both to the military and to life after the military, as well as strengthen the civic and political capability of veterans.17 The public provision of education, then, was widely understood as helping veterans to return to secure lives, not simply as vocational training.

Much of the congressional floor debate in 1944, in fact, revolved around jobs and pay for veterans as the legislature’s most important priorities, not education or training. In January 1944, for example, Representative Philip Philbin (D-MA) pointed to the broad intervention necessary to ensure returning veterans didn’t face economic insecurity: “The best repayment we can give to these boys is to arrange our national economy so that when this war is over they will return to a nation . . . where they can obtain jobs at decent wages under the same system of free enterprise they left behind, which will permit them to enjoy in a fair, just and generous measure the benefits of democracy and freedom.”18 When Representative Marion Bennett, a Republican from the World War Veterans’ Legislation Committee, reported the bill to the floor on June 15, a short paragraph on education was buried between descriptions of the GI Bill’s sections on medical care; insurance; mustering out pay; burial allowance; farm, home and business ownership; and unemployment compensation.19 Representative Dean Gillespie, highlighting the broad system of social supports for veterans, framed the GI Bill around both security and opportunity: “[Our veterans] will come home with a sense of security and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in a Nation of opportunity and private enterprise.”20 Given the wider purchase of social democracy at the time, it was fitting that Gillespie was a Republican.

Congressional proponents believed supporting higher education was important, but, clearly, they viewed it as an opportunity—for both the individual and perhaps for the nation—that represented something extra, but not required for a job. For example, a statement from Representative Joseph O’Hara (R-MN) in January 1944, cited his own experience to point out that “I was one of these who had to finish college training after the last war. I had a year of college left to complete my course, and if someone had come along and offered me a good job at $1000 a month the chances are I would have taken than job and never finished my professional education.”21 The implication was that if veterans legislation only ensured jobs, many GI’s would not seek opportunities beyond that. Representative Samuel Weiss (D-PA) spoke in support of the GI Bill just as it came out of conference committee, “The major concern and the principal thought of all our gallant fighting sons is. . . . Will I get my job back? Will the country soon forget me and fail to get me employment? While looking for work, will my Government tide me over so that I will not be required to sell apples or seek relief?” Weiss did mention education, but he argued it was an additional opportunity, not necessary for the expectation of an economic livelihood.22

The massive funding for higher education in the GI Bill was not the primary locus for veterans to access economic security, but it nonetheless provided millions of new opportunities, both in economic and civic life. Modeled loosely on a Wisconsin law passed in 1919 that provided World War I veterans thirty dollars a month to attend any nonprofit high school, college, or university in the state, the education component of the GI Bill was more robust than competing bills. The GI Bill guaranteed up to four years of education for most returning veterans, while the initial White House proposal would have guaranteed most veterans only a year’s worth of vocational training.23

The expansion of access to higher education under the GI Bill was profound. Eight million American veterans (of either WWII or the Korean War) accessed higher education with funding provided by the bill. Though the benefits went to some men who would have gone to college regardless, the new funds played a major role in expanding access to higher education for those from working-class families who would likely not have been able to afford to go.24 As political scientist Suzanne Mettler puts it: “To appreciate the scope of the GI Bill’s influence, we must consider that among men born in the United States in the 1920s . . . fully 80 percent were military veterans. And unlike veterans of the Vietnam War and today’s all-volunteer force, they were broadly representative of the general male population.”25

Funding higher education through the choices of individual GIs, rather than by only allowing access to specific institutions, opened up more space for the argument that education facilitated individual opportunity. A competing bill debated in Congress in May 1944, for instance, proposed to provide higher education only to those who, with the consent of university educators, had concrete plans that met the greater needs of American society. Though unemployment and reemployment provisions and housing spoke to security, the push to allow veterans to decide where to access their education, in contrast, enhanced the notion that education equated to an opportunity that veterans were best able to determine how to use. And, this structure of paying for higher education became the model for later expansions of access with the Higher Education Act of 1965 and its amendments, which would also build consent for the notion of education as economic opportunity. Further, the generous benefits of the GI Bill (including up to five hundred dollars a year in tuition and living stipends that increased if the veteran had a family) and the relatively low tuition at most universities meant that GI’s, practically speaking, could go to just about any college or university.26 Finally, the GI Bill’s partial focus on vocation—the VA also pushed campuses to engage students in vocational counseling, and millions accessed vocational training—forced campus administrators and students to think more carefully about the link between postsecondary education and job training.27

There were clear limits to this expansion of higher education, however. Most obviously, the fact that the GI Bill was framed around military service limited the benefits, mostly, to men, though the 2 percent of those who served who were women were eligible.28 In this respect, the GI Bill represented the preeminent manifestation of that fact that New Deal era social democracy had been built on a model that put male breadwinners at its center. Building on the broader sweep of American history that had put men at the center of public life and viewed women’s economic contributions as invisible, women, whether they worked or not, were characterized as dependent. The majority of workers forming unions in the wake of the Wagner Act were men, and the construction of Social Security—which allowed single women to claim benefits for “dependent” children but not single men—reinforced gender roles that privileged men as the focal point for growing economic security.29 The GI Bill did the same, as one historian has argued, forcing women in postwar America “into new dependencies that limited their life options.”30

Further, the color-blind nature of the GI Bill allowed African American veterans to benefit from its education provisions, but profoundly less so than white GIs. Forty-nine percent of nonwhite veterans, compared to 43 percent of white veterans, used the education and training benefits of the GI Bill by 1950, including 56 percent of nonwhite veterans in the South. Black GIs were less likely to attend college, however (just 12 percent compared to 28 percent for white GIs).31 Part of this discrepancy resulted from the fact that African Americans had disproportionately been unable to complete high school; more important, however, was the construction of the GI Bill. Essential to garnering the support of powerful southern racists like Mississippi Democrat John Rankin, the final version of the bill allowed local centers of the VA to administer education benefits. Racist administrators kept Blacks in the South from accessing the better resourced, all-white institutions.32 Though African Americans outside the South could, theoretically, attend integrated institutions, Blacks in the South (the vast majority of Blacks who used GI Bill funds), could only access segregated institutions, and these institutions were hampered by extremely low budgets and even more overcrowding than white institutions that had expanded access after World War II.33 As sociologist Ira Katznelson has persuasively argued, “On balance, despite the assistance that black soldiers received, there was no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill.”34

The Right to a Job?

Although there were many who were against it, the idea that all Americans had the right to an economic livelihood assumed wide purchase during the Roosevelt years. While it is often forgotten in discussions about the GI Bill, veterans’ publications made clear that the law gave them the right to return to their job after service.35 Economic planners, both in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, pushed for meaningful policy changes that would guarantee good jobs for everyone, not just GIs. So too did social democrats in Congress. Indeed, throughout 1945 and into 1946, Congress debated a proposed full employment bill that would have effectively established the right to a job for all Americans.

Led by Keynesian New Dealers, the push for full employment came from several different directions. In addition to Harry Hopkins, the WPA, and the National Resources Planning Board, proponents included economists such as Alvin Hansen (who collaborated with the NRPB), the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the National Farmers Union (NFU), whose leadership saw the interests of farmers as intertwined with the overall fate of the national economy. Even some prominent Republicans supported the idea. As GOP presidential candidate Thomas Dewey put it in September 1944: “If at any time there are not sufficient jobs in private enterprise to go around, the government can and must create job opportunities, because there must be jobs for all in this country of ours.”36

Based on a proposal by the NFU and introduced by Senator James Murray (D-MT), the original draft of the Full Employment Act of 1945 established the right to a livelihood for every adult. Indeed, the bill introduced in 1945 mobilized FDR’s language in the Economic Bill of Rights, asserting in its opening paragraph “that every American able to work and willing to work has the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries, or shops, or offices, or farms, or mines of the nation.”

Unfortunately, the bill was heavily influenced by Leon Keyserling, a Keynesian cool on the idea of the federal government directly employing workers in need of a job. Keyserling, an economist on the staff of Senator Robert Wagner who played a major role in drafting both the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, turned away from the popular legacy of the WPA, as did other social democrats involved in drafting the bill who believed directly guaranteeing a job would make it more difficult to circumvent conservative opposition. This turn of events was unfortunate, since more than 75 percent of Americans at the time believed the government should function as employer of last resort.37 Instead, the 1945 Senate bill charged the president with ensuring the federal government filled whatever gaps were left by the private sector in job creation: not literally guaranteeing everyone a job, but, even so, making certain the state would ensure everyone’s right to a livelihood through economic planning.

Twelve days of committee hearings sandwiched around the Japanese surrender to the Allied forces in the summer of 1945 brought a forceful case for ensuring full employment. Senator Wagner led congressional hearings on the bill in 1945 for the Committee on Banking and Currency. Wagner, who had authored the National Labor Relations Act and been integrally involved with the construction of the Social Security Act, introduced discussion of the bill by remarking, without hyperbole, “We meet to consider what I profoundly believe to be as important a proposal as any before the Congress within my memory.” While some policy-makers quibbled about the definition of “full employment,” Wagner asserted it could be defined easily: “The right to work is synonymous with the inalienable right to live. . . . Society was organized to enlarge the scope of that right and to increase the fruits of its exercise. . . . Whomever believes in this right to work, believes in it for every adult who is looking for an honest job at decent pay, must believe in full employment.” Drawing on the experience of the nation during the Depression, Wagner believed the government was responsible for ensuring jobs for everyone.38

Though not without opposition,39 the bill attracted a broad array of constituencies who supported a government guarantee of full employment in the Senate hearings. Bishop Bernard Sheil, director of the Catholic Youth Organization in Chicago, pointed out: “It is not enough to say that all men are created equal, with equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Citing Pope Leo XIII, Sheil stated, “[If] private industry is unable to afford men the opportunity of a decent and honorable living, government is bound by its very nature to employ all its resources to secure all citizens this essential right to work.”40

While pointing to some of the dramatic inequalities that still existed in the labor market, NAACP secretary Walter White testified that the wartime economy and federal nondiscrimination policy had already brought much more economic security for African Americans. “It is tragic,” White asserted, “that it took the catastrophe of war to give the Negro for the first time in his more than three centuries in America an opportunity to earn a decent living.” But White urged the Full Employment Act to be passed, arguing it would “clearly establish the responsibility of the Federal Government for guaranteeing an economic bill of rights to all Americans.” Indeed, White also urged the government to pass other planks of FDR’s bill of rights such as a national housing guarantee and an expansion of social security.41

Paul Hoffman, president of the Studebaker Corporation and chairman of the Committee for Economic Development, also argued for the right to a job. The Keynesian businessman made the logical argument that “the recognition that the principal role of the Federal Government in our free economy is that of a policy maker takes us only a short distance toward the answer to our question of the responsibility of the Federal Government for employment.”42 Francis Brown, a representative from ACE, also testified in the Senate. He pointed out that “the problems of youth and youth employment and the problems of higher education are inextricably involved in the solution of the problem of full employment.” Full employment would require “training at all levels,” according to Brown, which meant universities could both provide that training and advance the state of knowledge in the nation. Finally, he argued, there was a clear link between full employment and funding for higher education: “Economic crises and unemployment mean the diversion of public funds from education to meet more urgent immediate demands for relief and unemployment compensation.”43 Brown thus argued that the right to a job would augment the nation’s human capital stock, even if the term human capital was not yet in employ. But the causal relationship in Brown’s logic is important: broad economic security would facilitate the development of new skills for working people, not the other way around.

Senator Murray, the NFU, and others embarked on an immense public relations campaign in support of the Senate’s version of an employment guarantee. The Union for Democratic Action (later the Americans for Democratic Action) led the charge, receiving support from a range of constituencies, including the AFL, CIO, Businessmen of America Inc. (a liberal small business association), the YWCA, the NAACP, and the National Women’s Trade Union League.44 President Truman also forcefully supported the bill. In an address to Congress in September 1945, for example, the new president outlined his notion of a “fair deal” which centrally included “a national reassertion of the right to work for every American citizen able and willing to work—a declaration of the ultimate duty of Government to use its resources if all other measures should fail to prevent sustained unemployment.”45

Despite some minor amendments, the bill sailed through the Senate in late September 1945 by the overwhelming margin of 71–10. Conservative forces like the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Farm Bureau mobilized against the bill, however, as it made its way to the House, where they sought to eviscerate it of any meaningful obligation on the part of the federal government to ensure full employment. The bill’s opponents feared the growth of labor’s bargaining power if there were no longer a reserve army of unemployed workers, and they also feared the growth of the state, which they believed might someday develop industries to compete with the private sector in order to fulfill a jobs promise.46 In the House hearings, for instance, one key spokesperson for business argued that “the Bill should be purged of its remaining vestiges of the right-to-a-job idea, its qualified but still persistent reliance on Government spending as a panacea, and the surviving remnants of its mandate for long-range fiscal-year forecasting.”47

Ultimately, the critics succeeded in watering it down significantly. Though the more robust bill had made it through the Senate without many modifications, it was critically weakened in the House Committee on Expenditures in Executive Departments. President Truman vigorously pushed for the guarantees of the Senate when the two bills were in conference reconciliation, but the House version won out. The name change—from the Full Employment Act of 1945 to the Employment Act of 1946—evoked the much weaker version of the law’s jobs promise.

The Employment Act of 1946 left the federal government with the highly qualified responsibility to “to promote maximum employment, production, and purchasing power.” The law basically created a process for establishing macroeconomic goals: The Council of Economic Advisors (CEA), to be appointed by the president, was responsible for developing an annual report, on which Congress would hold hearings. The CEA would publish a final revised report, and Congress and the president could then use the material to legislate.48 The fight for the right to a job was by no means dead, but the limited nature of the Employment Act of 1946 significantly constricted future social democratic possibilities.49

Though the right to a job was not to be, the dramatic growth of unions in this era encouraged workers to use collective bargaining to carve out something resembling FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. The Wagner Act ushered in the expectation that workers enjoyed the right, or even obligation, to organize, and wartime policy—in which workers were automatically enrolled in their union in exchange for unions’ agreement not to strike—expanded membership even more. The number of workers in unions exploded in the 1930s and 1940s, from three million members in 1935 to ten million by the end of 1941 and to fourteen million, more than one-third of the nonagricultural workforce, by the end of the war.50

Unions sought a secure share for workers of what the abundant American economy produced. The best example of this effort is the militance of Walter Reuther and the United Auto Workers (UAW), one of the most social democratic unions in the United States at the time. Soon to be president of the union, Reuther in 1945 had vigorously supported the full employment bill. In a letter to Wagner, he asserted that “the Government must coordinate and direct the overall basic planning which is necessary to successfully convert our war economy to peace production with a minimum of unemployment, and it must continue in this role once conversion takes place.” While Reuther also asked that more labor standards be included in the bill, he enthusiastically endorsed the notion of a “right to useful, remunerative, regular, and full-time employment.”51

In a strike of General Motors in 1945–46, in fact, Reuther and the auto workers sought similar guarantees through collective bargaining. In the walkout, the UAW asked for a 30 percent wage increase while pushing GM to maintain the sale price of their cars, thus arguing for an even greater share of what was being produced. Though the UAW was unable to win these conditions (they won a modest pay increase instead) the union went on to negotiate what observers called the “Treaty of Detroit” in 1950: a collective bargaining agreement in which workers automatically received wage increases to cover rising cost of living and for increases in productivity over the life of the contract in addition to health insurance and a pension in exchange for labor peace. As one historian explains it: “Quickly spreading to much of unionized heavy industry, the Treaty of Detroit proved a milestone from which there was no turning back.”52 Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, organized workers built on the growing power of labor to negotiate much of the economic security FDR called for in the Second Bill of Rights: health insurance, retirement, job security (through seniority policies), and increased time for leisure. Nonunionized employers were forced to offer workers similar benefits to limit worker attrition or to avoid unions in their workplace.

It is true that these benefits accrued disproportionately to white, male, blue-collar workers, and that they privileged male breadwinners in what Gabriel Winant calls the “insulated pools of economic security” created in unionized heavy industry in the 1950s.53 The incremental increases, nonetheless, revolutionized the lives of millions of working people. As Jack Metzgar argues in his powerful meditation on how his father’s more secure livelihood changed his family’s future , Striking Steel:

The perception of remembrance of the 1950s as a time of repressive conformism and spiritless materialism . . . did not relate to us. . . . All the discretion that the foremen and the company were losing was flowing right into our home. There were choices. There were prospects. There were possibilities. Few of these had been there before. Now they were. And because they came slowly, year by year, contract by contract, strike by bitter strike, they gave a lilting, liberating feeling to life—a sense that no matter what was wrong today, it could be changed it could get better—in fact, by the late 1950s, that it was quite likely that it would get better. . . . If what we lived through in the 1950s was not liberation, then liberation never happens in real human lives.54

Wisconsin represented an exemplar of these trends. The state had been a pioneer in social democracy in the early twentieth century. Built on the Wisconsin Idea—that expert knowledge could inform a more democratic politics and Progressive government programs—the state was the first in the nation to pass worker’s compensation (1911) and, in 1932, was the first to provide unemployment insurance. Wisconsin intellectuals like the economists John Commons and Edwin Witte informed national policies, and the Social Security Act in 1935 was influenced by the Wisconsin law.55 Further, the state passed a jobs program for unemployed workers under Governor Phillip La Follette in 1931, as well as labor legislation in 1937 (the Wisconsin Labor Relations Act, also known as Wisconsin’s “Little Wagner Act”) that established the Wisconsin Labor Relations Board, limited employers’ efforts to break unions, and compelled employers to bargain with certified unions. New organizing efforts flowered across the state, such as at the General Motors plant in Janesville, and workers flocked into unions. Though a conservative legislature set new restrictions on workers’ rights in 1939, workers joined unions in huge numbers in Wisconsin in the 1940s. Union membership exploded from under 20,000 in 1935 to over 250,000 by 1960. In 1959, Wisconsin was the first state to ensure public employees had collective bargaining rights, and by 1974, Wisconsin was fifteenth out of the fifty states in unionization rate, with about 32 percent of its workers covered by collectively bargained contracts.56

The Expansion of Educational Opportunity—for Democracy and Citizenship

The rising standard of living, the overall prosperity of the postwar era, and the growth of more white-collar professions (including a tremendous increase in teachers), led more and more young Americans to continue their education longer than previous generations. Public investment in schooling, at all levels, exploded in the 1950s and beyond, and the average level of education increased dramatically. American attendance in high school, already on the increase before World War II, continued its ascent. The national high school enrollment rate grew from around 50 percent in the 1930s to 80 percent by 1955 and the graduation rate rose from about 40 percent to about 65 percent over the same period.57

College enrollments similarly grew. In addition to the GI Bill funds that expanded access, states significantly expanded funding for higher education too.58 Outside the South, state governments had already begun investing more money on higher education before World War II: state and local spending on higher education, as a percentage of total budgets, doubled in the first four decades of the twentieth century.59 These increases continued into the postwar era: total spending on higher education by state and local governments exploded from about $250 million in 1945 to over $500 million just five years later and to $3.2 billion by 1965. Though federal investment in public education, in part the result of the Cold War competition for technological supremacy, accounted for a sizable portion of the increase, the vast majority came from state governments. As a percentage of total funding on higher education in the United States, state spending climbed from 19 percent to almost 21 percent and then 23 percent over the same time period.60 Though GI Bill investment had disproportionately offered education to men (college graduation rates for males born in the mid-1920s were double those for women in the same cohort), broader investment in higher education brought many more women into higher education by the 1950s with huge increases in access to college beginning with the generation of women born in the mid-1930s.61

It is important to point out that this expansion occurred simultaneously with the growth of blue-collar livelihoods. While the lives of Jack Metzgar’s parents were getting better, for example, so were the educational opportunities for both their son and daughter, the former who went on to college and became a history professor. Thus, while American social democracy persisted in a much more limited manner than what FDR had envisioned in its most comprehensive form, the dramatic increase in public support for education continued as one aspect in a broader program of facilitating both economic security and opportunity.

Further, many policymakers understood education as doing more than serving the purpose of developing skills for the job market, and in fact, yoked the expansion of postsecondary study to the development of the civic capabilities of Americans. The quintessential example of this vision is the President’s Commission on Higher Education created by President Truman in 1947. In the late 1940s, as Truman’s charge to the commission made clear, the nation’s higher education system was at a crossroads. Indeed, the GI Bill and the dramatic expansion of access had begun to strain the resources of universities. Appointing George Zook, president of ACE, as chairperson,62 Truman suggested the commission study the questions of how to expand educational opportunity “for all able young people,” the “adequacy of curriculum, particularly in the fields of international affairs and social understanding,” the possibility of more technical institutes in the United States, and the expansion of funding for new facilities.63 In fact, at the very time Truman called for economic security in the form of a jobs guarantee and national health insurance, he also clearly viewed education as both a social and economic opportunity to be layered on top of the security blanket.

After months of analyzing American higher education, the commission ultimately made the case that colleges and universities were most important for their role in building a strong democracy in the tumultuous international Cold War climate in which the United States had emerged as a leader. The complexity of American political economy, the report asserted, “has made a broader understanding of social processes and problems essential for effective living.” Philosopher Horace Kallen, famous for his work on cultural pluralism, served on the commission. Therefore, it was not surprising that the report also included a call for higher education to help build national unity. “We undertake to effect democratic reconciliation,” the report argued, “so as to make the national life one continuous process of interpersonal, intervocational, and intercultural cooperation.” In addition, the heightened role of the United States in international politics required “a knowledge of other peoples—of their political and economic systems, their social and cultural institutions—as has not been hitherto so urgent.” Finally, growing fears of nuclear annihilation had “deepened and broadened the responsibilities of higher education for anticipating and preparing for the social and economic changes that will come with the application of atomic energy to industrial uses.”64

In sum, the report eschewed the argument that public education served to enhance the skills of workers in any narrow sense. Instead, the new skills to come from higher education would help ensure a more secure workforce that could make sense of their rapidly changing nation and its place in the world. Indeed, the ultimate goal, moving forward, for US higher education was to advance

Education for a fuller realization of democracy in every phase of living.

Education directly and explicitly for international understanding and cooperation.

Education for the application of creative imagination and trained intelligence to the solution of social problems and to the administration of public affairs.

Not only did the report argue that college students must study democracy, but that the very way universities were administered should be restructured because “democracy must be lived to be thoroughly understood.”65

The commission called for substantial investment—in materials, research, and instructors—to achieve these goals. Pointing out that total investment in education in 1947 (even with the GI Bill) was only 0.5 percent of gross national product, the report asserted the nation’s failure to fund education was “indefensible in a society so richly endowed with material resources as our own. We cannot allow so many of our people to remain so ill equipped either as human beings or as citizens of a democracy.” In fact, the report even took issue with the argument that individual economic opportunity represented education’s purpose: “All too often the benefits of education have been sought and used for personal and private profit, to the neglect of public and social service. . . . The democratic way of life can endure only as private careers and social obligations are made to mesh, as personal ambition is reconciled with public responsibility.”66

Pointing to the number of Americans, who because of race, region, or rural upbringing lacked education, the report asserted that “these conditions mean that millions of youth are being denied their just right to an adequate education. The accident of being born in one place rather than another ought not to affect so profoundly a young person’s chance of getting an education commensurate with his native capacities.” In addition to calling for a minimum high school degree for all Americans, the report also recommended two years of tuition-free education at all public universities in order to double the number of Americans in higher education within just a few years.67 This argument took as its the premise, though certainly in a much more inclusive version, Jefferson’s notion that the government should use public education to ensure Americans had every opportunity to develop their own social capacities.

In fact, Truman’s Higher Education Commission, combined with the president’s Commission on Civil Rights (which also released its report in 1947), helped to elevate the century-long efforts of civil rights activists to ensure equality in higher education for African Americans. The Civil Rights Commission, like the Higher Education Commission, forcefully argued that all citizens—not just those who had contributed military service, as in the GI Bill—deserved the right to higher education.68

It is no surprise, then, given the significant increase in the importance policymakers placed on education in the 1940s and 1950s, that one of the most important federal landmarks in the struggle against segregation occurred in that realm. The Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) decision clearly addressed racial inequality in schools in the United States after World War II. As the Truman Commission on Higher Education pointed to the necessity of using the higher education system to enhance American democracy, the antidemocratic nature of American apartheid was glaring. Brown v. Board represented the culmination of decades of efforts by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund attorneys (most prominently Thurgood Marshall) to highlight the unequal nature of segregation. Particularly important had been Sweatt v. Painter (1946), a lawsuit that sought redress of the stark disparity between the educational opportunity at the University of Texas’s all-white law school and the inferior all-Black law school the state created to maintain segregation. Further, the provisions of the GI Bill accessed by African Americans directly impacted the demand to eliminate segregation, as GI Bill recipients were disproportionately active in confrontational civil rights activism in the 1950s and 1960s.69

The Brown decision ruled that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” It is worth pointing out why an education case represented the Warren court’s primary avenue for dismantling the doctrine of “separate but equal.” Indeed, the relatively short decision commenced by highlighting the state of public education in 1954. When the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified in 1868, the court pointed out, public education, even in the North, was “rudimentary.” But conditions had changed by the 1950s, and the court argued it must “consider public education in the light of its full development and its present place in American life throughout the Nation.” And, clearly, education had grown in the postwar era to a place of utmost importance. In fact, it was integral to American democracy itself. “Today,” the decision argued,

education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.70

The message could not have been clearer in its argument for why a good education was essential, and as had been the case with the Truman Commission on Higher Education report, facilitating human capital was not primarily why education was important. On the contrary, the court mostly zeroed in on why education was crucial in teaching democratic citizenship in a more complicated postwar environment. When Brown v. Board mentioned professional training, the court talked about opportunity in a broader sense than merely the economic.

Still, in its focus on individual adjustment and opportunity—particularly the notion that “it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education”—the court decision did highlight a transition. Whereas the GI Bill and FDR’s Second Bill of Rights had framed education in the context of a broader expanse of economic security, the Brown decision had begun to assert the growing necessity of education in access to economic mobility, even if the discussion of the labor market was implied more than expressed.71

Great Expectations

In the 1930s and 1940s, the New Deal brought nation-changing advances in social democracy. Though labor rights, social security, and other government supports allowed greater numbers of Americans to access good jobs, healthcare, and decent housing, none of these were fully institutionalized as “rights.” Only public education reached even that rhetorical level, as civil rights activists successfully pushed the nation to guarantee, at least in theory, a comparable education for every American child. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society would usher in the last important expansion of American social democracy. Though the Democrat’s agenda in the 1960s prioritized limited expansions of economic security, it also advanced a greater argument for economic opportunity that sowed the seeds of the education myth. Many of the assumptions around government interventions like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, for example, focused on the notion that poor people, particularly African Americans, needed to overcome their individual deficiencies. Schools would thus give them the “equal educational opportunity” to succeed on their own, in spite of other structural limitations they might face in accessing good jobs.