The Political Compromise: Relying on the Dixiecrats

 

The Political Compromise: Relying on the Dixiecrats

​To pass his economic agenda through Congress, FDR was forced to navigate the complex dynamics of his own party. The Democratic coalition of the 1930s included northern liberals, urban unions, and conservative Southern segregationists, often referred to as "Dixiecrats."

​Because African Americans in the South were widely disenfranchised through poll taxes and voter suppression, Southern white politicians won reelection indefinitely. Under congressional rules, their long tenures earned them control over key leadership posts, including the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee.

​With effective veto power over all federal legislation, Southern committee chairs demanded that New Deal programs protect the Southern racial caste system and maintain access to cheap agricultural labor. To secure their votes, the Roosevelt administration accepted major concessions that excluded Black workers from federal protections.

​The Agricultural Adjustment Act and Mass Evictions

​The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 aimed to boost falling crop prices by paying landholders to reduce overall agricultural production and leave acreage fallow. In practice, the structure of the policy incentivized the removal of Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers:

• ​Financial Subsidies Directed to Landowners: Federal checks were sent directly to white landholders, who were legally expected to share payments with their Black sharecroppers. Instead, many landowners kept the funds or reclassified tenant farmers as low-wage laborers to bypass the requirement.
• ​Widespread Displacements: With less acreage under active cultivation, landholders needed significantly less labor. Between 1930 and 1940, over 100,000 Black sharecroppers and tenant farmers were evicted from Southern farmland.
• ​Discriminatory Local Administration: To satisfy Southern lawmakers, the federal government placed local county committees in charge of distributing AAA benefits and credit. Controlled almost exclusively by white landowners, these committees routinely denied Black farmers access to low-interest government loans and relief.

​Exclusion from the New Deal Safety Net

​To prevent federal standards from setting a floor for labor costs in the South, Southern lawmakers insisted that core safety-net legislation explicitly omit key occupations:

• ​The Social Security Act of 1935: By excluding agricultural laborers and domestic workers—the two occupations encompassing over 60 percent of the Black workforce nationwide—millions of Black Americans were cut off from old-age pensions and unemployment safety nets.
• ​The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938: Established national standards for minimum wage and maximum workweeks, but explicitly exempted agricultural and domestic workers.
• ​The Wagner Act of 1935: Granted workers the right to organize unions and bargain collectively, but excluded farm labor, leaving Black agricultural workers without legal protections against unfair employment practices.

​Federal civil rights protections were similarly set aside. When the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill was introduced in 1934 to make mob violence a federal crime, Southern senators threatened to block all pending New Deal legislation. FDR declined to endorse the bill, prioritizing legislative progress on economic recovery over federal intervention against racial violence.

​Grassroots Activism and the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union

​In response to widespread fraud and evictions under the AAA, Black and white sharecroppers organized the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union (STFU) in Arkansas in 1934.

​The STFU staged strikes, public demonstrations, and national awareness campaigns to demand federal oversight and equitable distribution of AAA benefit checks. Although the union brought national attention to the plight of Southern farmworkers, local landowners and law enforcement responded with severe intimidation, and federal policy adjustments remained limited.

​Long-Term Legacy on Black Landownership

​The policy choices of the 1930s fundamentally reshaped American agriculture and accelerated the loss of Black-owned land throughout the twentieth century:

• ​1920: Peak Black landownership, with roughly 925,000 Black farm operators across the United States.
• ​1940: Following a decade of AAA evictions and local credit discrimination, the number fell to 680,000.
• ​1970: Continued economic pressures and systemic loan denials reduced the total to 87,000.
• ​Present Era: Approximately 45,000 Black farmers remain today, representing roughly 1.3 percent of all U.S. farm operators.

​By stripping Black agrarian families of land, capital, and federal protection during the nation's pivotal period of economic restructuring, New Deal policies contributed directly to the long-term racial wealth gap and fueled the Great Migration of displaced rural families to industrial centers across the North and West.