Before the EEOC: How Management Integrated the Workplace

Business History Review

Volumn 81, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 269-295

  Delton, Jennifer ^a  

^a SKIDMORE COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 34548577387     PISSN: 00076805     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/s0007680500003366     Document Type: Review

References (127)

1. For the positive effects of antidiscrimination law, see Gavin Wright, "The Civil Rights Revolution as Economic History," Journal of Economic History 59 (June 1999): 267-89;
2. and James P. Smith and Finis R. Welch, "Black Economic Progress after Myrdal," Journal of Economic Literature27 (June 1989): 519-64.
3. Wright, 276; Timothy Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960-80(Chapel Hill, 1999).
4. In some instances, workplace integration was accompanied by violence, as Nancy MacLean and others have shown. However, it never approached the level that business owners feared it would, nor did it ever approach the frequency and intensity of the violence that occurred with unionization or, even, school integration. See Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace(New York, 2006).
5. Thomas N. Maloney, "Personnel Policy and Racial Inequality in the Pre-World War II North," Journal of Interdisciplinary History30 (1999): 235-58;
6. Frank Dobbin and John Sutton, "The Strength of the Weak State: The Rights Revolution and the Rise of Human Resources Management Divisions," American Journal of Sociology104 (Sept. 1998): 441-76,
7. and Frank Dobbin, John R. Sutton, John W. Meyer, and Richard Scott, "Equal Opportunity Law and the Construction of Internal Labor Markets," American Journal of Sociology99 (Sept. 1993): 396-427.
8. Their work is supported by historian Sanford Jacoby, who has traced the history of internal labor markets, training programs, and personnel offices, which all factored into integration. See Sanford Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-45(New York, 1985);
9. and Modern Manors: Welfare Capitalism since the New Deal(Princeton, N.J., 1997).
10. The following account draws from Jacoby, Modern Manors;
11. Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments(New York, 1991);
12. Loren Baritz, The Servants of Power: A History of the Use of Social Science in American Industry(Middletown, Conn., i960);
13. and Daniel Nelson and Stuart Campbell, "Taylorism vs. Welfare Work in American Industry: H. L. Gantt and the Bancrofts," Business History Review46 (Spring 1972): 1-16.
14. Jacoby, Modern Manors, 43;
15. and Henry A. Landsberger, Hawthorne Revisited: Management and the Worker, Its Critics, and Developments in Human Relations in Industry(Ithaca, 1958);
16. and William Foote Whyte, "Human Relations Theory-A Progress Report," Harvard Business Review34 (Sept./Oct. 1956): 125-32.
17. See Burleigh Gardner, "The Factory as Social System," in Industry and Society, ed. William Foote Whyte (New York, 1946), 4-20.
18. Ibid., 2.
19. Bell, "Adjusting Men to Machines," Commentary3 (Jan. 1947): 79-88, p. 80.
20. Whyte, ed., Industry and Society, v-vi.
21. See also Jacoby, Modern Manors, 222-23.
22. See Baritz, The Servants of Power, for conspiracy theory,
23. and William Foote Whyte, Participant Observer: An Autobiography(Ithaca, N.Y., 1994), 145, for a contrary view.
24. See for instance, Everett Cherrington Hughes, "The Knitting of Racial Groups in Industry," American Sociological Review11 (Oct. 1946): 512-19;
25. and CHRI, "General Research Program," 11 July 1946, in the President's Papers, 1950-1955, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center. Gardner, who became heavily involved in consulting, nonetheless remained an expert on race relations into the 1960s. For evidence of the influence of this school of race relations, see the bibliography of the essay by John A. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes in War Industries," New York State War Council, Committee on Discrimination in Employment, 1942.
26. Union demands and new labor laws also contributed to these developments. See Dobbin et al., 401-2;
27. Dobbin and Sutton, 444;
28. Jacoby, Modern Manors,44-46.
29. For the underlying philosophy and empirical basis of "community relations" programs, see W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory(New Haven, 1947);
30. or Warner and Low, "The Factory in the Community," in Whyte, ed., Industry and Society, 21-45 (the condensed version of the findings later published in their book, cited above).
31. See also General Electric's account of its community-relations program, "Beyond Our Walls: A Program for Interpreting GE to the Community," prepared by the Plant Community Relations Services Department, Feb. 1955.
32. William H. Whyte Jr., The Organization Man(Philadephia, 2006), 9. Originally published in 1956.
33. See especially Bell, "Adjusting Men to Machines," and Mills, White Collar.
34. Bell, "Adjusting Men to Machines." This model of equilibrium also underlay their understanding of race relations-the caste theory-which was uniformly criticized for accepting the status quo in race relations.
35. See, for instance, Robert Michael Smith, "From Blackjacks to Briefcases: Commercial Anti-Union Agencies, 1865-1985" (Ph.D. diss., University of Toledo, 1989);
36. and Jacoby, Modern Manors, 130-44.
37. Employee Relations Department, Annual Report, 1955, 6, in Du Pont Human Resources, series I, box 1, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Del.
38. William Breen, "Social Science and State Policy in World War II: Human Relations, Pedagogy, and Industrial Training, 1940-1945," Business History Review76 (Summer 2002): 233-66;
39. F. Stuart Chapin, "Social Obstacles to the Acceptance of Existing Social Science Knowledge," Social Forces26 (Oct. 1947): 7-12.
40. Executives often rose from line positions. In many businesses, a major fault line existed between line workers and more educated, younger staff workers who manned the employeerelations and public-relations offices, for instance, and who were greatly resented by line workers precisely for their ideas about human relations. See Melville Dalton, "Conflicts between Staff and Line Managerial Officers," American Sociological Review15 (June 1950): 342-51.
41. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation(New York, 1977, 1984) also explores this division. I thank Pamela W. Laird for pointing me to Dalton and Kanter.
42. See, for instance, Whyte, Participant Observer.
43. See Armstrong Association of Philadelphia, 1918-23, in Lukens Steel Company papers, box 1988, at the Hagley Museum and Library.
44. On the wartime FEPC, see Merl Reed, Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President's Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941-1946(Baton Rouge, 1991);
45. Louis Ruchames, Race, Jobs, and Politics: The Story of the FEPC(New York, 1953);
46. Daniel Kryder, Divided Arsenal: Race and the American State during World War II(New York, 2000);
47. and Malcolm Ross, All Manner of Men(New York, 1948).
48. On labor unions' long history of exclusion, see most recently Paul Moreno, Black Americans and Organized Labor: A New History(Baton Rouge, 2006).
49. See Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race(Cambridge, Mass., 1998).
50. Kryder, Divided Arsenal, 149, 229.
51. "Racial and Cultural Democracy: Summary of Class Proceedings, 1943-44," May 15 meeting, box 5, Department of Political Science papers, University of Minnesota Archives, Minneapolis.
52. Burleigh Gardner and David Moore, Human Relations in Industry(Chicago, 1945; rev. ed., 1950), 310-11.
53. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes," 23. See also American Management Association, "The Negro Worker," 1942, which was apparently the AMA's first research publication.
54. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes," 42-43. Davis also draws from the research of leading black sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Charles S. Johnson, who were Robert Park's students and colleagues of Allison Davis, Burleigh Gardner, and W. Lloyd Warner at the University of Chicago. All these men, including Dollard, held to the "castetheory" school of race relations, which was criticized at the time and later discredited for its apparent assumption of stasis and equilibrium in white supremacy.
55. See Oliver Cox, "The Modern Caste School of Race Relations," Social Forces21 (Dec. 1942): 218-26;
56. and Maxwell Brooks, "American Class and Caste: An Appraisal," Social Forces25 (Dec. 1946): 207-11.
57. Davis also cites the human-relations classic by F. J. Roethlisberger and W. J. Dickson, Management and the Worker: Technical vs. Social Organization in an Industrial Plant(1939), to support his points about the importance of group dynamics;
58. see Davis, 22.
59. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes," 8.
60. Ibid., 17-18.
61. Dalton, "Conflicts Between Staff and Line Managerial Officers." See also Kanter, Men and Women of the Corporation, 167.
62. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes," 17.
63. Everett Cherrington Hughes, "The Knitting of Racial Groups in Industry," American Sociological Review11 (Oct. 1946): 512-19.
64. Davis, "How Management Can Integrate Negroes," 24.
65. See especially Ross, All Manner of Men;Cecil Newman, "An Experiment in Industrial Democracy," Opportunity(Spring 1944): 52-56;
66. Sara Southall, Industry's Unfinished Business: Achieving Sound Industrial Relations and Fair Employment(New York, 1950);
67. and John A. Davis, "Negro Employment: A Progress Report," Fortune(July 1952): 102-3, 158, 161-62.
68. On the effectiveness of the wartime FEPC, see William J. Collins, "Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets," American Economic Review91 (Mar. 2001): 272-86.
69. Paul Moreno, From Direct Action to Affirmative Action: Fair Employment Law and Policy in America, 1933-72(Baton Rouge, 1997).
70. On the ineffectiveness of state FEPCs, see Michael Sovern, Legal Restraints on Racial Discrimination in Employment(New York, 1966). On their effectiveness,
71. see William J. Collins, "The Labor Market Impact of Anti-Discrimination Laws, 1940-1960," Industrial and Labor Relations Review56 (Jan. 2003): 244-72.
72. Sovern, Legal Restraints on Racial Discrimination, 49.
73. Eli Ginzberg, The Negro Potential(New York, 1956), 42.
74. Ibid., 117.
75. On corporate responsibility and civil rights during these years, see Stacy Kinlock Sewell, "The Best Man for the Job: Corporate Responsibility in the Workplace, 1945-1960," Historian65, no. 3 (2003): 1125-46.
76. The following draws from Jack Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker(New York, 1965);
77. and Stephen Habbe, Company Experience with Negro Employment(New York, 1966), 2 vols.
78. See also "Hiring Negro Workers" and "Recruiting Negro Graduates" in Conference Board Record, June 1964 and August 1964, respectively.
79. Habbe, Company Experience with Negro Employment, preface, by H. Bruce Palmer.
80. Habbe, Company Experience, 124.
81. In the 1960s, about 4.7 percent of Du Pont employees were represented by national unions, 59 percent by independent unions, and 36 percent were unrepresented. See Employee Relations Department Annual Reports in series 1, box 1, Du Pont Human Resources papers.
82. Habbe, Company Experience, 29.
83. Ibid., 28.
84. "Affirmative action" at this time did not mean "quotas" or racially selective hiring, but rather that employers were taking active steps-such as recruitment, training opportunities, contacting the local Urban League-to change the color of their workforces. Ibid., 16-17, 28- 29;
85. Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker, 14-15.
86. Habbe, Company Experience, 32-38.
87. Pamela Walker Laird, Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin(Cambridge, Mass., 2006).
88. On the history of personnel offices, see Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy.
89. Maloney, "Personnel Policy," 238-39.
90. At least in nonunionized companies. Unionized companies negotiated compensation deals for laid-off workers, while nonunionized companies were more likely to retrain workers and place them in another position. Jacoby, Modern Manors, 43-44.
91. Mahoney, "Personnel Policy," 240.
92. Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker, 77-78;
93. see also the example of the ColgatePalmolive Company in Habbe, Company Experience, 111.
94. Habbe, Company Experience, 39-44;
95. Gourlay, writing on behalf of the AMA, suggested that the word "qualified" was subjective and hence open to redefinition. Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker, 12. On Du Pont's reassessment of testing,
96. see Habbe, Company Experience, 28;
97. and Employee Relations Department, Reports to the Executive Committee, 1965, 7, in box 1, Du Pont Human Resources papers. See also "Report on the Workshop Panels, Regional Conference on Equal Opportunity and Economic Growth, 10 June 1964," 4. These are Vice President J. Stewart Huston's notes on the conference, as found in box 2018, Lukens Steel Company papers.
98. Department of Industrial Relations, Annual Report, 1964, section entitled "Plan for Progress," 3, box 2163, Lukens Steel Company Papers.
99. Breen, "Social Science and State Policy in World War II." For a contemporary puff piece on the program, see Stuart Chase, "Educating the Boss: The Job Relations Program of the TWI," Men at Work: Some Democratic Methods for the Power Age(New York, 1941,1945), ch. 4.
100. Chase, "Educating the Boss," 40.
101. Ibid., 47.
102. See Du Pont, Employee Relations Department, Annual Report, 1956.
103. Lukens Steel Company's training department, for instance, handled the HOBSO program, which indoctrinated workers into the virtues of both human relations and the freeenterprise system. See "HOBSO file" in box 2020, Lukens Steel Company papers. So too at Du Pont, where the Employee Relations Department instituted HOBSO at the first companywide conference of training supervisors. See Employee Relations Annual Report, 1952, in Du Pont Human Resources, series 1, box 1. See also Howell Harris, The Right to Manage: Industrial Relations Policies of American Business in the 1940s(Madison, 1982).
104. See, for instance, consultant J. M. Manley Jr.'s proposal for a "basic development plan" based on an outline titled "Luken's Steel Co., Management Indoctrination Program for Shop Supervisors." J. M. Manley Jr. to Lukens Steel Company, 4 Mar. 1953, box 2020, Lukens Steel Company papers.
105. See, for example, International Harvester's experiences with integrating its southern plants in 1949 in NPA Committee of the South, Selected Studies of the Negro Employment in the South: Three Southern Plants of International Harvester Company(Washington D.C., 1953). 85-87.
106. "Minutes of the Industrial Relations Managers Conference, French Lick, Indiana, 8-12, Nov. 1948," in McCormack International Harvester Papers, Mcc Mss 6z M2001-125, box 7, folder 25, 17-18, at Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison.
107. Lukens Steel Company, "Fundamentals of Human Relations," in box 2020, Lukens Steel Company papers.
108. NPA Committee of the South, Selected Studies of the Negro Employment in the South, 87.
109. Lukens Steel Company, Industrial Relations Department Annual Report, 1965, 4, in box 2163, Lukens Steel Company papers. See also Habbe, Company Experience, ch. 9.
110. See Stewart Huston to Charles Lukens Huston, 18 June 1968, reporting on a conference panel he attended on jobs, training, and housing. Box 2020, Lukens Steel Company papers.
111. Habbe, Company Experience, 42.
112. Clearly the lesson about the capital "N" for Negro had yet to be learned. Department of Industrial Relations, Annual Report, 1964, section entitled "Plan for Progress," 4, in box 2163, Lukens Steel Company papers.
113. Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker, 14.
114. Habbe, Company Experience, unnumbered introductory pages;
115. and Gourlay, The Negro Salaried Worker, 7-8.
116. See Industrial Relations Department Annual Report, 1964 and 1965, section entitled "Plan for Progress," box 2163, Lukens Steel Company papers.
117. Industrial Relations Department Annual Report, 1966, section entitled "Plan for Progress," box 2163, Lukens Steel Company papers.
118. Employee Relations Department Annual Report, 1968, 7, Du Pont Human Resources papers.
119. See "recruitment" section in Department of Employee Relations Annual Reports in series 1, box 1, Du Pont Human Resources papers.
120. The black community targeted Du Pont because it did not intervene to prevent the governor from imposing martial law in black neighborhoods in 1968.
121. C. B. McCoy to Mr. Morris, 5 Nov. 1969, box 19, Charles Brelsford McCoy papers, 1967-74, Hagley Museum and Library.
122. T. W. Stephenson to management heads, 18 Apr. 1969, box 12, Charles Brelsford McCoy papers, 1967-74.
123. John Oliver to J. A. Dallas, 11 Dec. 1970, box 12, Charles Brelsford McCoy papers, 1967-74.
124. John Oliver, "Social Responsibility," 7 Jan. 1970, box 12, Charles Brelsford McCoy papers, 1967-74.
125. See for instance, Nancy MacLean, Freedom is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace(New York, 2006);
126. Minchin, Hiring the Black Worker;
127. and Terry H. Anderson, The Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action(New York, 2004).