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494

(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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494 An American Dilemma
proportion. While there were Negro Democratic organizations in every
city, they made little headway except in New York.®^ In Chicago only 23
per cent of the Negro vote went to the Democratic party in the presidential
election of 1932, despite Hoover’s lily-white tendencies, and perhaps an
even smaller proportion went against Republican Mayor Thompson in
1931.®^ Similarly, only 19.5 per cent of Detroit’s Negro vote was Demo-
cratic in 1930.®® This attachment to the Republican party both hurt and
helped the Negroes politically. It helped them because the Republicans
were in power in most of the Northern cities before J930, and Negroes
gave the Republican party a disproportionate number of their votes. In
Chicago, for example, Negroes constituted only 6.9 per cent of the total
population in 1930, and 8.7 per cent of the population of voting age, but
ii.O per cent of the Republican voters.®^ The strong attachment to the
Republican party hurt them because the party felt sure of the Negro vote
and hardly made an attempt to solicit it or favor it. When, after 1933,
the Negro vote became more fluid, it was more actively solicited by both
parties and was rewarded to a greater extent by the Democratic party,
which was in office in most Northern cities.®®
Many Negroes were dissatisfied with the Republican party by 1932.
Like other poor people, they were disgusted with the Hoover adminis-
tration’s methods of meeting the depression. They had also become aware
of the snubs given them as Negroes by both national and local Republican
party organizations. Of course, some Negroes felt a sentimental attach-
ment to the party of Lincoln that could stand almost any amount of
snubbing. Some upper class Negroes, too, were quite satisfied with the
conservative performance of the Hoover administration or felt that the
^‘best people” voted Republican. In 1932, Roosevelt was relatively un-
known outside of New York, and there was some anxiety about the role
that Southern Democrats might play in his administration. The whispering
campaign, that Roosevelt was in ill health and that his running mate—the
Southerner, Garner—^would soon take over the Presidency if they were
elected, was perhaps influential in keeping the Negro vote Republican
in 1932.
But when the New Deal relieved the economic plight of the Negroes
during the depression, and—in the North—treated them almost without
discrimination,® and appointed Negro advisors for many phases of the
government’s activities, Negroes began to shift to the Democratic party
in large numbers. The movement was accelerated when the local Demo-
cratic machines proved more grateful for the Negro’s vote than had their
Republican predecessors.®® The estimated proportion of Negroes voting
for Roosevelt in Chicago was 23 per cent in 1932. 49 per cent in 1936, and
*See Cliapter 15.

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