Anthony S. Chen

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Anthony S. Chen | "The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas": Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941–1945 | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

"The Hitlerian Rule of Quotas": Racial Conservatism and the Politics of Fair Employment Legislation in New York State, 1941–1945

The legislative chamber was filled with many more people than usual. Hundreds of observers sat in the audience, and scores of others stood stiffly in the back of the room, two to three rows deep. A civil rights bill outlawing job discrimination had been introduced a few weeks before, igniting one of the fiercest political controversies in recent memory. Critics of the measure had worked patiently for weeks to stage a public hearing, and earlier in the day they had taken advantage of the chance to testify, raising a litany of complaints. Now the time had come for their leader to make a definitive statement. He spoke carefully and expanded on the criticisms that his colleagues had made earlier. It was a strong performance, culminating in the most potent and resonant charge of the day. The law, he prophesied, would essentially impose "quotas" in hiring and promotion. Its passage would spell doom for the free market and meritocracy: "It means the end of honest competition, and the death knell of selection and advancement on the basis of talent."¹	1
It is easy to guess that the foregoing scene must have unfolded on Capitol Hill during the mid-1960s, when civil rights took center stage in national politics. It would seem even easier to guess the identity of the critics. Surely it was southern Democrats, uttering whatever artful rhetoric they thought would help the Bourbon elites preserve their flagging control over the political and economic life of the South. In fact, historians familiar with the period will correctly recall that Sen. Sam Ervin, a North Carolina Democrat, raised the charge of quotas in the 1963 congressional debate over Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, eventually compelling Sen. Hubert Humphrey, a Minnesota Democrat, to deny explicitly that the law would require racial quotas or racial balancing. But neither guess would be correct. The hearing had taken place years earlier, not in Washington, D.C., but in Albany, New York. There were no southern Democrats in the packed New York State Assembly Chamber that day. Instead, it was the Republican state senator Frederic Bontecou, ringleader of a rank-and-file revolt of GOP legislators, who rose to read aloud a lengthy letter written by Robert Moses—park commissioner, descendant of German Jewish émigrés, and the fabled power broker of New York. At stake was the passage of the Ives-Quinn bill, a fair employment practices (FEP) bill that mandated equal treatment in public and private employment. In his letter Moses furnished opponents of Ives-Quinn with potent new language in which to frame their criticisms. Others before him had argued that the bill would lead to "proportionate" representation, but Moses was the first overtly to invoke the specter of "quotas." It was February 20, 1945.²	2
This article presents a political and legislative history of the Ives-Quinn Act, the first of more than two dozen FEP laws adopted by northern states before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. With only a handful of exceptions, historians have largely overlooked Ives-Quinn, mainly because it eventually passed by a bipartisan majority. The little that is known comes from Richard N. Smith's biography of Thomas E. Dewey. Smith's brief discussion of the episode hints at a hard-fought, divisive, wide-ranging battle that included opposition from the New York State Chamber of Commerce, the conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, and park commissioner Robert Moses, who expressed fears of quotas. The historian Paul D. Moreno has added the observation that "large numbers of conservative upstate Republicans" defected from the eventual bipartisan majority. But important questions remain unanswered. How widespread was opposition to Ives-Quinn, especially among business interests and conservative Republicans? What terms did Moses, Pegler, and other critics in the Empire State use in objecting to the bill? Since the bill mandated nondiscrimination, what was their basis for expressing fear of quotas? Did the episode have a larger significance?³	. . .

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