Vol. 11 No. 6 (June 2001) pp. 311-313.

INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND CIVIL RIGHTS POLICIES IN THE UNITED STATES, 1941- 1960 by Azza Salama Layton. Cambridge University Press, 2000. 217 pp. Cloth $49.95. ISBN: 0-521-66002-5. Paper $17.95. ISBN: 0-521-66976-6.

Reviewed by Gordon Silverstein, University of Minnesota Department of Political Science and Law School.

America's "Greatest Generation" battled across Europe and the Pacific to reaffirm Jefferson's self-evident truth echoed by Lincoln at Gettysburg that ours was a "new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." However, when they returned, many who had sacrificed and been wounded or maimed for those ideals were greeted with abject discrimination and segregation, denied the right to vote, subjected to the whims of lynch mobs, and denied liberty at every turn.

The gap between America's ideals and American reality was cavernous (Huntington 1981). Yet, those in power at both the national and state levels had little interest in bridging that gap: The 1946 congressional elections "seemed to indicate the country was moving to the right" (p. 4), southern Democrats held great sway in an era of seniority rule in Congress, and there were few electoral points to be scored by supporting broad civil rights.

So why did Harry Truman use his Executive authority to desegregate the Army, to end racial discrimination in federal employment, and to desegregate eating facilities at Washington's National Airport, among other measures? (p. 86). Azza Salama Layton offers a clear answer. America's concerns about the Cold War overrode Truman's (and later, Eisenhower's) domestic political calculus.

Layton sets out to put some political science and empirical muscle on a persuasive historical claim, and she certainly succeeds in illuminating a critical historical juncture in American political development. In terms of the broader implications for political science, the book suggests that foreign policy not only changed the context for domestic policy, but also that it changed the way in which policy entrepreneurs framed and structured their arguments for change. Layton's book leaves unexplored whether these changes were permanent. In an age of globalization, is the foreign policy context now the rule-or was it an important exception in the exceptional context of the Cold War?

Layton argues that her work challenges and extends the literature on social movements and their organization. Though this is an important context, one is left wondering about the counterfactual. Imagine no Cold War-would there have been no civil rights movement? Would it have failed? Or would it simply have been delayed? These are impossible questions to answer, though it is intriguing to think about comparative studies as a way of teasing this out a bit. Did international pressure work in the same way in South Africa and Rhodesia as Layton argues it worked in the U. S.? If

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so, there might be even more power to her argument that social movement theory must account for the foreign policy context.

The book does an admirable job of explaining how the President was pressured by the Department of State that, in turn, was under fire in international organizations and national capitals around the world. It also explains the ways in which American civil rights advocates carefully framed their arguments to point up the Cold War implications of discrimination without pushing these themes hard enough to fall victim to the red-baiting that was constantly hurled their way.

Why, Layton asks, would Truman and Eisenhower "undertake civil rights reforms aimed specifically at desegregation," rather than at the less politically costly targets of "lynching, job and housing discrimination, and the absence of due process?" The answer is that the areas addressed by these administrations were those that received the greatest international attention. The Executive branch "pursued desegregation specifically because of its saliency in the eyes of the world" (p. 108). This saliency came home to the Executive branch not only from the spontaneous reaction of foreign dignitaries who had been humiliated by American segregation, but also because of the careful and conscious development of a strategic efforts by American civil rights leaders to orchestrate domestic and foreign pressure on the United States. Layton uses historical sources, papers, documents and written records to support her argument. The evidence is quite persuasive.

The book is broken into five chapters. An introductory chapter sets up the theoretical issues, and lays the groundwork. In her second chapter, Layton focuses on the conscious framing of issues, demonstrating the ways in which African-American leaders framed their arguments to maximize foreign policy pressure. Chapter three examines two major civil rights commissions. The 1947 Civil Rights Committee whose report-"To Secure These Rights"-laid out chapter and verse most of the civil rights reforms that would be enacted in the following decade. The 1957 Civil Rights Commission, Layton persuasively argues, demonstrated that executive action on civil rights reform was "stimulated first and foremost by international pressure at the moment that the United States was competing fiercely with the Soviet Union for new strategic allies" (p. 104) from among the non-aligned nations of the 1955 Bandung Conference.

In her fourth chapter, Layton turns her attention to the judicial branch, and to a number of court cases that paved the way to the extension of American civil rights. Although she does a fine job of demonstrating the constant focus by the Truman and Eisenhower Administration lawyers on the ways in which discrimination and segregation were undermining American foreign policy, her examination of these cases might have been strengthened with a bit more attention to the constitutional and doctrinal problems faced by the courts.

Even if the judges were willing and ready to attack racial discrimination, they still faced a constitutional dilemma. Most forms of discrimination were imposed by or tolerated by government and law enforcement authorities at the state level-and not at the national level. Did any of these lawyers, or any amici briefs, argue for the supremacy clause, or even stretch the concept of the Act of State doctrine? Just

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how did they propose to deal with these problems in a constitutional sense?

This issue has importance beyond the typical problem of a reviewer turning the focus toward his or her area of special concern. As Layton herself notes in her concluding paragraphs, "Southern defiance to the interests of 'global' America opened the United States even more to world spectators, to international criticism and pressure, and, consequently, to an increasingly active federal government" (p. 138).

Since it would seem to strengthen Layton's broader political science claim that social movement theory must grapple with an international context as well as domestic analysis, federalism is a theme that could have been profitably explored at greater depth. In the American case, we are left to wonder if foreign policy (via the civil rights movement) may have tipped the balance between national power and state autonomy in the post World War II era.

In 1946 civil rights were left largely to the states. Less than 20 years later, the 1964 Civil Rights Act shifted that authority to the national government. Layton's book supports the notion that this may have had a lot more to do with foreign policy than we have generally been inclined to believe. Also if that is right, it suggests that globalization may further erode the American commitment to federalism not only because of obvious pressures from globalization's economic requirements but perhaps as well from the ways in which globalization will structure debates about domestic policy and political culture.

Globalization may be a new concept, but American domestic politics have long been shaped by and in response to the tidal swings of international politics and American foreign policy. Layton's book adds an important chapter to this larger story. It also makes a contribution to an important broader argument that we would be well advised to break down the intellectual barriers between the subfields of our discipline. Foreign policy matters in the evolution of American public law, just as the decisions of the Court influence and constrain the options available to political leaders. There is no way to make sense of the changes in American civil rights policies in the 1940s and 1950s without close attention to foreign policy and judicial decisions as well as American domestic politics. It is a lesson we would be wise to learn before we leap into theory building about the role and impact of globalization on our various subfields.

REFERENCE:

Huntington, Samuel P. 1981. AMERICAN POLITICS: THE PROMISE OF DISHARMONY. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.