Democratic Opposition to the Fair Labor Standards Act: A Comment on Fleck

Extract

In a well-crafted recent article in this JOURNAL, Robert Fleck argues that voting on the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the last and among the most contentious pieces of major New Deal legislation, was heavily influenced by regional political differences and by the “southern political system.” This contention is broadly supportive of a view held by several traditional historians, who have argued that political differences between the North and South were a major factor in voting. According to this view, the considerable support for minimum wages among southern workers, African American leaders, and the general public did not translate into congressional votes for the FLSA due to southern political institutions that effectively disfranchised many of the voters who were predisposed to support the FLSA. In a previous article I argued that, although southern representatives were more likely to vote against the FLSA, this was primarily because of economic differences between the two regions, not political factors. I argued that the opposition to the FLSA was spearheaded by low-wage employers, who were disproportionately concentrated in the South. This note examines the reasons for these conflicting results. It is argued that Fleck's approach to prediction, which evaluates the marginal impact of his independent variables individually, but does not jointly consider the variables that defined the southern political system, is misleading, and a more appropriate approach using his own regression results supports my contention that political differences between North and South were inconsequential to the overall roll-call vote on the FLSA. It is shown that, holding economic factors constant, had the South been politically like the North, the estimated roll-call vote on the FLSA would have been very similar to the actual votes in 1937 and 1938.