This Is Not Civil Rights

Any scholar who has mined New Deal agency archives cannot help wondering how meaningful letters from rank-and-file citizenry, usually filed under “general correspondence,” are in the big scheme of things. Although correspondence with the mass citizenry is among the innovations of Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency—White House clerks accustomed to opening a thousand pieces of mail per day confronted 460,000 letters upon fdr's inauguration—scholars have yet to fathom this deluge's democratic implications. George I. Lovell engagingly and creatively helps do so by examining the letters of “ordinary people” to the Civil Rights Section of the Justice Department (crs). Examining more than one thousand letters, representing 879 cases brought to the crs, Lovell argues that this correspondence enables him to probe “the underlying beliefs and commitments of people who make idealized claims about law and rights” (p. 19). This is a large argument based on a small sample, especially for social scientists who will search in vain for the criteria Lovell used in selecting letters. But the interesting cases he evaluates more than compensate for the methodological shortcomings of this elegant study. The crs, originally called the Civil Liberties Unit, was founded in 1939, and fdr and Attorney General Frank Murphy designated the unit to explore legal remedies for southern crimes against African Americans, including lynching, which were considered beyond federal authority. But Lovell finds that the letters he examined—written between 1939 and 1941—included not just complaints about racial discrimination (only 8 percent of his sample) but also pleas pertaining to free speech, property rights, and due process. Most interesting, many correspondents, primed by New Deal rhetoric that envisioned an economic constitutional order, claimed the right to government benefits and sought the support of fdr, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Justice Department in fulfilling their right to a job

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