Inside Affirmative Action

The Executive Order That Transformed America's Workforce

Karin Williamson Pedrick, Sandra Arnold Scham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351751063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Affirmative action is still a reality of the American workplace. How is it that such a controversial Federal program has managed to endure for more than five decades? Inside Affirmative Action addresses this question.

Beyond the usual ideological debate and discussions about the effects of affirmative action for either good or ill upon issues of race and gender in employment, this book recounts and analyzes interviews with people who worked in the program within the government including political appointees. The interviews and their historical context provide understanding and insight into the policies and politics of affirmative action and its role in advancing civil rights in America.

Recent books published on affirmative action address university admissions, but very few of them ever mention Executive Order 11246 or its enforcement by an agency within the Department of Labor - let alone discuss in depth the profound workplace diversity it has created or the employment opportunities it has generated. This book charts that history through the eyes of those who experienced it. Inside Affirmative Action will be of interest to those who study American race relations, policy, history and law.

Part 1

Inside and Outside Affirmative Action

1 Our Stories

Two Civil Servants and Ten Administrations

And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

President John F. Kennedy¹

As students, we watched the inspiring figure of President Kennedy, like millions of Americans, with not a little amazement that such a young man was replacing the man we had come to identify with that office for most of our lives—Dwight Eisenhower, who was well over sixty years of age when he became President. Uncharitably, as shallow teenagers, we also saw with relief that, as the age of the televised Presidency began in earnest, the most photogenic candidate had won the election. Later, we were to see the dark side of the presidential media circus as the visit of President Kennedy to Dallas took a horribly tragic turn before our eyes. It is probably safe to say that Kennedy’s eloquent inaugural address was the inspiration for many a Government career in the 1960s and 1970s in addition to our own.

With Kennedy’s Presidency so tragically cut short, what he might have accomplished during his probable second term is mere speculation. Consequently, history’s full measure of the man as a President will remain an enigma. While he is likely always to be remembered as a hero, the Presidents who followed him, Johnson and Nixon, as this book will make clear, were not the villains we suspected them to be at the time. As Americans, we have thus far been spared the excesses of twentieth- and twenty-first century autocrats elsewhere in the world.² Also, after several decades have passed, the dichotomies of our youth have begun to blur into a general view that the majority of people, including Presidents we don’t agree with, are complex individuals who display behavior that can be surprisingly inconsistent. Some of the people we interviewed for this book display this trait more than others—at least in terms of what we were led to expect would be their fidelity to a certain political orientation. Their experiences were the catalyst for this book, but our reflexive self-interviews, as they might be called, form the backdrop.

We are referring to our self-interviews as reflexive for a reason. In social science, reflexivity refers to the analytical focus of the researchers on their own relationships to the object of study and the way in which their backgrounds create both conscious and unconscious positions with respect to that object.³ For the most part, on issues involving the Federal Government’s intervention in civil rights and to affirmative action in particular, we acknowledge that our perspective is the product of our backgrounds and our careers. Before we begin to chart our individual courses toward the convergence of our views into that perspective, we should first lay out the singular similarities that contributed to those views. We are both Washingtonians, born and bred, and like most of the people we have known in this city of migrants, we are the children of parents who arrived here from elsewhere in the country. Second, we have in common the fact that our parents worked for the U.S. Government—one of our mothers worked for the legislative branch and the mother and father of the other for the executive branch. Third, we both worked for the Federal Government for most of our careers—perhaps because we were inspired by Kennedy’s words at an impressionable age. Finally, we both, before we had ever met, filed in with many other Americans to the rotunda of the US Capitol to view the body of our thirty-fifth President as it lay in state.

Figure 1.1 The authors both vividly recall viewing John F. Kennedy’s body lying in state in the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Our Stories Follow—First Karin’s and then Sandra’s

Karin: As a native Washingtonian, it was perhaps inevitable that I would work for one of the three branches of the Federal Government. As the seat of Government, D.C. was pretty much a “company town” when I was growing up, and the Federal Government was the employer of choice for many residents in the Washington metropolitan area. That inevitability did not seem so inevitable when you contemplate the journey my parents took to arrive here. Eleanor Lofgren and Luke Williamson, from Lindsborg, Kansas, and Aiken, South Carolina, respectively, were both young when they left their hometowns in search of adventure and better opportunities.

They met in New York City in 1939 and as the story goes, Luke spotted Eleanor across the street and pointed to her telling his buddy, “See that good-looking redhead? I’m going to marry her some day!” They did meet and began a five-year courtship. Eleanor wanted to see the West Coast and moved to sunny California where one of her brothers was living at the time. She spent a summer working in Yellowstone Park where they received their weekly salary in silver dollars, and when she returned to Los Angeles, she worked in a department store and did some modeling for a while. Luke followed her to California to continue their courtship. He got a day job but gifted with good looks and an impressive voice he sang at some of the local clubs where dozens of talented musicians and aspiring actors hung out.

Luke enlisted, like most young men in their early twenties, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He joined the U.S. Navy and was assigned to one of the many minesweepers seeking German explosives in the Atlantic Ocean. When Luke enlisted, Eleanor moved to Washington, D.C. to be near her older sister, Agnes, who was working as a secretary at the Department of State. In July 1944, Eleanor and Luke decided to tie the knot, and Luke was granted several days of shore leave to marry Eleanor in a small ceremony back in D.C. While he was on leave, tragically the minesweeper was blown up in the Atlantic, and all those on board were lost at sea, an event that left my father emotionally scarred for the rest of his life. Today, he would probably be diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.⁴ When the war came to an end and he was discharged, Luke and Eleanor remained in Washington where she found a clerical job with the National Bureau of Standards, and like so many returning veterans Luke got work in a bank and finished college with the help of the GI bill.

In 1954, my mother got a job working on Capitol Hill in one of the administrative offices under the Office of the Doorkeeper for the House of Representatives.⁵ Sister Agnes knew someone who worked there and arranged a job interview for her. Among his many duties, the doorkeeper escorted the President into the annual joint session of Congress to deliver the State of the Union address, and he would announce loudly, “Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States.” The doorkeeper’s office was one of those interesting traditions from the late eighteenth century that continued into the twentieth. It was not to survive into the succeeding millennium, as this political position was abolished in 1995, and the duties of the doorkeeper were absorbed by other officers of the House, including the sergeant-at-arms who now performs the escort duties.

The House Disbursement Office, where my mother worked for two decades, was the responsibility of the Office of the Doorkeeper and provided personnel and payroll services for all members of the House of Representatives and their staffs. She was very well liked by the members to whom she provided such services. In fact, two Congressmen, Fred Rooney of Pennsylvania and Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, spoke on the floor of the House shortly after her death, saying that they and “all of us in this Chamber have lost an able and faithful staff member and many of us a dear friend in the recent death of Eleanor Williamson of the House Finance Office.” They continued their remarks with a wonderful summary of her life story and ended their tribute with the following remarks, “Since May of 1955, Eleanor’s warmth, pleasant, soft voice and graciousness have served to ease the task of Members of this body and I know all of us join in extending deepest sympathy to Luke, daughter Karin and son-in-law Bob Pedrick and the delight of Mrs. Williamson’s life, granddaughter four-year-old Ingrid Pedrick.” Their remarks were published in the March 18, 1974 Congressional Record.

As a result of my mother’s career on the Hill, I was exposed to a lot of politics as a child, and I thought working for Congress would be an exciting job. I remember coming home from elementary school and watching televised hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee chaired by Congressman Joseph McCarthy.⁶ The hearings were great political theater for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the targeting of the entertainment industry by McCarthy and his fanatics. In those moments, as I was curled up in front of our black and white television, I became acutely aware of the powerful role that politics plays in our lives.

As a perk of working on the Hill my mother was frequently invited to the House of Representatives’ social gatherings. One year, I remember attending one of Hale Boggs’s⁷ annual lawn parties with my parents at his Bethesda home on Bradley Boulevard. In a setting, reminiscent of the Old South, I mingled with the other partygoers, some of whom I was later to recognize in the newspapers. The antebellum-style house had a large, oversized lot to the side where the enormous party tent was installed to accommodate the crowd. I felt like a Hollywood extra attending a post-Oscars party. Hale Boggs, the House majority leader, was in his element holding court in his signature white suit and suspenders. The youthful senator from Massachusetts, Teddy Kennedy, attracted a great deal of attention. Like moths to a candle, the assorted female guests, including me, seemed to converge on him. The moniker he later earned as the “Lion of the Senate”⁸ would have been far from descriptive of this strikingly good-looking young man.

It was, however, the 1961 inauguration of Jack Kennedy as the thirty-fifth President of the United States, several years before the Hale Boggs party, that really stimulated my interest in Government work. A nor’easter had blanketed Washington, D.C. the night before his inauguration leaving eight inches of snow and pretty much shutting down the city. The unexpected snowfall left the city in chaos, and thousands of cars were marooned or abandoned, causing massive traffic jams. Like many commuters that evening, my mother had to abandon her small Chevrolet Corvair on the way home from work near the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in downtown Washington because of the snow accumulation on the roads, managing to catch a ride with someone in a bigger, heavier car.

The Army Corps of Engineers teamed up with more than a thousand D.C. employees and an army of snow-removing vehicles to clear the inaugural parade route, so that the inauguration was able to proceed as planned the next day.⁹ It was televised, so we were able to hear Kennedy’s inspiring inaugural address in real time, sitting in our living room. As I listened, his words seemed directed at me personally and to my entire generation, which became known as the “Baby Boomers”—it was a call to public service, and he urged us to answer that call.

In the fall of 1963, I began my freshman year at George Washington University. At the time, it was one of the few in the area that I could attend, because women were not admitted to many of the other regional colleges I was interested in—Georgetown, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. Colleges and universities would not be required to admit women until the passage of the 1972 amendments to the Civil Rights Act.¹⁰ I chose Political Science and International Affairs as my field of study with the hope of pursuing a career in public service as President Kennedy had urged in his inaugural address. Sadly, in November of that year, Kennedy was assassinated. As I was leaving French class at GW people were gathering around cars that had stopped in the street trying to listen to their radios. The breaking news that the President had been shot was being covered on all stations in real time. When I got home from GW, like millions of Americans I watched the continuous coverage on television, weeping for hours, as I mourned collectively with the entire nation.

President Kennedy’s body was going to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda so that the public could view his coffin and pay their respects. My parents and I wanted to do this, and as a congressional employee on the doorkeeper’s staff, my mother had a parking space near the U.S. Capitol Rotunda and the necessary ID that allowed her on the grounds of the Capitol. We arrived early and parked in her parking space before they opened the rotunda to the public. As we drove in to park, we came upon a black limousine parked along the curb near a side entrance to the rotunda, and a man got out of the limousine—alone, head down, visibly grieving as he walked toward the rotunda. As he did so I realized that it was the President’s brother, Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States. He approached the side door of the rotunda where he could view his brother’s coffin privately before the public viewing was scheduled to begin. As he was walking to the side door, he passed our car. I could see his face very clearly, and his expression embodied the grief and despair the entire nation felt that day. It was an incredibly solemn and private moment, and one that I will never forget.

After graduating, I began to look for a job. With my college degree in hand, I set my sights on Capitol Hill, with the ambition of working for a congressman. My mother enjoyed working on the Hill, but she had reservations about her daughter working as a congressional staffer. However, despite her reservations she arranged an appointment for me with the office that processed applications for all congressional staff vacancies, which was located in the Capitol but was staffed by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Manpower Administration (later to be renamed the Employment and Training Administration). I was interviewed and given a typing test, which was required for entry-level jobs on the Hill whether you had a college degree or not, at least for female applicants. I was told that there were no openings at the time, but I would be referred for interviews if and when they received any requests from a member of Congress. However, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword: Who, What and When
• PART 1: Inside and Outside Affirmative Action
• PART 2: The Making of Affirmative Action
• PART 3: Hesitation and Second Thoughts
• PART 4: Four Presidents and the Legacy of a Program
• Index