During the 1930s, Southern congressmen headed many of the key committees in Congress. They used this power to ensure that New Deal measures did not threaten the nation’s racial stratification. For example, as the Columbia University historian Ira Katznelson and others have documented, it was largely at the behest of Southern Democrats that farm and domestic workers—who made up more than half the nation’s workforce at the time, and an even higher percentage of the Black workforce—were excluded from New Deal policies, including the Social Security Act; the Wagner Act, which ensured the right of
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