On a hot and humid August afternoon in 1949, a group of nearly one hundred picketers marched slowly for an hour in front of the White House. Among the marchers was singer and activist Paul Robeson, holding aloft a sign reading: “Mr. Truman Take Jim Crow Off the American Dollar.” Another placard asked Truman to “enforce” the “FEPC” and still another called on “Mr. Snyder,” the secretary of the treasury, to “give negro vets a chance.” Although one newspaper described it as an “uneventful demonstration,” organized by a “Citizens’ Committee to End Discrimination at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing,” the protest punctuated a summer of intense organizing on behalf of federal black workers at the bureau.^{Footnote 1} Coming less than a year after Republican Thomas Dewey, race liberal Henry Wallace, and segregationist Strom Thurmond unsuccessfully sought to defeat Harry S. Truman for the presidency—an election in which civil and labor rights played prominent roles—the protests indicated the continued intensity of progressive politics and the ongoing grassroots collaboration between leftists and liberals on civil rights. Despite the national schism between the two wings as well as the threat of a southern defection from the Democratic Party, African American activists targeting discrimination in the federal government pressed ahead with their efforts in the postwar era, focusing a good deal of attention on long-standing race discrimination among production workers at the Department of Treasury.

Bowing to publicity and mounting pressure, the Truman administration eventually gave black workers the opportunity to tell their story in front of the Fair Employment Board (FEB). Established through executive order in July 1948 by Harry S. Truman to ensure workplace equity in federal agencies, the FEB wrestled with the bureau case from the board’s founding until its demise in 1955.^{Footnote 2} The tortured narrative of the bureau case tells two stories about fair employment policies. First, it reveals much about the government’s inability to effect these policies in its own agencies. The executive order establishing the board emerged from the recommendations of President Truman’s Committee on Civil Rights as outlined in its report, “To Secure These Rights” (1947), and it accompanied Truman’s order to ensure equal treatment in the military. However, unlike the military with its cleaner lines of authority, civilian departments represented a decentralized or horizontal structure, as historian William Novak described it, thus making it more difficult to address racist employment patterns throughout the bureaucracy.^{Footnote 3}

Second, the case demonstrates an ongoing struggle by civil rights activists, from the center and left, to push government policy beyond a colorblind model of fair employment. This early effort by individuals, and eventually the FEB, to make affirmative action and systemic racism legally actionable concepts gives us a sense of the opportunities and constraints that fair employment policy advocates faced at the federal level during a critical phase in the long civil rights movement. According to Timothy Thurber, the operation of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Committee on Government Contracts (PCGC), which tried to root out discrimination among federal contractors, demonstrated how fair employment policy “emerged more often as a result of fighting among fragmented bureaucratic entities, the priorities of agency officials, and the [committee’s] limited capacity.”^{Footnote 4} In this instance, however, the bureau fight reveals the significant policy influence of a fluid left-liberal fair employment coalition that braved Cold War red-baiting to encourage government administrators to see the obstacles put in the path of black workers by agency officials and a white craft union determined to preserve control over access to skilled jobs.^{Footnote 5} This complex case, the largest and most publicized one handled by the FEB, therefore calls into question not only the insular nature of fair employment policy making but also the narrative of decline that many historians apply to left-liberal politics in the late 1940s, which they attribute in large measure to anticommunist attacks.^{Footnote 6}

Significantly, black women played a leading role in pushing this case forward and they strove to highlight injustice experienced by groups, rather than simply individuals, thereby moving beyond colorblind models of fair employment. Leaders in the United Public Workers of America (UPWA)-CIO, such as bureau local leader Margaret Gilmore, worked within existing procedures while consistently supporting liberal values, such as merit, and simultaneously advocating a broader structural challenge to group privileges and discrimination.^{Footnote 7} Using publicity, petitions, pickets, and the fair employment policies themselves, these activists ultimately pushed the FEB toward a proactive effort to root out and remedy race discrimination, a process one protagonist in this story labeled “affirmative action.”^{Footnote 8}

Fought amid a federal loyalty program and rising anticommunist movement that equated civil rights activism with communism, the campaign to bring the Bureau of Engraving and Printing case before the FEB managed to withstand red-baiting. Even though FEB members and staff, along with white craft union leaders in the bureau, smeared the UPWA with red charges, FEB members ultimately sided with the appellants; board members made no reference to the UPWA’s left-wing reputation in its report on the bureau’s lilywhite apprentice program.^{Footnote 9} Certainly, UPWA’s activism, including its challenge to prohibitions on political activities of civil servants as well as the no-strike rule for government employees, came at a high price for the union as well as the many civil servants in need of its organizational strength. Indeed, the UPWA local at the bureau complained that CIO leadership not only refused to offer assistance in the bureau case but also asked UPWA representatives to “abandon this drive.”^{Footnote 10} UPWA’s purge from the CIO in 1950 for communist influence and eventual demise left African American bureau workers without a strong union presence when dealing with agency officials. In fact, UPWA leaders claimed that their active stance against race discrimination prompted the CIO’s decision to cut ties with UPWA.^{Footnote 11} Even so, by late February 1950, the FEB had taken up the cause of the workers and advocated on their behalf until the Eisenhower administration dismantled the board.

The effort to end race discrimination in the bureau primarily faltered not because of red-baiting, but because of the fragility of state apparatuses aimed at regulating labor. The FEB’s organization, meager appropriation, and mandate reflected an approach to fair employment that relied on a decentralization of power to federal departments, a process that placated southern Democrats and white agency administrators.^{Footnote 12} Historians have long illuminated the history of American fair employment policies, although they have shed less light on the policies created for and operating in the federal civil service.^{Footnote 13} And few have considered these policies in the context of the intense debate over expansion of the welfare and regulatory states in the late 1940s, which southerners influenced so profoundly.^{Footnote 14} The diffuse power structure and lack of access to the courts associated with fair employment in this era derailed the efficacy of these policies, allowing agency administrators multiple avenues for avoiding compliance.^{Footnote 15} Created through executive orders, the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice (FEPC, 1941–46) and the FEB (1948–55), along with other committees charged with these functions in the 1940s and 1950s, remained vulnerable to electoral politics and political whim.^{Footnote 16} Lacking an institutional history of their own, these entities needed to be lodged in a fully empowered, legitimated agency staffed by administrators and experts who could protect them from attacks. Denied that, they appeared and disappeared, depending on the preferences of the president or congressional majorities. Significantly, without institutional continuity, administrators in new fair employment entities could not benefit from the experiences of their predecessors. Additionally, agencies that practiced fair employment risked a loss of power and authority. As the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell stated in 1946, some representatives and senators engaged in the “cowardly practice” of cutting funds to agencies attempting to treat black workers fairly.^{Footnote 17}

The protracted battle in the bureau reflected the advances and retreats of progressive politics and civil rights in the late 1940s as well as the persistence of labor (and thus class) concerns within civil rights organizations.^{Footnote 18} In the mid-1940s, six thousand people worked at the bureau printing the nation’s money and stamps. Accusations of race discrimination found a broad audience at a time when civil rights was a topic of the 1948 national election. The situation at the bureau was the subject of well-publicized and visible protests in D.C., congressional hearings, commentary from Eleanor Roosevelt, and notably, congressional legislation sponsored by southern Democrats aimed at maintaining the bureau’s racial hierarchy. Reported on extensively in the Washington papers as well as black newspapers around the country and referenced in the New York Times, the bureau case attracted attention not generally given discrimination charges lodged against a federal agency. In the nation’s capital, race progressives made the local civil rights campaigns aimed at government departments, theaters, restaurants, education and housing matters of national attention. The government’s symbolic position as an employer counted, a fact that FEPC officials recognized in their 1943 report: “Very early in its official life the Committee came to the conclusion that the chances of success in securing cooperation from private employers would be lessened if the government’s own employment practices were open to criticism.”^{Footnote 19}

In the bureau, race, gender, and class hierarchies had existed since the second half of the nineteenth century, but the rigidity of those hierarchies and their expression fluctuated significantly over time. Notwithstanding the implementation in 1883 of a merit system that promised to award individual talent, the bureau’s workforce evolved into a racial and gender caste system rooted in the assumed inferior capabilities of African Americans and women.^{Footnote 20} By the early twentieth-century this industrial concern employed nearly three thousand individuals in a wide variety of skilled and unskilled jobs relating to the engraving, printing, wetting, drying, cutting, and counting of money as well as stamps.^{Footnote 21} Although female printers’ assistants developed skills similar to those of white male printers, management relegated their work to unskilled and semiskilled job classifications. Black men had positions as “helpers,” which reflected a wide range of duties associated with printing as well as money hauling and storage; others worked as elevator operators and messengers. Job titles and pay scales both mirrored and institutionalized gender and racial divisions of labor; these personnel policies amounted to a form of personnel red-lining that fortified gender and race hierarchies. Furthermore, in the early twentieth century, the bureau racially segregated toilets, locker rooms, and cafeteria space, in addition to many workspaces. Spatial separation supported and helped legitimate the system of occupational segmentation that isolated black men and women in poorly paid, unskilled positions.^{Footnote 22}

Although the bureau was a nonprofit entity, managers celebrated the values of American corporate capitalism and business: efficiency, productivity, technology, a functional division of labor, and clear demarcations between “workers” and “management.” Given the bureau’s task—the printing of money and stamps—it also placed a premium on security, and worker movements and activities remained meticulously documented and under strict surveillance. In this environment, a firm hierarchy emerged, with the bureau director and division supervisors dictating policy in an unbending fashion. Employees responded with collective action, as skilled workers joined elite craft unions, such as the Washington Plate Printers Local 2 of the AFL-affiliated International Plate Printers, Die Stampers and Engravers Union, to protect their positions. White female printers’ assistants and white-collar workers tended to belong to the National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE), an AFL affiliate until 1932, when NFFE became independent. By the late 1930s, a local of the CIO’s United Federal Workers of America (UFWA) appeared in the bureau, representing the largely semi- and unskilled black workers. In spite of these and other unions operating in the bureau, Alvin Hall, who became director in 1924, reinforced the work hierarchy with business policies that minimized union input and sought to maximize production at the lowest cost possible.^{Footnote 23}

Publicly the bureau and media’s representation of money making focused on the skill and technological prowess behind this production process, consequently masking the extent to which Jane and Jim Crow were firmly imprinted on the nation’s dollars. While employees challenged racial inequalities on occasion throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, they did so much more frequently during World War II, when labor shortages, the Double “V” campaign, and the FEPC gave them more clout and prescribed procedures. Even so, the hierarchical and businesslike work culture of the bureau—fortified by rigid job classifications and segregation—made it difficult to dismantle the racial hierarchy on a case-by-case basis. In fact, after the war, cafeteria, dressing rooms, bathrooms, and work floors remained segregated, white men referred to black men as “boys,” black women were shut out of clerical positions, and black men could not get skilled trades jobs. Very few black men and women could ever aspire to become supervisors, except in the lowest-paid occupations, and the practice of calling low-level employees by their first names, and all forepeople by Mr., Mrs., or Miss continually reminded employees of these distinctions. For the bureau’s African American employees, these patterns of discrimination at the bureau contradicted a pervasive narrative in the civil service that it was a meritocracy.

Even when the FEPC dissolved in 1946, black workers at the bureau did not give up their quest for equal treatment. The UFWA-CIO had by 1946 become the UPWA-CIO, representing not only federal workers but also state and local workers. In the bureau, UPWA-CIO Local 3 (which succeeded UFWA-CIO Local 11 and which became independent UPWA Local 30 in 1950) attracted a loyal membership of black men and women.^{Footnote 24} After the war, Margaret Gilmore, widow of a World War I veteran and a printer’s assistant who had worked at the bureau intermittently since 1919, became the head of the local. Almost immediately, Gilmore faced a looming crisis that threatened to cause wholesale turnover among the bureau’s large African American female workforce. During the war, the government hired employees outside regular civil service channels as temporary “war service” appointments, with the idea that once the war was over these employees would have to take regular civil service exams to retain their posts. In August 1947, bureau officials made plans to offer an open examination, expected to attract fifteen thousand test takers, for all printers’ assistants, tissue separators, and operatives. Of the eighteen hundred women serving in these positions, sixteen hundred were black, with approximately one thousand of those in war service appointments. Geographic quotas would make it impossible for the bureau to hire only from the Washington, D.C., area, where current employees lived. Skilled printers with wartime appointments, by contrast, simply filled out a form, effectively giving them permanent jobs in the civil service.^{Footnote 25} After the exam registers were established, Gilmore and her associates estimated that up to eight hundred black women with six to seven years of experience at the bureau would lose their jobs. The privileges accorded the skilled printers, who kept their jobs simply by filling out a form, must have been particularly galling to printers’ assistants, because during this period they had to train newly hired journeymen printers on use of the bureau’s distinctive printing equipment.^{Footnote 26}

The only bright spot for the bureau’s black employees in the immediate postwar era came in July 1948 with Truman’s fair employment executive order establishing the FEB and Hall’s decision to hire apprentice plate printers to deal with the combination of increased production demands and shortages of skilled printers. On July 16, 1948, Hall posted Bulletin No. 746 announcing an in-house examination for the position of apprentice plate printer for male veterans in specific job classifications. As World War II veteran Thomas Irving indicated in his testimony about this exam, this was the first time that African American employees had access to information about an exam or job openings that could potentially earn them promotions. Although eligible veterans in the custodial-mechanical (CM) service would take a temporary pay cut if they became apprentices, they relished the possibility of promotion to a skilled trade with its commensurate increases in pay, power, and prestige.^{Footnote 27} The forty-seven black and forty-seven white veterans who qualified to take the exam then waited, and waited, for the exam to be held.^{Footnote 28}

Meanwhile, black women with war-service appointments at the bureau struggled to retain their jobs. Shut out of the apprenticeships because of their gender, they had few avenues for promotion, but for many there was the real concern that they would lose even their lowly positions at the bureau.^{Footnote 29} In early October 1948, Gilmore requested a meeting with Hall to discuss four broad problems: (1) unfair overtime and Saturday pay practices toward printers’ assistants as compared to printers; (2) unequal treatment of printers’ assistants and skilled helpers as compared to printers with reference to leave, tardiness, and excused absences; (3) appointment to permanent status of war-service printers, but not war-service printers’ assistants, who were forced to take an exam; and (4) lack of access to promotions for African Americans, including an inexplicable delay in the apprentice plate printer exam.^{Footnote 30}

In an October 26 meeting, representatives from the personnel office, Mildred Weber and John O’Neill, moved to placate Gilmore and the union by noting that the bureau was about to appoint three black women to the clerical staff.^{Footnote 31} Gilmore received little concrete action on any of the other issues, and listened in disbelief as one of the officials told her that the lack of black supervisors at the bureau was a consequence of the fact that blacks had only been recently hired. There seemed to be little to no discussion of the situation facing female printers’ assistants and a great deal of hemming and hawing about the apprentice exam. According to Gilmore’s memorandum on the meeting and later testimony about it, O’Neill told her that plate printers in Local 2 objected to the apprentice exam because the bureau could hire journeymen instead. The white printers’ opposition put the bureau in an “awkward” position, he indicated, adding that the whole situation was rather “ticklish.”^{Footnote 32}

Privately, personnel officials told UPWA representatives that opposition to the apprentice exam came from the plate printers’ union, a fact later mentioned by Undersecretary of the Treasury Edward Foley in a meeting with the FEB’s second head, James Houghteling.^{Footnote 33} Publicly, Hall and Foley claimed that the delay in the apprentice exam was due to a modernization program that would over time diminish the need for skilled printers. Repeatedly Hall insisted that in good conscience he could not train apprentices who might then be displaced by new technology. The desire to maintain two separate stories—a modernization tale that would absolve department officials of responsibility with the all-white printer’s union, congressional and other administrative officials, and a recalcitrant white union narrative that would absolve them of responsibility with black employees and their union—was evident in Hall’s changes to Gilmore’s memorandum summarizing the meeting of October 26. He deleted all references to the plate printer’s union, affirmed the desirability of hiring journeymen, and eliminated the description of the bureau’s “awkward” position and the “ticklish” situation it faced with the plate printer’s union. Instead, he inserted an explanation that the exam was not held because of a “plan to increase production on plate printing presses through modernization of equipment.”^{Footnote 34}

Hall’s modernization explanation contained some truth to it, but his story failed to incorporate the role of racial politics in his campaign to upgrade technology at the bureau. He consciously exploited preexisting racial divisions among the working class to shore up a management hierarchy capable of effecting its business decisions with minimal input from workers. For many years, bureau officials had tried to introduce new machinery to speed production and cut labor costs, which Washington Plate Printers Local 2 members, not surprisingly, resisted.^{Footnote 35} Toward the end of World War II, Hall and other bureau officials perceived an opportunity to revive their efforts at modernization, using black workers as pawns. Black and white bureau workers believed that bureau managers used the announcement of an in-house apprentice exam “as a sort of club” to force plate printers to accept modern labor-saving printing presses.^{Footnote 36}

Management’s effort to cut production and labor costs through the introduction of new technology was not racially neutral. Managers knew that the all-white plate printers union would do everything in its power to keep African Americans from becoming skilled printers, so managers used the threat of an apprentice program that would likely include black workers, to get skilled plate printers to tolerate the new machinery. Apparently, when they had pressured the white union into accepting new technology, they then called off the apprentice plate printer exam. In fiscal year 1948, the bureau purchased twenty-new flatbed presses, with automatic double-wipe plate polishers and semiautomatic feeder boards, updated existing machines, and bought modern offset presses for revenue stamps.^{Footnote 37} Administrators deliberately fortified racial identities as a means of pushing through their business agenda and enhancing their power at the expense of both the white union and black workers.^{Footnote 38}

On November 5, 1948, Hall issued a memo making official indefinite postponement of the apprentice plate printer exam, at which point the head of UPWA’s antidiscrimination committee, Thomas Richardson, began work with local UPWA officers on an extensive charge of race discrimination against bureau officials.^{Footnote 39} Trained in drama, Richardson belonged to the leftist artistic movements of the 1930s, which blended theater with activism. A founding member of the left-wing Southern Negro Youth Congress, Richardson had long understood the economic costs of race discrimination. As a vice-president for UFWA during the war, he worked with other left-leaning groups to modify seniority rules so that African American workers would not be laid off when white veterans returned home. His advocacy for “adjusted seniority,” a fight that leftists in the CIO lost, made him particularly sensitive to the plight of the bureau’s printers’ assistants.^{Footnote 40}

In December, Richardson penned a detailed memo to FEB Chair Guy Moffett emphasizing that patterns of discrimination at the bureau had created a culture that supported “economic discrimination, Jim Crow, and racial intolerance.” It was within this “atmosphere,” he continued, “that racial bigots over the past number of years have been able to sow their seeds of intolerance in all areas of the agency’s life successfully and with impunity,” thus generating “bitterness between Negro and white employees but also [stimulating] anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic feeling among the various employees.” He called on the FEB to end “this shameful situation.”^{Footnote 41} Richardson’s letter to Guy Moffett, the first FEB chair, arrived just as the board was setting up business and the procedures developed reflected a conservative approach to its mandate.^{Footnote 42}

Throughout its existence, the board operated within a bureaucratic framework that discouraged centralized regulatory power, especially on matters relating to race.^{Footnote 43} After Truman’s civil rights report, “To Secure These Rights,” was released, the Civil Service Commission offered the Truman White House the first draft of a fair employment executive order. It merely stated that discrimination based on race, creed, color, or national origin violated federal policy and that appointing officials should make decisions based on “merit and fitness.” Rather than establish a special board, it gave the commission the authority to investigate complaints, and it said nothing about enforcement. At least one of Truman’s assistants, Philleo Nash, felt that the order was “too weak and that it would incur as much wrath as a stronger Order and yet would not gain any favor.”^{Footnote 44} In the final version, the executive order ambiguously lodged the board within the Civil Service Commission, giving it a nebulous position within the executive branch. Members of the board were to “be officers or employees of the Commission.”^{Footnote 45} At one point, it appeared that current Civil Service Commission employees would sit on the board, but concerns over potential conflicts of interest convinced the administration to recruit members from outside the commission. UPWA officials praised this decision, as they had recommended removal of the board from the jurisdiction of the Civil Service Commission in order to ensure confidence in its operations, a necessary component, they believed, to its success.^{Footnote 46} Indeed, fair-employment advocates had long recognized the Civil Service Commission’s own poor record on racial equality, with one FEPC official noting in 1942 that “when it comes to hiring its own employees, the Civil Service Commission is on all-fours with the agencies most loudly complained against.” He observed that commission excuses for failing to hire African Americans amounted to “the kind of talk one is accustomed to hear from discriminatory employers, rather than from an administrator of the Federal Government’s merit system.”^{Footnote 47} Once established, the board’s rotating chair suggested its tenuous authority. Virginian Guy Moffett, the first chair, served one year when he was replaced by James Houghteling, a New Deal liberal. Married to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s cousin, Laura Delano, Houghteling had previously served as commissioner of immigration and naturalization and assistant secretary of the treasury. W. A. McCoy, a recently retired Civil Service Commission official, then took over from Houghteling in April 1952.^{Footnote 48}

Like the FEPC, the board lacked strong enforcement powers with only the ability to make recommendations to department heads and no recourse to the courts.^{Footnote 49} Consequently, nearly all of the power to implement the fair employment order rested with department heads and, more specifically, their designated fair employment officers. This structure, so often in place with reference to employment discrimination policies, showed the influence of southerners determined to prevent robust central authority on issues of racial justice. It also fed into conservative views that minority rights were dangerous in part because they supported the growth of the regulatory state. Board rules in place from 1948 to 1951 spelled out a chain of command for complaints of discrimination starting with supervisors and moving up to fair employment officers and departmental heads. Only when an employee had exhausted all of these levels could he or she appeal his or her case to the FEB.^{Footnote 50}

As the UPWA and Bureau of Engraving and Printing employees pressed forward with their discrimination case in 1949, the flaws in a decentralized approach to fair employment became even more apparent. Within the Treasury Department, the fair employment officer was James Hard, the head of the personnel division, whose staff was deeply implicated in the racial discrimination complaint and the deputy fair employment officer was Hall, the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Treasury personnel officers testified for the department against the nine appellants who eventually made the formal complaint about the postponement of the apprentice exam.^{Footnote 51}

Bureau officials remained adamant in testimony before Congress and in official correspondence that there was no evidence of race discrimination. In the case of the printers’ assistants, FEB officials agreed, noting that white women also had war-service appointments and had taken the exam.^{Footnote 52} They also told UPWA officials they needed to see evidence of specific white women who were given clerical jobs over better-qualified black women. Each time the union brought forth information on these cases, the bureau defended them as legitimate personnel decisions, a view that the FEB seemed to support. Nevertheless, bureau officials began to feel the heat in the summer of 1949, as printers’ assistants refused to go quietly.^{Footnote 53}

Many wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, who in turn penned a short letter to Secretary of the Treasury John Snyder asking him to look into this case. She noted that there seemed to be a “good deal of discrimination at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing,” which in light of Truman’s civil rights program, should be investigated. Snyder assured Roosevelt that there was “no truth” to the accusation of discrimination. All of these charges, he claimed, were brought on by “outside agitators.”^{Footnote 54}

He was probably referencing UPWA leaders and lawyers who were now heavily involved in helping Gilmore build a case against the bureau. Thomas Richardson, UPWA international vice-president and head of its antidiscrimination committee, provided critical organizational support and writing skills, as did Albert Bernstein, a UPWA lawyer and organizer, and Milton Kelenson, another national UPWA official. They helped bureau employees navigate the labyrinth of procedures. Richardson, for instance, wrote long letters explaining the inequities in the bureau, and recipients came to dread his letters along with his relentless pursuit of justice, which they interpreted as harassment.^{Footnote 55}

Treasury Secretary Snyder’s comment about “outside agitators” may have also been a reference to a number of grass-roots groups that had taken up the cause, including the “Citizen’s Committee to Eliminate Segregation at the Bureau” organized by Therese Robinson, a retired physical education teacher and Independent Benevolent Protective Order of Elks member, who headed its Civil Liberties Department. Following several mass meetings in support of BEP workers at Bethel Baptist and other churches in the winter and spring of 1949, activists organized summer picket lines outside the White House, Treasury Department, and Bureau of Engraving and Printing.^{Footnote 56} With growing attention from the papers and Congress—in May, Representative Adam Clayton Powell explored discrimination at the bureau during a hearing for a permanent FEPC, and in July Senator William Langer and House Representative Vito Marcantonio introduced resolutions calling for the investigation of race discrimination in the bureau—Hall tried to contain the damage, implementing token integration of workspaces.^{Footnote 57} This amounted to a “smoke screen,” one newspaper columnist noted, to cover up the large numbers of pink slips the bureau was about to issue to hundreds of experienced printers’ assistants.^{Footnote 58}

Aside from Hall’s refusal to recognize race discrimination in his bureau, board procedures had a profound effect on the way in which bureau employees and their union representatives ultimately presented their discrimination case. Initially, union leadership began by outlining a series of discriminatory practices in the bureau and meeting with bureau officials to discuss remedies. After repeated requests that the FEB act on the case, in letters and meetings with FEB officials, union representatives learned that the FEB could not act because (a) the secretary of the treasury had to rule on the case before an appeal to the board could be made and (b) the complaint had to involve a “specific personnel action … filed by a person who was himself adversely affected by such action, rather than by another person or an organization that may take an interest in the case.”^{Footnote 59}

Richardson consequently found himself inside a Kafkaesque maze in which the FEB’s procedures thwarted efforts to use its procedures to investigate racial inequities. As Richardson repeatedly pointed out to the FEB, the bureau’s fair employment officer and the secretary of the treasury had both stipulated that there was no race discrimination in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Moreover, bureau leaders and fair employment officer Hard refused to meet with union representatives and Richardson. In fact, Richardson noted that Hard had not even communicated to employees “any of the procedures” they were to follow under the fair employment order. “It is difficult, perhaps impossible,” Richardson concluded, “to understand a procedure for hearings and appeals which can be waved aside by an administrative official by simply saying ‘This is not discrimination.’ By this token, it is conceivable that Mr. Hard could succeed in barring every complaint arising in the Treasury Department without hearing or appeal ever taking place. What then would be the value of Executive Order 9980 in the Treasury Department?”^{Footnote 60} Even if they would rule on a specific case, Richardson also remarked, “I do not know how it is possible to handle these situations by individual complaints or appeals. The problem is not that a particular Negro has been passed over in appointment or promotion. Rather, it is that a fixed policy of systematic exclusion of Negroes from such positions has been in effect for many years.”^{Footnote 61} It was difficult to prove, for instance, that an individual had deliberately kept information about openings in the clerical staff from black women.^{Footnote 62} Given these bureaucratic obstacles, Richardson indicated that he and the employees at the bureau felt that there was “a grave defect either in Executive Order 9980, or the Regulations issued under it, or in the application of these Regulations.”^{Footnote 63}

Information flowing from management into the white plate-printers union and discussions among white printers in all-white locker rooms assisted them in passing jobs along to friends and family. While Hall postponed the apprentice exam, claiming that new machinery would eliminate the need for more skilled printers, he was unable to keep up with production demands without forcing printers and their assistants to work overtime. The sons of at least one white union member soon appeared on the payroll and went into training to become skilled printers.^{Footnote 64} One bureau employee recognized that the color line did not have to control the flow of information. Thomas Irving described how he had served with all-white units “for a big push” during the war. “These men gave us their information and we gave them our information,” he recalled, just before becoming too emotional to continue his testimony at the FEB hearing held on the case.^{Footnote 65}

Richardson tried to convey to the FEB the perspective of black workers. “I think you can accept,” he told Moffett, “our assurance that the Negro employees of the Bureau are, with almost no exceptions, convinced in their own minds that a serious condition of discrimination exists there. That alone is evidence that affirmative action is needed, over and above the application of the Board’s procedures (or at least the Treasury’s interpretation of these procedures).”^{Footnote 66} Moffett’s response to this call for affirmative action was to meet with Richardson for an hour and advise him to “process a specific complaint through the agency to secure a decision from the Secretary of Treasury which could be appealed” to the FEB.^{Footnote 67} In August, Richardson acquiesced, supplying the names of several black women qualified to become clerical workers but who were passed over because they were never permitted to file an application to take the clerical exam. Civil Service Commissioner Harry Mitchell, the agency responsible for the exam, provided a detailed rendering of the numbers of black and white women who had taken clerical exams and concluded that Richardson’s allegations were groundless.^{Footnote 68}

When Houghteling took over as the FEB chair in October 1949, he scheduled a meeting with Richardson, Bernstein, Gilmore, and bureau employees in mid-November. Houghteling assured the group that he felt strongly that the “whole problem of Negroes getting into the skilled trades” was a problem that had “to be met.” Tellingly, Houghteling identified the “problem” as the one involving skilled trades, which were open only to men; he privileged this problem over the one involving female printers’ assistants. To address this problem, he asked Richardson to follow procedure by having an employee lodge a complaint of race discrimination with the bureau’s fair employment officer.^{Footnote 69} Richardson subsequently presented the first one from Raymond F. Cooke, who had signed up to take the apprentice plate printer exam. Once the board received Cooke’s request in November 1949, Houghteling finally wrote to Hard telling him that “under the circumstance it would be helpful in clearing up a somewhat complicated situation if the Fair Employment Officer will proceed with a hearing on Mr. Cooke’s appeal.” Only then did the case finally move forward.^{Footnote 70}

Because of the FEB’s stipulations, the union had to narrow its case to a handful of individual employees and decide which aspect of the overall pattern of discrimination—inconsistencies in pay policies, the lack of promotion opportunities, or the existence of segregation—it should distill into a case involving a personnel action. Segregation usually fell outside the board’s definition of discrimination because in its mind segregation did not directly affect an employee’s economic status.^{Footnote 71} Similarly, “patterns” would not be considered evidence of discrimination. This left the case of the female printers’ assistants and the aspiring male apprentices.

Ultimately, the printers’ assistants’ case, which concerned systemic racism against black women, foundered on the FEB’s insistence that the union prove that individual white women received privileges and assistance not accorded individual black women. The Civil Service Commission’s earlier rejection of the union’s evidence coupled with large number of pink slips going out between September and December 1949 sealed the fate of the African American printers’ assistants. Although Richardson called attention to the status of many of the black female employees as “mothers,” he could not get the commission or board to recognize their situation as a problem.^{Footnote 72} The union’s decision to drop this matter was probably also guided by its realization that a case involving male veterans would likely carry more moral authority than one focused on women. At a mass meeting, Gilmore revealed the weight given the apprentice situation, calling this part of the case the “most disgraceful form of discrimination.” She asked the audience: “Is this what America promised to Negro veterans, men who honorably answered the ‘call to colors?’”^{Footnote 73} Consequently, left in place and unquestioned was the gender hierarchy, which excluded all women, but especially black women, from well-paying craft jobs and management positions. In the end, a general campaign against racial discrimination became a battle over the promotion of a group of male employees to apprentice positions. Just as the women were losing their jobs, the case involving the canceled apprentice exam began to gain some traction.

When it became clear that the FEB would probably hear the case about the apprentice plate printer exam, Plate Printers Local 2 turned to southern Democrats in Congress. The union took credit for drafting legislation that would have made it mandatory for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to hold a national, not internal, exam for apprentice plate printers under the auspices of the Veterans Preference program. Representative Robert L. Ramsay (D-W.Va.), chair of the Senate Committee on the Post Office and Civil Service, and Olin D. Johnston (D-S.C.) introduced H.R. 7185 and S. 3050 on 7 February and 16 February 1950, respectively. Identical, the bills sought to amend the Veterans Preference Act of 1944 by stipulating that competition for apprentice positions would be restricted to veterans and that exams for these posts would have to be done on a national basis.^{Footnote 74}

By introducing this legislation, elected officials sought to control administrative authority over the hiring process when it involved race. During much of the 1940s, especially after passage of the Veterans’ Preference Act, the Civil Service Commission had been seeking to retain overall accountability for examinations, while providing departments with more flexibility in carrying out appointments.^{Footnote 75} Moreover, for many years, the commission, along with agency personnel directors and federal civil service unions, had been encouraging promotion from within as a means of elevating morale and diminishing turnover. Determined to maintain the racial status quo, legislators such as Senator Johnston sought to use laws to rein in the activities of the FEB in order to prevent African Americans from gaining access to skilled trade positions.

Both Ramsay and Johnston, who were known for their pro-white labor, pro–civil service views, cast the bills as an effort to restore fair play to the civil service. Ramsay told his constituents that H.R. 7185 was “designed to correct what I thought … was a grave injustice in connection with an examination for apprentices at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.… The Treasury Department was limiting applicants to a select group of its own employees, thirteen of whom happened to be negroes. My bill merely states that such examinations shall be open to all citizens, no matter where employed.” Ramsay then played on the pervasive anticommunism of the era, complaining that the bill was “under fire by the left-wing United Public Workers of America,” which was “one of the unions suspended by the CIO as Communist dominated.”^{Footnote 76} Johnston, too, stressed the bill’s intention to make the civil service adhere to the “merit” system through open, competitive examinations. Neither Johnston nor Ramsay explained how their support for veterans’ preference was consistent with the merit principle. Nor did Johnston explain his subsequent willingness to exempt the apprentice programs of the Tennessee Valley Authority and National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.^{Footnote 77}

For the most part, members of Plate Printers Local 2 stayed out of the limelight, working to block the apprentice program through congressmen and simultaneously through a failed court case.^{Footnote 78} Printers saw themselves as a “small band of artisans” determined to protect their craft and autonomy.^{Footnote 79} To the union’s legislative liaison, Frank Coleman, the hiring of black apprentices represented yet another effort by management to weaken the union, and he employed the argument of equity to challenge this breach of the color bar. Although his voice, and the voice of other plate printers, is not heard much in the records, he did write to President Truman’s assistant, John Steelman, on April 12, 1950, to request that Truman force the Treasury Department to suspend appointments to the apprentice program until both houses of Congress could consider H.R. 7185 and S. 3050. He argued for the halt on the basis of fairness, maintaining that the department “had arbitrarily restricted applicants for this examination to certain employees in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.” As he explained it, the legislation would simply give all veterans the ability to take the exam. Assuring Steelman that this proposal had the “backing of all the Veterans Organizations in the United States” as well as AFL President William Green, Coleman asked Steelman to ignore the “demand” from the FEB, “at the request of the United Public Workers,” that the treasury secretary make appointments off the apprentice exam register. His hostility was palpable as he told Steelman that veterans groups “would resent, in no uncertain terms, the appointment of these so-called apprentices from this so-called promotional examination at the request of the out-lawed United Public Workers Union whose influence with the administration seems to be far greater than that of the American Federation of Labor and all of the Veterans Organizations in this country.” By drawing attention to the “out-lawed United Public Workers,” a union known to have many African American members, Coleman suggested that Truman’s support for the union, and civil rights more generally, amounted to preferential treatment of black citizens, as well as endorsement of radical, communist-led unions.^{Footnote 80} In his mind, the Truman administration, along with Treasury Department officials, was biased toward black workers and their union.^{Footnote 81}

Green had also expressed these views, and those of Johnston and Ramsay, in correspondence to Truman. Green’s letter reads race completely out of the case, making the controversy an issue of fair play. Green informed Truman that apprentices in the bureau had always been selected from a “nation-wide competitive examination” that was “open to all American citizens regardless of race, color or creed, and was taken by members of all such groups.” He neglected to mention that blacks with high scores were always bypassed using the Civil Service Commission’s “rule of three,” and that when bureau officials had no choice under civil service rules but to appoint an African American from the exam register, they simply stopped making appointments. Still, Green found the bureau’s desire to restrict the exam to bureau employees “one of the most peculiar and un-American processes I have ever heard of” and noted that the plate printers had complained to Hall of this “unfair practice.” According to Green’s version of events, plate printers told Hall to request a Civil Service Commission exam for journeymen, and astoundingly that “improved machinery be installed in the Bureau” to keep up with production demands. If this occurred, it suggests that bureau managers were able to use the threat of an apprentice exam open to African Americans in the bureau to get the plate printers union not simply to accept the new equipment, but to request it.^{Footnote 82}

Neither legislators nor white plate printers could prevent the FEB from holding a hearing on the apprentice plate printer exam, an event that allowed a handful of bureau employees to tell their individual stories about systemic discrimination. For the male helpers hoping to take the apprentice exam, the hearing before the board was the culmination of a long fight for recognition.^{Footnote 83} UPWA officials Bernstein, Richardson, Kelenson and Gilmore sought to paint a picture of deeply rooted discrimination at the bureau, rather than to focus solely on the case of the nine appellants. In his opening statement, for instance, Richardson spoke of the “deep pattern of discrimination against Negroes,” which he said led to the postponement of the exam.^{Footnote 84} Perhaps more critically, the bureau men testifying linked the particular to the general, citing individual case after individual case of white men with less or equal education and experience who had advanced far beyond them. Employee John White detailed two specific instances of men who had come in with him and advanced six or seven steps above his CM-2 position, concluding that “that is the reason I believe that there is a pattern in the Bureau concerning the upgrading and promotion of Negroes.”^{Footnote 85} Bernstein stressed that a review of all skilled trades revealed patterns of race discrimination that went far “deeper” than simply the postponement of the apprentice exam.^{Footnote 86}

Yet, in keeping with a liberal interpretation of race relations, Richardson encouraged the FEB to recognize that American ideals could and should be colorblind. Emphasizing that the bureau men wanted to work within the system to change the situation, he noted that the FEB hearing was their “last court of appeal” and that they were not trying to “knock around procedures,” but rather to present evidence that would “leave no stone unturned.”^{Footnote 87} He advanced a democratic vision of the executive branch in which bureau men in the CM services represented the government as much as high-level Treasury Department officials. “We consider our witnesses also government witnesses,” he stated, “in the sense of representing something that the government stands for.”^{Footnote 88} Although he did not specify what that “something” was, Richardson underlined the fact that the bureau men had served their country at home and abroad. For many years, they had remained faithful civil servants working for Uncle Sam, and when war began, they answered their government’s call to duty, risking their lives for their country. Their aspirations for upward mobility and faith in the merit system—they had not after all disputed the use of an exam to determine admittance to the apprentice program—represented very American values. As if to emphasize their democratic rather than communist ideals, at the end of the hearing Richardson told the board that the case was about much more than an apprentice exam; it was about “whether the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are living documents.”^{Footnote 89}

Recognizing the systemic race discrimination in the bureau, FEB officials stipulated that an individual approach was not necessarily adequate, and that the FEB should not be merely an “appellatory” body. Issued on February 23, 1950, the final draft of the FEB’s decision made some effort to recognize the modernization story as a legitimate, colorblind business decision, thus preserving the credibility of department officials, but it also acknowledged deep patterns of discrimination at the bureau. It may not have delved into segregation, but it certainly called attention to “a system which has operated effectively to bar Negro citizens from the civil service position of plate printer in the bureau,” and it noted in several places that no African American had ever been a plate printer. If a system of recruitment deprived “any group of American citizens by reason of race, color, religion, or national origin, the opportunity to qualify for the civil service position of plate printer,” it declared, “the recruitment policy and program should be changed.” In a later letter to President Truman acknowledging the shortcomings of a colorblind approach to fair employment, Houghteling remarked that the bureau barred African Americans “regardless of their merit and fitness, from advancement into the skilled trades.”^{Footnote 90} The hearing seemed to have a profound effect on Houghteling, who told Undersecretary of the Treasury Foley that the postponement of the exam was but a small visible piece of the problem because “the underlying basis for said complaints goes much deeper into the historical pattern of skilled craftsmen recruitment in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. In our mutual responsibility for carrying out the President’s Fair Employment program I am sure you will recognize this fact.”^{Footnote 91} He even used the FEB’s 1950 annual report (never published) to call on fair employment officers to focus on patterns of discrimination because current procedures offered too narrow a focus on individual complaints. Nevertheless, the FEB’s February 23, 1950, report made no mention of the plate printer’s union role in helping to create these patterns, perhaps, in part, because the union had not testified at the hearing.^{Footnote 92}

In 1951, the FEB undertook a substantial revision of its rules, it seems primarily in response to this case. Among the changes were provisions allowing organizations to file complaints on behalf of groups of employees, not only individuals, and employees to lodge grievances directly with the department’s fair employment officer, without first going to a supervisor or deputy fair employment officer. Additionally, Houghteling asked Treasury to submit written procedures.^{Footnote 93} FEB chair Houghteling continued to see discrimination as largely an individual problem, but critically he acknowledged that traditions and “unconscious” acts could lead to race discrimination.^{Footnote 94}

Unfortunately, department officials did not feel the FEB ruling mandated that they implement the apprentice program, only that they hold the exam. On March 15 at 9:00 a.m., the apprentice applicants finally sat down in the bureau’s annex to take the exam. It seemed to be the end of a long road, and no doubt Irving, Cooke, Edgar Sims, and the other African American test takers felt a sense of exhilaration at earning this opportunity. But they also may have felt great apprehension, for perhaps they already knew that the department had struck a deal with congressional committee chiefs. In deference to Senator Johnston, Representative Ramsay, and chair of the House Post Office and Civil Service Committee Thomas Murray (D-Tenn.), bureau officials had decided that they would make no appointments off the register until Congress had considered fully H.R. 7185 and S. 3050.^{Footnote 95} The FEB urged Truman to oppose the congressional legislation with the hope that this would allow Treasury to appoint apprentices, but there is no evidence that the president advocated for the black workers, either publicly or privately.^{Footnote 96}

Once the 81st Congress adjourned, the standoff ended. By the end of January 1951, the bureau had made thirty-five apprentice appointments from the exam register; fourteen of them were African American; and four of the fourteen belonged to the group of nine appellants who had brought the case to the FEB. In March 1952, it appointed another fifteen African Americans in its second apprentice class of thirty-five.^{Footnote 97} Richardson, Gilmore, and others at UPWA were elated. The Washington Afro-American put Gilmore on its “honor role” for her tireless advocacy in this case. Sims, representing the men who earned the posts, wrote to the FEB thanking it profusely for helping justice to be done.^{Footnote 98}

But the fight was not over. In July 1953, the bureau abandoned its apprentice program along with the twenty-nine African American men who had entered training to become journeymen plate printers. This decision capped a two-year campaign of opposition to the apprentice program. From 1951 through 1953, Plate Printers Local 2 continued to maneuver around the apprentice program and place whites in skilled printer jobs, while bureau officials pursued a relentless cost-cutting program.^{Footnote 99} Warned of the program’s demise, Cooke, Sims, and several others met with Treasury fair employment officer Hard, but to no avail. Even though Undersecretary Marion Folsom assured the White House and others that the apprentices would be retained in other positions and perhaps receive promotions, there would be no possibility for promotion to the lucrative plate printer post.^{Footnote 100} As soon as the program was officially closed, Sims and the other men immediately filed grievances with the Civil Service Commission and FEB alleging violations to the Veterans Preference Act as well as fair employment in this decision.^{Footnote 101}

Once again, the lack of a powerful agency committed to fair employment thwarted the employees. The Civil Service Commission denied that the Veterans Preference Act had been violated and suggested that because the men had grieved the case to the commission, they were not eligible to file a complaint with the FEB under executive order 9980.^{Footnote 102} Further illustrating the FEB’s vulnerability, the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 brought in a new set of political appointees with little knowledge of the FEB or the tangled history of the case. Board chair McCoy, who had taken over from Houghteling, attempted to educate the new administration on the case by meeting with Eisenhower’s chair of the Civil Service Commission and leader on personnel matters, Philip Young, in the summer of 1953. Young asked for recommendations and the board supplied him its most recent detailed decision on the case in mid-September 1953. After that, however, FEB officials found it difficult to get an appointment with Young to review their findings.^{Footnote 103}

Based on its July–August 1953 investigation of the decision to end the apprentice program, the FEB questioned the veracity of Treasury Department’s statements, issuing a recommendation in August that the bureau revive the program. It concluded that the apprentice program might involve a “slight additional cost,” but that “such cost, if any, should not be weighed against continued injustice to a race.” To the board, the demise of the apprentice program “removed the only remedial action available to correct the long-standing injustice to Negroes.” In its decision, the board spent a considerable time in its background section outlining the responsibility that the plate printers’ union had in maintaining barriers against African American advancement. But the board also criticized the bureau, noting previous miscalculations by the bureau of the number of positions that would be eliminated by virtue of its various modernization programs.^{Footnote 104} Desiring direction from the Eisenhower administration, the board finally received a directive from it: to cease its operations. On January 18, 1955, in the FEB’s last meeting, FEB members wrote to the Civil Service Commission, stating that the FEB did “not have information concerning action which may have been taken on its memorandum dated September 14, 1953 to the Chairman of the Commission relative to the appeal filed by the Apprentice Plate Printers in the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.”^{Footnote 105}

Race discrimination continued to plague the bureau in the late twentieth century. In the 1980s, African American employees frequently referred to the bureau as “the plantation,” lodging a race discrimination case against it in 1982. Eight years later, the bureau settled the suit in federal district court, awarding $1.4 million in back pay to African American employees denied promotions to craft positions. Forty-four retired workers received pension increases, with the total cost to the government over ten years estimated at $6.1 million. According to the suit, “the bureau had perpetuated an old-boy network under which white workers were brought in from private industry by friends and relatives and were given preferential treatment for craft jobs.” Of the 750 craft jobs in the bureau, whites held about 640, or 85 percent of them; of 1,750 noncraft posts, blacks occupied nearly 100 percent. Often, black workers trained incoming whites on the distinctive bureau machinery. Written exams that tested skills unrelated to craft jobs also thwarted African American promotions; the settlement instituted a moratorium on written tests for apprentices.^{Footnote 106} By then, of course, the government had an established equal employment opportunity apparatus with access to the courts to address discrimination.

Unfortunately, many of those involved in the original case were not around to enjoy this legal victory. After the UPWA disbanded in 1952, Thomas Richardson eventually turned to public relations and advertising work in New York City. He passed away at the age of fifty-one in 1963. Margaret Gilmore continued to work at the bureau until her retirement. In 1973, at the age of seventy-two, she was involved in a traffic accident on H Street in southeast Washington, D.C., and died of her injuries. Albert Bernstein was still alive in 1990, but the ruling in the case must have been bittersweet, because Bernstein’s progressivism in the 1940s and 1950s had cost him dearly. He lost his legal career during the anticommunist purges of the 1950s and was forced to open a laundry to make a living. At the time Treasury announced the settlement, Bernstein’s son Carl, an award-winning journalist most famously associated with Watergate, had just published a memoir of his parents’ activism, a book that apparently stirred up very painful memories for the Bernsteins.^{Footnote 107}

Bernstein, Gilmore, and Richardson no doubt felt frustration and defeat in the early 1950s, when bureau officials succeeded in blocking black men from printer apprenticeships. In 1949, Richardson had sadly observed that “the stories of human misery [from the bureau] … which have been told time and time again … have apparently made no dent in the hearts of government officials charged with responsibility for maintaining and protecting the merit system.”^{Footnote 108} Yet their activism had made a dent as it paved the way for discussions of new, aggressive remedies to employment discrimination and helped the FEB to consider as flawed a colorblind model and individual case-by-case approach. Due to this case, FEB members moved from seeing UPWA’s advocacy on behalf of black workers at the bureau as misguided and irritating to legitimate, eventually entreating the Treasury Department to break the color bar for skilled printers’ positions.

Left unresolved, of course, was the place and fate of other workers, especially black women, who played such a vital role in drawing attention to the pervasive racism in the bureau, but whose gender and race left them no hope for advancement, regardless of their skills. The FEB’s recognition of discriminatory patterns may have given these women hope, but the end of the UPWA and subsequently the FEB gave them little opportunity to revive their case.^{Footnote 109} Moreover, from the war through the early 1960s, southern Democrats and their conservative allies in the Republican Party kept future fair employment bureaucracies understaffed, underfunded, and disempowered. Denied substantial state power, boards such as the FEB struggled to address race discrimination, even within a federal civil service committed to the merit principle.