Only One Place of Redress: African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal. By David E. Bernstein. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Pp.xiii, 191.$39.95

In the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a maximum hours rule was a violation of the fourteenth Amendment. At first glance a rule limiting work hours for New York City bakers might appear to have little to do with the African American former slaves that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect. However, in Only One Place of Redress David Bernstein argues that Lochner was very relevant to the former slaves and that the courts' subsequent rejection of its doctrine caused African Americans significant economic harm.

The argument that economic regulation hurts African Americans is not new. Thomas Sowell in Markets and Minorities (New York: Basic Books, 1981) argues that racially discriminatory hiring and wage policies tend to persist only in markets with government restrictions on entry or pricing. Like Sowell, Bernstein is a critic of government economic activism, but he stops short of advocating laissez-faire as a means to improve the economic status of African Americans. Bernstein's analysis is grounded in the theory of public choice rather than in the theory of the invisible hand. Although he writes in his introduction that "economic regulations tend to benefit those with political power at the expense of those without it" (p. 5), in his final chapter he concludes, "the fact that economic regulation generally clashed with the interest of African Americans when they lacked political power does not prove, or even necessarily suggest, that over the longer run African Americans would have benefited disproportionately from economic laissez-faire" (p. 113).

The first two chapters make the strongest case for laissez-faire. Chapter I describes the efforts of Southern white landowners to limit mobility of black workers through restrictions on emigrant agents. Chapter 2 details how government-enforced licensing requirements restricted access of African American trades- and craftsmen to white consumers. Both chapters offer clear examples of facially neutral government restrictions enacted in response to market forces that threatened to undermine the existing racial hierarchy. Both offer examples of how judicial tolerance of economic regulation enabled a group with power to continue to subjugate the group without it. Furthermore, in both examples the facts strongly suggest that the economic status of African Americans would have been higher in the absence of regulation.

The case for laissez-faire gets progressively weaker in the final three chapters. Railroad unions, the subject of chapter three, were notorious for their exclusion of black co-workers and for their creation of work rules that limited the use of low-wage labor. The combined effect was to reduce African American employment—again, a persuasive example that economic restrictions can harm those without power. However, in the absence of unions, railroad workers would have been at the mercy of the railroad industry cartel and it is not clear that African Americans would have been better off. Chapters 4 and 5 discuss prevailing wage laws and the economic activism of the New Deal. As Bernstein documents, the intent of some advocates of prevailing wage laws was to limit competition from low-wage. Largely black. Southern labor, but there is some dispute as to whether they succeeded. In support of the argument that prevailing wage laws harmed African Americans, Bernstein quotes a 1934 article by Robert Weaver, but Weaver later changed his position. In Negro Labor (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company) published in 1936, Weaver wrote, "At first the establishment of minimum wages under NRA codes threatened the jobs of many Negroes. There were rumors and predictions of mass displacement of colored workers by whites once racial wage differentials were abolished or modified in the South. . . . much of this arm chair theory proved false. There was some displacement, but the extent of it was much less than had been prophesied since in the average establishment it is expensive and troublesome to replace a group of workers who have been employed for some time. More important. however, was the fact that NRA initiated a trend toward weakening the wage differential based on race" (Negro Labor, p. 14).

Despite his professed agnosticism regarding laissez-faire policy, Bernstein rarely acknowledges an alternative to economic regulation other than a perfectly competitive, non discriminating market. There are some curious omissions. In addition to leaving out Weaver's change of heart, Bernstein attributes the rise in African American employment exclusively to New Deal policy (p. 103) without mention of Weaver's extensive work on this topic. Bernstein devotes an entire chapter to the railroads, but J. Phillip Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters merit only a paragraph. Only One Place of Re-dress clearly should not be read as a stand-alone text on this topics, but it does provide important historical lessons.

-~ CECILIA A. CONRAD, Pomona College

Reprinted from 61 J. Econ. Hist. 847