Further furor erupted after a member of Congress (possibly Representative Bob Sikes of Florida) publicly announced that the US Army had procured fifty-five thousand copies for the purpose of training officer candidates, stirring up Southern white segregationists. Outrage filled the editorial pages of Southern newspapers. The News-Tribune in Rome, Georgia, editorialized, “If the Government has any surplus energy, it should be put into winning the war with the Axis, not into the crusade for social equality.” The Telegraph in Macon, Georgia, went still further: “If our representatives in Congress have any respect for themselves and their constituents they will utterly destroy the crawling vermin who are responsible for things like this.”48
Southern segregationists had caught more than a whiff of racial equality, integration, and racial amalgamation from the book, sensing a subversive intimate subtext that, while only indirectly stated, was clearly present. In March, US representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky and a few other Southern congressmen led the House Military Affairs Committee to pressure the US Army into halting its planned distribution of The Races of Mankind. Since that congressional committee controlled the army budget, the army had little choice but to comply, and it eventually destroyed its entire cache of pamphlets. The chief reason given by May for his opposition was the tract’s use of data that showed Northern blacks scoring higher on intelligence tests than Southern whites. In April, a House military subcommittee led by Representative Carl T. Durham of North Carolina assailed the pamphlet again, complaining that even if it were true that people of all races were brothers, “even brothers in the same family are not necessarily equal mentally, physically, socially, politically, or morally.” Indeed, the pamphlet’s problems extended “all the way from half-truths through innuendos to downright inaccuracies.”49
In the category of “innuendo” Durham and his allies surely included the pamphlet’s detailed discussion of “racial mixture” and the long history of peoples traveling, meeting others, and breeding with persons across races. As the authors wrote, “Thousands of Negro slaves have been brought into Europe at various times. Where are they now? People have come and gone in Europe for centuries. Wherever they went, some of them settled down and left children. Small groups were absorbed into the total population. Always the different races moved about and intermarried.” For this reason, and against everything German leaders were then saying about the so-called Aryans, “no European is a pure anything.” A “pure” race did not exist. Americans, too, were mixed and descended from all kinds of ancestors—“Cro-Magnons, Slavs, Mongols, Africans, Celts, Saxons, and Teutons.” And while further mixing of the races could “be made a social evil,” the authors wrote, “as far as we know, there are no immutable laws of Nature that make racial intermixture harmful.”50
Dixie statesmen would not stand for such a thing. Representative Joseph Bryson made an impassioned case for white supremacy against “the intermingling of the races” on the House floor, condemning the “long-haired men and short-haired women” who did not recognize the “innate intellectual superiority of whites over Negroes” and who persisted in “agitating for the amalgamation of the races.” Clearly, these agitators were subversive radicals and likely sexual deviants, as their rebellious hairstyles indicated (another favorite descriptor often invoked by critics was “starry-eyed”). In fact, Bryson insisted, against the clear trend toward culturalism in anthropology, “Archaeologists and evolutionists are quite unanimous on the subject of white supremacy.”51
Race mixing remained a profoundly disturbing idea to many white people, including these white Southerners, in the 1940s. White Southerners’ conviction, in one scholar’s words, that “the South was the last repository of the ‘pure’ white race” and their “pathological fear of miscegenation” ran ever higher as fear of Communism heightened during and after the war. White Southerners were profoundly aware that the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) held no opposition to interracial sex, and charges that the pamphlets’ authors were Communists were soon to come.52 Indeed, the FBI reported “with unease” that The Races of Mankind had made the rounds in the Communist Party headquarters in New York.53
Congressional leaders in both the Senate and the House were still fulminating about the pamphlet in May, when it emerged pointedly as a subtext in the heated debate over H.R. 7, a bill that would outlaw the requirement of poll taxes as requirements for the right to vote. Senator John Little McClellan of Arkansas warned his fellow legislators that to outlaw the poll tax was to start down a slippery slope of sexual chaos into intermarriage. He protested, “We do not discriminate concerning marriage in the South; we simply do not let the whites and Negroes intermarry.” The Southern Baptist senator Bilbo made this issue the very centerpiece of his own vigorous argument against H.R. 7, several times referring to the anti–poll tax measure as an effort to “rape the Constitution.” Noting that the Communist Party of the United States had, “in the first place,” called for “the abolition of all laws which prohibit the intermarriage of the races,” Bilbo railed directly against “the statements of Dr. Benedict and Dr. Willfish [sic] in their book entitled ‘The Races of Mankind’”: “There has never been a more disgusting conglomeration of scientific and physical facts than is to be found in this book. The whole scheme looks to the consummation of the plank in the platform of the Communist Party calling for the repeal of all laws forbidding the intermarriage of the races.”54 Bilbo’s tirade made the connection clear: the advocacy of intermarriage and sex across the color line was linked to Communism, an ideology seen to be both anti-American and anti-Christian.
Like Bilbo, Representative Malcolm Tarver of Georgia drew a similar link between the sin of intermarriage and the scourge of Communism. He was next to lambaste The Races of Mankind in a lengthy speech aiming to strike funding for the Fair Employment Practice Committee from the war appropriations bill. Convinced that the FEPC was itself a Communist-inspired plot to force black and white mixing, Tarver argued it was engaged not in the war effort but in “an effort to foist certain ideas of social, not economic, equality, which have long been entertained in this country, upon the white people of the country who feel a certain pride in their race, and justly so, and who, while they are willing and anxious that the Negro shall have his economic rights, are not willing, and will never submit, to his being forced upon them as a social equal and bedfellow.” It was “God Almighty” himself who had created the white race superior to the black race, and “while these facts have been controverted in the communistically prepared publication The Races of Mankind, which was prepared for circulation among our armed forces and which has been severely condemned by a subcommittee of the Military Affairs Committee, they cannot be successfully challenged by men and women of intelligence who are, in good faith, endeavoring to state facts.”55
Mississippi’s Bilbo continued to raise the twin specters of intermarriage and racial “amalgamation” every chance he could, blaming anthropologists from Columbia’s Boas to William Leo Hansberry of Howard University. Still inveighing against the FEPC in June, Bilbo informed Senate colleagues that, “Back in the heart of every Negro in America who is behind movements of this kind is the dream of social equality and intermarriage between whites and blacks”; and why shouldn’t they so dream, when, “Dr. Frank Boas, the great anthropologist of Columbia University, boasts of the fact that the intermarriage and the mingling of the two bloods would bring about a better race.” (Indeed, Boas had long suggested that racial hatred would be combated, over time, by “intermixture.”) In a speech to the Mississippi legislature that he insisted on preserving for posterity in the congressional record, Bilbo warned, “We have only to look about us and to read what time has recorded about race relations to realize that there are only two permanent solutions to the race problem—separation or amalgamation. If this first—a physical separation of the races—is not chosen, then the results will inevitably be the latter—amalgamation, a mixing of the blood and the destruction of both races.”
Propounding falsely “negrophilistic” Christian gospels of universal brotherhood would lead to the embrace of miscegenation and “plunge the Southland into hopeless depths of hybridization,” a degraded, “mongrelized” condition that “neither wealth, nor culture, nor science, nor art, nor morality, nor religion itself” could cure. Civilization itself would collapse if sex and marriage were permitted across the color line.56Bilbo’s own racial views received considerable support from Southern white church leaders, ministers and lay people alike, who were affiliated with local segregationist Citizens’ Councils. One of his favorites, Archibald Stimson Coody IV, was an influential Sunday School teacher at the First Christian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, and what one scholar dubs a “folk segregationist theologian.” An open member of the Ku Klux Klan, Coody tapped into the resentment increasingly felt by many lay people toward the racially moderate position taken by some ministers and church bodies, and he insisted that white Southern Christians were under attack by an international conspiracy—whose methods included “mongrelization,” immigration, and taxation—made up of Communists, federal government officials, the NAACP, the National Council of Churches, and the United Nations. In 1944 he published a pamphlet titled The Race Question that strenuously defended the lynching of black rapists, noting that African Americans were far likelier to commit rape because of “atavistic sadism, or sadistic atavism,” an “irresistible oestrus,” and wholesale lack of “will power and character.” Not only was white men’s “summary execution” of such a vile wretch “natural and instinctive,” it was a noble exercise of every man’s “right to kill in defense of his person his home and his family.” Essential to the “safety of the white woman” was “the prompt extermination of every beast that commits any overt act against her sanctity.” Coody even described four lynchings in detail, some of them performed as hangings and one the burning of a live man chained to an iron stake in the town’s public square. “And that was the end of that,” he bluntly concluded. “Was it any worse than burning a witch?”57
Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo delivering a typically flamboyant speech in 1946. KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES.
Bilbo utilized Coody as a speechwriter and advisor, and he was among the many dyed-in-the-wool Mississippians who wrote Coody with praise for The Race Question. He ordered extra copies to distribute to Senate colleagues and wrote coolly, “I believe if we will continue to propagandize the American people with the slogan of a physical separation of the races as the only solution of the race trouble that when all this ‘hell breaks loose’ we can get some real cooperation on the part of the public leaders of both North and South to a resettlement of the negro in Africa. It may be that we will have to kill half of them before the other half will be willing to seek a new country in Africa.” Through the national platform he occupied in the US Senate, Bilbo was able to transmit and popularize Coody’s brutal ideas to an audience far beyond Mississippi.58
During this time, Walter White, still heading the NAACP, spoke of his travels to visit with US soldiers in Great Britain, northern Africa, Italy, and the Middle East, and he denounced the racism that “a highly aggressive and vocal minority” of soldiers from the American South had carried with them into their overseas duty. The impact on their ability to fight successfully for freedom had been greatly compromised by their attempts to instill segregation overseas. But White reserved his greatest contempt for “what is going on here at home” to fuel that racism. “The news we have received abroad during the past 4 months has been almost universally depressing. It has been of certain Members of Congress pouring forth hate-filled tirades against the Commander in Chief of our Nation, and against racial and religious minorities, as vicious and intemperate in content and tone as any sent out by Goebbels from Berlin.” He singled out Bilbo for his “blatant boasts of filibusters against the anti-poll tax bill,” and he decried the congressional bloc that made it so difficult for American soldiers, “both white and Negro,” to get “objective information” on racial issues, placing blame directly on Andrew May’s successful halt of army distribution of “a factual, nonpropaganda pamphlet on The Races of Mankind, written by two of America’s most distinguished anthropologists, Profs. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish.”59
Bilbo saw nothing but anti-Christian, anti-American propaganda in what Benedict and her fellow anthropologists were teaching about the races, and he continued his attacks, outraged that the culturalists appeared to be winning. He repeatedly called out Boas, whom he constantly reminded readers was a “German Jew” who had poisoned the minds of all his students, including Lillian Smith (author of Strange Fruit, the best-selling novel about interracial love that Bilbo called “one of the dirtiest pieces of literature that has ever been printed and circulated”). “Miscegenation and mongrelization and hybridization” were the entwined themes that “old Dr. Boas taught in Columbia University,” Bilbo railed yet again in 1945. Racial mixing, “whether one likes their odor or not,” was the anthropologist’s dogma, all in hopes of fueling sexual intercourse that was against God and nature. “He taught it to his students, and that damnable doctrine and poison has been scattered all over the United States through Columbia University and his teaching. Today he has students posing as teachers of ethnology and anthropology and trying to teach the American people that there is no difference between the white race and the black race, that they are the same, and had the same common origin.” Anyone who believed such things deserved to be “liquidated, deported, or put out of business in some way,” warned Bilbo—only violence could halt such a vile crime as interracial union.60
This nasty rhetoric against the pamphlet and its authors was a staple of the pro-segregationist literature of the time. Soldier Ira Calvin’s The Lost White Race (1945), republished under the title Only Blondes Are Angels by Ira Calvin White, censured “that pamphlet The Races of Mankind” and promised that it would forever be a blot on Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential administration. “If you are a decent person you will need a clothes pin on your nose while you study it, for it stinks.” White women’s virtue was clearly at stake. Calvin penned the poem “Pretty Pink Skin, Blue Eyes and Blond Hair” (“Out here in the far South Pacific / I have learned something quite terrific; / Your lovely skin is what I adore / And is just what I am fighting for”) and wrote that “all sane white men consider any union of a white woman with a Negro as immoral, and dog-level prostitution, no matter what kind of marriage rites may have been performed beforehand.” Calvin railed against sex across the color line in godly terms: just as “God made the tiger the enemy of the lamb,” He made “the colored man the certain destroyer of the white man.” This was “not the fault of the white man,” who was, in fact, an innocent recipient of this arrangement: “Why God made white women beautiful like His own angels, and gave white men eyes with which to recognize this fact, and then created other women not lovely to white men’s eyes, is a matter we need not take up here.” The very notion of white women mating with nonwhite men was too disgusting to contemplate. “White men haven’t protected and preserved the delicate whiteness of their women’s skins these thousands of years to wind up by handing them over to the colored races to despoil. They will die first!” And in this regard, Calvin assured, “rebellion against destruction is obedience to God.”61 Religion, racism, and anti-Communist politics entwined here as in the ideology of Bilbo, and the weight of this concoction rested on the taboo against interracial sex.
These writings continued to build off one another and were repackaged again and again. Benedict’s name and work reappeared once more in Bilbo’s final 330-page segregationist sermon, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization, self-published in 1947, shortly before his death. There he wrote that the “underlying purpose” of The Races of Mankind was “to further the program of amalgamation in this country.” Proclaiming the commingling of white and black blood in marriage an “unpardonable sin against race” and insisting with full religious fervor that “nothing is more sa
cred than racial integrity,” Bilbo devoted a full chapter to denouncing Boas and his students for their “evil, disastrous, and racial suicidal preachments” and “insane and corrupt doctrines of miscegenation, amalgamation, intermarriage, and mongrelization” that were destroying America. In his aim to produce “a Nation of mulattoes and mongrels,” Boas cared not that this “new brown race of Americans” would still carry “the odoriferous African aroma which forever remains with a human being no matter how small an amount of Negro blood flows in his veins.” Gathering Boas, Benedict, and Weltfish into a group that also included G. A. Borgese, a University of Chicago professor and author of the article “A Bedroom Approach to Racism,” Bilbo insisted that educators like these were filling the young minds of their students with “damnable doctrines of destruction.” A white person so willing to be “a disgrace to his own race” by advocating the death of racial purity and of “white man’s culture and civilization” must be completely “ostracize[d] from white society.”62
After Bilbo’s death in August 1947, a fellow Southern Baptist from South Carolina, the young Strom Thurmond, would be the most outspoken segregationist to take up Bilbo’s mantle in the Senate. Likewise offended by anything that threatened to reduce the stigma of race mixing and intermarriage, in 1948 Thurmond—then the governor of South Carolina—ran for president on the third party ticket of the Dixiecrats, or the States’ Rights Democratic Party, which was a split-off from the national Democrats. Denouncing President Harry Truman’s civil rights proposals, he regularly told audiences that the separation of the races was necessary for “the protection of the racial integrity and purity of the white and Negro races alike” and thundered to supporters, “I want to tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there’s not enough troops in the army to force the southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigger race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches”—a theme repeated throughout his long career. Fifty-five years after that presidential campaign, a seventy-eight-year-old woman named Essie Mae Washington-Williams came out publicly as Thurmond’s daughter, the product of a union between twenty-two-year-old Thurmond and a fifteen-year-old black servant in his parents’ home.63 The prolonged white segregationist paradox lived on: repulsion toward one sort of cross-racial sex—between black men and white women—and fascination when the gender/race roles were reversed.
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