He was correct. The push for an extra session dissipated, along with the criticism of the reconstruction corporations. Then Hoover simply declared success. Rebuking Sinclair Lewis, he told a Rotary club in New Orleans: “We rescued Main Street with Main Street…. The cooperative spirit of Main Street is what is putting the Mississippi Valley back on its feet after the flood. The people of the valley are settling their own problems of rehabilitation without a great deal of outside help. It is upon such independence and self-government that is based the greatness of the United States.”
The press moved on. Hoover did not. First he rebutted even indirect criticism of his actions. No newspaper had criticized him personally; to the contrary, many papers that had demanded a special session and attacked Coolidge had also, like those in the Scripps-Howard chain, pointedly offered him “unstinted praise.” Yet Hoover let nothing pass unanswered. To every newspaper that called his plan inadequate, and to dozens of individuals who had criticized it as well, he wrote identical but personalized lengthy responses which often ran as special articles. No paper was too small for his attention. Even weeklies in such places as Bowie, Arizona; Bremen, Indiana; Blaine, Washington; Electra, Texas; and Hartwood, Nebraska, received his rebuttal. To each editor he insisted that each individual victim had been cared for, that he had personally sat in on meetings when the reconstruction corporations had decided to loan enormous amounts to large planters, sawmill owners, manufacturers, and concluded, “I have thought upon explanation you would perhaps be willing to correct any misapprehension.”
To the country he was a hero, reclaiming the title he had earned in his European relief efforts, the Great Humanitarian. When he returned to Washington after one trip through the flood states, Will Rogers joked, “Bert’s just resting between disasters.”
BUT HOOVER’S PROCLAMATION of success did not equal success, and he had failed to address the real problem. He had only created credit. Credit involved risk. Private capital demanded either collateral enough to mitigate that risk or return enough to compensate for it. The devastated areas could not pay a high return, and planters had no collateral, since they had already mortgaged their land to plant the crop destroyed by the waters. Therefore, ironically, the reconstruction corporations had greater difficulty loaning money than they had had raising it.
In Greenville, Hoover’s program came under direct attack. Billy Wynn criticized the plan publicly: “We challenge the statement in the press that it will meet the need.” While Percy himself said nothing publicly, his refusal to defend the plan did not go unnoticed. Privately, W. H. Negus, president of the First National Bank of Greenville on whose board LeRoy Percy sat, described the situation clearly to the head of Mississippi’s reconstruction corporation: “There is, in fact, a super-abundance of bank funds. What this section is short of is banking collateral and that is the reason and necessity for ‘rehabilitation.’ Unless your corporation can furnish such need, which appears unlikely, it will do very little business, if any.”
Once again Hoover, refusing to be thwarted, intervened. First he convinced the St. Louis Intermediate Credit Bank to ignore its regulations and discount new crop mortgages even if a prior lien existed, so long as the lien holder agreed not to foreclose before the new crop was harvested. To further ease credit he also had the Red Cross promise to reimburse the reconstruction corporations for half of any losses. Percy, after the New Orleans bankers Hecht and Pool asked for assistance, and Alfred Stone also helped; they convinced Percy’s old friend and college classmate Tom Davis, head of the New Orleans Federal Intermediate Credit Bank, to suspend payments due on flooded land.
Meanwhile, Crosby answered criticism by lying to reporters. He said the Mississippi Reconstruction Corporation had, only two weeks after being organized and while flood water still covered nearly all the Delta, loaned out $100,000. In fact, months after his assertion, it had loaned only $50,000—and half of that went to the State of Mississippi to pay the National Guard. There was simply no demand for the loans, because there was no collateral available. Privately, Crosby informed Hoover: “It has been a source of much worry to me that an appreciation…[of] the great service you are rendering…has not been made manifest in as strong degree as I should like to see it…. For some reason the people in the flooded area have been difficult to arouse to their opportunities.” Nor was there much demand for loans in Arkansas and Louisiana.
Hoover could admit neither error nor failure. Earlier he had proceeded with massive soybean plantings despite scientific advice against it. Now he told Butler, “I have the feeling that while there is not much demand for [the credit corporation’s] services…yet its very existence has accomplished two-thirds of what we set out to do.”
In fact, his massive financing effort accomplished next to nothing. In the end, the Mississippi corporation made loans amounting to barely 5 percent of what Hoover had envisioned, and the Arkansas and Louisiana corporations did little better. The experience was pregnant with implications regarding the ability of the private sector alone to meet a crisis, but Hoover paid little attention to them. Instead, having declared success, Hoover was advancing to something far more ambitious than simple economic rehabilitation, something that would directly advance his own ambitions as well.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE RED CROSS treaded ever so lightly when it came to race. After a 1921 race riot in Tulsa left 9,000 blacks homeless, for example, James Fieser ordered a Red Cross professional assigned to help them “to pull out as quickly as possible.” The man refused, instead took a leave of absence, and continued to help the blacks without salary “at great uneasiness” to Fieser and the national organization.
In the first days of the flood, Red Cross headquarters similarly ordered Henry Baker, the on-scene disaster chief, to avoid Red Cross involvement in the issue of using the National Guard to keep black refugees in the camps. Hoover, despite his attention to other camp details, also initially avoided entanglement in race. When a Red Cross aide suggested telling planters that if they waived all 1927 tenant debts, the Red Cross would feed their tenants through the crop year, Fieser instantly rejected the proposal, replying it was “unwise to become too involved in local conditions.”
But as word of abuses of blacks in the camps had spread through the North, Hoover had created the Colored Advisory Commission and named Robert Moton chairman. Fieser had not objected. Moton, Fieser felt sure, would embarrass no one and would prove useful. Yet in return Moton had something large in mind.
ROBERT RUSSA MOTON stood well over six feet tall and towered over most men, but his slumped shoulders, rumpled appearance, and pudgy physique conveyed little force. He looked like a man who belonged in a study, smoking a pipe and pondering a problem, yet he was arguably the single most powerful black man in the United States, and what he pondered was the future of his race in American society. A man whom the Percys and their class would have commended, he personified the mythos of race relations that they expounded. During the Civil War, his father, a slave, had found himself behind Union lines but rather than claiming his freedom, he had returned to slavery because, his son explained approvingly, “he had given his definite promise he would stand with [his master] Colonel Womack until the war was over.”
Whether his father really had kept his word at the cost of freedom or Moton told the story simply to please southern whites, Moton did believe that the moral force of honorable behavior would ultimately compel white men to behave honorably as well. He was no Gandhi, who used moral force like an anvil breaking the hammer; he confronted no one, trusted powerful white men, made himself useful to them, and patiently awaited them. Yet in his own way he did everything possible to advance his race, and in a most difficult time he danced a most delicate dance. For this, radicals in his race called him naive and even dangerous.
Moton rose in the world through ability, hard work, and the influence of his powerful mentors. He had a sense of dignity, but also of caste. He did not have pride. Fellow students at H
ampton Institute were Native Americans and he could not understand their pride. Once a visiting Army general wanted to shake hands with the son of an Indian chief whom he had killed in battle. Moton brought the student forward and introduced him “with all the deference due to the General’s position…. The general greeted this boy of seventeen years of age very cordially, unusually so for the ranking general of the United States Army…. Paul looked him straight in the eye, did not salute, and refused to shake hands with him. I thought he had not observed the general’s outstretched hand and in a whisper I said, ‘The general wants to shake hands with you,’ but in typical Indian fashion he said, ‘Know it.’” Moton confessed he was “very much humiliated” by the incident.
He considered pride a luxury too expensive to indulge. Wasn’t the experience of the Indians proof? Whites were wiping them out. Wasn’t it better to bend to the white wind, to make progress and survive even if that meant keeping one’s thoughts to one’s self? So he held his thoughts back. He did so even in his book titled What the Negro Thinks, telling whites, “Negroes have always met the familiar declaration, ‘I know the Negro’ with a certain faint, knowing smile….[T]here are vast reaches of Negro life and thought of which white people know nothing whatever, even after long contact with them, sometimes on the most intimate terms…which reflects the persistent effort of the Negro on the concealment of his thoughts and feelings…. The Negro has always been quite chary of disclosing all his thoughts to the white man. He seldom tells all the truth about such matters; a great deal of it may not find its way into this volume.”
A protégé of Booker T. Washington, Moton was a conciliator, and not only with whites. He once tried to bring the two great rivals Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois together, and with them the race. When Washington died, Moton succeeded him as principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and also took command of what was called “the Tuskegee machine,” a machine built upon cooperating with, and not confronting, the white power structure. Teddy Roosevelt had helped create this machine by giving Washington nearly total control over relevant federal patronage jobs. Although Moton never attained Washington’s stature or influence, he still proved useful to whites. During World War I even Woodrow Wilson, who had imposed segregation on the federal bureaucracy and endorsed the film Birth of a Nation, had relied on Moton when black troops in France grew angry over the difference between how the French and their own countrymen treated them. At Wilson’s request Moton had gone to France and oiled the waters, and Wilson had thanked him for “the wholesome advice” he gave black soldiers “regarding their conduct during the time they will remain in France…[and] as to how they should conduct themselves when they return to our own shores.”
Back in Alabama, Moton carefully did not offend. Unlike at some black colleges, whites visiting Tuskegee were completely segregated, even entering chapel through a private door and sitting separately. Other black leaders, including some moderates, condemned Moton for this. When whites asked Moton to broadcast a radio appeal urging blacks to remain in the South, he did so, saying: “Whatever might be said to the contrary, the white man of the South loves the Negro. Many who have gone North have not found conditions as they had expected…. There is less reason now for Negroes to leave the South than ever before, because the basic sentiment in the South today, official and otherwise, is determined that the fundamental desires of the black man shall be assured him.”
He had confronted whites only once, over the issue of hiring Negro physicians for a new hospital for black veterans at Tuskegee. Many black leaders nationally, such as Du Bois, raised their voices loudly. Moton exerted all the influence he possessed, but only privately—albeit successfully. Few black leaders knew how hard he had worked, and few gave him any credit. To white leaders, however, he had proved his reliability and proved he would do nothing that would hurt them.
In return for all his efforts, Moton whispered in the ear of national politicians. In 1922, while LeRoy Percy was wrestling with the Klan, and tens of thousands of Klansmen were preparing to march down Washington streets, William Howard Taft chose Moton to give the chief address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial, symbolizing Moton’s status in white eyes. And the Tuskegee machine, if somewhat eroded after Washington’s death, still gave him power. Long before the flood, Hoover had informed Moton he would “be pleased to see you any time that you come to Washington.” Coolidge was also willing to meet with him or his representatives.
Equally important, Moton whispered in the ears of philanthropists. He served on boards with Andrew Carnegie, William Howard Taft, and John D. Rockefeller, Jr. George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, gave $5 million to Tuskegee. An even larger giver was Julius Rosenwald of Sears, whose many philanthropic acts included, at least partly as a result of Moton’s influence, building more than 6,000 “Rosenwald schools” for rural southern blacks.
It was this access to money that gave Moton the most power. When the black Kittrell College desperately needed $15,000 “to save an embarrassing situation,” it called upon Moton to raise it. When the all-black Delta town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi, was foundering, Moton promised its leader Eugene Booze to raise $100,000 for him. (Booze then asked Moton “the proper approach to Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr.” for a $1 million contribution.)
Now Hoover was intimating that he had large plans to help Negroes. And if Hoover became president—what possibilities that could afford! Now Moton was playing at a level higher even than Washington had, with the highest potential stakes for the race. It was up to Moton to play the game well.
IN EARLY JUNE in Memphis the Colored Advisory Commission met for the first time. Moton divided the members into small groups and sent each into different areas of the flood zone. Their trips were strenuous. One investigator reported: “Our train took six hours to go eleven miles, the water up to the lower steps of the car; the train in utter darkness the lights having failed, the Jim Crow coach half occupied by whites, and the remainder packed with Negroes some sitting three in a seat, aisles filled with men standing and the noise of the water boiling over the track, terrifying one woman until she screamed and put down the window to shut out the sound, with the people refusing to sing because of what seemed to be a sullen resentment at their treatment. It was an experience which will long cling to me.”
Despite the difficulties, the several groups quickly visited dozens of camps. In some, when they presented papers signed by senior Red Cross officials, whites muttered, called them “nigger,” and made certain they talked to no refugees alone; at least once, commission members left a camp hurriedly for fear of being kept there and forced to work. In other camps, including Greenville, whites treated them with utmost courtesy.
After ten days commission members reunited, prepared a preliminary report, and on June 14 presented it to Hoover and Fieser. It confirmed charges that Negroes were systematically being held in camps against their will and forced to work. In isolated places, the National Guard had also stolen, raped, and probably committed murder. One investigator separately sent a summary to the Justice Department asking for a criminal investigation. Yet Moton released only a much-censored version to the press with the most minor recommendations, for example “that a screened structure with tables and seats be erected for the serving of food at Greenville.” He also wrote an inoffensive story for release to the Associated Press and told Hoover, “You may feel free to make any changes or additions that may seem desirable to you.”
Claude Barnett did syndicate a story through his Associated Negro Press to over one hundred black newspapers stating that “members of the commission were bitter in their comment on conditions in several camps, particularly at Greenville, Mississippi.” But he explained apologetically to Hoover that Greenville had received so much publicity that “the truth must be admitted” or their report would have no credibility, and pointed out that his story praised the national Red Cross as “eminently fair and just in its orders.” Hoover reassured him that the story was “constru
ctive.”
The first phase had gone well for everyone. Hoover and Fieser, pleased, made good use of Moton’s press release to defuse criticism. For Moton the worst abuses of the Guard had been ended, and Hoover and Fieser had promised to implement the report’s recommendations. Barnett also assured Moton that they had trumped their rivals: “The [Chicago] Defender demands ‘a probe of flood conditions.’ It is a weak and hollow cry, used to bolster their attempt to take credit.”
But Moton had a larger goal in mind than maneuvering against more radical competitors in the black community. He had been willing to mute public criticism of the Red Cross, and indirectly of Hoover, to further another goal. Hoover had told Barnett that “something substantial can be accomplished.” Hoover had also hinted to J. S. Clark, president of Southern University, that he would do something, and Clark told Moton, “I am of the opinion that the work of our Committee is going to be far-reaching.” Moton himself had gotten a similar message from Hoover. Excited, he told a confidant, “It is my frank opinion that, as a result of the flood, the position of the Negro as an individual farm owner is going to be considerably strengthened.”
Rising Tide Page 45