Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  The essence of Moton’s hopes lay not in the implementation of any specific recommendation of the commission report but in a more general plea. “We were face to face with one of the greatest labor questions of America, the relation between the planters and these tenant farmers,” Moton wrote. “We were interested in a song that these people sang in the levee camps—that the flood had washed away the old account. They felt that the flood had emancipated them from a condition of peonage…. We are strongly convinced that something ought to be done permanently to relieve the hopeless condition under which these people have lived all these years. They ought not to be permitted to go back to this hopeless situation…if there is rehabilitation.”

  HOOVER ENCOURAGED the commission to think he would help the Negro. He intended to, and also needed their help. So far, they had given it. The flood had brought new attention to the plight of the Negro in the South; the sudden explosion of lynchings in May and June in Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana, compounded by the sympathy for flood refugees, was sparking new calls for federal antilynching legislation and new criticism of the Red Cross. Moton and his commission had defused some of those attacks with their first report. Still, Hoover noted, “We are having great difficulty through the North…in connection with the colored people.”

  On July 8, the day after a policeman murdered a black in Greenville, Moton, Barnett, and several other members of the commission met again with Fieser and Hoover, this time in Fieser’s Washington office, to present a more complete, second report, far more damning than the earlier press release or even than the preliminary draft. Moton reviewed it with Hoover and Fieser, doing most of the talking, gently noting that perhaps too little had been done since the first report, elaborating where necessary, and answering their questions while Barnett and the others remained silent. Moton neither said nor implied that he might release this potentially explosive document to the press. On the contrary, in order to protect the Red Cross and Hoover, Moton had prepared only three copies and had even refused to give any to other commission members; two copies he kept, one he gave to Hoover. But he also asked about rehabilitation and made a veiled reference to Hoover’s hints of ambitious plans.

  The next day Hoover received Moton privately in his office. By then they both knew he could very well be the next president of the United States. Indeed, his chances were increasing daily. Coolidge could legally run again, but tradition limited presidents to two terms. He had had them. And rumors were rife that Coolidge’s enemies were about to launch a campaign to force his retirement. Soon one GOP senator would publicly declare his opposition to a third term and a wire-service story would proclaim, “Underground Forces Working Against Calvin; Hoover Boom Is Growing…The widespread subterranean alienation from Mr. Coolidge which has long existed among professional Republican politicians will come to the surface in successive explosions…. As soon as the next Senate meets, it will consider an anti-third term resolution.”

  Now Moton sat alone with Hoover; it was a heady feeling, and one filled with promise for the future. It became headier when Hoover reviewed an idea that he had not wanted to discuss before the others. He said that the flooded region suffered from a “background of bankrupt economics.” The plantation system and dependence on cotton had wasted the richest land in the world. Then he outlined a comprehensive, and revolutionary, plan, a plan that could remake the face of the Delta. A memorandum he wrote that day, July 9, proposed “a subdivision of the land into smaller holdings and the building up of small farm ownership.” (Almost certainly neither he nor Moton realized that less than thirty years earlier, blacks had owned two-thirds of the farms in the Delta.) Those large plantations experiencing difficulties would disappear, to be replaced by, ultimately, tens of thousands of small farms. The program would nominally serve “both white and colored farmers,” but in reality it was designed for blacks. A “land resettlement corporation” would be created to issue first mortgages for the purchase of twenty-acre farms, and second mortgages for purchasing animals and equipment and to provide working capital. Hoover estimated that an initial capital of $4.5 million, properly rediscounted, would allow nearly 7,000 families to buy and equip farms. Repayments and profits would be plowed into new loans, allowing rapid expansion. Theoretically, the program could increase exponentially and transform the entire region. Hoover reasoned that white plantation owners would support the plan because it would decrease the supply of available land and therefore raise all land values. “If it were possible to save from the Mississippi flood fund a sum of [several] millions of dollars,” he stated, “we would be justified in applying it to this purpose as a part of the whole rehabilitation of the flood territory.”

  Moton left the office ecstatic. He believed that Hoover’s proposal could lift a large number of blacks out of poverty, and create both a black middle class and a promised land in the Mississippi Delta. He believed also that Hoover had the power to implement this plan—and would very likely soon have far more.

  On August 2, Coolidge announced he would not seek reelection.

  Before the flood, prominent southern Republicans, both black and white, had stated that their convention delegates would not support Hoover for the nomination under any conditions. Now many of the same men were promising Hoover their support regardless of his opponent.

  Meanwhile, Moton began to hint at the resettlement plan in speeches. In late August black businessmen gathered in St. Louis at the annual meeting of the National Negro Business League, an association closely linked to the Tuskegee machine, founded by Booker T. Washington, and presided over by Moton. Many of the attendees had scratched out a tiny pile of money from black poverty and death, running penny savings banks, or funeral homes, or burial societies that became insurance companies. Few were radicals, even by the standards of the day. Many were Republican activists. They were, like Moton, hopeful. Now Moton gave them real hope. After this meeting they scattered across the country, committed to Hoover, because of what Moton told them.

  “I am not at liberty to give you details but you will hear about it soon,” he said, his words stirring curiosity and interest. “But the Red Cross fund will doubtless be the instrument for doing something in behalf of the negro more significant than anything which has happened since Emancipation.”

  YET HOOVER had only been holding out a tantalizing carrot. He already knew that the Red Cross fund would serve no such purpose. Only Moton did not know it. Assuming that the Red Cross did support the resettlement idea, Moton had invited Fieser to the meeting of black businessmen. Fieser had already explicitly told Hoover the Red Cross could not support it, but sat there, the only white man in a sea of black, smiled at a fulsome introduction, and accepted enthusiastic applause. Then he wrote an angry letter to Hoover.

  In it he cited ten specific objections to the plan, beginning with the fact that “newspaper publicity [from] people like Senator Percy [has] created a state of mind that the fund is inadequate to meet even those items we have accepted as our responsibility.” The Red Cross had to husband its money because its original policy of giving refugees just two weeks’ supply of food upon leaving camp had to be abandoned; it was now “certain…that considerable numbers of people must be fed through the winter.” Finally, should they implement the resettlement plan, there was “the possibility of a gorilla [sic] warfare or financial persecution or ostracism which would drive the negro beneficiaries off the land.” He flatly declared it “impossible for the Red Cross to undertake such a program.”

  MOTON NEVER LEARNED of Fieser’s position. Hoover continued to hold out the promise of the resettlement plan. Moton continued to respond to it.

  Arthur Kellogg was managing editor of the Survey, a leading Progressive magazine, and a Hoover supporter. Sympathetic to blacks, Kellogg knew Moton and judged him harshly but perhaps accurately when he told Hoover, “A great many people had hoped that the introduction of northern workers, money and ideas would blast the crust of inertia in the Delta. I presum
e there wasn’t time…. Perhaps a committee [might have] with a more forceful man at its head than Dr. Moton who, poor soul, has to raise the money for his school both North and South and finds himself a plump, middle-aged gentleman, riding precariously on the narrow side of a 2×4.”

  Moton felt differently. In Hoover he believed he had found the solidity of rock, of real power. I shall be the nominee, probably, Hoover had said. It is nearly inevitable. Trusting in Hoover, through the fall of 1927, Moton advanced Hoover’s presidential candidacy at every opportunity, and exerted all the influence at his command to suffocate all criticism of Hoover among blacks and insure black support for his nomination. He was intent on seeing that there would be no sudden explosion of scandal from the flood that could in any way harm Hoover’s chances. And Hoover continued to use him.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  WHILE HOOVER and Moton pursued their agendas, nature imposed its own upon them, through the refugees. They were beset upon by plagues.

  The first plague fell upon their crops. When the refugees finally left the camps, they planted alfalfa, wheat, peas, and the largest crop, soybeans. Hoover had insisted on the soybeans even after agricultural scientists had strongly advised against it. Everything had grown well initially, and Red Cross officials had beamed with pride. But then came a drought, followed by an infestation of insects and worms punctuated by an early freeze. Only 20 to 25 percent of the limited crops planted were harvested; the soybeans were nearly all lost. God was mocking everything the Delta’s people had done that year.

  The second plague fell upon the people. Tens of thousands developed pellagra. The disease, caused by poor diet, begins by draining energy from its victims (it accounted for at least some of the “laziness” ascribed to blacks by white southerners). But the disease can also become ugly and dangerous. Sores erupt on the skin and form a thick black crust. Victims become morose, hallucinate, feel as if a fire burns in their heads and spines. Untreated, pellagra kills. At the end of every winter, tenant farmers all over the South, white and black, were on the verge of developing the disease, but normally in the spring their diet improved enough to stave it off. In 1927 in the Red Cross camps the refugees’ diet did not improve and pellagra became rampant. Initially, Red Cross officials denied all responsibility, but as the number of the afflicted grew to 50,000 in the Delta alone, they brought in experts who distributed tons of yeast (Washington County received one-third of the total for Mississippi). The yeast helped immeasurably, but a U.S. Public Health Service report concluded, “[A]ny attempt to remove the conditions which are fundamentally responsible for the prevalence of pellagra would involve a revolution of dietary habits and of the entire economic and financial system as it exists.”

  For the final plague was race. There had been discrimination in the camps, and there was discrimination in their closing. In Vicksburg, for example, the Red Cross had built different camps for different races; the black camp closed seven weeks earlier than the white camp. Blacks were sent home to work even while fields were still covered by a foot of water. Later, discrimination became even more blatant. By then the earlier sense of shared disaster and common humanity had dissipated; attitudes reverted to those common in the region.

  Hoover and Fieser had specifically ordered that “all aid be given directly to sufferers.” Victims were supposed to get enough feed, seed, tools, clothes, basic furnishings to start again; some of the totally destitute who had lost farm animals were even to get a mule or hog or a few chickens. But Hoover’s policy was honored in the breach. Throughout the flooded territory, county Red Cross chairmen, sometimes with the explicit approval of a national Red Cross staff person, gave supplies to planters for distribution. Some planters did simply distribute the goods to their tenants for free. Some charged for the goods, or subtracted the value of the supplies from old debts, or shifted a mortgage from a drowned mule to a Red Cross-supplied mule. And some simply stole the supplies for their own use. Blacks who owned farms, their tenants, and tenants on plantations with absentee owners got almost nothing. Even official Red Cross policy discriminated against tenants of absentee owners, assuming that owners living outside the Delta were not destitute and could take care of those tenants.

  From late summer through early fall, Moton focused on getting supplies to struggling tenant farmers, continually sending reports to Hoover with details of abuses. Hoover continually denied that there were any systemic problems, and told him to forward each report of abuse to the Red Cross for handling on a case-by-case basis.

  In November, Du Bois wrote in the NAACP’s magazine Crisis: “We have grave suspicions that the [Moton] committee…will be sorely tempted to whitewash the whole situation, to pat Mr. Hoover loudly on the back, and to make no real effort to investigate the desperate and evil conditions of that section of our country…. The one fatal thing for them to do, and the thing for which the American negro will never forgive them, is spineless surrender to the Administration and flattery for the guilty Red Cross.” The words were harsh and biting. Du Bois concluded with the promise, “Next month we shall have more to say.”

  Now Moton’s own credibility was at stake. Barnett warned him, “The Crisis had a white woman investigator covering the flood district recently…[who] was conversant with one particularly bad situation. I think we ought to beat them to any publicity on both bad and good.” So Moton prodded Hoover once more, asking for another investigation and wiring, “Suggest that Red Cross release news story about Commission…at once.”

  Irritatedly, Hoover told Fieser “the colored complex has again arisen.” But he also recognized that Du Bois could conceivably stir up the white press and black Republicans and finally agreed to authorize a November inspection tour by the Colored Advisory Commission. On December 12 this final report was presented to Hoover, Fieser, and half a dozen Red Cross officials in Fieser’s Washington office. Moton did not make the presentation; an automobile accident prevented him from attending, so Claude Barnett and Albion Holsey, Moton’s deputy, discussed it instead. Moton was accustomed to meeting men with power. Barnett was not. Perhaps because of this, perhaps to show that he was not intimidated, or perhaps because he simply thought he was among friends, he spoke more candidly, even brashly, than he might otherwise have.

  For three hours, beginning late in the afternoon and continuing into the evening, Barnett and Holsey reviewed the report. It stated that local officials had “frequently nullified” national Red Cross policies, that landlords were routinely stealing supplies designated for tenants, that black landowners were refused supplies, that thousands of colored victims had yet to receive clothing needed for the winter, that tenants who tried to leave plantations were being whipped. Blacks had refused to talk to commission members because “their lives would be in danger…[but] the facts are known and admitted by Red Cross officials in some of the communities…. We urgently recommend that the Red Cross on its own initiative investigate the conditions which are set forth in these reports…. Confidential investigators from Washington would be able to make some interesting discoveries.”

  Hoover and Fieser had expected praise. They were startled at first, then grew increasingly angry. They were being rebuked, unusual enough for either of them. And they were being rebuked by Negroes, indeed, by the assistants of a Negro. Still, they revealed little of their anger.

  Barnett left the meeting pleased, confiding to a colleague: “I think we beat [the NAACP] to it on the flood thing. They can now rave, but we have done our duty by everybody around Mr. Hoover.” A few days later Hoover promised Moton that the charges would be “vigorously investigated and remedies applied.” Naively, Barnett told Moton, “I felt Secretary Hoover would rise to the occasion but this is better than my most sanguine hopes.”

  But Hoover was not a man who took criticism well. Though he promised action to Moton, he also conveyed extreme displeasure.

  DESPITE THE PAIN from his automobile accident, Moton decided to come to Washington immediately. At stake was not
only the fate of the flood victims and his personal relationship with Hoover, who seemed closer to the presidency every day, but the resettlement plan. Moton knew also that he had misjudged Hoover. The report had been written as if to one who saw things the same way. Hoover apparently did not see things the same way. It was a mistake no man in Moton’s position could make often and survive.

  Moton arrived in Washington in the evening, and early the next morning, while most men were still eating breakfast, went to Hoover’s office. He was not kept waiting. Hoover did not manipulate people in that petty way. But now it was Hoover’s turn to hold little back. Coldly, he told Moton the report had “disappointed” him. It was a powerful word, disappoint, a word impossible to rebut. Then Hoover critiqued it in detail, complaining especially of its failure to credit the good the Red Cross had done.

  Moton replied fulsomely, praising Hoover’s “consistently wise and patriotic service.” He apologized for not being in attendance when the report was first tendered, explaining, “The presence of some of us who were absent might perhaps have given a little different atmosphere to the meeting, but I want to assure you there was no intention on the part of those present to indict the National Red Cross in any way.” Then he made a literally unbelievable statement: “I had not seen the report as presented to you. I saw it afterwards.”

  Even if somehow Moton had not read the report, he had to have read the summary. It was only seven pages long and included some of the bluntest criticism, and it was in the form of a letter from him to Hoover. He had signed it—before his accident. By disowning it, he could not have humbled himself more completely and abjectly.

  Hoover listened to Moton’s explanations, told him to see that the report was rewritten and to write a press release, then dismissed him absently. After the meeting, Hoover called Fieser. With some smugness and a still smoldering anger, he said he “laid Dr. Moton out.” And although Moton had submitted meekly, Hoover still told an aide to bring “another element of the colored world into the picture.”