Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  On the domestic front Eisenhower did not do so well. He would not act boldly and openly against Joe McCarthy, explaining privately that ‘I just will not – I refuse – to get into the gutter with that guy.’ This left McCarthy free to intensify his persecution of the State Department and to launch a new campaign against the army; luckily for Eisenhower this last enterprise backfired completely, so that in December 1954 the majority of the Senate at last felt brave enough to vote for a motion condemning ‘the Senator from Wisconsin, Mr McCarthy’ for bringing the Senate ‘into dishonour and disrepute’. After that Joe’s unique power as a national bully was at an end. Eisenhower burdened himself with the most pious Secretary of Agriculture in American history, Ezra Taft Benson, member of the Council of Twelve of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism was now utterly respectable), who was also the most unpopular with farmers, for he made a determined effort to reduce the size of federal subsidies to agriculture. In other respects the Eisenhower administration was little more than colourless. Its most important action, the Interstate Highway Act of 1956, was undertaken largely at the bidding of a well-organized pressure-group. This Act committed the federal government to spending 833,500,000,000 in fourteen years on building a national network of motor-roads. It was to do more to shape the lives of the American people than any other law passed since 1945. It reinforced the ascendancy of the private car over all other forms of passenger transport; it made continental bus services fully competitive with the already declining railroads; it boosted freight carrying by truck; it gave a great impetus to black emigration from the South, and a huge boost to the automobile, engineering and building industries, thus helping to stimulate the prosperity of the sixties; by encouraging car-ownership it encouraged car utilization, thus stimulating the spread of the population into vast sprawling suburbs, where only the car could get you to work, to the shops, to schools, entertainments and voting-booths; and this change in turn would soon be reflected in political behaviour. Yet it can hardly be pretended that the administration foresaw or desired these results, any more than it did the widespread corruption and faulty construction that went with the hasty building of the highways.

  The Eisenhower years were in general ones of comfortable lethargy. When the Soviet Union put the first satellite into space in 1957 the shock to American vanity was almost unbearable; the cry went up that something was badly wrong with American society, American science, American education; it was to take several years for the speed with which the lapse was made good to wipe out this impression. The rifts in the Republican party were obvious, and if time saw off the dinosaurs (McCarthy died in 1957, Knowland disappeared after losing a gubernatorial election in California) it was not bringing forward many bright new Republican faces. True, Nelson Rockefeller, a grandson of old John D., was elected Governor of New York state in 1958, but by this time the GOP was very weary of always taking its cue from the multi-millionaires of the East, who seemed more and more dangerously liberal. That left only the Vice-President, Richard Nixon, whose one certain talent was for a sort of deodorized McCarthyism. He badly wanted the Presidential nomination, and exploited the Vice-Presidency cunningly, carrying out all the routine party chores which bored the President. Nixon, every party-worker knew, would speak for anyone, anywhere. He called in the debts thus incurred in 1960, when he easily won the nomination. He had the rather reluctant blessing of the President; but if he could turn that into a willingness to campaign on his behalf (Ike never much liked campaigning for himself) he would surely be able to glide into the White House, if not in a landslide, at least without great difficulty. Times were not bad; no grave crises obviously threatened; the Democrats, as usual, were deeply divided.

  They were not, however, downhearted. The election of 1956 had been a nightmare; Adlai Stevenson had again won the nomination, but had campaigned far less effectively than in 1952, and been beaten even more thoroughly. However, his party had increased its majority in Congress; and in 1958, at the worst point of the Eisenhower recession, had increased it again, enormously. Eisenhower the Invincible was constitutionally barred from running again. Nixon was widely distrusted and disliked (the favourite Democratic joke of the period was a picture of the Vice-President looking shifty, with the slogan underneath, ‘Would you buy a used car from this man?’). The economy had still not wholly recovered. Eisenhower’s modest and cautious style of leadership had appeared to many as merely timid and incompetent, and the collapse of his peace-seeking ventures at the Paris conference had confirmed the impression. Finally, the Democrats had plenty of energetic and talented candidates.

  Of the field, two men looked to the past: Adlai Stevenson, half-reluctant, half-anxious for a third nomination; and Senator Symington, Harry Truman’s candidate, who had been one of Truman’s Cabinet officers and came from Missouri. These two never looked very likely to get the prize. Three candidates saw themselves as men of the future: Hubert Humphrey, Senator from Minnesota, one of the most energetic and politically creative spirits in Congress; Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas, Senate Majority Leader, who had given Congress the firm leadership that Eisenhower had refused to supply; and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, junior Senator from Massachusetts. Kennedy won the day. He was young, as politicians go; very handsome, very charming, very able, very rich. He was also a consummate politician. While he demolished Humphrey in the primaries, he quietly rounded up enough support among the old pros of the Democratic party (men like the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, and John Bailey, the boss of Connecticut) to be sure of defeating the rest, and particularly Johnson, at the convention. Everything went according to plan, and soon nothing was left but the battle with Richard Nixon. It proved a hard tussle; but Nixon’s charmlessness, his implausibility as the heir of the smiling, reassuring, authoritative Eisenhower, and half a dozen blunders, of which the worst was to engage in a television debate with Kennedy, which simply gave the rival candidate a chance to get better known, eventually handed the Presidency to Kennedy, who ran a brilliant campaign. He was elected by an almost invisible majority (118,574), but elected he was, and a country which had basked quite happily in the sunny inaction of the Eisenhower era began to feel eager to see what the energetic leadership promised by the new man would amount to. There was a lot needing attention: the ever-deepening rift between the United States and the communist regime which had recently come to power in Cuba; the latest Berlin crisis (the Russians in August 1961 built a wall across the city to stop the flow of refugees from East to West); threatening campaigns by communist guerrillas in Laos and Vietnam; at home, a backlog of long-overdue reforms and, above all, an explosive racial situation. At least one old problem had been solved: though Kennedy had certainly lost votes in some important states because he was a Catholic, he had won them elsewhere for the same reason, and proved in the end that it was no longer necessary to be a Protestant to be President of the United States. So a bad tradition came to an end, and Kennedy stepped forward to take the oath of office. Then he delivered a short inaugural speech. It was an essay in the higher eloquence, well enough for such an occasion though perhaps rather fustian when read in cold blood; its note was stirring, but possibly disconcerting:

  Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has passed to a new generation of Americans – born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of human rights to which this Nation has always been committed…

  Could he mean it? It sounded like a call to a new world war. Well, time would show. Meanwhile it was a moment for joy: joy in the glitter of the new administration, in the high spirits of the President, the beauty of his wife, the obvious intelligence, energy and devotion of his ministers; in the strength and
splendour of America at her height, queen and dynamo of the nations. Eisenhower went quietly back to his farm at Gettysburg. Nobody foresaw that his bumbling, peaceful reign would ever be looked back on fondly.

  25 Unfinished Business 1954–68

  There comes a time when people get tired. We are here this evening to say to those who have mistreated us so long that we are tired – tired of being segregated and humiliated, tired of being kicked about by the brutal feet of oppression. We have no alternative but to protest. For many years, we have shown amazing patience. We have sometimes given our white brothers the feeling that we liked the way we were being treated. But we come here tonight to be saved from that patience that makes us patient with anything less than freedom and justice.

  Martin Luther King, 5 December 1955

  The bland smile of American democracy displayed a rotten tooth, or rather two rotten teeth: the plight of the South and that of the African-Americans. They were and always had been intimately related, never more so than at the beginning of the twentieth century, when 85 per cent of 8,800,000 African-Americans lived in the South, a region where the per capita income was little more than half the national average (if one omitted the trans-Mississippi South from the calculation, it was less than half the national average). Before the First World War the final touches were put to the Jim Crow edifice, and in spite of all the brave aspirations to a ‘New South’ the region stood supreme in disease, poverty, ignorance, sloth, hunger and cruelty: in 1900 there were 115 lynchings (nine of whites, 106 of blacks) in a year when the total number of homicides was 230. Not all the lynchings occurred in the South, but most of them did. Southern politics appeared to be immune to the successive challenges of Populism and Progressivism: however vivacious the reformers, in the end the old order of corruption, demagogy and reaction, cemented by hatred of the blacks, persisted, it seemed, unchanged. The South still seemed caught in the trauma of Appo-mattox: the old Jeffersonian themes of agrarianism and states’ rights were mumbled (or, when necessary, shouted in defiance of the Yankee intruder) like prayers to a rosary, and with ‘the war’ formed the staple of most respectable public discourse. It was a world, it appeared, condemned by itself and fate to permanent exclusion from the American mainstream. The teeth, one might pardonably have assumed, were beyond the skills of the dentist: were past repair and (thanks to Abraham Lincoln) impossible to extract.

  Yet this gloomy appearance was necessarily false. Historical change could not spare even the South. Rescue was at hand; the agents of it, war and capitalism.

  The First World War served the South in many ways. First, by stimulating a huge demand for unskilled labour and by at the same time cutting off immigration from Europe, it gave the blacks an alternative to cotton-picking. The factories of the North were clamouring for workers; the South supplied them. The ‘Great Migration’ began: in their thousands the blacks slipped away from the fields to board the trains for Chicago and Detroit. They were seizing the chance to cut the cord which tied them to poverty and the South. Never mind that they would suffer appallingly at the hands of the Northerners; in the end this internal migration would be seen to be the best thing that had happened to their race since the slaves walked away from the plantations. Meanwhile, war necessities poured a flood of wealth and economic stimulus into the South. Her coasts were fringed with shipyards, each building frantically. Soldiers needed cheap, convenient smokes: suddenly the cigarette was big business, and the tobacco farmers were saved. Cotton, needed for explosives, boomed: ‘King Cotton is now restored to his throne,’ an admirer rejoiced, ‘and from fields nodding drowsily in white through the summer he draws royal revenues.’ Oil was so much in demand that the problem of overproduction was solved, for the time being at any rate. Vast new coalfields were opened in Kentucky. Army camps sprang up all over the South, bringing with them a huge stimulus to stores and soda-fountains (smoking was not the soldier’s only relaxation). The Southern textile industry boomed, and began the rapid advance that was to overtake New England in the post-war period. Ordinary wage-earners – even if they were black – found themselves prosperous as never in their lives before. The South was suddenly alive again; hope was real at last.

  It might all have been a bubble, but although there was indeed a recession immediately after the war, and although the perennial problems of Southern agriculture got worse and worse during the twenties, the march, once begun, was not halted, even by the 1929 Crash. During the twenties Northern capital, energetically seeking new investment fields, began to enter the South in unheard-of quantities. Wartime success had opened investors’ eyes to the possibilities: they were eager to realize them, and most Southern state governments, mint-new from their Progressive reshaping, were eager to help, especially by advertising the low cost of Southern labour, kept that way by rigid opposition to labour unions and (though they did not say so) by the fomentation of racial rivalry. In the South-West there was an oil boom, characterized by wide-open frontier towns like those of yore, in which the Wild West had its last fling; Coca-Cola, which was manufactured in Atlanta, began its spectacular rise as the world’s most popular teenage drink; new commodities such as aluminium and rayon came on swiftly; there was a rising demand for lumber; and the Florida building boom. The result soon showed in the statistics: while the number of wage-earners in manufacturing sank nationally by 9 per cent between 1919 and 1927, it went up in the South by the same amount, and the South’s urban population grew more rapidly than that of any other section, though it was still only 32.1 per cent of the area’s total in 1930. Southern boosters acclaimed the new vigour and hopefulness of Dixie. It was all very reminiscent of the West a hundred years previously.

  All was not gracious in the garden: the boll weevil completed its devastation of the cotton areas in the early twenties, while the mosaic disease threatened the Louisiana sugar industry, and sharecropping continued to spread. But in retrospect the signs of hope seem more important. Certainly they were more important for the Southern blacks, for the ancient agricultural South would never offer them anything other than more of the same tyranny. That was the most compelling reason for the Great Migration; but however many blacks left the South, the number remaining would still be huge, and growing: 8,912,000 in 1920, 9,905,000 in 1940, 11,312,000 in 1960. Even though the Southern black population was slowly dwindling as a proportion of the US black total, African-Americans would never be free and equal until their position in the South had changed fundamentally.

  During the twenties the signs suggesting that such a change was on the way multiplied. Such ancient curses as hookworm, malaria, yellow fever and pellagra were eliminated. The last-named, a deficiency disease caused by the country people’s too-restricted diet of meal, molasses and salt meat, was not diagnosed until 1906 and not generally recognized as a deficiency disease for another twenty years. Yet it was one of the chief causes of Southern lethargy, of that notorious inability of the poor whites and blacks to work either hard or speedily. Its disappearance was a major blessing, if only for what it implied about improved diets and therefore improved incomes.

  Inevitably, the South was badly hit by the Depression. The boosters (who in the twenties had brought about substantial investment in new roads, among other things) were stopped in their tracks. Southern farmers probably suffered worse than any others from the general economic collapse. Forced sales of farm lands were on a gigantic scale (on a single day in April 1932, a quarter of the land of the state of Mississippi was auctioned), banks and railroads collapsed, so did the prices of the great Southern staples, cotton, tobacco and sugar; state governments tottered on the brink of bankruptcy. At some point between 1930 and 1935 tenant farming and sharecropping, those twin certain indicators of economic malaise in the South, became more common than ever before or since. Yet the region almost certainly gained more from the New Deal than any other. This was partly because of the Congressional ascendancy of the South in the newly dominant Democratic party: important partners of FDR like Senator Rob
inson of Arkansas, the majority leader, or Representative Bankhead of Alabama, Speaker of the House between 1936 and 1940, not to mention Cordell Hull of Tennessee or James Byrnes of South Carolina, were excellently placed to further the interests of their section; and a stream of legislation poured continuously out of Washington to aid the South, the most spectacular item of which, the TVA, rescued from poverty and oblivion the hinterland of five Southern states (Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and North Carolina). Still more important, perhaps, was the fact that the nature of the Depression entailed certain remedies, and both the emergency and its cure were marvellously appropriate stimuli to the Southern economy. The collapse of the world market, for example, at last brought about the dethronement of King Cotton. What a century of agrarian reformers had urged in vain was now compelled by disaster. White and black farmers learned alike, the hard way, that their apathetic reliance on cotton could now only ruin them; and while many abandoned agriculture altogether, many diversified into other crops, particularly livestock, which they found to their surprise were much more profitable; while those who stuck to cotton were bailed out by the federal government on condition that they henceforth regulated production with reference to the national, not the international, market. Subsidy, in short, implied federal planning and control; reluctantly the sturdy individualists of Southern agriculture accepted the lesson (the tobacco farmers made a bolt for freedom in the later thirties, but it ended so rapidly in disaster that they returned to the fold with equal speed) and Southern farming began at last to catch up with farming elsewhere in America. Meanwhile the NRA made itself felt in Southern industry, raising wages in cotton manufacturing (and ending the scandal of child labour in the mills), regulating oil production and making possible the unionization, at long last, of the coalmines. The RFC encouraged the development of a paper industry in the region, exploiting the abundant softwoods of the piny barrens. Chemicals rapidly made their way to a leading position in the Southern economy, partly as a side-effect of the rise of the oil industry. The South recovered more rapidly than any other part of the nation from the Depression; by the Second World War it was poised for a spectacular burst of growth. The emergence of new industrial, financial and commercial classes implied that the entire basis of Southern politics would soon be altered.