Most of Hick’s letters from this time are lost, but on 9 April she wrote from her headquarters in New Orleans, the new and exquisite Hotel Monteleone in the French Quarter. For Hick, the real news about New Orleans was its fabulous food: She ended a long day of “gloomy conferences,” for New Orleans is commercially “just a charming corpse,—with dinner at Arnaud’s.” It was a memorable feast with “two gin fizzes, some kind of a marvelous shrimp concoction known as shrimp Arnaud, pompano baked in a paper bag, potatoes souffle, a pint of sauterne, crêpes suzette (I think I’ll never order them anywhere else!) and black coffee. You never tasted such food! What a town for a glutton! …”
ER was happy in New York, but there more than anywhere her thoughts turned to a permanent situation with Hick:
Someday we’ll lead a leisurely life and write—so we can take our work with us & do all the things we want to do. Now and then we’ll take Earl along because he seemed so lonely yesterday that my heart ached! Women do get along better alone than men. Even you dear, settle down to work and I drown my longings in routine but a man has something the quality of a lost animal!
While in Fort Worth, Hick lunched with Elliott and his new wife, Ruth Googins. She found Elliott more settled, more mature, “neither so hilarious nor so bitter.” Ruth, she decided, was a good influence. Hick was interested that Elliott said that “the trouble with father (please don’t repeat this to the President) is that he has too much of a tendency to compromise.” Ruth told Hick that “Elliott adores” his mother.
While Hick toured the Southwest, ER returned to Washington in time for the final legislative battles over Washington’s alley bill and emergency meetings with Walter White on the Wagner-Costigan antilynching bill. With Walter White and the NAACP, ER now turned her most urgent attention to the effort to end the race violence and lynching that had plagued the nation’s history.
*Born in Cambridge, in June 1851, she was the granddaughter of Edward Everett, famed orator, statesman, and Harvard president. In 1878 she married Colonel Archibald Hopkins of the 37th Massachusetts Volunteers, son of Mark Hopkins, president of Williams College. From her famous home on DuPont Circle and Massachusetts Avenue, she organized her many voluntary projects for the dignity of all Washingtonians.
10: The Crusade to End Lynching
Of all the issues on ER’s agenda, none was more bitter than the U.S. government’s refusal to confront lynching. The ravages of the Depression and the rise of racial violence and fascism in Europe fortified white supremacists in the United States. Similarly, America’s commitment to segregation and its ghastly habit of public lynching, unpunished and unopposed, emboldened Nazis in Europe. During the 1930s, the Klan regrouped, and a new generation of night riders appeared. Opposed to a New Deal for all, Southern leaders determined to retain their privileges which depended on humiliation and degradation, peonage and poverty.
There were twenty-eight lynchings in 1933, and it was clear to ER that the federal government had to take an official stance to oppose these atrocities. ER joined the NAACP’s crusade to pass a federal antilynch law. Lynchings were not merely public hangings, they were community ceremonies witnessed by mobs of men, women, and children who worked themselves into bloodlust as torture and burning proceeded. They were a historically sanctioned tradition, protected by “states’ rights,” and local “law enforcement” agents and the “best people” in the area either participated in or condoned the event. Lynchings were as depraved a means of social control as any society had devised.
In 1934, ER joined a growing biracial movement of opposition to lynchings that called for a new day in the United States. Walter White’s 2 April “Welcome Home!” letter concerning the Virgin Islands enclosed a lawyer’s brief for the Wagner-Costigan bill which White hoped “you will find time in your busy life to read.”
Introduced in January 1934, the bill (S.1978) called on the federal government to hold local officials accountable if they “failed to protect its citizens.” Senator Robert Wagner of New York and Senator Edward Costigan of Colorado opposed America’s long collaboration with mob rule. In response to the proliferation of lynchings in 1933, Wagner deplored the “shocking reversion to primitive brutality” and the community climate which “connived with mass murder.”
The Wagner-Costigan bill promised “equal justice to every race, creed and individual” and would penalize the state or local government: If a lynching went unprosecuted for thirty days, federal law enforcement would intervene and charge local officials whose indifference or collusion made them responsible for the delay. They could receive a fine of up to $5,000 and/or a jail term of up to five years. In the original bill, the county in which the lynching occurred would be fined up to $10,000.
ER’s alliance with Walter White intensified as they worked together to promote this legislation. Walter White, the NAACP’s president, was white-skinned. With blond hair and blue eyes, he could easily have been a passing Negro rather than a Negro leader. His dedication to justice was forged during his college years at Atlanta University, when he began to investigate lynching for the NAACP. After graduation he continually risked his life by infiltrating lynch mobs on behalf of the Dyer antilynch bill of 1922. His researches resulted in his vivid book Rope and Faggot.
During the 1920s, a new liberal Southern movement stimulated by Will Alexander, a Methodist minister and social worker who founded the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, opposed race violence and promoted racial harmony. In May 1930, many people agreed with Will Alexander that lynching would soon become a “lost crime.” But the day he made that prediction, at a Methodist church conference, another black man was hanged and burned, and in 1930 the lynching rate doubled. Alexander organized a Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, which produced two monumental studies: Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching and James Chadbourn’s Lynching and the Law. These books proved, Will Alexander declared, that lynchings “could have been prevented, and any honest, vigorous effort on the part of law enforcement officers could have found those who did the lynching.”
The studies confirmed Ida B. Wells’s 1892 analysis: Greed, not woman’s honor, was behind most lynchings. Now, Alexander thought they “had stripped lynching of its last shred of respectability.”
Insulted to be excluded from Will Alexander’s Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching, Southern white women, led by Jessie Daniel Ames, a prominent Texas suffragist and director of Women’s Work for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, called a meeting on 1 November 1930 to repudiate the connection between lynching and the “honor” of Southern women.
Ames’s new Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching resolved:
[Lynching] is an indefensible crime, destructive of all principles of government, hateful and hostile to every ideal of religion and humanity, debasing and degrading to every person involved….
It brutalizes the community where it occurs, including the women and children who frequently witness its orgies…. It brings contempt upon America as the only country where such crimes occur, discredits our civilization, and discounts the Christian religion around the globe….
Thousands of white Southern women joined the movement against lynching, which black women had pioneered since Ida B. Wells’s lonely campaign generated the NAACP’s activities in 1910 and the Women Anti-Lynch Crusaders of 1922.
Jessie Daniel Ames believed that Southern women needed to know their sheriffs and marshals. They needed to know the men under the pillowcases: She intended “to reach the … the wives and mothers of the men who lynched….”
But she refused to participate in a congressional campaign. Ames told her biographer Jacquelyn Dowd Hall that she did not believe Southern women “would have gone along with us if we had endorsed a federal anti-lynching bill. They’d say we were following the Yankees and doors would have been closed to us.”
ER admired Jessie Daniel Ames’s commitment to education and protest; was impressed by her forceful publi
cations. But in 1934 ER believed that federal legislation was needed, and she made several attempts to persuade Ames to join the effort.
After her first meeting with Ames, ER spoke with White, who was impatient with Ames’s tired arguments. He agreed with her opposition to the $10,000 community fine because it would cause hardship and intensify opposition; it should be lowered. But he could not understand her “fear that anything done to stop lynching may increase lynching. The plight of the Negro in the areas where lynchings are most frequent is so terrible that it could hardly be worse.” In addition, White concluded, violent groups were being refortified all over the country, including the Ku Klux Klan, “Nazi, Fascist, and other reactionary groups, who are so bitterly fighting the President’s recovery program.”
ER then invited Ames to lunch on 15 April. Ames had begun to realize she was increasingly isolated when state leaders of her own organization called for support of the legislation. Also, on 13 March 1934, 1,000 women representing 250,000 members voted unanimously at the Southern Methodist Woman’s Missionary Council convention meeting in Birmingham, Alabama, to endorse Costigan-Wagner. Ames left uncertain, and ER wrote again on 20 April to persuade her to endorse the legislation.
The real urgency, White repeatedly wrote ER, was to get the president to speak out for the bill. Held up by a small group of Southern senators, it had popular support and a congressional majority. It could be brought up before adjournment—but only if FDR supported it. Every time he requested a meeting with the president, McIntyre told him the president was too busy.
FDR’s refusal to speak out on lynching had been a matter of bitter observation even before the bill was introduced. In the autumn of 1933 he was asked at several press conferences to comment on three lynchings that occurred within weeks of each other. Each time; he replied only: No comment.
How, the Philadelphia Tribune editorialized in October 1933, could the president of the United States receive an honorary degree from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, without saying a word about the lynching that had occurred only hours before in Princess Anne County on Maryland’s Eastern Shore?
The reference was to what The New York Times called “the wildest lynching orgy in history.” On 18 October 1933, “a frenzied mob of 3,000 men, women, and children … overpowered 50 state troopers” to remove a prisoner from his cell. George Armwood, twenty-four, was accused of attacking an aged white woman. He was stripped naked, tortured, and hung. Then his body was dragged “half a mile on Main Street to a blazing pile in the centre of the thoroughfare.” Although local officials made an effort to protect him, the mob “seemed crazed.”
In November, during a concerted effort to get the state of Maryland to respond to Armwood’s lynching, the NAACP called upon FDR to comment. Finally, after a California mob seized two white men out of a San Jose jail and hanged them, FDR publicly deplored “lynch law” as “a vile form of collective murder.” On 6 December 1933 on a nationally broadcast radio address to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ, FDR protested those in “high places or low who condone lynch law.”
Walter White telegraphed that “12 million Negroes” applauded FDR’s words. But the president would say nothing about the Costigan-Wagner anti-lynch bill, endorsed by long lists of mayors, governors, clergy, journalists, writers, artists, and college presidents as well as the National Council of Jewish Women, the YWCA, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, the ACLU, the Writer’s League Against Lynching, and other organizations representing millions of Americans.
By April, White counted fifty-two Senate votes in favor and thirty opposed. He believed the bill would pass, if only it was brought out of committee and put to a vote. This time, White insisted, everything was in place: The bill’s timing was perfect; Southerners who could not vote for it had indicated they would absent themselves. FDR had only to support it.
White feared that “failure to pass the bill will result in a serious increase in the number of lynchings.” It was palpable in California, and across the South: A “mob spirit” was “now pent up not only against Negroes but against other minority groups.”
ER wrote to White on 2 May:
The President talked to me rather at length today about the lynching bill. As I do not think you will agree with everything that he thinks, I would like an opportunity of telling you about it, and I would also like you to talk to the President if you feel you want to.
She invited him to the White House for tea the following Sunday, 7 May. Sara Delano Roosevelt joined ER and White, and they had a long conversation. FDR had not yet returned from his afternoon’s sail on the Potomac when White arrived. After the president finally joined them, he proceeded to banter until ER turned insistently to the subject at hand.
FDR was blunt: “Joe Robinson [Senate majority leader, from Arkansas] tells me the bill is unconstitutional.” In addition, there was the threat of filibuster.
In rebuttal to each, one of FDR’s points, White presented dramatic and specific facts.
The president turned sharply: “Somebody’s been priming you. Was it my wife?”
He turned to ER: Had she coached Mr. White?
ER suggested they continue the discussion.
FDR turned to his mother: “Well, at least I know you’ll be on my side.”
But SDR “shook her head.” No, his mother agreed with Mr. White.
FDR “roared with laughter and confessed defeat.” Walter White left the White House feeling optimistic.
But FDR still did nothing on behalf of the bill, and firmly stated he would not “challenge the Southern leadership of his party”:
I did not choose the tools with which I must work…. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule … are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill [needed] to keep America from collapsing.
FDR did not exaggerate. The powerful opposition the administration faced was highlighted almost daily in long reports Hick sent Hopkins and ER from her second tour of the South, now into the Southwest—from Alabama and Louisiana into Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. After FDR abruptly cancelled CWA because of Southern and conservative opposition on 1 April 1934, the relief situation worsened, and she was plunged into gloom. The Depression intensified, until federal work efforts were restored by WPA in 1935.
Hick wrote from North Carolina: “Sometimes I think the white people in the South would be perfectly happy if we’d take over the job of feeding all the Negroes just enough to keep them from starving in droves and cluttering up the streets and alleys with their dead bodies!”
On 11 April, Hick sent ER her report from Houston: “At no time previously, since taking this job, have I been quite so discouraged as I am tonight., Texas is a Godawful mess.” Relief funds were exhausted, and the politics of the local administration and the state relief commission were scandalous: “God help the unemployed.”
Relief in Houston “is just a joke. A case worker in charge of single women told me tonight that she had orders today to cut their weekly food allowance down to 39 CENTS! They’ve been getting less than 50 cents a week for some weeks….”
Hick was particularly dismayed by the attitude of industrialists who dominated Texas’s economy, especially oil drilling manufacturers. They told her at lunch their business was actually thriving, and they needed more workers. But they could not “take on any more untrained men…. ‘It costs too much.’ “
And that, Hick stormed, when “the relief load is 12,500 families with applications coming in at the rate of 1,100 a week….
“Don’t you see? Those babies are thinking in terms of 1929 profit. Why, they’ll let orders go, dammit, before they’ll permit their cost of production to go up and cut into their profit. Now, if that’s following the spirit of the New Deal, I’ll eat my hat….”
Hick had no idea where it would all end. The prospect
s everywhere were tragic. She had dinner with several social workers who handled “unattached people, including single women.” They told her that most of the young women “supplement their relief by having lovers or practicing prostitution.” One night a male social worker put on old clothes and went through “the transient set-up, to see how the transients were treated. Several girls solicited him as he walked along the streets. To one of them he said:
‘I can’t. I have no money.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ she said wearily, ‘It only costs a dime.’ “
As Hick wandered about in search of some usable solutions, she slid back into her populist, racist views. She had met a “retired capitalist,” the local chair of Houston’s relief funds. He liked what he saw in his recent visit to Italy, “believes in Fascism,” and concluded, “If Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere….”
Hick was impressed. “Honestly,” she decided, “If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I’d start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist movement in the United States.”
Hick then had second thoughts; perhaps “Russia is better off.”
If we have to have a dictator, I personally would prefer Roosevelt…. I wonder if his best chance wouldn’t be to go completely red and get it that way. Anyway, the ‘fat boys’ aren’t going to play ball with him. Not on any voluntary basis.
Disturbed by Hick’s ode to dictatorship, ER wrote that she would not show her “gloomy” report to FDR and hoped “somewhere you find things more cheerful.”
A fervent democrat, ER was not amused by casual references to fascism and communism, and especially resented all discussion of FDR as a benevolent or potential dictator. ER was aggravated by Hick’s reports from her second tour of the South. Renewed serenades to white supremacy, they reveal the depth of America’s racial quagmire during the 1930s. While ER met and worked with Walter White in Washington, Hick sent reports from Alabama and Louisiana that contradicted everything ER believed in.
Eleanor Roosevelt Page 27