by John Egerton
It all connects. That’s the first thing you need to remember, and the last. Anywhere you start, you’re walking into the middle of something. There’s no way you can go back to the actual beginning, because there is no beginning, and no end. History is not a straight line but a rolling wheel; it’s a perpetual story, and all the spokes of it eventually tie together. This particular story—more precisely, this reconstruction of some scenes from the twentieth-century South—commences more or less arbitrarily with the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and ends with the United States Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. Between those two dates—Tuesday, November 8, 1932, and Monday, May 17, 1954—the South left Yesterday and entered Tomorrow, and the day the war ended in 1945 may have been the invisible hinge, the imperceptible moment of turning from the one to the other.
To glimpse that moment at street level in the joyful heart of Atlanta seems especially fitting, for the city was—and still is—the urban epicenter of the South, not just in a geographical sense but also historically, symbolically, philosophically. Its lofty and enduring status was assured when it rose from the ashes to more than double its former size just six years after General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union army torched two-thirds of the buildings in the landlocked community of ten thousand people on November 16, 1864. Almost from the time of its rebirth, Atlanta has beckoned to Southerners as the region’s gateway, its crossroads, its meeting place. By the 1940s, all of the jarring contrasts that made up the culture and character of the South were vividly illuminated there—caste and class and color, wealth and poverty, hope and despair, tradition and change, Gone With the Wind romance and Tobacco Road reality.
Atlanta in 1945 was between Talmadges; father Gene’s heyday was all but over, and son Herman’s had not quite begun. Standing between them was thirty-eight-year-old Governor Ellis Arnall, a liberal Democrat who had led the Georgia legislature to abolish the poll tax and extend voting privileges to eighteen-year-olds. Arnall and his allies had even coaxed the electorate into approving a new state constitution. A newly formed nonprofit organization in Atlanta, the Southern Regional Council, had begun an interracial search for solutions to the region’s vexing social problems. A spirit of renewal was in the air, and Governor Arnall sought to feed it, frequently writing articles for national magazines in which he proclaimed the dawning of a glorious day of liberalism and equality and prosperity for the New South.
But events were conspiring to hold back the day. By law, Arnall could not succeed himself in office, and before the end of 1946, the Talmadge dynasty had been resurrected and plans were afoot to ensure that the all-white Democratic primary would effectively and perpetually bar most blacks from voting. South Carolina, Alabama, and other Southern states devised similar measures of defense and retaliation as yesterday’s rulers girded for battle against the harbingers of tomorrow.
In July 1946, while Arnall was still governor, an organized band of more than two dozen unmasked white men ambushed and executed four blacks—two young men, one of them an army veteran, and their wives—in broad daylight in a rural county not fifty miles from the state capitol. Many Georgians recoiled in horror from the brazen atrocity, but weeks and then months slipped by with no criminal charges filed and no arrests made. An ominous wave of lynchings and other terrorist crimes against blacks rolled across the South that summer. Ralph McGill assailed the perpetrators in thunderous outrage—but refused to endorse a federal anti-lynching law, saying the Southern states had to work the problem out themselves. Even in Atlanta, the prospects for such reform seemed poor; the postwar strength of white supremacy and the pervasiveness of Jim Crow laws and customs dictated that black citizens of the city could not even serve as jurors or be employed as policemen.
Overlaid upon the exposure of the South’s ingrained patterns of racial discrimination in the mid-forties was another powerful force in the American drama of that volatile time: an obsessive anticommunism. A combination of real and imagined threats from the Soviet Union and other Marxist societies had given birth to a rigid orthodoxy of political and social thought. People who criticized authority or resisted conformity raised suspicions; they were accused of being unpatriotic and disloyal “fellow travelers,” or enemy agents enmeshed in the “Communist conspiracy” to overthrow the government of the United States.
Those who questioned the widely accepted “Southern way of life” and tried to reform its racial laws and customs were certainly challenging established authority. It took only a small step from that self-evident conclusion for the reactionary rulers and opinion-shapers of the postwar South to view the proponents of racial integration and the followers of communism as two inseparable sides of a single coin. According to that line of logic, anyone who advocated “race mixing” was by definition at least pink if not red, a Communist sympathizer if not a card-carrying Communist.
So much of this relatively recent history seems wildly improbable now, looking back on it, but here’s what’s truly amazing to me: This is not about another time and place far removed from my own experience; it’s about what has happened in my lifetime, in just a little over half a century, here in the Southern states of America, where I have lived the whole of my life. In a very specific and substantial way, this is my history. I haven’t witnessed everything, of course—no one person could be in so many places and hear so many voices and recall it all fifty years later. But in the hope that I might know and understand it better, I have gone back and scoured the written record, sought out as many once-active participants as I could find, and searched my own memory—and from the accumulated mass of words and pictures and artifacts, I have put together this verbal and visual account, this imperfect representation of what the historians call the recent or modern or contemporary South.
One of the things I have come to see in retrospect is how favorable the conditions were for substantive social change in the four or five years right after World War II. It appears to have been the last and best time—perhaps the only time—when the South might have moved boldly and decisively to heal itself, to fix its own social wagon voluntarily. But it didn’t act, and the moment passed, and all that has happened in the tumultuous decades since—the federal court decisions, the minority quest for civil rights, the actions of presidents and congressional bodies, of governors and legislatures, of mayors and city councils and law-enforcement officials—has followed from that inability to seize the time and do the right thing, not simply because it was right, but because it was also in our own best interest.
In a manner of speaking, there are essentially three kinds of history: what actually happened, what we are told happened, and what we finally come to believe happened. The first is infinitely expansive and beyond retrieval; if you doubt that, try to write down everything you said and did yesterday. The second pours forth in a ceaseless torrent of verbal and visual and audible documents that constitute the public and private record, and in myriad volumes of expansion and comment upon that record. The third, derived from the first two, is filtered through the experiences and reasoning powers of each receiving reader and viewer and listener, and is the ultimate shaper of our individual and collective understanding, belief, and identity.
It is the third of these that I confront and grapple with in these pages. A brief period in the life of my homeland has attracted my interest, aroused my curiosity, and finally claimed my undivided attention. At the beginning of it, in 1932, a political initiative launched in response to a desperate economic crisis brought hope to a beleaguered populace mired in colonial dependency. At the end, in 1954, a union of two hallowed American constitutional principles—equal justice under the law and the right of citizens to petition their government for a redress of grievances—brought to robust life a movement toward freedom that now, forty years later, still energizes people and nations around the world.
I have concentrated on the time between those two momentous turning points to ponder why things happened as they did, and what it would have
taken to bring about a more amicable and equitable result. Who were the prophets of Tomorrow in the South? What was their vision? How did the institutional pillars of the society—religious and academic, political and journalistic—respond to that better vision? How did the North respond? Why was the moment of opportunity after the Second World War not realized and captured and converted to the South’s advantage? Why did it take a virtual revolution in the courts and in the streets, and another generation of time, to bring us to a point that was almost within our reach when America—“a mixture, an idea, a way of life, an attitude”—won the war and took the lead in the international crusade for freedom and democracy?
And so I come forward, a middle-aged, middle-class, white Southern male with moderately liberal biases in this, the last decade of the twentieth century, five hundred years downstream from Columbus and forty years after Brown v. Board of Education, to report the answers I have found to these questions and to relate a story that I believe needs to be told about a time that needs to be remembered. The story doesn’t include everything that happened, of course, or even necessarily what the record and its earlier interpreters have told us happened; it is simply my partial and subjective account of what I believe happened in the South’s fading days of opportunity before Brown came down and brought with it a social revolution.
It has taken me a long while—almost sixty years—to get here, to get my mind focused and my eyes open and my ears attuned. But now, finally, I can feel the movement of Yesterday’s South in the throes of change, and I can see the faces and hear the voices—and so, step by step, the story proceeds to unfold.
I
1932–1938:
A Feudal Land
I had never really seen plantation country, save in passing, until after I came to Georgia in the spring of 1929. It was a bad time to see it. It was struggling with the boll weevil plague which had come with the twenties. And it was soon to fall into the demoralization of land and people which the depression of the thirties brought. A second cotton kingdom died then. The cabins began to empty, their doors and shutters sagging. Looking back at it now, I know that segregation began to die then too, though it was twenty-odd long years until May 17, 1954.
—RALPH MCGILL,
The South and the Southerner
1. The Cruelest Year
When America caught cold, the South got pneumonia, and when the nation was really sick, as it was in the Great Depression, its colonial states below the Mason-Dixon Line were on their deathbed. (I call them colonial not because they harked back to the era before the American Revolution, though some of them did, but because they were still wards of the national government 150 years after the revolution had ended British dominion.) It was exceedingly rare for citizens and their leaders, North or South, to agree on much of anything, but on the night of Tuesday, November 8, 1932, they rose in overwhelming majority to anoint a fifty-year-old paraplegic who had promised them a “New Deal.” God knows how desperately they needed one; the old deal had bankrupted tens of thousands of businesses, tripled the suicide rate, and driven millions of theretofore-functional citizens to a nomadic search for their very survival. Historian William Manchester called 1932 “the cruelest year,” and he was right. It was the year the United States of America almost went belly-up.
At the Biltmore Hotel in midtown Manhattan, where the Democrats had their national headquarters, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was compelled to wait until past midnight for Herbert Hoover to throw in the towel. There was never any doubt about the outcome, but the counting of hand-marked ballots stretched out the inevitable conclusion, and the results trickled in by radio and telephone. Like a slow-motion avalanche, the mountain finally fell on the incumbent President. Roosevelt carried forty-two of the forty-eight states and had a popular-vote margin of seven million out of forty million cast. When his son Jimmy at last lifted him gently into bed in the wee hours of Wednesday morning and left him to his own thoughts, the President-elect must have wondered what on earth was in store for him and his besieged and beleaguered nation. Though he would soon assure us we had nothing to fear but fear itself, he acknowledged in that private moment of sober reflection his own fear that he might not have the strength to handle the enormous job he had just been given.
The eleven states of the old Confederacy favored him with sixty to ninety percent of their votes. Four years earlier, Hoover had broken the so-called Solid South by winning five of those states over the Democratic nominee, an anti-Prohibition Irish Catholic Yankee urbanite named Al Smith, but FDR, a New York patrician himself (and a wet, too), got them back with a smile and a promise. Even if Hoover had been a great man and a great president—and he was neither—he still would have had to answer for the failed banks and the five-cent cotton and the endless lines of hungry, destitute people on relief.
So the election of Roosevelt was one of those deeply significant shifts in American history that come along only once in a generation or a century—and if it was that important for the nation, you can imagine what it meant for the South. Even some of the state and local plutocrats who would soon be cursing the very name of Roosevelt and assailing his liberal programs—people like Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, Senator “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina—endorsed him and voted for him. You might say Huey P. Long of Louisiana rode to the Senate on Roosevelt’s coattails (though in truth he didn’t need them), and Theodore G. Bilbo, having just completed a scandal-ridden term as governor of Mississippi, would win election to the Senate in 1934 as an ardent New Dealer. Most nonwhite Southerners were locked out of the electoral process, and those who did get to vote went for the Republican Hoover purely from force of habit, but a dramatic turning away from the party of Lincoln was about to begin among black voters North and South.
When you consider what desperate shape the South was in at that time, it’s easy to understand why so many people in the region looked to Roosevelt for their deliverance. Some even thought of him as one of them, a part-time Southerner by virtue of his country estate at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had been going periodically for a decade to rest and soothe his polio-stricken legs. Roosevelt didn’t shy away from that Southern identity; in fact, he delighted in being called “a Georgia farmer-politician.”
Not many people knew that he also had an indirect interest in some Kentucky real estate. His mother’s people, the Delanos, were involved in a turn-of-the-century acquisition of mineral rights in a vast coalfield in Harlan County, and in 1908, Franklin went there with his uncle, Warren Delano, to take a look at the holdings. They traveled to southwest Virginia by railroad and continued on horseback into a pristine Kentucky valley of sparkling streams and virgin forests that looked to the young man like a Garden of Eden. In letters to his wife, Eleanor, he described these “magnificent views” in great detail. It was twenty-three years later, just a year and a half before the 1932 election, that war broke out in Harlan County between hired gunmen of the coal companies and miners seeking union representation.
Franklin Roosevelt made a connection in his mind between the idyllic wilderness he had seen in 1908 and the coalfield killing ground at the Battle of Evarts in 1931; he also recognized that it was people like the Delanos—estate-building, laissez-faire capitalists—who were largely responsible for the plight of what he called “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” The nation, and especially the South—from the coalfields to the cotton mills, from the tenant farms to the grim, gray interior cities (small though they were)—was overwhelmingly populated with such forgotten men and women and children, and everywhere they seemed to be headed toward either violent revolution or total collapse.
While Roosevelt was waiting for President Hoover to concede defeat, Southerners of every rank and station waited too. In a sense, the entire region was in a state of suspension, for no one else in the country had more riding on that election than the people of the South. Their perceptions of the economic crisis and its far-r
eaching consequences no doubt differed greatly from one to the next, but few among them could have failed to realize that something momentous was happening.
The rising generation of young adults would retain especially durable memories of that changing of the guard. Time and circumstance summoned them as messengers, as heralds; they were the leading wave of what was to become a twentieth-century social revolution more sweeping than anything since the Civil War. Some of them would eventually fall back into the ranks of the silent majority, but others would be thrust into prophetic roles that they could not have imagined at the time Franklin Roosevelt came to power. Either way, none of them would ever forget Election Day, 1932.
Near the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford on that rainy November day, shy, reclusive William Faulkner, at thirty-five an Ole Miss dropout and former postmaster of the university (fired for his careless handling of the mails), showed little interest in politics, but a passion—and a genius—for fiction rooted in his own time and place. Light in August, the latest of his half-dozen novels, was just out, and the literary critics were generous in their praise of it. If they failed to plumb the depths of his vision, they could certainly be excused, for so did his family, his friends, his neighbors—and, in all probability, Bill Faulkner himself.