by John Egerton
During the first three decades of this century, segregation so permeated the laws and customs and daily activities of the South that it did, in fact, seem as though it had been in place forever. Northerners appeared not to be bothered by the South’s peculiar new institution—if, indeed, they took note of it at all—but as the pace of black migration into their cities quickened, they turned more and more to informal practices of separation similar to those the South was imposing overtly through the force of law.
The racial arrangement that the white South had chosen was riddled with paradox and contradiction. People who advocated out-migration of blacks as the ultimate solution had no satisfactory answer to the question they always heard in response: Who’ll do all the hard work? It was mostly blacks who picked the cotton and worked the tobacco, who cooked and cleaned, who nursed the babies and cared for the sick and elderly. Without them, the “Southern way of life” would have been impossible.
And there was another profoundly sobering irony, one that few people seemed to think about, or at least to talk about. It was this: The ultimate cost of a segregated Southern society was perpetual disadvantage and second-class colonial status vis-à-vis the North. Simply put, the South was too poor to support dual and overlapping institutions and services—schools, hospitals, universities, park systems—and it couldn’t catch up without using all of the human resources it possessed. The South in its relationship to the North was uncomfortably similar in many ways to blacks in their relationship to whites: cast down, taken for granted, ridiculed, exploited, robbed of assets and of self-esteem. It would take bold, courageous, sacrificial initiatives to break the old pattern and build a new and more equitable society. Until that happened, the South was doomed to languish in the swampy backwaters of American life.
Almost no one was thinking such thoughts in 1932, least of all the politicians who were largely responsible for the South’s ironclad system of segregation and for its low standing in the nation. Of all the factors, internal and external, that contributed to the shaping of the Southern character at that point in its history, none could have been more central than its political leadership—or lack thereof.
It goes without saying that they were all white, all Democrats, and almost all males (the one notable exception being Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, governor of Texas—a stand-in for her husband, zany Jim Ferguson, who sold the electorate on a package deal: “two governors for the price of one”). These were the days when politics provided the best live entertainment around, and elections were the South’s number-one spectator sport. Theodore G. Bilbo had just finished a disgraceful term as governor of Mississippi and would soon be elected to the U.S. Senate, and Georgia voters chose Eugene Talmadge, a bombastic planter-lawyer, to be their governor. The Senate was already pretty much dominated by some shrewd operators, including Carter Glass of Virginia, “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, Walter George of Georgia, Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, and virtually the only progressive in the lot, Hugo Black of Alabama. Joining them after the 1932 election would be Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, Huey Long of Louisiana, Richard Russell of Georgia, Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, and John H. Bankhead, Jr., of Alabama. Speaker of the House John Nance Garner of Texas would be tapped as FDR’s vice president.
These were, by and large, the men who controlled Southern politics by controlling their electorates, their legislatures, the governors’ offices—and even, to a substantial degree, the two houses of Congress. Collectively they had more than enough seniority, tenure, and key committee chairmanships to command the attention of whoever happened to be occupying the White House. Participatory democracy was of no interest to most of them; they were more concerned with limiting the vote to manageable size. In Virginia, only about ten percent of all the people age twenty-one and older could be expected at the polls, even for a crucial election like the one in 1932; in the region as a whole, fewer than three in ten adults voted.
With all the restrictions that either kept blacks, women, and the poor away from the polls or used them as pawns in a game of power, and with the almost total absence of an opposition party, the Democrats who controlled the South were an oligarchy, a loose confederation of feudal lords answerable to no one. In personality, style, appearance, and philosophy they differed greatly one from another, but as a group they were recognizably related, and even the rare exceptions like Hugo Black were few enough in number to be tolerated by the others as eccentrics. Like the Bourbons who preceded them and the men of like mind who would follow in their wake, the South’s political rulers of the early 1930s built and maintained their empires by drawing from the same sources of energy: cotton, conservative Protestantism, laissez-faire capitalism, and white supremacy.
Suspicious of outsiders, distrustful of Yankees, reflexively resistant to change (except the kind that jingled in their pockets), the lords and their lackeys, whether in Washington or in statehouses and courthouses from Richmond to Austin, looked upon the coming of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a mixed blessing. At least he was a Democrat, they said—but he was a Yankee, and a left-winger (compared to them), and he kept dropping hints about the need for big changes. That made them nervous. Still and all, conditions were bad, really bad, and something had to be done—some federal aid to the farmers and the schools, some relief, maybe a little business stimulus. The last thing in the world they wanted to tamper with was segregation and white supremacy. As best they could tell, race was the furthest thing from FDR’s mind, too. They would just have to watch and wait, just bide their time and see how radical this smooth-talking New Yorker really was.
3. Bourbon Legacy
How did this condition of extreme desperation come about? What was it that sent the South, once a spawning ground of national wealth and power and leadership, provider of nine of the first twelve presidents of the United States, plummeting into a bottomless quagmire of poverty, helplessness, and defeat? When and where and why did the fall begin? There are so many answers to these questions that no single explanation can possibly suffice, and no consensus is ever likely to emerge. You can start with the Spanish explorations in the fifteenth century, or the English colonial outposts in the seventeenth century, or the slave ships from Africa, or the revolutionary birth of the nation, or the war that divided the states and almost destroyed the country in the nineteenth century. You can start anywhere you like, and still you will end up in the 1930s with a nation in desperate straits and its Southern region on the brink of total collapse—and the effects will be much more obvious and unmistakable than the causes.
The events that fill these pages took place primarily in an era that began with the Roosevelt years in the early 1930s, but a prelude to set the stage for their retelling seems almost essential. More or less arbitrarily, then, I look back to the aftermath of Union victory in the Civil War as my point of departure, and for the sixty-five-year period between the war’s end and the onset of the Great Depression, I have drawn up a chronological sequence of generalized assertions. These are statements of probable truth for which there is, among scholars and students of history, a broad consensus:
• The victors, like all victors throughout history, followed military conquest with economic and political rule. Northern Republicans—officials of the Union government and other so-called carpetbaggers—moved south into positions of power after the war, imposing a program of federal occupation and supervision in the region. The stated political purpose was to prepare the rebellious states for reentry into the nation and to extend citizenship rights to all male residents, including former slaves; the unstated economic objective was to exploit the region’s natural resources and its supply of cheap labor.
• In 1877, after more than a decade of this Reconstruction—during which the radicals and reformers of both major political parties in the North gradually lost interest in the people and problems of the South—a bargain
was struck between Republicans and Democrats to end federal domination and day-by-day administration of the Southern state governments. The North thus relinquished political power within the region, but kept a tight grip on economic power.
• The Southern white men who gained control of those governments were variously characterized as Bourbons, Redeemers, Conservatives (all terms of confused meaning and limited utility now). Much like their antebellum predecessors, they were mostly noblesse-oblige paternalists identified with the landed gentry—planters, bankers, merchants. They sought at first not so much to deny civil rights to blacks as to contain and control the black vote and lure it away from the national Republicans. But the Southerners and the Republicans, though they were political rivals, had much in common: a patronizing interest in the black masses and a similar disdain for the white poor; a class-oriented vision of the economic and social structure; mutual preference for a government more oligarchic than democratic in nature; and an agreement in principle that the North should build more factories and let the South remain primarily a land of cotton and farms. In the boardrooms of the North, where Yankee money did most of the talking, Republican lenders and Bourbon borrowers made the decisions that perpetuated the colonial status of the South.
• The Populist revolt against the upper-class oligarchy in the 1890s was a radical uprising of grassroots workers, mostly farmers, against both the Southern patricians and their Northern allies. At first the movement sought to unite working-class whites and blacks, but when the ruling Democrats, with help from the North, stymied the rebellion, the Populists in frustration turned their reactionary fury against the blacks, whom the planter Democrats were already in the process of disenfranchising and abandoning. Thus, by the beginning of the twentieth century, all of the factions in the Southern power struggle—the Northern Republicans and Democrats, the Southern Redeemers, the Populists—had first exploited and then cast aside the millions of powerless Southern blacks, leaving them ignored and helpless at best, and at worst prey to the violent frustrations of their white neighbors.
• For the next three decades, as whites in the region outdid one another in zealous pursuit of legalized segregation and white supremacy, the South slipped deeper and deeper into the morass of isolation, inferiority, defensiveness, and self-delusion—and that is essentially where it was when the depression fell upon the United States and Franklin D. Roosevelt answered the call for a rescuer to take command. The alienation felt by white former Confederates toward the national government—the Union—had not by any means abated when FDR came in. By the same token, the federal government had shown little concern for African-Americans since the Reconstruction era ended—and not all that much for Southern whites. What was new and different about the New Deal, insofar as the South was concerned, was its interest in economic—not political—reform.
To encompass two eventful generations of American history in a few brief summary statements such as these seems like too much of a shortcut to the New Deal years. It should be helpful—if not absolutely necessary—to go back and take a closer look at some pivotal and transitional people in that earlier period, and to pick up a few amplifying historical details.
Inviting the congressmen and senators and governors of the Southern states to take part in a mission of domestic economic and social reform in 1932 was a little bit like summoning a pack of foxes to help clean up the henhouse. (No doubt, in the proprietary view of the South’s political leaders, it was Roosevelt who was the fox, and the South was first on his list of chicken coops to be cleaned.) The politicians were the heirs of a shrill and potent breed of reactionary extremists who held political power at the beginning of the twentieth century, and they in turn had been handed control by the white planters and former Confederate generals who took over the states after Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s.
Some of those who ruled the states at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Tom Watson of Georgia, had started out on a Populist crusade to organize the poor, white and black, against exploitation by the reestablished planter class. Watson had the makings of a genuine reformer, a charismatic leader outraged by the injustices he saw all around him. Others, like “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman of South Carolina, a raving, half-blind zealot (living proof of the old adage that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king), were devoted from the start to unrelenting white supremacy. In the end, virtually all of these Southern radicals, including Watson, were so infected by the virus of racial hysteria that it became their legacy, a chronic infection wracking the South in body, mind, and spirit.
Look from ex-General John B. Gordon, a Bourbon senator and governor, to the volatile Watson, who served in both houses of Congress, to his adversary-turned-ally Hoke Smith, and on to Eugene Talmadge in the Roosevelt years, and you can see the disease being transmitted in Georgia. Or witness the transfer of it in South Carolina from General Wade Hampton to Ben Tillman to Cole Blease and “Cotton Ed” Smith—an unbroken line spanning almost a century. Likewise in Mississippi, you can observe the degeneration from the reconciler L. Q. C. Lamar to James K. Vardaman to Theodore G. Bilbo. In one Southern state after another, ranting demagogues subverted the rule of law and the democratic process to disastrous effect in the first half-century after the Civil War—and in most of the states, the subversion continued for another forty or fifty years after that.
Off and on from about the mid-1880s until World War I, white voices of opposition or anguished doubt were occasionally raised against extreme racial subjugation. George Washington Cable, a New Orleans writer, took up the issue in his 1885 book, The Silent South, published in New York. Segregation laws, he declared, amounted to a “stupid firing into our own ranks,” not only wrong but ineffective. No one was advocating social equality, he asserted; the real issue was the denial of civil rights, of elementary justice. Various churchmen, most of them Methodists and Episcopalians, joined the cause at about the same time. Among them were Edgar Gardner Murphy, an Episcopal priest in Alabama, and Atticus G. Haygood, a Georgia educator and minister (later to become a Methodist bishop), who in 1881 wrote a book called Our Brother in Black: His Freedom and His Future. Some respected journalists of the period, most notably Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, tried to come to grips with the problem, as did some businessmen, such as Lewis Harvie Blair of Richmond, who in 1889 wrote A Southern Prophecy: The Prosperity of the South Dependent upon the Elevation of the Negro.
In education, James Hardy Dillard of Tulane University and John Spencer Bassett of Trinity College (later Duke University) were among those calling for fairness. Another was Thomas Pearce Bailey, former superintendent of schools in Memphis and dean of the department of education at the University of Mississippi, who in 1914 wrote Race Orthodoxy in the South, a book calling for full political, civil, and economic rights for blacks. “The real problem is not the negro,” concluded Bailey, “but the white man’s attitude toward the negro.” There were other dissenters scattered about the region, but even in chorus they raised no more than a whisper against the shouts of the politicians.
Occasionally, expressions of dissent by blacks were heard, but they came mainly from afar, because outspoken candor by nonwhites in the South was known to be reckless, even suicidal. When Ida B. Wells, born a slave in Mississippi in 1862, dared to write critically of unequal funding of schools and of lynching in Memphis in the early 1890s, she was fired from her teaching job, her small newspaper was destroyed by fire, and her life was threatened; thereafter, she waged her crusade for equality from Chicago.
After the Populist uprising fizzled, the Progressive movement ushered in some modest reforms in a variety of areas, but race relations was not chief among them. The last quarter of the nineteenth century, wrote the historian Rayford W. Logan years later, was the nadir for black Americans, the Dark Ages; Jim Crow, he said, was permanently enthroned at the center of Southern life and culture as the twentieth century commenced, and “second-class citizenship for Negroes w
as accepted by Presidents, the Supreme Court, Congress, organized labor—indeed, by the vast majority of Americans, North and South, and by the ‘leader’ of the Negro race, Booker T. Washington.” And yet, as bad as those times were for blacks in particular and the South in general, they would not get much better in the “progressive” years ahead.
Booker T. Washington was the best-known black American of his time, having founded Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881, when he was just twenty-five years old, and later having told his remarkable story to the world in an acclaimed autobiography, Up from Slavery. Washington gained immeasurable stature and approval from whites throughout the country in 1895 when he declared, in his famous Atlanta Compromise address, that the Negroes of the South should stay in the region, accept segregation and disenfranchisement, work hard, and look to the charity of whites for help in securing a subservient role in agriculture and industry. “Cast down your bucket where you are,” he advised his listeners. In effect, he strategically conceded the superiority of whites, commended their behavior toward blacks in the post-Civil War years, and endorsed the U.S. Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” doctrine in advance, a year before its articulation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Perhaps he was simply trying to buy some time for his race to get on its feet—but looking back, it appears that he played directly into the hands of the white oligarchy that was just then beginning to chisel segregation and white supremacy into the stone tablets of the law.