by John Egerton
And yet, miraculously, there were saving graces in the South and in its people—strengths of family and community that manifested themselves in manners and fellowship, in generational continuity and respect for history, in richly original music and art, and in the indigenous gifts of language and cookery; strengths of religion that went deeper into faith and belief and devotion than the institutional church could fathom; strengths of nature that returned with seasonal regularity to bless the people and their place. These were not the exclusive property of the well-to-do—they belonged to rich and poor, white and black, old and young.
A fiercely loyal attachment had grown up around this diverse place, this vast kingdom between the mountains and the sea. It yielded a livelihood, albeit sometimes grudgingly. It had God-power, it was holy—you put down seeds and things grew. It held memory, so much of it that many people could not leave, and many of those who did were forever seized by a compulsion to come back. The South was sorely troubled, but it was not without universal and abiding virtues—not in the long ago, or in the thirties, or later. What the region lacked most grievously was honest, dedicated leadership. Its long-suffering people certainly deserved far better than they got.
When it finally came Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s turn to govern, he had a mandate to chart a new course of economic and psychological recovery for the nation, and the South got a sympathetic friend in court. He had spent enough time on his Georgia farm to gain a genuine liking for the people, and he saw how desperately they needed help. They had nothing to tax—not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of, as their earthy humor told it—but they were generous to a fault, bringing the patrician Mr. Roosevelt possums to eat and corn liquor to drink (he did both), and generally making him feel at home, and he was deeply touched by their kindness.
Earlier, before he was crippled with polio, he had served his federal apprenticeship as an assistant secretary of the navy in the administration of Woodrow Wilson. His boss there was Josephus Daniels, who owned the Raleigh News & Observer, and Roosevelt learned Southern ways from him no less than from the likes of Ben Tillman and James K. Vardaman and Tom Watson, all of whom held sway in the U.S. Senate. (I like to think that the future president may also have learned something about the South from my father’s father, an obscure Tennessee lawyer who, for reasons that I have never understood, was plucked out of the Dickson County courthouse in 1913 and awarded a top legal post in the Navy Department. He kept the job for eight years, during which he and FDR were colleagues and close companions. I remember that one of my father’s proud possessions, passed down to him in the family, was a framed photograph of the young Roosevelt, signed in 1918 to “my dear friend Judge Egerton, with sincere best wishes.”)
If recovery had been all that the South and the nation needed in 1932, both they and the President might have succeeded spectacularly. But recovery was only part of what Roosevelt wanted, only the beginning. In the long view, he was most interested in bringing about basic reforms, and it was precisely this that the Southern oligarchy feared, for their feudal kingdoms were built upon constancy and control.
For decades after the Civil War, an unending public debate had held center stage in Dixie: Old South versus New South, agriculture versus industry, rural and small-town life versus city life, adversarial versus cooperative relationships with Yankees, the need for tradition versus the need for change. Sometimes it made good theater, but it was at bottom a bogus debate, a set of distinctions without real differences. Older, conservative white men of power and privilege controlled both sides of the argument, and their basic attitudes and beliefs were essentially the same on all the subjects that really mattered—the place of blacks, the status of women, the separate and limited powers of church and state. To a man, they were far more Democratic than democratic, and believed—like their conservative forebears—that the fewest possible voters should oversee the least possible government, serving the “best sort” of people first and dividing the rest among all the others. If that sounds more Republican than Democratic, remember that the two parties were not all that different philosophically before FDR came on the scene.
The great contribution of the New Deal to the cultural and political life of the South was that it turned a mock debate into a real one and offered a genuine alternative to the Old South/New South philosophy. The liberal agenda of Franklin Roosevelt and his administration called for a massive economic reformation to bring higher living standards to all; far-reaching new programs in support of labor, education, health, housing, and the general welfare; major reforms in agriculture and industry; and an opening of the democratic political process to virtually all adults as an alternative both to the oligarchic status quo and to the threat of state control under socialism or communism. Of necessity, these changes would bring about more federal government planning and regulation, more collectivism, more bureaucracy. It was not a perfect blueprint by any means, but it did bring hope to small farmers, wage earners, racial and ethnic minorities, and others in desperate straits. Eventually, inevitably, such transforming changes would challenge the continued existence of white supremacy and extreme socioeconomic class stratification. It was the realization of this prospect, more than anything else, that energized and mobilized a permanent resistance among Southerners in the Presidents own Democratic Party.
If Roosevelt could have accomplished his goals simply by carrying the people with him, he would have realized his highest ambition—but in order to remake the South, he had to have the cooperation of its despots. In his first administration he managed to keep most of them in camp, partly by observing an informal and unspoken rule of mutual consent that the laws and customs of white supremacy would not be challenged. As time passed, though, it became clear that neither the President nor the Southerners could hold that position indefinitely.
6. The Fireman Cometh
Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency of the United States; had he lived, he would have served sixteen years in the White House. His New Deal for the American people was considerably shorter. It lasted no more than about six years, from the date of his first election in November 1932 to somewhere around the midterm congressional elections of November 1938. From that time forward, the reactionary opposition was powerful enough to stymie reform; in fact, had it not been for World War II, his enemies probably would have succeeded in dragging Roosevelt himself down to defeat.
In a way, he must have welcomed the diversion of war, grimly serious as it was, for even though his popularity remained high with a great majority of ordinary citizens, and his party continued to dominate the political landscape, he had essentially lost control of the Congress to a conservative coalition of Republicans and breakaway Southern Democrats. As the political mastermind of the most massive program of emergency relief and economic recovery ever undertaken by this or any other country, the President had commanded the support not only of his legions of ardent disciples but also of the reluctant denizens of conservatism in the Democratic Party. But by the beginning of 1939, so much opposition was mounting against him and his domestic programs that the unifying consequences of a global threat to national security effectively served as a timely shift of focus and a jolt of new energy for his flagging administration.
The supremely confident new President and his coterie of advisers, cabinet officers, and staff assistants had started with feverish haste and boundless enthusiasm in March 1933. All through the campaign and in the days between election and inauguration they had been making plans, and on Sunday morning, March 5, the day after his swearing-in, Roosevelt calmly and decisively began to generate a succession of sweeping actions that would save the nation from disaster.
By executive order, he commanded a shutdown of all banks—those not padlocked in panic already—and called the forced closure a “holiday.” He set the Treasury Department’s presses to work printing new money. He called the new Congress into extraordinary session, and when the lawmakers arrived, he had thei
r work laid out for them. An emergency banking bill was pushed through both houses and signed into law on the very first day they met. In what came to be known as the Hundred Days, thirteen major pieces of legislation went on the books before the exhausted representatives and senators adjourned in mid-June. Direct relief of human misery, work-relief programs, bank deposit insurance, home mortgage refinancing, regulation of the stock market, new labor laws, and public housing legislation were among the measures approved. (There was even an act authorizing the sale of low-alcohol beer and wine, this in anticipation of speedy ratification by the states of a new constitutional amendment repealing Prohibition. Both houses of the lame-duck Congress had overwhelmingly approved it just a month earlier—concluding, apparently, that if there ever was a time when a body needed a drink, this nerve-racking season of depression and despair was surely it.)
A rush of new programs and agencies proliferated in an alphabetical epidemic—AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Act), CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), FERA (Federal Emergency Relief Act), NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act), and so on. NIRA then gave birth to PWA (Public Works Administration), and FERA spawned another work-relief effort, CWA (Civil Works Administration)—neither of which should be confused with the WPA (Works Progress Administration), which would come along under the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. As they said out at the ballpark, you couldn’t follow the game without a program—and even then, it was easy to get confused. Such acronymic initiatives as these were to become virtually a trademark of the New Deal, and a few of them would survive as permanent legacies of the Roosevelt era.
Partly in contrast to the stiffly conservative Herbert Hoover and partly because of his own personal and political skills, Franklin Roosevelt clearly displayed from the start his enormous capacities as a leader. It was not his specific program ideas so much as his personality that captured people’s minds and hearts; more pragmatic than ideological, he was a consummate politician, a large, handsome man with a big smile, a memory for names and faces, a gift for gab, a sense of humor, and a sensitivity to human suffering. He turned his physical handicap into an asset simply by rising above it. He could explain complicated things in simple language, like a good teacher or a preacher, and he used that gift masterfully to hold the people he had won to his side, whether he reached them directly in public appearances or indirectly in his “fireside chats” on the radio and in his innovative press conferences with working reporters. He could say “my old friend” in a dozen languages. With all of these gifts, FDR conveyed a vivid image: Here was an energetic and resourceful man who genuinely liked people and wanted to help those in need by whatever means necessary; if anyone could pull America to safety from its raging house fire, surely it was this sincere, plucky, courageous, gimpy-legged volunteer fireman leading the bucket brigade.
With more enthusiasm than they had shown for any Yankee since well before 1860, the people of the South took President Roosevelt to their hearts, and he remained there throughout his tenure in the White House. Far ahead of their leaders—and generally ahead of the rest of the country as well—Southerners white and black gave him their overwhelming support early and late, in peace and in war, and nothing ever destroyed their faith in him. Even though there were no Southerners in the inner circle of presidential advisers and staff assistants and only one of note in his cabinet (Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a longtime Tennessee congressman), Roosevelt drew on his own credentials as a part-time Georgian and his generally good relations with the Southerners in Congress to make certain that the region was not slighted in the overall plan of relief and recovery.
The people who headed cabinet-level departments and administrative offices for the President included several whose influence on the fortunes of the South would be pervasive and enduring, and all of them were from the East or Midwest. Harry L. Hopkins, a top aide to Roosevelt when FDR was governor of New York, wore a variety of hats, foremost of which was as chief administrator of New Deal relief programs. Hopkins and three cabinet secretaries—Henry A. Wallace of Agriculture, Harold L. Ickes of Interior, and Frances Perkins of Labor—were probably the figures in the executive branch who affected the South the most (except for the President himself, of course, and for Eleanor, his wife and distant cousin, whose unofficial role may have been the most significant of all).
Mrs. Perkins, the first woman ever to receive a federal cabinet appointment, had served FDR as industrial commissioner of New York, and she was a loyal administrator of New Deal labor programs during all of his years in the White House. Wallace, a longtime agricultural journalist in his native Iowa—and a Republican until 1928—headed the Department of Agriculture for eight years and served four more as Vice President. Ickes, a Chicago journalist and lawyer and a former president of that city’s NAACP chapter, was also an ex-Republican. He not only ran the Department of the Interior from 1933 to 1946 but headed the Public Works Administration as well, and did more than any other New Deal cabinet officer to bring black Americans and liberal white Southerners into the government.
Of all his many talents as a politician and public figure, Franklin Roosevelt’s strongest suit was surely his ability to motivate people—to take them into his confidence, to inspire them, to win their loyalty, to play them one against another. He was a manipulator, pure and simple, and that side of his nature inevitably reinforced the convictions of his devotees, who saw him as an angel of mercy, and his detractors, who thought of him as the devil incarnate. He said yes to practically everyone, left and right, stroking and flattering and gently prodding them to bring out their best, like a great conductor before an orchestra, or a manager handling an all-star team. In one respect, his manner was almost the opposite of manipulation, giving free rein to every participant in the faith that competition would produce excellence—but the catch was that each of the players often felt that he or she had a green light to move ahead, when in fact the same liberties had also been bestowed upon others. Among his closest aides and associates, it was thus not uncommon for brooding animosities and latent conflicts to hover just beneath the surface, concealing a wide range of ideological and psychological differences.
Roosevelt’s relationship with the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government also showed signs of presidential manipulation, but with a twist: The lawmakers and judges often had a sense of self-importance every bit as large as the President’s, and they were as apt to try to shape his thoughts and actions as he was to mold theirs. The separation-of-powers principle of the U.S. Constitution has never been more severely tested than in the New Deal era—and the most contentious and volatile manifestations of the conflict arose when the strong-willed President found his way blocked by the Southern leadership in Congress.
The Bourbon-Redeemer Democrats who forged a regional oligarchy—the so-called Solid South—in the post-Reconstruction era had needed almost no time at all to take control of the old Confederacy, and just fifty-five years to win virtually complete dominion over the U.S. Congress. When the Roosevelt landslide in 1932 reestablished the Democrats as the majority party (they outnumbered Republicans 60 to 35 in the Senate and 310 to 117 in the House), it was the Southerners who gained the most. They didn’t have numerical superiority on the party roster of senators and representatives, but they had so much seniority that two-thirds of the thirty most important committees of both houses in the first New Deal Congress were chaired by Southerners, all experienced men who knew how to get what they wanted.
One of Roosevelt’s rivals for the presidential nomination, House Speaker John Nance Garner of Texas, had been given the vice-presidential spot on the ticket in return for his concession, but the party leadership was so loaded with Southerners-in-waiting that it would keep the speaker’s chair filled with them for the next thirty years, first with Joseph Byrns of Tennessee, then with William B. Bankhead of Alabama, and finally with Sam Rayburn of Texas. In the Senate, floor leadership was held by Joseph T. Robins
on of Arkansas from 1923 until his death in 1937 (meaning, of course, that he was majority leader from 1933 on), and his replacement was another Southerner, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, who edged out Pat Harrison of Mississippi by a single vote in a closed-door power struggle among Democrats of the upper chamber.
How did the Southerners get such a stranglehold? To begin with, they had succeeded in building an inner unity around an ideology of Southern nationalism—the Lost Cause lament, the heartbreak of defeat, the code of honor, hatred of Yankees, and so forth. They maintained a monolithic society, the four corners of which were politics (Democratic), religion (Protestant), race (Caucasian), and livelihood (cotton), and through physical and intellectual isolation they shielded it from outside influences. They kept taxes low and public services at a minimum, and deflected criticism by pitting working-class whites and blacks against each other, thus leaving the middle and upper classes in positions of relative but perpetual advantage. And, finally, they controlled the political process so completely through malapportionment, poll taxes, and other limitations on voting that blacks, women, urban dwellers, and the generality of low-income people were either depreciated or left out of the process altogether. Incumbents thus could return themselves to office with the blessing of as little as ten percent of the age-eligible voting population.