Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Once ensconced, the Southerners, already well versed in the etiquette of social relations, quickly mastered the rules of the legislative club. As well as any and better than most, they honed the skills of parliamentary procedure, oratory, horse trading, and hospitality. They instinctively grasped the subtle distinctions between appearance and reality, betting and bluffing, party loyalty and personal ambition. As different as they were from one another—and they were indeed vastly different in many ways—they were so close together ideologically and so determined to stay that way that they almost begged to be caricatured and stereotyped as bucolic Foghorns.

  Some, like Senator Ellison D. “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, tried hard to cultivate an outrageous image—and succeeded. Born during the Civil War and groomed by such classic Rebels as Wade Hampton, Ben Tillman, and his longtime colleague Cole Blease, Smith seemed to personify in dress and mannerisms the very essence of a stereotypical retired Confederate colonel and cotton-country gentleman. To all that he added a gift for rhetoric that made him a walking, talking showpiece throughout six full terms in the Senate. A lawyer and the son of a Methodist minister, he seemed intent on overcoming the implied respectability of his background. He was a profane and unrelenting racist of the old school, a man who could equate a decent wage for cotton-pickers with intermarriage and “black contamination of the pure white race.” He had favored federal assistance to farmers for almost a quarter of a century before FDR came along, but despite his claims to constituents that he was a loyal New Dealer, Smith was, from 1933 on, an obstructionist foe of almost every legislative initiative the White House attempted. Although he was chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, the administration had to turn for leadership to another committee member, John H. Bankhead, Jr., of Alabama, in order to get its massive farm relief legislation, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, safely through the Senate.

  In contrast to the excessively flamboyant Smith was the aristocratic and parsimonious Carter Glass of Virginia, a tightly wound little man whose three decades in Congress had left him with a self-righteous certitude that bitterly disdained the very notion of broad-based democracy. At the age of seventy-five—six years Smith’s senior—he was the oldest member of the Senate, and he would still be there when Roosevelt died. Hoping to blunt his opposition by co-opting him in 1933, the President tried to get Glass to be his treasury secretary, but the cantankerous old senator refused the bait. Although he never deserted the Democratic Party, he acted from the start of the New Deal as if FDR were the deserter, a socialistic tinkerer whose policies would destroy white supremacy and deliver the nation to communism.

  Glass and Smith anchored a solid rock of Southern intraparty rebels who seldom could be found in the New Deal’s corner. With them most of the time were Harry Flood Byrd of Virginia, Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, Walter George of Georgia, and Tom Connally of Texas. To a man, they were latter-day Tories and states’ rights royalists—terms aptly descriptive of their economic and social conservatism, their racial views, their abiding belief in class privilege, and their clever control of the folks back home. Paradoxically, their election-day allegiance to the machinery, if not to the platform and principles, of the Democratic Party kept them perpetually in power. Many Southern politicos such as these served in Congress for thirty years or more.

  Also in solid opposition to Roosevelt—but from the left, and only briefly—was Huey Long of Louisiana. If the Tories thought FDR was a dangerous left-wing radical, they shuddered at the very mention of “the Kingfish” and his “Share Our Wealth” program. (The President understood their alarm; he considered Long one of the most dangerous men in America.) Here was a self-styled “dictator for the people,” a ranting zealot whose ambition transcended ideology and whose political compass gyrated wildly around the dial. In Louisiana he controlled the legislature, the courts, the schools, the banks, the police, the press. To the menace of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, he offered cold comfort. “Quote me as saying that Imperial bastard will never set foot in Louisiana,” he told reporters in reference to one particular hooded nemesis. “When I call him a son of a bitch, I’m not using profanity—I’m referring to the circumstances of his birth.” Long was probably more a friend of the black and poor masses than any other member of the Senate, and more an enemy of the privileged classes, but his closest lieutenants, including Shreveport preacher Gerald L. K. Smith and legislator Allen J. Eilender, who followed him to the Senate, tended to be right-wing extremists of a more predictable stripe. Long himself was busily plotting a serious challenge to Roosevelt’s reelection plans when an aggrieved constituent shot the senator dead in a corridor of the Louisiana State Capitol on September 8, 1935.

  A few Southern senators were not only party loyalists but enthusiastic supporters of the early New Deal relief and recovery programs, and even of many of the more far-reaching reforms. Hugo Black of Alabama was the most liberal of them, by almost any measure, and FDR rewarded him with the first vacant seat on the Supreme Court in 1937. By then, Claude Pepper of Florida had come into the upper house, and he became the foremost Southern liberal there when Black left. Others were consistent New Dealers throughout their careers, among them Alben Barkley of Kentucky, Morris Sheppard of Texas, and Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, the first woman ever elected to the Senate from any state. John Bankhead of Alabama and Joe Robinson of Arkansas, the majority leader, were more conservative in their personal views than these others, but their loyalty to the President and the party usually kept them from straying off the New Deal ranch.

  The same could hardly be said of half a dozen others: Richard Russell of Georgia, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Pat Harrison of Mississippi, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina, and the most enigmatic of them all, Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi. More conservative on most issues than the loyalists but also less class oriented than the royalists, these few were constantly working to maintain good standing in both camps. In Roosevelt’s first term, when race issues were by mutual consent kept out of the equation of governmental activism, a boilerplate racist like Bilbo or more paternalistic white supremacists like the others could indulge in a moderate or even radical approach to economic problems; thus, on almost all the major legislative acts passed into law in 1933 and 1934, Southern opposition in the Senate was confined to the half-dozen or so unreconstructed rebels of the Carter Glass persuasion. If race relations had been made a central issue in that first term, it is doubtful that any Southern or border-state senator, with the possible exception of Hugo Black, would have deviated at all from the rigidly orthodox catechism of white supremacy. The Yankees, if the truth were known, might not have voted much differently.

  In its own way, the House of Representatives showed a similar if less visible pattern of ideological and strategic division among its Southern Democrats. But there the party’s margin over the Republicans was nearly two hundred seats, and with the Democratic right wing small and not well organized, the administration had an easier time getting its program through. Men like Howard W. Smith of Virginia and Martin Dies of Texas were early and vocal opponents of the New Deal, but their notoriety as reactionaries would not truly blossom until later. Meanwhile, from the safe center to the more adventurous but still moderate left, several Southern congressmen would make names for themselves as early New Deal supporters, among them William B. Bankhead (brother of Senator John Bankhead) and Lister Hill, both of Alabama; Maury Maverick (a 1934 election winner) and Marvin Jones of Texas; Robert Lee “Muley” Doughton of North Carolina; and Edward H. “Boss” Crump, the kingpin of Memphis (and, in years to come, ruler of the entire political domain of Tennessee).

  With his mandate from the people and his huge party margins in both houses of Congress, Franklin Roosevelt was in an ideal position to gamble for far more than relief and recovery. When the midterm congressional elections of 1934 brought the Democrats not a technical and customary adjustment downward but a surprising increase of nine seats in each hous
e, the administration unleashed another whirlwind of new proposals—and in that “Second New Deal,” both the reach of Roosevelt and the resistance of his adversaries exceeded their 1933 levels.

  Before the end of summer, 1935, another dozen or so pieces of major legislation had cleared Roosevelt’s desk. Two new programs were established under the Federal Emergency Relief Act: the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a massive public-works effort aimed at tapping the skills and talents of the unemployed, and the Resettlement Administration (RA), a diversified attempt to help farm families displaced by the depression. Other legislative innovations soon followed: the Rural Electrification Administration (REA), the National Youth Administration (NYA), the National Labor Relations Act, the Social Security Act, the Soil Conservation Act, and various additional laws affecting banking, taxation, interstate commerce, farm mortgage protection, and regulation of public utilities.

  The sweep and scope of the New Deal offensive and its bold vigor in comparison to the demoralized lassitude of the Hooverites were like an invasion of spring air and sunlight into a dismal winter den. Across the land, people responded with enthusiasm and rising hope to their hearty, smiling new President and to the cornucopia of programs spilling forth in his name and that of the Democratic Party. The “forgotten man” of FDR’s victorious campaign was no longer forgotten; the factory laborer, the sharecropper, the tenant farmer, the immigrant, the neglected mother, the exploited child, the unemployed city dweller—these and many others who bore the brunt of the Great Depression and all its extreme contrasts of wealth and poverty were beginning to experience some relief from their pain and suffering, and they showed their approval with an outpouring of gratitude and affection.

  That response energized and uplifted the New Deal architects, and they were emboldened even more when the American voters dramatically reaffirmed the Roosevelt mandate in the 1936 elections. FDR swept to an eleven-million-vote victory over his Republican opponent, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas. The electoral margin was 523 to 8, with only Maine and Vermont in Landon’s column, prompting one pundit to quip, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont.” The Democrats all but vanquished the GOP in Congress, too, attaining majorities of 76 to 16 in the Senate and 331 to 89 in the House (minor parties won the few remaining seats). The same pattern prevailed all over the nation; forty of the forty-eight state governors were Democrats, and so were the vast majority of legislators.

  In 1937 and 1938 the Roosevelt administration pushed still more new legislation through Congress, including the National Housing Act (for slum clearance and low-cost public housing), the Fair Labor Standards Act (to regulate wages, hours, and child labor), and the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenancy Act—named for its chief sponsors, Senator John Bankhead of Alabama and Congressman Marvin Jones of Texas—under which was established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to consolidate the government’s response to issues involving sharecroppers and tenant farmers.

  From the earliest signs of the oncoming depression in the 1920s and throughout Franklin Roosevelt’s quest for national leadership, the plight of tenant farmers and sharecroppers had symbolized all that ailed America. This was still an agricultural nation, by and large, and its millions of small farmers stared failure squarely in the face. It was a nationwide problem, of course, but it was nowhere more acute than in the rural South, where practically everyone’s livelihood was tied in one way or another to the soil. The first Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933 was partially invalidated by the U.S. Supreme Court three years later, and a new act was written to replace it in 1938. During those same years, several other laws affecting farmers were enacted, and more than one cabinet-level official had a hand in trying to fix the agriculture problem. To follow the winding path of some of those efforts and other New Deal initiatives of a similar nature is to see how complex and unpredictable, how incidental and accidental, the ponderous machine of government truly is, and how much it depends for energy and direction on the whims and impulses and imperfect judgments of those who sit at the controls.

  In 1935 the University of North Carolina Press published a critical study of Southern agriculture that had an immediate impact on government policy. The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy was praised by FDR himself (though it was in fact a sharp indictment of early New Deal policies), and it directly influenced the reformist shape and substance of the Bankhead-Jones Act and the second Agricultural Adjustment Act. The book was coauthored by three men with deep Southern roots: Charles S. Johnson of Fisk University, Edwin R. Embree of the Rosenwald Fund, and Will W. Alexander of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.

  Almost as significant as the book itself was the personal dynamic among its three authors. Johnson and Alexander we have encountered before in this narration—the one a black Virginian trained in sociology at the University of Chicago and groomed for his return south by service to the Urban League and the Harlem Renaissance in New York; the other a Missouri-born white man with a Tennessee education and many years of Atlanta-based experience in race relations. Embree was, in a sense, the link between them, a Midwesterner by birth but a Southerner by virtue of the fact that he had been raised in the Kentucky home of his grandfather, John G. Fee, who had founded Berea College as an interracial school in the 1850s on land donated by the abolitionist firebrand Cassius Marcellus Clay. Embree went to Berea himself before the turn of the century, only a few years before Kentucky lawmakers forced the college to expel its black students and operate thereafter under new segregation laws. He went on to Yale and then into philanthropic work with the Rockefeller Foundation, and in 1928 he was asked by Julius Rosenwald, head of the Sears, Roebuck empire in Chicago, to take charge of the Rosenwald family’s charitable investments. Embree was keenly interested in public policy, in the South, and in race relations (he was, among other things, the author of a farsighted book, Brown America, “the story of a new race,” in 1931). As president of the well-endowed Rosenwald Fund, he was in a favorable position to act substantially on his interests.

  At the CIC, Alexander had benefited directly from the charitable resources managed by Embree, and in 1930, when he was invited to become a trustee of the Rosenwald Fund, he accepted readily. Both Embree and Alexander knew Charles Johnson well and admired his record of scholarship and diplomacy in Chicago, New York, and Nashville; they recruited the Fisk sociologist to serve part-time as the fund’s director of research. For nearly twenty years the three men would work in close harmony, making many significant contributions to the long-range resurrection of the South with funds drawn from the well-feathered Rosenwald nest in Chicago. By no means the least of their efforts was the role they played in the desegregation of the New Deal.

  Soon after Roosevelt was inaugurated, they devised a plan to make certain that the needs and interests of black Southerners would be taken into consideration by federal policymakers. They wanted someone in a position of authority in the administration to be an advocate for African-Americans, someone who would see to it that they weren’t left to the pitiless mercies of Southern white supremacists and Yankee reactionaries. The Rosenwald team proposed to pay the salary of this “adviser on Negro affairs” with foundation funds, in order to keep the position out of the firing range of members of Congress. They managed to get the proposal into the White House for consideration, and it was quickly approved by FDR himself, in keeping with his inclination to encourage almost anyone with fresh ideas.

  Embree and Johnson then turned to Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, whom they had known in Chicago as a tough, aggressive lawyer and public-spirited advocate of social justice. Ickes liked their idea and agreed to appoint an advocate, but he felt strongly that the first appointee should be a white man, the better to face up to white critics of Negro opportunity. He got no resistance from the Rosenwald men; they already had a white candidate in mind. Thirty-one-year-old Clark H. Foreman, a grandson of Clark Howell, the arch-conservative founder of the Atlanta Constitution, had impeccable academic credentials (including a Ph.D. fro
m Columbia University)—but more to the point, he had worked for a couple of years each at the CIC under Alexander and at Rosenwald under Embree. They knew and trusted him as a charming but hard-driving liberal who would stand up to the Southern reactionaries. The irascible and combative Ickes liked those qualities, and he gave Foreman the job in August 1933.

  Initial resistance came not from white Southerners but from the NAACP and the black press. W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White were insulted by the paternalism implicit in the appointment. Veteran publishers Robert S. Abbott of the Chicago Defender and Robert L. Vann of the Pittsburgh Courier, both of whom were native Southerners and militant critics of racial discrimination in all its forms, echoed a similar cry of outrage. The complaints were short-lived, though, for not only did Foreman prove to be effective, but he was soon joined by a black assistant, twenty-six-year-old Washington, D.C., native Robert C. Weaver, a Harvard-educated economist. And Ickes then went further to appoint a black assistant solicitor, William H. Hastie, another bright, under-thirty Washingtonian with a Harvard degree.

  Ickes was the leading standard-bearer for social change in the early Roosevelt years, breaking the segregationist ice in the Interior Department and in the Public Works Administration, which he also headed (and into which Clark Foreman moved in 1934). Other cabinet-level administrators followed the lead of Ickes in appointing black assistants and race-relations advisers, and by the late 1930s about a hundred such posts had been filled. The number seems insignificant in a bureaucracy as vast as the federal government, but at the time the appointments symbolized a major break with the past and a promise of greater changes to come. Blacks had worked for the national government before 1933, of course, but rarely in positions of authority; furthermore, segregation in the various agencies and departments had always prevailed as a matter of course, and the District of Columbia was as thoroughly divided racially as any city in the Deep South.