by John Egerton
Aubrey Williams didn’t have a lot to do with the artistic ventures of the WPA, but he was a lightning rod for Hopkins from the day he joined him at the Federal Emergency Relief Administration in May 1933—and a stormy decade in Washington did nothing to lessen his notoriety. Williams was soon to become one of the foremost liberal advocates of social change in his native region. Many a Southern member of Congress listened in openmouthed disbelief to the Alabamian’s drawling, soft-spoken radicalism and concluded that he was a traitor and a menace to the Southern way of life. Naturally, Williams didn’t see himself that way at all, but he was definitely a threat to the traditions that gave exclusive advantage to white, upper-class Southern males, and he was never hesitant to say so.
From early on, Williams had lived an unconventional life. Born and raised in meager circumstances in the rural orbit of Birmingham, where his father was a blacksmith and wagon builder, young Aubrey got most of his early education through the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, to which his hardworking mother was deeply devoted. He went to work before he was ten, and in 1911, when he was twenty-one, he was admitted to ministerial study at Maryville College, a Presbyterian institution in Tennessee, even though he had finished only one year of formal schooling. The formative experiences of his early life pointed him toward service to people in need, and by the time he got to Maryville, he had earned his spurs as a skillful helper and advocate for exploited Southern millhands and miners.
Over the next decade or so, Williams studied at Maryville and at the University of Cincinnati, went to France to work for the YMCA, saw combat with the French Foreign Legion and then with the U.S. Army, returned to finish a degree in social work at Cincinnati, pastored a Lutheran church in Kentucky, got married, became a Unitarian, aimed for further study at Harvard Divinity School, and turned at the last minute in a different career direction to become executive secretary of the Wisconsin Conference of Social Work. After ten years in that job, he got into public-relief assistance as a government social worker during the Hoover depression years, and that brought him to the attention of Harry Hopkins in the spring of 1933. It didn’t take the two men long to discover their common interests and outlook.
Williams was assigned to oversee the federal relief effort in six Southern states, and as he immersed himself in the gritty reality and the grimy politics of those jurisdictions, his unflinching determination to reach the needy with direct assistance quickly got him in hot water with the likes of Senators Huey Long of Louisiana and Joe Robinson of Arkansas and Governor “Alfalfa Bill” Murray of Oklahoma. When both Hopkins and President Roosevelt gave him support and encouragement, Williams proceeded with growing confidence to assert his vision of government activism. He and Hopkins sold FDR on the concept of work relief, as opposed to direct handouts, and it was his proposal that led in late 1933 to the establishment of the Civil Works Administration, which was something of a forerunner of, and model for, the Works Progress Administration of 1935.
By then, Williams had moved his family to the Washington area and settled into a fast-paced life of hard work and occasional play, making friends with other New Deal liberals—including fellow Alabamians Clifford and Virginia Durr of Montgomery and Senator Hugo Black—and building a firm link with FDR and an even closer relationship of mutual admiration and collaboration with Mrs. Roosevelt. The creation of the WPA and the National Youth Administration within three months of each other in mid-1935 was a sign of even greater responsibility for Williams, since he was not only second in command at the WPA for a time, but also executive director of the NYA.
Throughout his New Deal years, Aubrey Williams openly exhibited a populist idealism that accorded to minorities and the poor a full measure of equality in every aspect of the programs he administered. Remembering the lean years of his own youth and the desperate circumstances of so many Southern peasants—and seeing most of them worse off in the depression than they had been thirty years earlier—he was driven with a zeal rooted in his Alabama past to come to their aid, and when critics blasted him as a “screwball planner” or a meddlesome troublemaker or a Communist, he was all the more determined to stand and fight. Particularly in the NYA, which was his alone to direct, he went out of his way to ensure that blacks and other demonstrably needy groups were fully represented. In that respect, the program was a model of fairness—everything that such agencies as TVA and the Civilian Conservation Corps were not.
The purpose of the NYA was to provide employment and education support services to young people whose opportunities for personal development were sharply curtailed by the depression. Hopkins, Williams, and Eleanor Roosevelt were united in their belief that children and youth were innocent and unnecessary victims of the nation’s economic and social calamity, and they wanted to give high priority to programs aimed at that population group; NYA was their primary vehicle. All three of them were also aware that the South had a disproportionately large number of such young people, white and black. Considering that, Mrs. Roosevelt encouraged Hopkins to include a black representative, sixty-year-old Mary McLeod Bethune, on the NYA’s national advisory committee. The appointment was made, and shortly thereafter, in the late summer of 1935, Williams put Mrs. Bethune on his staff as head of the NYA Office of Minority Affairs. From then until she returned to her home in Florida ten years later, she was the most visible and influential African-American in the New Deal.
Practically everything about Mary McLeod Bethune seemed to have a heroic quality, a larger-than-life dimension. Born during Reconstruction on a plantation near Mayesville, South Carolina, she was the fifteenth of seventeen children in a family of illiterate sharecroppers; her parents and some of her older siblings had been born in slavery, and no one before her had spent a day in school. The arrival of a Presbyterian mission for blacks gave her that opportunity, and with missionary help she went on to a church-supported high school in North Carolina and then to the conservative Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. Her dream was to be a missionary to Africa, but the Presbyterian mission board thought it somehow inappropriate to send a young black American woman to the service of black Africans, and they refused to appoint her. Undaunted, Mary McLeod dedicated her life to the education of African-American children.
After teaching for nearly a decade in Southern mission schools, she started an institution of her own—for girls—in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904. It became Bethune-Cookman College after a merger in 1923, and Mrs. Bethune (having married and separated) served as its president until 1942. She also founded the National Council of Negro Women in 1935, heading it until 1949, and was a longtime board member of the NAACP and the Urban League. During her government service in the Roosevelt years, she was the convenor, host, and “mother superior” of the Federal Council on Negro Affairs (or, as it was popularly called, the Black Cabinet), in which the first black administrative appointees in the New Deal established an influential presence, not only with the Roosevelt executive branch but with leading civil rights activists outside the government.
As the first black woman ever to hold a position of any significance in the federal government, Mary Bethune established a lofty precedent for all who followed. From a childhood in the cotton fields, she had blossomed into a dedicated, intelligent, fearless, forceful, eloquent figure—a large and imposing woman, dark and serious and redoubtable, resplendently outfitted in regal attire that often included a flowing cape and scepter. She had the stately bearing and demeanor of an African queen, and even Washington’s resident white supremacists were a bit in awe of her. They knew little or nothing of her background; what they saw and heard was a supremely confident individual whose very presence seemed to make color irrelevant.
That must have been what Eleanor Roosevelt thought when she first met Bethune at a social function in the 1920s. Their acquaintance evolved into a close friendship that eventually gave the Florida educator access to the White House and influence with both Eleanor and Franklin. For her part, Mrs. Bethune revered the President and th
e First Lady, and steadfastly defended them from critics on the right and left for the rest of her life.
And with good reason, particularly in the case of Mrs. Roosevelt. First among the towering figures of the New Deal, from her husband on down, the President’s wife was committed in her heart and soul to the ideals and the documentary icons of American democracy. She was forty-eight years old when the New Deal began, a conspicuously tall, ungainly woman with a fluttery, high-pitched voice that belied a fighting spirit. Born to privilege but not contentment, she had left her unhappy childhood behind when her Uncle Teddy Roosevelt gave her away in marriage to her cousin Franklin in 1905.
The couple’s relationship was tinged with heartbreak before and after he was stricken with polio in 1921. “Back of tranquillity lies conquered unhappiness,” she liked to say, quoting someone now forgotten; her conquest involved boosting her husband back into politics, becoming his eyes and ears and feet, traveling thousands of miles a year for him, broadcasting radio commentaries and writing newspaper columns, establishing her own identity as a champion of the underdog, and giving of her time and money and energy to a multitude of charitable and progressive causes.
The Roosevelts never put limits on each other. As her interest in the desperate plight of blacks and poor whites deepened, Eleanor used her great influence to help them—exhorting administration officials and members of Congress to step up their efforts, bringing her friends Mary Bethune and Walter White to the executive residence for chats with her husband, making phone calls or visits in behalf of the organizations and issues and concerns that filled her lengthy care list. She tried to persuade her husband to be more outspoken in his support of the underclass, and when he declined to do so, she endeavored to work around him. “Well, what about me? Do you mind if I say what I think?” the historian Frank Friedel quoted Eleanor as asking the President. He reportedly replied, “No, certainly not. You can say anything you want. I can always say, ‘Well, that’s my wife. I can’t do anything about her.’ ”
She was vilified by the right wing—by Southern reactionaries in particular—as a meddlesome do-gooder and bleeding-heart liberal, but most Americans, including most Southerners, knew better. They recognized genuine human decency when they saw it, and they returned their admiration and affection for her care and concern. Marquis Childs, writing about Eleanor Roosevelt years later, said hers was “the story of the ugly duckling who at last came into the life of a swan and yet remembered what it was like to be an ugly duckling.”
In the domestic realm, Franklin Roosevelt’s political rocket had risen from ground zero in 1932 to its apogee in 1936, and then had started its long descent. The South benefited more than any other region from that flight of hope and glory, and the vast multitude of its people saw in FDR a public servant deserving of their undying love and respect. Never before had so many Southern men and women and children put such faith in a politician (nor have they since). Tragically, though, it was Southern politicians—white men in the legislative branch of the federal government and others in the states—who led the opposition against the President, his wife, his cabinet officers, and the Democrats’ own New Deal. What mattered to them more than economic recovery, more than democratic reform, more than anything, was the preservation of their own privilege and advantage and power, and of the fabled Southern way of life. To keep all that, they willfully opposed their President and neglected their people—the Southerners and other Americans they were sworn to serve.
7. Thunder on the Right
It took the whole of the first Roosevelt administration for the leaders of the American black minority population to be persuaded that their best hope for social reform and equal opportunity lay not with the Republicans but with the New Deal Democrats. And, coincidentally or not, it took about the same amount of time for the Southern political opposition to coalesce across party lines with other strands of right-wing thought and form a militant national resistance movement against Franklin Roosevelt and his allies.
The landslide of 1936 was so overwhelming that it lulled FDR and his brain trust into a false sense of confidence. Public-opinion polls, a new tool of the social scientists, had forecast a close election, but they were wildly and embarrassingly inaccurate. Three-fourths of the citizens over age twenty-one in the East, Midwest, and West had voted, and they favored Roosevelt over Alf Landon by about three to two. In the South, poll taxes and other voting restrictions kept three-fourths of the adults from participating at all (in South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, not even one citizen in five cast a ballot), but those who did vote gave the President an even greater margin of victory. Most of the black vote, small though it was, went to Roosevelt, dramatically reversing the three-to-one cushion they gave to the Republicans in 1932. Focusing on the still-needy segment of the population in his second inaugural address, FDR declared that one-third of the nation still lacked decent food, clothing, and shelter, and barely two of every hundred families had disposable income of as much as $5,000 a year.
A solid national coalition had united behind the popular image of FDR and the liberal programs he espoused. Those who benefited most from the federal government’s activism—small farmers, the urban poor, labor union members, blacks and other minorities, Southerners in general—swelled the rank and file of troops marching to the Democratic drummer. Catholics and Jews along with Protestants, intellectuals and creative artists as well as the workaday masses, and women as much as men found hope and promise in the pronouncements of their leader and the policies of his administration.
There was only one black member of Congress (Democrat Arthur W. Mitchell of Chicago), and there wouldn’t be more than one until after World War II, but white Democrats from outside the South had begun to show more sensitivity to social issues, including race; back in 1922, only eight of them had voted for the Dyer anti-lynching bill, but 171 of 185 would split from their defiant Southern colleagues in 1938 and support a similar bill—and still the Southerners would filibuster it to death.
Party politics and public office below the White House level were not exactly on the cutting edge of social reform, but neither were they entirely without signs of change. In Kentucky, Charles W. Anderson, Jr., a black attorney, was elected to the state House of Representatives from Louisville in 1933 and was subsequently reelected several times. And in Congress, it was at least possible by 1936 for white Southerners to run as unabashed New Deal liberals and get elected, as witness the presence of Alabama’s Hugo Black and Florida’s Claude Pepper in the Senate and Maury Maverick of Texas in the House. Alabama’s House delegation in 1937 included at least four men firmly allied with FDR: Speaker William Bankhead, Lister Hill, Luther Patrick, and John Sparkman. Border-state senators like Alben Barkley of Kentucky and Harry S. Truman of Missouri also voted consistently as liberals, and there were others similarly inclined.
Truman was bound for higher glory, of course, and Black was FDR’s first appointee to the Supreme Court; Pepper would last until 1950 as the Senate’s lone-wolf Southern liberal; and Maverick—well, Maury Maverick lived up to his name. His range-riding grandfather’s unbranded cattle had come to be called mavericks, and the word entered the language as a descriptive term for free-roaming, independent, outspoken individuals. Congressman Maverick was most assuredly one of those.
Born and raised in San Antonio around the turn of the century, Maury Maverick was deep-dipped in the rough-and-tumble politics of frontier Texas. A brash, earthy, undisciplined hell-raiser—and withal, exceptionally intelligent—he prided himself in claiming that he had never earned a diploma in his life (though he did attend Virginia Military Institute and the University of Texas, and passed the state bar exam after only a year of law school). For all his he-man antics, Maverick was from boyhood a sensitive champion of the underdog—of which Texas had an inordinate number. He went into World War I a patriot (seriously wounded, he won a Silver Star) and came out a pacifist; he declared himself an implacable foe of the wealthy elite that exp
loited the labor of impoverished Mexicans, blacks, and Anglos; as San Antonio’s tax collector from 1920 to 1934, he fought for social reforms and against the corrupt political machine that dominated the city’s politics.
The New Deal was a dream come true for Maverick, and when he won a seat in Congress in 1934, his liberal reputation preceded him onto the floor of the House. “In the South are my people,” he declared, “neither worse nor better than any other Americans,” and that egalitarian point of view was the sum and substance of his public life. He said of the South: “With all her faults, I love her still. But this will not keep me from telling the truth and lambasting her when she needs it, and she needs it plenty.”
A squat, pudgy brawler with bulging eyes and a bullfrog voice, the iconoclastic Maverick attacked pretense and pomposity with the ferocious intensity of a hungry dog on a bone. Among his lasting contributions was a new word, gobbledygook, to ridicule high-flown bureaucratic and academic jargon. He quickly became the spokesman of a clutch of House liberals who backed most of the New Deal’s programs—except those they deemed too timidly conservative—and FDR was delighted to have such articulate pressure from the left. “I’m so liberal I say chigro instead of chigger,” the irreverent Texan joked, and though he, like virtually all white progressives, stopped short of attacking segregation, he was foremost among his House colleagues in demanding equal treatment and dignity for minorities and the poor. Roosevelt was ecstatic on election night in 1936 to learn that among the many Democrats who would return to Washington with him was Maury Maverick.
But a small band of liberal knights errant in Congress, together with others in the executive branch and literally millions of enthusiastic followers across the country, were not enough to assure the New Deal of permanence. The 1936 landslide may have proved to FDR that he no longer needed the South to win the White House, but he still had to have the support of Southerners in Congress to get his programs approved. At the beginning of his quest for national leadership, he had tacitly struck an unholy bargain with the Dixie bloc: their support of his programs in exchange for his accommodation to their racial and social biases. He had no deep convictions on the subject. In his eyes, this was strictly a political trade-off, the kind of deal he handled so adroitly, and he used it to push them much further to the left than anyone might have expected. He could laugh at their “nigger” jokes, look the other way when blacks suffered public indignities, even withhold his endorsement of anti-lynching legislation—all of which he did—and at the same time give support and encouragement to liberal administrators, jurists, lawmakers, activists, and intellectuals who attached high priority to social reform in the South. Somehow the bargain had held through four years of relief and recovery—but reelection and the start of a second term for the President proved to be the warning buzzer for a monumental intraparty clash.