Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Roosevelt had been careful not to exclude arch-conservative Democrats from the New Deal; in fact, he earnestly courted the favor of some, with notable success. Bernard Baruch, the South Carolina-born wizard of Wall Street, was brought into FDR’s inner circle of advisers by Senator James F. Byrnes, and he remained a close associate of the President. Boston financier Joseph P. Kennedy, whom critics branded a speculator and an isolationist, held three different high appointive positions during the first two administrations, and even wrote a book in 1936 called I’m for Roosevelt (in which he declared emphatically, “I have no political ambition for myself or my children”).

  Still, the overwhelming majority of reactionary Republicans and Southern Democrats were filled with fear and panic by the direction in which FDR was steering the nation, and so were many others atop the economic and institutional totem pole—corporate and industrial barons, big planters, doctors and lawyers, religious leaders, newspaper publishers. What they objected to, in broadest terms, were government initiatives that weakened their long-established economic advantage: land and income reforms in agriculture, collective bargaining, regulation of wages and hours, production controls, price supports, regional planning, and government-owned utilities like TVA.

  The Southern States Industrial Council, headed by John E. Edgerton, a Tennessee manufacturer (and no kin of mine), sounded the reactionary alarm against unions, foreign labor (including Yankees), and “dilution of racial purity” in the workforce. The council opposed wage and hour regulations, and even fought to perpetuate regional pay differentials that discriminated against the South’s own workers. Such unmitigated advocacy of economic privilege was by no means confined to the South’s wealthy elite. It was from the ranks of these upper-echelon critics, North and South, that the anti–New Deal Liberty League was established in 1934, claiming among its sponsors the two previous Democratic presidential nominees, Al Smith and John W. Davis.

  The federal courts loomed as an even more immediate New Deal stumbling block. By the end of 1935, lawsuits against New Deal legislation had resulted in more than a thousand injunctions, and the Supreme Court subsequently invalidated almost a dozen major laws, including significant portions of the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act. Increasingly, conservatives throughout the nation saw the Supreme Court as the last hope for keeping state and local solutions ahead of federal remedies and business interests ahead of individual rights and liberties in the traditional American scheme of things. The strain on the court’s four conservative, three liberal, and two moderate justices revealed itself clearly in the high number of five-to-four decisions they rendered.

  The South was squarely in the center of the spreading opposition to the New Deal. Even as they voted for relief and recovery programs, Southern members of Congress saw to it that pay scales remained lower in the South than elsewhere, and lower for blacks than whites—all in the interest of perpetuating the cheap-labor/white-supremacy status quo. A $2-billion infusion of federal funds in the South in the first six years of the Roosevelt era brought tens of thousands of jobs and countless physical improvements to the region, raising the standard of living substantially—but also raising the ire of planters, businessmen, and even homemakers who complained of the loss of low-paid employees. They were outraged that relief was taking away the field hands and janitors and cooks who had previously found no other choice except to work from sunrise to sunset, from can to can’t, for fifty cents a day.

  Georgia Governor Eugene Talmadge never took a neighborly liking to Roosevelt; on the contrary, he was among the first to proclaim belligerent opposition to the man and his programs. Rumor had it that Huey Long, just before his assassination, was plotting an anti–New Deal alliance with Talmadge. As unlikely as that seems, given their conflicting viewpoints, they did share an overweening ambition for higher office and for Southern, if not national, dominion. Roosevelt stood directly in their way—and furthermore, he was rapidly winning the allegiance of the South’s people—so it’s not hard to imagine that a conspiracy to stop him was in the works.

  In January 1936, a few months after Long’s death, Talmadge joined with Louisiana preacher and Kingfish loyalist Gerald L. K. Smith and North Carolina novelist Thomas Dixon to stage a “Grass Roots Convention” in Macon, Georgia. John H. Kirby, an arch-conservative Texas lumberman, put up most of the money for the gathering, and such wealthy Northerners as Alfred P. Sloan and Pierre S. du Pont also contributed. The anti-Roosevelt rhetoric was loud and reckless, but ineffectual; invitations to “Jeffersonian Democrats” from Maryland to Texas attracted only a few hundred people, and even some of them were put off by the extremist tone of the event. That fall, Talmadge tried to unseat Senator Richard B. Russell, a lukewarm New Dealer at best, but a dependable party loyalist. Predictably, Russell gave him a sound thrashing.

  Certain tactics always seemed to work for the demagogues: blame the Yankees, blame the Republicans, blame the foreigners, the Communists, the Catholics and Jews—and if all else failed, blame the “niggers.” Nobody could pluck those strings more adroitly than Gene Talmadge. Snapping his bright red suspenders, ringing spittoons with unerring accuracy, spouting outrageous slanders against every obstacle in his path to a Fascist dictatorship, the “Wild Man from Sugar Creek” parlayed a University of Georgia law degree and a labor-intensive south Georgia plantation into an income base for his entertain-the-rubes rise to power. Elected governor in 1932 as a New Deal tub-thumper and reelected in 1934 under similar pretenses, he promptly jumped ship to organize the abortive grassroots revolt in Macon. When he failed in 1936 to unseat Russell and in 1938 to defeat Georgia’s other senatorial incumbent, Walter George, the undaunted Talmadge got himself elected governor again in 1940, and remained a force to be reckoned with until his death in 1947.

  In the final analysis, though, it was not court decisions or right-wing pressure groups or even rabble-rousing governors like Gene Talmadge that dealt such crippling blows to Roosevelt and the New Deal; rather, it was the veteran Southerners in Congress, men as outwardly proper and respectable as Senator Russell and as unapologetically bigoted as his colleagues Cotton Ed Smith and Theodore Bilbo. Together—and with the acquiescence of their Northern lodge brothers in the House and Senate—they kept democracy at bay in the South for another generation. The people of this region have never spoken more clearly than they did at the polls in 1936—they gave FDR over seventy-five percent of their votes—but their voices have never been so effectively nullified as they were in the years that followed.

  The signs of incipient revolt were clearly visible before the 1936 election, but apparently no one took them seriously. At the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia that summer, Cotton Ed Smith had stalked out of the meeting hall when a black minister was called upon to open a session with prayer. “By God, he’s as black as melted midnight!” roared the South Carolina senator, quivering with rage. “Get out of my way! This mongrel meeting ain’t no place for a white man!” Others dutifully trailed him into temporary self-exile. Then, to compound the Southerners’ outrage, the convention delegates threw out their long-standing “two-thirds” rule and allowed a simple majority to nominate the party’s presidential candidate, thus depriving the Southern bloc of minority control over the process. Clearly, the Northern liberal coalition was in charge, and FDR was openly aligned with them. His overwhelming victory in November, far from causing resigned acceptance among Southern conservatives and their like-minded allies, only served to escalate their alarm and hostility.

  Shortly after Congress returned to work in early 1937, Roosevelt began to make known his conviction that major reform of the federal judiciary was the only way to ensure final approval and implementation of the New Deal. Too many new laws were being overturned by judges who held a narrow view of federal authority, the President believed. In a February message that few of his advisers had been consulted on, he asked both houses to act promptly on a sweeping proposal to create up to fifty new feder
al judgeships, including six on the Supreme Court—one for every sitting jurist who, having served ten years or more, refused to retire after age seventy. Six of the nine sitting justices, including all four of the conservatives, happened to fit that description.

  The “court-packing plan,” as the press came to call it, hit Capitol Hill like a clap of thunder, and the storm of controversy that followed lasted six months. Generally speaking, the President got most of his Southern support in the Senate from Florida’s Pepper, Alabama’s Black, Bilbo and Harrison of Mississippi, Robinson and Caraway of Arkansas, Kentucky’s Barkley, and Sheppard of Texas—but the much more vocal opposition was led by Byrd and Glass of Virginia, Bailey and Reynolds of North Carolina, Smith of South Carolina, George of Georgia, and Connally of Texas. Vice President Garner, another obstructionist foe, worked behind the scenes to torpedo the bill.

  In the House, Maury Maverick quickly signed on as a sponsor of the legislation, and Lyndon B. Johnson actually won his seat there in a close election in the Texas hill country that year by making his support of the plan a pivotal issue. But even in the Texas delegation Maverick and Johnson were outnumbered, and House opponents from throughout the South easily managed to dodge the heat, forcing the Senate to take the matter up first.

  It was this issue that finally brought the anti-Roosevelt Southerners out into the open. Those who had mumbled their discontent in private now shouted it to any who would listen—and many did. The court-packing plan smacked of executive reprisal; it was an audacious scheme that seemed to toss aside age-old constitutional principles. The debate dragged on through the spring. The Supreme Court, meanwhile—apparently taking heed of its vulnerability—gave signs of having discovered new justifications for upholding controversial legislation (including the Social Security Act, which in January 1937 began withholding a maximum of $30 a year—one percent of the first $3,000 of income—from workers’ paychecks). Each succeeding decision the court rendered in favor of the New Deal was widely viewed as further proof of the effectiveness, for good or ill, of the Roosevelt power play. “A switch in time saves nine,” one wit noted; another observer called the court’s action “self-salvation by self-reversal.”

  In May, conservative Justice Willis Van Devanter made a timely announcement of his retirement, and Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, having been promised the first vacancy on the court, prepared to move up, with Pat Harrison of Mississippi in line to take his Senate post. Indeed, it was their anticipation of these promotions that kept Robinson and Harrison in line as proponents of court reform. At that point, Roosevelt could have dropped the plan and still had what he wanted: a court more receptive to the New Deal philosophy. But the President, cockily overconfident, wanted total victory, and he leaned hard on his troops to deliver it.

  With each passing week, though, support for the legislation seemed to fade, and the opponents sensed victory. The FDR coalition was coming apart, although Roosevelt himself seemed unable to see it, and no one was able to impress the fact upon him. He didn’t help his cause when he pointedly refrained for weeks from telling Joe Robinson that the court vacancy was his. As pressure mounted on all sides, the temperature in both houses of Congress followed the Washington summer thermometer straight up to the boiling point.

  On July 13, while Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina was deep into a diatribe against the court bill, Robinson got up and left the chamber, exhausted and in pain. The next morning he was found slumped on the floor in his apartment, dead of a heart attack. The court-packing plan, already in grave danger, quickly died its own anticlimactic death without ever coming to a vote; a week later, the Senate sent the bill back to committee.

  In his thirty-three years of congressional service, Joe Robinson had represented Arkansas in both houses, and he had also been Al Smith’s vice-presidential running mate in 1928. He was no liberal, certainly, but he was a loyal team player for FDR and the Democrats, and his departure destroyed the administration’s defenses. A bruising battle for his leadership post ensued between Pat Harrison and Alben Barkley, and the President further alienated the conservatives by letting it be known that he supported the more liberal Kentuckian. Insult was heaped on injury when Theodore Bilbo, Harrison’s hostile Mississippi colleague and a man whose loyalty had often gone to the highest bidder, cast the decisive vote that gave Barkley the victory by a cliff-hanging majority of one.

  In August, when Roosevelt nominated fifty-one-year-old Hugo La-Fayette Black to fill the Supreme Court vacancy, some of the senator’s Southern colleagues, including Bilbo, George of Georgia, McKellar of Tennessee, Connally of Texas, and Reynolds of North Carolina, quickly joined the liberals in voting sixty-three to sixteen to confirm him. (Was this simply senatorial courtesy? Southern pride? Did they want most of all to remove him from their midst? Were they setting him up for some sort of surprise attack? Even now, their motives remain a mystery.) The diehard Virginians, Glass and Byrd, were the only two Southerners to vote no; several others, including Cotton Ed Smith and Josiah Bailey, managed to be absent from the chamber when the vote was recorded.

  A month later, journalist Ray Sprigle of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported what had long been common knowledge in Alabama and even among the members of the Senate: that Black had joined the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1920s, and had used the secret society’s endorsement to help launch his career in politics. In the resulting uproar, the new justice finally decided to go on national radio to defend himself. He acknowledged the former membership, but cited his Senate record as proof that he had repudiated the Klan. Few were placated on either side of the issue, and a cloud of suspicion followed Black to the bench.

  It didn’t linger for long. Black, a largely self-educated man whose parents had been country storekeepers in Alabama, proved to be one of the Supreme Court’s most learned and articulate defenders of civil liberties and civil rights, a liberal in the truest and best sense of that much-abused word. In one of his first cases he sided with the majority in declaring that the University of Missouri must offer equal opportunity in its higher-education system to qualified applicants such as Lloyd Gaines, the Negro plaintiff in the suit at issue. That 1938 case, Missouri ex rel. Gaines v. Canada, was the first race-and-education decision ever handed down by the Supreme Court.

  One signpost after another revealed the first two years of Roosevelt’s second administration to be the parting of the ways between him and most of his former allies in the Southern congressional delegation. In 1937 and 1938 he lost the allegiance of both Mississippi senators, Bilbo and Harrison, of Tennessee’s McKellar, and of North Carolina’s Reynolds, to name just four; by 1939, even his principal first-term adviser in the Senate, James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, was cleverly undercutting the President at almost every turn. In the House there were a few bright lights, but not enough: Maury Maverick was defeated in 1938, just as Martin Dies, a reactionary east Texan, was rising to notoriety with the quiet encouragement of Vice President Garner; Lister Hill of Alabama left the House to run successfully for Black’s Senate seat; and in the Deep South states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, progressive or moderate or even mildly conservative congressmen were as scarce as hens’ teeth.

  It is worth remembering that until the late 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt appeared ready to attempt a fundamental realignment of the Democratic and Republican parties along ideologically distinct liberal and conservative lines, his difficulties with the Southern conservatives, all of whom were Democrats, had little to do with such principles as states’ rights and federal authority, and practically nothing to do with the issue of race. In fact, men as different in demeanor and outlook and personality as Bilbo and Jimmy Byrnes were reliable supporters of New Deal legislation until 1937, apparently seeing little if anything in FDR’s personal behavior to make them fear that he was going to spark an economic or racial revolution in the South.

  But the court-packing battle changed all that, and Black’s appointment, his Klan history notwi
thstanding, served notice to the Southern bloc that a monumental fight for liberal social change—possibly even including racial change—was on the horizon. The outbreak of world war would cause most of the Southerners to put aside their differences with the President, but the realignment would be limited and temporary; on domestic issues, they never trusted him again. Two who had been with him from the first were Bilbo and Byrnes; their sharply contrasting styles of subsequent opposition showed how infinitely diverse and inventive were the ways of Southern politicians.

  A compassion for the rural poor among whom he was born and a raging fear and hatred of all things alien to his understanding struggled constantly for dominance inside the fertile personality of Theodore G. Bilbo—and most of the time, the fear and hatred won out. Raised in a pious Baptist family of modest means on a farm near Poplarville in southeast Mississippi, he tried theology school briefly before studying law at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and then spent twenty-five years in public office in his home state—including two terms as governor—before being elected to the U.S. Senate at the age of fifty-six in 1934.