by John Egerton
Scandal trailed him like a skunk’s scent from the very start of his political career. He was accused of bribe-taking, conflict of interest, stealing, lying, and abuse of women, among other things; in one breach-of-promise case he was sent to jail, and the state senate narrowly missed expelling him for “his established bad character and lack of credibility.” But Bilbo—whose axiom was “The voters will always forget”—had that peculiar Southern knack for stump oratory, and he beguiled and blustered his way to the top. Like Gene Talmadge and Cotton Ed Smith, he could masquerade convincingly as a poor white country boy put upon by the big delta plantation colonels and the corporate barons on one side, and by the “niggers” on the other. Blacks were a slight majority of Mississippi’s two million people in 1930, but only a token few hundred of them were permitted to vote. “I’m calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes,” he exhorted campaign crowds, “and the best time to do it is the night before!”
The name Theodore means “God’s gift,” he was fond of declaring, and Bilbo means “a two-edged sword—and I’m both edges.” (There was another dictionary meaning, chillingly symbolic: a bilbo in Spanish was “an iron bar with shackles, originally used to confine the feet of slaves aboard ships.”) During his second term as governor, “The Man,” as he liked to call himself (and be called by others), kept Mississippi in the Democratic column behind Al Smith, a Catholic and a whiskey-drinker—“and me a dry, a Baptist, and a Ku Klux Klansman,” Bilbo boasted. He seemed almost pleased when writers referred to him as “a Mississippi Mussolini”; others, less charitable, dubbed him “the Bilbonic Plague.” He left the state government in shambles in 1932, and then promptly entrained for Washington, where he talked Senator Pat Harrison into getting him a New Deal post in the Department of Agriculture. After less than two years in that sinecure, he turned on Harrison and his elderly colleague, Senator Hubert Stephens, and went home to challenge and defeat Stephens. And so, from 1935 on, the amiable and easygoing Harrison had Bilbo as his senatorial cross to bear.
During his first term in Washington (and sporadically after that), the explosive Mississippian displayed a paradoxical affinity for Franklin Roosevelt and many of the New Deal programs. Both the President and most of Bilbo’s colleagues in the Senate humored “The Man,” indulged him, tolerated him. When he embarrassed them with his extreme Negrophobia, they pretended not to be listening—as when, for example, in both 1938 and 1939, he praised Nazi Germany’s racial policies and introduced legislation calling for the federal government to spend a billion dollars on the deportation of twelve million African-American citizens to colonial lands in Africa.
But when the Southerners joined forces to resist social change, Bilbo was their friend and ally—as when, again in 1938, the Dixie senators staged a grueling seven-week filibuster to defeat another anti-lynching bill. Every one of them—including the liberal Claude Pepper of Florida, who was running for reelection—closed ranks under the banner of “states’ rights” in this obstructionist fight. Pat Harrison put aside his gentler nature and his hostility to Bilbo and joined his junior colleague barb for barb in a double-barreled blast at “this treason against the South.” Jimmy Byrnes of South Carolina, smooth and urbane beyond a hint of his humble origins, vowed that he and his Southern brothers would talk on for a century, if necessary, to prevent the majority from imposing its will upon them.
Of all the men in the Dixie bloc, from the simplest to the most complex, none was more fascinating or puzzling than Byrnes. In sharp contrast to the colorful extremists and fanatics who had dominated South Carolina politics for the better part of a century—Ben Tillman, Cole Blease, Cotton Ed Smith—the little Irishman, James Francis Byrnes, was a model of respectability and cool restraint. Born a Catholic in Charleston shortly before his father died in 1882, he was nurtured by his hardworking mother, a struggling dressmaker, and by an aristocratic lawyer who hired him at age thirteen to be an errand boy and subsequently became his mentor. Jimmy didn’t go far in school, but he rose quickly from runner to office clerk to court stenographer to attorney, passing the bar in 1904 without benefit of formal instruction.
By 1910, when he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, Byrnes had married and gravitated to the church of his Episcopalian wife, had made a name for himself as a lawyer and editor in Aiken, near the Georgia line, and had cast himself as a moderate reformer on the bridge between the old South and the new. Thoroughly immersed in the racial mores of the region, he believed unquestioningly in the total supremacy of the Caucasian race; like many so-called progressives of his time, he saw Jim Crow laws and black disenfranchisement as positive reforms that would make it easier for paternalistic whites to deal fairly and benignly with “their negroes.”
Tillman and Smith were in the Senate and Blease was in the governor’s office when Byrnes got elected; in their shadow, he must have looked and sounded like a meek little do-good lawyer spouting pious platitudes about “duty” and “fairness.” Indeed, in his first reelection race, he was challenged by an opponent who called him a “nigger lover”—and after that he concluded that outspoken white supremacy was essential if he wanted to be successful in politics. The strategy worked for fourteen years, during which he was such a dependable Southern guardian of white privilege that the Congress-watchers at the NAACP took disparaging note of his “militant white racism.” But even when he tried, he was no match for the sulfurous Blease, who “outniggered” him to victory in a race for the Senate in 1924. Six years later, Byrnes tried a softer tack, appealing “to the reason and intelligence of the people instead of their passions and prejudices,” and he came away with a narrow upset victory.
As a loyal Democrat, he had campaigned for Al Smith in 1928, and long before the New Deal was invented he was courting favor with Governor Roosevelt, whom he had known for at least a decade. In fact, the term New Deal itself could well have come from Byrnes, because he worked for FDR as a speechwriter and strategist in the 1932 campaign. Though he was only a first-term senator, the crafty Carolinian was a Capitol Hill veteran who knew well the ways of the Club, and he soon gained added stature as the President’s unofficial point man in the Senate. The two had much in common: ambition, pragmatism, a knack for control by indirection, a consuming passion for the political game. Ideology was secondary to them; winning was always first.
Not least of the favors that endeared Byrnes to Roosevelt was his introduction of Bernard Baruch into the White House inner sanctum. The celebrated Wall Street wonder boy and freewheeling financier had enjoyed a comfortable South Carolina boyhood as the son of a Prussian-born Jewish surgeon famed for his service to Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy. By the time he was thirty years old, young Baruch had acquired a huge Carolina plantation retreat, and over the years he frequently entertained his political friends there, including FDR. For social as well as financial reasons, Roosevelt treasured his association with Baruch, and he gave Byrnes full credit for having brought them together.
Senator Byrnes was especially valuable to the President as a middle-man between the liberals and conservatives on Capitol Hill. He could go either way with ease, moving so quietly and inconspicuously that his influence was often unnoticed—and all the more effective for that. Practically every bill that became law in Roosevelt’s first term got a helping hand at some crucial moment from Jimmy Byrnes. Other Southerners held the leadership posts and the committee chairmanships, but no one in the Senate had more of an inside track than he did. Cautiously skirting controversial issues, including race, he went home to run for reelection in 1936 with the admiration and respect of his colleagues and the strong support of his Democratic constituents. His opponents tried to brand him and the President as Socialists “who consort with colored people,” but the ploy was a spectacular failure; Roosevelt got ninety-eight percent of South Carolina’s votes in 1936, and Byrnes lost only one precinct in the entire state.
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sp; You might think that such an overwhelming mandate would compel a politician to keep moving in the direction he was going. Byrnes seemed perfectly positioned: to the right of Black and Pepper, to the left of Glass and Bailey, a dignified cut above such knee-jerk bigots as Bilbo and Cotton Ed—and most important of all, right in the center of the White House, where real power was supposed to reside. But it was precisely here, at the moment of his and Roosevelt’s greatest triumph, that Byrnes fell once again under the hypnotic spell of the ancient Southern bugaboo of race.
With his blood brothers in the Dixie bloc leaning heavily on him, and with his own emotional convictions reinforcing their insistent pleas, the junior senator from South Carolina took a racial turn to the right as soon as Congress convened in 1937. For the next two years—until Roosevelt himself put the domestic agenda on ice and sought refuge in the pressing concerns of foreign policy—Jimmy Byrnes acted more like Cotton Ed than like “the President’s favorite senator” (as he had been described in the press in 1933). Suddenly he was hostile to strikes by the industrial unions, to certain staff decisions within the Farm Security Administration, to minimum wage provisions in the Fair Labor Standards Act, to appropriations for the Works Progress Administration—and beneath each criticism was a racial angle, a caveat based on skin color.
When the anti-lynching bill was placed at the top of the Senate’s 1938 agenda by Majority Leader Alben Barkley, Byrnes angrily blamed the NAACP and Walter White. “Barkley can’t do anything without talking to that nigger first,” the senator was quoted as saying. In the ensuing filibuster, Byrnes escalated his attack on White, charging that Congress had become his puppet. The Democratic Party, he declared, had fallen under the control of “the Negroes of the North,” and the South “has been deserted by the Democrats.”
In reality, Walter White had precious little influence in Washington, and neither did any other minority figure in American public life. What Byrnes and the other Southerners truly feared was that as soon as Roosevelt and the white liberals finished recruiting Northern blacks and making room for them in the Democratic Party, they would turn their attention to the South. But such convulsive changes were far in the future—and in the meantime, the Southerners still had the filibuster. In the legislative arena, it was The Bomb, the ultimate weapon. With it, they stopped the anti-lynching bill cold once again, while President Roosevelt sat uneasily in his office, intently gazing in another direction.
Jimmy Byrnes was not the only Southern senator to ride back to Washington on the Democratic tidal wave in 1936; Carter Glass, Pat Harrison, and John Bankhead rode with him, and so did Josiah W. Bailey. A pious Confederate of the old school, Bailey had first arrived from North Carolina with the unbeatable blessings of the Baptist Church and Buck Duke’s electric power company, and he never did anything to cause either pillar to shake beneath his feet. Along with religion and business he was also devoted to white supremacy, and that holy trinity was enough to plant Bailey in the Glass house of righteous resistance to the New Deal almost from the start. Once in a while he strayed over to the Roosevelt camp, and like Cotton Ed Smith and a few others, he was not above telling the voters that he was a New Deal Democrat—sort of. But by 1937, when he was safely back in Washington for six more years, you could confidently expect to find old Josh Bailey spewing hot coals on the heads of FDR and the liberals.
The court-packing episode was the catalyst for a bipartisan effort by Senate conservatives to mount a semiformal counterrevolution, and the sixty-five-year-old Bailey was one of its ringleaders. He and ten others, including four Southerners, started meeting early in the year to map strategy. Buoyed by the failure of the court reform plan and alarmed by the onset of an economic recession in late summer, the group—enlarged by then to about thirty, equally divided between Republicans and Democrats, and including more than a half-dozen Southerners—came close to formally uniting behind a “conservative manifesto” that emphasized five major governmental imperatives: to reduce taxes, to balance the budget, to curb labor violence, to promote free enterprise, and to honor states’ rights. Bailey was the chief draftsman and editor of the document.
Their movement had begun as an alarmed reaction against what they perceived as Roosevelt’s intention to convert the Democratic Party into an ideological base for all liberals; the aim of Bailey and his allies was to form the nucleus of an opposition party, a conservative resistance. But then, as the President’s fortunes sagged, some of the plotters began to think they might be able to defeat him without a drastic realignment of the two parties (failure, they knew, would mean the loss of their party privileges). Soon they were mired in partisan wrangling while their grand strategy disintegrated. In December the story of their secret pact broke in the papers, and the plotters were widely suspected of fronting for the Liberty League, an elite nest of ultra-right-wing reactionaries. Amid finger-pointing and denials, Josh Bailey was left to take most of the heat for what looked like an underground resistance plan, if not some sort of bungled party coup.
It was right after this incident that the disruptive and mean-spirited filibuster against the anti-lynching bill broke out, ushering in 1938 on a somber and jarring note of raw hostility. The gloves were off now. With the midterm congressional elections in the offing, the President decided in June to single out certain philistines who were up for reelection, and to bring the weight of his personal popularity to bear against them. Two of the senators on his hit list were Walter George of Georgia and Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina.
With the opinion polls showing more than two-thirds of the American people—and an even higher proportion of Southerners—still solidly in favor of him and the New Deal, Roosevelt went to Barnesville, Georgia, on August 11 for a campaign speech and declared, while Senator George sat stone-faced on the platform with him, that he and the staunchly conservative ex-judge “do not speak the same language.” The President urged his stunned audience not to send George back to Washington. The senator, with an admirable display of manners, shook hands with him at the end and said tersely, “Mr. President, I want you to know that I accept the challenge.”
A few days later, in another town, George sagely avoided a direct hit at Roosevelt but launched a scathing attack on alien others he associated with him, including Tommy Corcoran (a Yankee Catholic), Benjamin Cohen (a New York Jew), the labor leader John L. Lewis, and James Ford, the black vice-presidential nominee of the Communist Party. Turner Catledge of the New York Times, a native Mississippian, listened to the crowd erupt with cheers and knew that George’s blatant hate-mongering was going to work. “It reminded me,” he wrote later, “of what Pat Harrison used to say—that he could be a statesman for five years, but on the sixth—election year—he went back home to ‘sling the shit.’ ” George slung it with pinpoint accuracy, and it landed right on FDR’s spats. Four weeks later the senator won the Democratic primary in a landslide over the bombastic Eugene Talmadge and a little-known party functionary.
By the time Roosevelt got to South Carolina he had almost lost his taste for hand-to-hand combat, but he couldn’t resist a parting jab at Cotton Ed, who was being challenged by Governor Olin D. Johnston. The senator was primed and ready, itching for a fight. His walkout at the 1936 Democratic convention had made him a folk hero among his white constituents, so he played the racial tune again—and won reelection with ease. Even worse from FDR’s perspective must have been the knowledge that Smith got behind-the-scenes help from none other than Jimmy Byrnes.
As in the court-packing fight, Roosevelt had overplayed his hand, and the costs to his prestige and his program were enormous. The “Dixie Demagogues,” as writers Allan A. Michie and Frank Ryhlick dubbed the Southern congressional clique in a 1939 book, had slyly provoked the President into snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. In the November general election, the Democrats lost seven seats in the Senate and seventy in the House. And there was more bad news: The white press was lambasting FDR for his liberal programs and his high-handed manner with C
ongress and the courts, while the black press was attacking him for the lack of substance in his civil rights record and his soft-pedaling of Southern racists. Nazis, Fascists, and Communists were seen increasingly as a menace to the nation, and in the House of Representatives, the newly formed Committee on Un-American Activities was pursuing “foreign agents and disloyal citizens” with reckless abandon. The economy was still stalled, the budget deficit was ballooning, and the multiple problems of chronic poverty still plagued an alarming number of Americans, including a majority of Southerners.
When he boarded a train for Georgia and a much-needed Thanksgiving holiday in November 1938, the President could only look back in puzzlement and dismay at the string of frustrating defeats that had followed directly in the wake of his greatest election victory. War was about to envelop Europe, and the debate over how much or how little the United States should do to help its allies there had already begun. With an increasing sense of urgency—and not a little relief—Franklin D. Roosevelt quietly laid his domestic agenda aside for the duration. For all practical purposes, the New Deal was over.
Florida agricultural workers waiting to draw a day’s pay during the Great Depression (Illustration Credit 7.1)
Convict laborers under guard in rural Georgia in the 1930s (Illustration Credit 7.2)
PHOTO CREDITS APPEAR ON this page-this page.
Picketers at a mill in Georgia during the textile industry general strike, 1934 (Illustration Credit 7.3)