by John Egerton
Delegates to the first Southern Tenant Farmers Union convention, Marked Tree, Arkansas, 1935 (Illustration Credit 7.4)
A coworker watches as Melvin Swinea fills out his application for membership in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union at a rally in Parkin, Arkansas, 1937. (Illustration Credit 7.5)
Trustees of Providence, an interracial cooperative farm in Mississippi, 1938. From left, front row: Sam Franklin, Sherwood Eddy, Arthur Raper; middle row: John Rust, Reinhold Niebuhr, Charles S. Johnson; back row: James Causey, William Scarlett (Illustration Credit 7.6)
Willis D. Weatherford (front, center) and others, including Samuel Chiles Mitchell, behind him, at Weatherford’s Blue Ridge YMCA Assembly in the mountains of North Carolina (Illustration Credit 7.7)
This 1935 experimental model of the mechanical cotton picker designed by brothers John and Mack Rust presaged a time soon to come when machines would displace millions of laborers in the fields. (Illustration Credit 7.8)
Some Southern Democrats of the 1930s:
Senators Carter Glass of Virginia (left) and Tom Connolly of Texas (Illustration Credit 7.9)
Senator Huey Long of Louisiana (Illustration Credit 7.10)
Senate Majority Leader Joseph T Robinson of Arkansas (Illustration Credit 7.11)
Congressman Maury Maverick of Texas (Illustration Credit 7.12)
Senators Walter George (left) and Richard Russell of Georgia meet President Franklin D. Roosevelt on the campaign trail, 1938. (Illustration Credit 7.13)
Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, and E. Franklin Frazier (from left) with friends in New York during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s (Illustration Credit 7.14)
Atlanta Daily World editor Frank Marshall Davis at his desk in 1934 (Illustration Credit 7.15)
Thurgood Marshall with client Donald Murray (center) and mentor Charles H. Houston at a state court hearing on Murray’s plea for admission to the University of Maryland law school, 1935 (Illustration Credit 7.16)
Charlotte Hawkins Brown (center) with four of her teachers at Palmer Memorial Institute, a private girls’ school founded by her at Sedalia, North Carolina, in 1904 (Illustration Credit 7.17)
“Lone-wolf liberal” Senator Claude Pepper of Florida (Illustration Credit 7.18)
Jessie Daniel Ames, founder of the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching (Illustration Credit 7.19)
Attorney William H. Hastie was thirty-two when President Roosevelt appointed him in 1937 as the first African-American to be a federal judge. (Illustration Credit 7.20)
Robert C. Weaver, an economist with a Ph.D. from Harvard, was the first of about a hundred blacks appointed to administrative and advisory positions in the New Deal during the 1930s. (Illustration Credit 7.21)
Texas Congressman Martin Dies (center), chairman of the first House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938, with fellow Democrat and committee member Joe Starnes of Alabama (left) and J. B. Matthews, a Kentucky native and ex-Communist who was HUAC’s chief investigator (Illustration Credit 7.22)
University of North Carolina sociologist Howard W. Odum (Illustration Credit 7.23)
Florida-born novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (Illustration Credit 7.24)
Mississippi novelist William Faulkner (left) and Milton Abernethy, owner of the Intimate Bookshop in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, photographed there in 1931 (Illustration Credit 7.25)
James Weldon Johnson went from Jacksonville, Florida, to an illustrious career as a writer, diplomat, teacher, and NAACP leader. (Illustration Credit 7.26)
Social critic H. L. Mencken of the Baltimore Sun was an inspiration to many Southern writers of the 1930s. (Illustration Credit 7.27)
Liberal activist Howard “Buck” Kester (front), relaxing with two strike-idled coal miners at Wilder, Tennessee, in 1933 (Illustration Credit 7.28)
Southern Tenant Farmers Union leaders H. L. Mitchell (left) and Howard Kester (right) with Norman Thomas, U. S. Socialist Party leader, in Tyronza, Arkansas, 1934 (Illustration Credit 7.29)
At about the time he cofounded the Highlander Folk School with Myles Horton in 1932, twenty-six-year-old Don West had a degree in theology, a reputation for radicalism, and a shiny black motorcycle. (Illustration Credit 7.31)
Herman C. Nixon, an Alabamian, moved from right to left to center in the 1930s—first as a Vanderbilt Agrarian, then as an organizer of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and finally as an academician. (Illustration Credit 7.30)
Georgia’s once and future governor, Eugene Talmadge, on a campaign stop in rural Telfair County during his unsuccessful 1938 campaign to unseat U.S. Senator Walter George (Illustration Credit 7.32)
8. Shaking the Pillars
Measured in political terms, the impact of the New Deal on America in the 1930s was enormous; it was, after all, a political movement, if not more extensively a nonviolent revolution in which one ideology replaced another and power changed hands across the board. (That may be an overstatement of the case if you consider how substantially the Southern Democratic elite retained its authority—but on a national scale, the results really did seem revolutionary.)
Political transformation was not all that was happening in those years, though, even if it was the primary force at work in the society. Too much concentration on what politicians say and do can cause you to discount the activities of people and institutions outside the center ring of politics. I’m thinking particularly of what could be called, for want of a better umbrella term, the intelligentsia: scholars, academicians, thinkers; teachers and preachers; journalists and authors; activists on behalf of a cause, an issue, a social goal. The pillar institutions—church, press, university—and the special-interest associations of agriculture, industry, and labor were all profoundly affected by New Deal politics, but they in turn also had a powerful impact on the political process. In the spread of ideas, thoughts, impressions, and opinions into the public mind, the intelligentsia was probably at least as influential as the much more visible cadre of mainstream politicians. And in the South most especially, those who thought and spoke out, who wrote and took action, were vitally important figures in the 1930s, whether they were identified with the heralds of social change or the bedrock of resistance to it.
Religious motivation accounted for some of the movement on both sides of the fence. The thirties were years of such desperation that social experimentation was inevitable, and yet the very presence of conservative institutions intent on protecting their material possessions and their power foreordained a high level of social paralysis. In an indirect way, the Northern social gospel movement and the activist interests of the Federal Council of Churches did cause some Southerners to be mindful of the needs of the less fortunate among them—but in the main, their search for avenues of service led them to stations outside the institutional church.
Circumspection and a certain diplomatic caution marked the activities of most Southern Protestant denominations in those years, and the same was true of the relatively small number of Catholic parishes in the region and the far smaller congregations of Jews. The Protestant churches of the African-American minority were also quiescent; so surrounded and isolated were they by the power of white supremacy and segregation that aggressive agitation for social reform could only have struck them as a foolhardy notion. And, in the seminaries and colleges and secondary schools that operated with church support, it was exceedingly rare for people who advocated controversial deviations from the status quo to hold on to their positions, let alone make modest advances up the institutional ladder.
There were individual exceptions in almost every denominational body, of course. William L. Poteat, a biologist who served as president of Wake Forest College, an esteemed Baptist institution in North Carolina, was perhaps the most noted of a number of Southern Baptists who took a liberal or progressive view on most theological and social questions. Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists in the South also had some leaders who held moderate or l
eft-of-center views on such issues as biblical literalism, evolution, militarism and war, race relations, Prohibition, worker rights, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan, and the welfare of the poor. The long ordeal of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama rallied many denominational forces—Northern, mostly, but not entirely—to mount a defense that saved the youths from hanging, and support groups were also organized on behalf of striking miners and textile workers. In the main, though, religiously inspired people who worked for social change in the South did so either as individuals or as members of organizations not officially tied to the mother church.
Two of the oldest such organizations were the Christian student associations, the YMCA and YWCA. Willis D. Weatherford’s work among male students had begun early in the century, and in the mid-1930s, the two institutions founded under his leadership—the Blue Ridge Assembly in North Carolina and the YMCA Graduate School in Nashville—were still operating. Weatherford was a race-relations pathfinder in the first phase of his career, but the brotherly progressivism of his youth seemed more like paternalistic caution as he grew older; he resisted efforts to break down segregation in the student movement, not only between whites and blacks but between male and female associations as well. Though he maintained personal ties with a number of black college presidents and other minority figures of his generation (he coauthored a book on race relations with Charles S. Johnson in 1934), and even invited them on occasion to functions at Blue Ridge or in Nashville, the formal and somewhat imperious Dr. Weatherford saw to it that the laws and conventions of racial and sexual separation were strictly observed throughout his tenure at the two institutions.
The YMCA Graduate School was forced to close in 1936, a victim of the depression. Negotiations between Weatherford and Vanderbilt University, which held the mortgage on the school’s physical plant, finally broke down, and Weatherford, then past sixty, was disappointed to learn that Vanderbilt, his alma mater, wouldn’t make a place for him on its faculty. Fisk University hired him, though, to head its department of religion and philosophy, and he remained there until 1946. It was also in the mid-forties that Weatherford retired as director of the Blue Ridge Assembly, which he had started back in 1912. Always a man of enormous energy, he then gave two more decades to Berea College as a fund raiser and special consultant, not finally retiring until after his ninetieth birthday.
It is difficult to assess the numerous and diverse contributions of a man like Willis Weatherford. His career spanned almost three-quarters of a century; given such a lengthy tenure, it is hardly surprising that his views and actions should seem so advanced when he began, but lagged ever further off the pace of change as the decades passed. His inability to move beyond a paternalistic acceptance of segregation and the “separate but equal” myth underscores the complexity of achieving basic reform in a tightly controlled society. Even so, he began softly calling the white South to task for its racial misdeeds earlier than almost anyone of his race. Such notable Southern progressives as Will Alexander and Frank Porter Graham publicly praised Weatherford for awakening them to careers of public service—and he deserved the credit.
The Young Women’s Christian Association in the South generally stayed ahead of its male counterpart in pressing for cooperation and equality across the barriers of race and sex, but joint conferences and united programs didn’t become a reality until after World War II. Throughout the thirties and most of the forties, however, the Y’s were the nearest thing to a student social-issues movement then existing in the colleges and universities of the South.
Will Alexander’s primary institutional base, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, stayed in business until 1944, but its activities were sharply curtailed after he took permanent leave in 1935 to work for the Roosevelt administration. The CIC (another case of religious motivation finding an outlet beyond the confines of the church) made its most valuable contributions in the 1930s with well-researched studies of lynching, tenant farming, and other problems prevalent in the South. The churches were largely silent on these issues, but groups such as the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching got most of their strength from dedicated churchwomen. Jessie Daniel Ames of the CIC was recognized as the foremost activist and organizer in that movement.
The Southern Commission on the Study of Lynching was formed under CIC auspices in 1930 and chaired by George Fort Milton, the progressive young editor of the Chattanooga News. Charles S. Johnson and three other prominent blacks joined six whites on the ten-member commission, and investigative research was carried out by Arthur Raper of the CIC and a black sociologist, Walter Chivers of Morehouse College. Raper authored the 1933 final report, which was published by the University of North Carolina Press.
But in spite of the efforts of the women’s association and the study commission, lynchings, near-lynchings, and various other vigilante killings continued to plague the South. On an average of more than once a month throughout the thirties, the terror of such lawless acts was imposed with deadly effect, nine times out often on someone black. Beyond the “official” statistics on lynching, many additional deaths of blacks at the hands of whites were classified as disappearances or accidents, or as some “legal” form of homicide such as involuntary manslaughter or self-defense. The end result was the same: death without due process. Southerners were left with the frustration and shame of an antisocial crime that their courts refused to punish and their congressmen seemed to excuse or even defend.
Tenant farming and sharecropping, another of the South’s glaringly visible problems, drew the concerned attention of many progressives besides those who worked in the New Deal—and here again, religiously inspired groups and individuals played an active part. Numerous variations on the theme of cooperative farming and community renovation were orchestrated in the 1930s. Sometimes the crosscurrents of several initiatives could be found in a single community—Crossville, Tennessee, for example.
Timber cutting, subsistence farming, and coal mining were the primary occupations around Crossville, a remote village on the Cumberland Plateau between Knoxville and Nashville. Missionaries from the Congregational and Presbyterian churches had been coming to the area since the late 1800s, bringing churches, schools, and medical services to the scattered communities of white settlers there. Edwin Wharton, a former settlement-house worker in Cleveland, Ohio, was the schoolmaster at Pleasant Hill, a few miles out of Crossville, beginning in 1917; his wife, May Cravath Wharton, a physician, started a medical facility there and stayed on through a long and useful career as the celebrated “doctor woman of the Cumberlands.” A “Yankee missionary” of the Congregational Church named Abram Nightingale arrived in Crossville in 1924 and served for thirty-two years as a selflessly devoted minister to all who came in need—and many did, particularly in the lean years of the depression.
Nightingale attained legendary status for his good works, which he pointedly valued more highly than pious expressions of faith. One of his disciples was a country boy named Myles Horton, a YMCA student who worked under his direction for a couple of summers in the 1920s; Horton went on to Union Theological Seminary in New York and then returned to Tennessee and started the Highlander Folk School. In 1933, Nightingale was among a handful of Crossvillians who purchased land near the town and persuaded federal authorities to start a relief community, Cumberland Homesteads—one of the very first of the new communities created by the Farm Security Administration and its predecessor agencies. Among those who joined Nightingale in providing help on the project were Arthur Morgan, a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority; Dagnall F. Folger of Nashville, who was hired to select (from thousands of applicants) the 250 families who would live in the new community; Howard “Buck” Kester, a YMCA radical from Vanderbilt who recruited destitute families of stranded coal miners idled by a strike in a neighboring county; and, eventually, Alva W. Taylor, mentor of Kester and numerous other religious activists at Vanderbilt before his mild-mannered radicalism cost him his job there.
>
And if all those busy individuals were not enough to enliven the little village of Crossville and sparsely populated Cumberland County, there was also Eugene Smathers, a Presbyterian missionary who came in 1932 to serve four small country parishes. The twenty-three-year-old son of a Kentucky sharecropper had a seminary degree, an Arkansas wife, and a call to service from the Northern Presbyterians—a more liberal body than their Southern brethren. While the Cumberland Homesteads were struggling to build a new community on an economic base of subsistence farming and cottage industries, Smathers went quietly to work establishing a similar “force for good” on a smaller scale (about fifty families) in the Big Lick community.
A church was built, and a school, and a community center; there was also a health clinic, where a visionary preventive-medicine program was developed with small monthly “prepayments” from each family; most of the farming was done on a cooperative basis, and marketing was planned along the same lines; summer work camps brought a variety of outsiders to the community, including the first black people ever to stay overnight in the county. Big Lick became a small-scale model of what a cooperative community could be, and of what could be done to improve life in the rural South. And Gene Smathers in time became a noted figure in the United Presbyterian Church; thirty-five years after his arrival in Tennessee—and twenty years after the last of the Farm Security Administration homesteads got the political ax from Congress—the gentle shepherd of Big Lick was elected moderator (president) of his church’s national governing body.