Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Tall, slender, handsome, and eloquent, Randolph was an effective advocate—both as a writer and as a speaker—for pacifism, socialism, labor unions, and the rights of African-Americans. Once he made an unsuccessful run for Congress. His visibility brought him an invitation in 1925 to organize and direct the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a scattered contingent of overworked and underpaid black men who did all the hard labor on a chain of rolling hotels operated by the Pullman Company. Against the fierce opposition of management, Randolph forged a union of over two thousand members before the depression struck—and then, when the New Deal gave unions a new lease on life, he resumed the campaign to win recognition and status from both Pullman and the American Federation of Labor.

  At about the time John L. Lewis was punching his way out of the AFL, Randolph was shoving his way in. His was an expatriate Southerner’s rich voice thundering through the Northern union halls, insisting that organized labor could never win a decent life for white workers until it first opened its own house to the free and equal service of all workers. Before the end of the 1930s, he had won his fight with Pullman and the AFL, but bigger battles lay ahead. In the years to come, A. Philip Randolph would remain a beacon of strength in labor, race relations, and the reformation of the South.

  11. Birth of a Notion

  As different as they all were, each from the next, practically every one of the writers, activists, and intellectuals produced by the South and brought to the fore in the 1930s had one thing in common: At some time or other, they were publicly branded as sympathizers with the alien doctrines of communism, if not as fellow travelers or card-carrying members of the Communist Party itself.

  The onus fell not just upon those who openly proclaimed such ties—Richard Wright in his youth, for example, or vice-presidential candidate James Ford—or on radicals like Claude Williams and Don West, who sometimes gave even their friends cause to wonder; it also shadowed Aubrey Williams, a liberal public servant, and Walter White, a middle-class reformer, and Frank Porter Graham, who spoke from a prestigious institutional base, and Myles Horton, who found political ideology a boring subject, and Howard Kester, whose devotion to Christian socialism actually made him an archenemy of communism. No less an establishment liberal than Virginius Dabney had the charge thrown at him, too, and so did Ralph McGill and Will Alexander, and even the demure Miss Lucy Mason.

  What was to become in time a wave of red hysteria didn’t start out as an exercise in reckless name-calling. During the period between the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the fade-out of New Deal reforms some twenty years later, communism and its older political cousin, socialism, were very much in vogue in the United States. As time went on, however, arch-conservative defenders of the status quo throughout the country seemed to assume more or less automatically that all those who advocated a different social order must have violent revolution ultimately in mind. If you wanted to give the laboring majority or the black minority or women or children or the unemployed a better shake, you were an agitator, a troublemaker—and when the Communists and Socialists included these ameliorating objectives in their political platforms, that confirmed the worst suspicions and fears of a substantial segment of the nation’s socioeconomic elite and their vigilant guardians on the right.

  The Socialists under Eugene V. Debs had championed the cause of the American laboring class for almost a quarter of a century before Norman Thomas emerged as the party’s leader and presidential candidate in 1928. Thomas ran a total of six times, finally bowing out after the triumph of Harry Truman and the Democrats in 1948. His high-water mark came in 1932, when he got almost 900,000 votes. The Communists first entered the electoral process as the Workers Party in 1924, and stayed on the ballot for five consecutive elections. William Z. Foster headed their ticket the first three times, and Earl Browder was the candidate in 1936 and 1940. The Workers Party became the Communist Party in 1932 and also made its best showing that year, with 102,000 votes.

  Before 1932, the Socialists had looked upon the South with its racial problems as simply one manifestation of a floundering national economic system; replace dog-eat-dog competition and greed-driven profiteering with a cooperative spirit of sharing, the Socialists seemed to say, and all these problems of domestic injustice, including race and class discrimination, will soon fade away. Over the years, socialism had become a familiar (though minor) fixture on the American political scene, a bit player in the quadrennial drama of interparty warfare. The Democrats and Republicans had their alternative philosophies of representative government with which to woo voters; the Socialists had yet another philosophy, but they went about campaigning and politicking to win converts and build a grassroots constituency in much the same way as the major parties did.

  But the international Communist movement didn’t even give lip service to such libertarian notions as free and open political expression. From top to bottom the Communist Party was a rigid hierarchy controlled by a dictator and his handpicked comrades, who (not unlike the feudal lords of the Old South) weren’t the least bit interested in bringing more people into the political process. Their economic theory was actually a variation on the philosophy of socialism—a fact that confused most Americans—but it was also the antithesis of representative government, just as was the dictatorial state socialism (fascism) that Benito Mussolini brought to Italy in the 1920s and Adolph Hitler subsequently imposed in Germany. Japan, under Emperor Hirohito, followed a similar model. Though the differences among them were substantial, all these ideologies were marked by superpatriotic nationalism, aggressive militarism, antidemocratic despotism, and racial homogeneity.

  Communism was first and last a totalitarian ideology, a party line scripted in Moscow and passed down from the Kremlin in edicts that were neither debatable nor negotiable. While the Socialists in this country looked to Norman Thomas for leadership, and he in turn strove to win their trust and keep their support, Communists in the United States, like Communists everywhere, gave their unwavering allegiance to the international party apparatus based in Moscow, and to Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator who had seized power after V. I. Lenin died in 1924.

  As the Communists developed plans for international expansion in the late 1920s, they began to focus on racial discrimination in this country as a weakness to be exploited. Initially the party took as its inspiration and model the earlier black nationalist strategy of Marcus Garvey and his “Back to Africa” program. Later the Communist Party declared that there should exist somewhere in this country a separate “Negro Republic,” an all-black nation-state; come the revolution, it would of course be recognized as a Communist satellite. In the summer of 1932 the party recruited twenty-two young African-Americans (Langston Hughes, Ted Poston, and a few other writers among them) to make a movie in Moscow “documenting the manner in which capitalist America discriminates against and oppresses its colored citizens.” The blacks, who were not themselves Communists, did make the journey to Russia and stayed for nearly two months, but the ill-fated project never got off the ground. Before returning home, some of the disillusioned recruits embarrassed their hosts by firing parting shots of criticism at what they saw as the oppressive character of Stalinist Russia.

  In part because of such impractical ventures as these, the Communist Party floundered in the United States and utterly failed to attract a sizable following among blacks. But before the mid-1930s the strategy had begun to shift. Building on the miscarriage of justice against African-Americans exemplified in the cases of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Atlanta, the Communists mounted a prolonged and highly visible campaign to defend the accused blacks. Not only did they outmaneuver the NAACP and various other liberal groups (including the Socialists); they also drew public opinion to their side and effectively forced the left wing of American activism to affirm and support their efforts. Those endorsements and the eventual victories their lawyers won for the Scottsboro boys and Herndon in the U.S. Supreme Court gave the Communist
Party a degree of legitimacy it had been unable to achieve by other means.

  Not coincidentally, it was at just this time in the mid-1930s that the Communist International, the party’s world congress, decided to delay for a while its go-it-alone plan of world revolution in order to build antiracist, antifascist alliances of convenience with left-wing groups in America and Europe. This so-called Popular Front was to be the interim vehicle for the Communist Party’s drive against capitalism—and in short order, it recorded some impressive achievements. In addition to financing the International Labor Defense campaign that took the Scottsboro and Herndon cases to the Supreme Court, the party supported the American Writers’ Congress in its probes of labor abuses in the mines and mills of the South; it helped blacks and other workers establish unions, including some in the South; and it put its resources behind the National Negro Congress, an activist organization that sought to challenge and undercut the NAACP. Among other things, the National Negro Congress launched the Southern Negro Youth Congress to organize young blacks, whom the NAACP had largely ignored.

  The Communists also won the backing of some prominent individuals. Paul Robeson, the celebrated black athlete turned actor and concert singer, spent almost four years in the Soviet Union in the latter half of the thirties, and when he came home, his was the foremost American voice of militant black anger against racism and fascism. Richard Wright, the expatriate Mississippian, joined the Communist Party in Chicago in the thirties, while using his tenure in the WPA Writers’ Project to produce the stories of Southern racism that made up his first book, Uncle Tom’s Children. From there he went on to New York to write for the Communist Daily Worker and to produce his most famous novel, Native Son, before leaving the party in disillusionment in 1942. While some college-educated blacks were making their way into the New Deal, others, like Harvard Law School alumni Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., son of Atlanta’s leading black Republican, and John Preston Davis, director of the National Negro Congress, were gaining notoriety (and Communist support) as harsh critics of racial injustice wherever they found it, from New Deal agencies to Southern statehouses and courthouses.

  It was not uncommon in the mid-thirties for some Southern activists—intellectuals, labor leaders, editors of black newspapers, and others—to compliment the Communists for their outspoken opposition to Jim Crow segregation and white supremacy. Southern white resistance to communism in these years actually had much less to do with economic theory, which was poorly understood at best, than with the more emotional issues of race and religion. The Communists were atheists who advocated social equality without any racial distinctions, and that was more than enough reason to make them unwelcome in the God-fearing, churchgoing land of Jim Crow.

  American Communist Party leader William Z. Foster’s vice-presidential running mate in 1932—and also Earl Browder’s during his two campaigns—was an expatriate black Southerner, thirty-nine-year-old James W. Ford, son of a Birmingham steelworker. As a teenager he had labored in the mills himself, but somehow managed to finish high school and go at age twenty to Fisk University, from which he eventually graduated after serving in France as a World War I soldier. Ford got a job in Chicago, joined a labor union, and was fired for his involvement in a militant anti–Jim Crow protest. He joined the Communist Party in 1926. From then until his death, thirty years later, he worked openly and actively for the party, for the labor movement, and especially for the constitutional rights of African-Americans, in whose behalf he consistently voiced the same aspirations as generations of Americans before and after him: in Ford’s words, “a decent and secure livelihood, human rights, and an equal, honorable, and respectable status in social life.” His fellow Alabamians gave the Foster-Ford ticket 726 votes in the 1932 election.

  The travails of the Communist Party in Alabama are illustrative of just how much of an uphill climb the movement faced in the South. When it first entered Southern politics in the late 1920s, the party attempted to exploit the volatile labor-management climate in Birmingham, where the capitalist barons of coal and iron ore and steel manufacturing had for fifty years been running the economic, political, and social machinery of Alabama pretty much as they pleased. A relatively small number of black workers and a tiny handful of whites in Alabama subsequently joined the party or one of its units, such as the sharecroppers union; they literally risked their lives to participate in what they believed was the best and, as far as they knew, the only real initiative to win economic justice for Southern laboring people in mining, manufacturing, and agriculture. At most, the movement enlisted no more than a few thousand people before it peaked and subsided in an atmosphere of unrelenting hostility. By the end of 1938, the Communist Party in Alabama had only a few hundred members—and virtually everywhere else in the South, it could claim even less of a presence than that.

  The Communists were busily trying to infiltrate and subvert the leftist and antifascist organizations of this country when Stalin abruptly undercut and destroyed the Popular Front in the summer of 1939 by signing a mutual nonaggression pact with Hitler. The confusion thus generated was to be compounded further in less than two years when Hitler’s troops invaded Russia anyway. The Soviets and their brand of socialism thus automatically became allies with the Americans in a war against Hitler and his brand of socialism—and neither version was compatible with the socialism of Norman Thomas and his party in the United States. Throughout the war years, American propagandists managed simultaneously to portray communism as an international menace—and the murderous Premier Stalin as kindly “Uncle Joe.”

  By the beginning of the 1940s, the net result of all these national and international developments was that instability reigned in the political arena of the United States, North and South, as surely as it did in the world at large. The New Deal had lost much of its popular mandate, and conservatives, Democrat as well as Republican, were rising up in retaliation. Right-wing extremists—Fascists, Nazi sympathizers, the German-American Bund, the Brown Shirts and Black Shirts and Silver Shirts, the homegrown Ku Klux Klan—were more numerous and more disruptive of the political process than was the left-wing conglomeration of Communists, Socialists, and sundry other radicals. Hitler probably had a bigger following in the United States than Stalin; certainly he did in the South. Illustrative of the depth and pervasiveness of political confusion was the crypto-Fascist Union Party, a motley assortment of American oddball kooks and extremists, North and South, right and left; they got almost 900,000 votes in 1936—more than three times as many as the Communist and Socialist Party totals combined.

  Here in the South, where political participation of any kind was low and political sophistication was even lower, few people could grasp such hairsplitting ideologies as Socialist anticommunism. H. L. Mitchell could refuse to ally the Southern Tenant Farmers Union with the Communist-backed union of Alabama sharecroppers, as he did, and Howard Kester could keep Claude Williams and Don West, old friends he suspected of being Communists, out of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, as he did, but those were just empty gestures in the eyes of most white Southerners. The more telling point to them was that Mitchell and Kester were outspoken interracialists—and in the South, no philosophy or ideology was more dangerously radical than that.

  Few people in public life were more aggressively opposed to raising the status of blacks in American society—especially Southern society—than Martin Dies, Jr., the Democratic congressman from east Texas. Like his father (also a congressman) before him, Dies was an arch-conservative Anglo-Saxon purist whose political furnace was stoked with an all-consuming hatred of immigrants and people of color. Like many outspoken American isolationists in the thirties (including Senator Robert R. Reynolds of North Carolina and several other Southern members of Congress), the Texas lawmaker harbored a deep admiration for Hitler that was in large measure tied to the German dictator’s philosophy of Aryan racial purity.

  In 1937, Martin Dies enlisted the aid of Congressman Sam Dickstein of New York, a Je
w alarmed by Hitler’s anti-Semitism, to advance the idea of a House investigation of American extremist groups associated with the Nazis, Fascists, Bolsheviks, and other foreign interests. Republicans and Southern Democrats went along with the proposal, and in May 1938 the House Committee on Un-American Activities was established, with Dies as its chairman. He was joined by another like-minded Southerner, Joe Starnes of Alabama, and five others, including two Republicans. (Dickstein was not one of them; he had been cleverly maneuvered to the sidelines.) In an introductory statement of intent, Dies declared that the committee “will not permit any character assassination or smearing of innocent people.” Neither the public nor the Congress, he said, “will have any confidence in the findings of a committee which adopts a partisan or preconceived attitude.”

  For the post of chief committee investigator, Dies hired forty-four-year-old J. B. Matthews, a Kentucky native who sequentially had been a Methodist missionary in Asia, a college professor (at Nashville’s Scarritt College and elsewhere), a radical pacifist and racial equalitarian, a Socialist, and finally a hard-line Communist. Then, in what he described as a dramatic conversion—and his erstwhile comrades called an opportunistic betrayal—Matthews had offered his services to the right-wing opposition. Not only was he a valuable red-hunter by virtue of having been one himself; he was also a skilled propagandist who in short order produced The Trojan Horse in America, an anticommunist call to arms ghost-written for the byline of Martin Dies.