Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

The House Un-American Activities Committee—HUAC, as it came to be known—never showed much interest in hunting for Nazi sympathizers; it was the reds they were after. Before the summer of 1938 was over, a parade of carefully chosen witnesses had grabbed headlines with sensational testimony charging that the Communists secretly controlled the CIO and other labor organizations, the movie industry in Hollywood, and a wide range of liberal and progressive social-action groups. Matthews himself supplied most of the names of suspects, including those of many individuals active in the New Deal.

  In its beginning phase before and during the Second World War, HUAC seldom focused its attention on the South or on the issue of race; the right-wing concept of “un-American” behavior was more broadly construed then. Not until racial equality became a pressing right-wing concern in the Cold War years would the zealots in the House and Senate elevate Southern integrationists to the top of their “disloyalty” list. By that time, Dies and a few other key Southerners, including Representative John Rankin and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, would have effectively fused their opposition to racial equality with the anticommunist hysteria orchestrated by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and other Northern Republican reactionaries. Seldom if ever had such a cooperative alliance between North and South been seen. In the frantic hunt for subversives and traitors, the Southerners had no hesitation about following the McCarthy line. For their part, the Northern right-wingers just as willingly joined forces with the Southerners in a false alchemy that made a mix of black and white come out red.

  Dies had welcomed the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, and had gone along for a time as a loyal Democrat and New Deal partisan; even as late as 1937 he was still on good personal terms with the President, though he sometimes made disparaging references to the “idealists, dreamers, politicians, and professional do-gooders” in the administration. But along the way, Dies decided that the Democratic Party was slipping away from its Southern power base and into the hands of Yankees, Catholics, Jews, city bosses, immigrant ethnics, Negroes, laborites, liberals, radicals—in short, the very people he hated. HUAC gave him a base from which to fight back against this alien wave, and against FDR himself. Throughout the war years, Dies and J. B. Matthews and their bipartisan Northern and Southern colleagues on the committee would stand vigilantly in the watch-towers, searching for Communists in every nook and cranny of American life.

  As the struggle between left and right intensified in the political theater of the thirties, the neutral zone between them was gradually reduced to a narrow corridor where moderates and conciliators crowded together and paced nervously. People of a more radical persuasion at either end of the spectrum were usually easy to identify. (This was particularly true in the South, where liberals and progressives were few in number and right-wing reactionaries made no bones about their extremist views.) But those in the middle were harder to recognize, having as they did a more even-minded outlook. And, to complicate things further, they often appeared to step out of the neutral zone and cross the line to one side or the other.

  Mainstream Democrats dominated the moderate ranks in the South (there being no Republicans to speak of), but they, too, were outnumbered by conservative extremists in their own party. New Dealers may have been criticized for leaning too far to the left or right, but their sensitivity to pressure from both sides virtually ensured that they would remain in the middle. Leaders in the church, the university, and the press, almost by the nature and definition of their positions, likewise tended to slide toward the center. Even such organizations as the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, the various Northern philanthropies that funded Southern reforms, and the NAACP were usually outflanked by someone on the left, and the same was true of the Agrarians and others on the right.

  From a Southern perspective, one of the more curious of these moderate initiatives was started in April 1935 when Francis Pickens Miller of Virginia, working under the auspices of a national public-interest group called the Foreign Policy Association, invited about three dozen prominent citizens (all of them white males) to Atlanta to explore setting up a committee to work on the region’s manifold problems. Miller was a well-traveled, forty-year-old, middle-class liberal with a strong interest in international religious and social issues. A Presbyterian minister’s son, he had been a YMCA worker (one of Willis Weatherford’s protégés), a Rhodes scholar, an administrator in the World Student Christian Federation, and a cofounder (with Reinhold Niebuhr and others) of the magazine Christianity & Crisis. He had recently joined the Foreign Policy Association as a field secretary, organizing public-interest forums and study groups around questions of national policy.

  In Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham, and elsewhere, Miller found some thoughtful Southerners who shared his interest and concerns. He and a handful of others—chiefly Chattanooga editor George Fort Milton, Tulane University professor Herman C. Nixon (the onetime Vanderbilt Agrarian), and Brooks Hays, an Arkansas lawyer working for the Farm Security Administration—called the Atlanta conference to discuss several topics of primary interest to the South: agrarian policy, democratic institutions, social objectives, economic planning. Twenty-nine invitees from nine Southern states attended.

  Within a year, Miller and his companions had formally established the Southern Policy Committee as an organization loosely tied to the national association from which it sprang, but having its own officers (Nixon, Hays, Miller) and study groups in several Southern locales. On Nixon’s initiative, they also managed to breach the wall of race and sex segregation by bringing Charles S. Johnson and Lucy Randolph Mason into the group (after which a few of the white men promptly resigned in protest). The planners were cheered when about seventy-five people showed up for a general conference at the Lookout Mountain Hotel, near Chattanooga, in May 1936.

  From all appearances, the SPC was an established reality, even though it had no reliable source of funds for an ongoing mission of any substance. But exactly what was it to be, anyway—a legislation and policy center? an academic discussion forum? a research and education group? a political action committee? Were they actually going to do something, or was this just to be more endless talk? Predictably, the delegates couldn’t agree. They had begun with lofty pronouncements about helping the South and the nation regain a sense of direction, but their debate soon lapsed into ideological quarreling over thorny philosophical and social issues.

  To Nixon, the exercise had a depressingly familiar ring; every time Southern intellectuals tried to work together, it seemed, they ended up in contentious dispute. Among the Lookout Mountain delegates were some of his former Agrarian colleagues—Donald Davidson, Frank Owsley, Allen Tate—still preaching their reactionary sermons against government intervention and Yankee industrial invaders. Since parting company with them earlier in the decade, Nixon had taken up with their critics, Howard Odum and the Chapel Hill social scientists, who had their own “Southern regional committee” study group going. But they too were so engrossed in intellectualizing that they never got around to the nuts and bolts of regional reform. Labor organizers and others of a more radical bent were also meeting around the region, but none of these groups had yet become a catalyst for change.

  Francis Pickens Miller would keep up his organizing effort for a couple of years or so before turning his mind to foreign policy and the Nazi threat, thus leaving the remnant of Southern Policy Committee stalwarts to find their own ways of addressing the South’s woes. While they were together, though, Miller and his friends, particularly Nixon and Hays, did manage to assemble periodically a cadre of leaders who had been trying since the advent of FDR to point their impoverished homeland toward a new and better day. In this group were journalists such as Milton, Virginius Dabney, Jonathan Daniels, and Mark Ethridge; academicians Nixon, Frank Porter Graham, W. T. Couch, and Arthur Raper; New Dealers Hays, Will Alexander, Aubrey Williams, and Clark Foreman. The few blacks and women who participated in the discussions from time to time had limited roles
to play, but their presence was at least a token reminder that the region’s crises concerned more than just the white male population.

  Howard Odum was conspicuous once again by his absence. As he had done with the various regional initiatives of the New Deal, and as he soon would do with regard to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Odum chose not to be an active player in the deliberations of the Southern Policy Committee. The Chapel Hill sociologist’s dream was to merge his study group with the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (of which he had just been chosen president), thus creating a powerful and comprehensive new Southern regional research and development council. For a brief time he entertained the hope that Miller would be willing and able to roll the SPC into the same big ball, but when that became problematic, Odum dropped the idea. His own ambitious strategy was complex enough; he hardly had time for the grand plans of others.

  Two spin-off groups created by the Southern Policy Committee turned out to be more important than the SPC itself. One was the Alabama Policy Committee, a Birmingham-based gathering of industry and labor leaders, academics, journalists, and public officials; the other was a highly informal and constantly shifting aggregation of Washington-based Southerners in the New Deal who met irregularly under the SPC banner at a popular riverside restaurant-saloon not far from Capitol Hill. H. C. Nixon, an Alabamian himself, had a lot to do with the vitality of the Birmingham group; Francis Pickens Miller, who with his journalist-wife, Helen Hill Miller, lived in the Virginia suburbs, was the chief convener of the District of Columbia group. Joining the Millers, Brooks Hays, and Will Alexander for dinner at Hall’s Restaurant periodically were such rising young public servants as Maury Maverick of Texas, Lister Hill and John Sparkman of Alabama, Estes Kefauver and Abe Fortas of Tennessee, Claude Pepper of Florida, and others (among them once or twice a lanky Texan named Lyndon B. Johnson). The chief significance of the Washington group was that it provided a private forum for moderately progressive Southerners in the federal government to explore ideas about social change in the region. As for the assembly in Birmingham, it would perform a much more specific and functional service in the late thirties.

  By 1938, there existed in the South a loose confederation of groups and individuals within hailing distance, right or left, of Roosevelt’s New Dealers. It would be an overstatement to call them a network or an alliance. They were not all of one mind, or of the same political, economic, religious, social, or ideological persuasion; they weren’t even all acquainted. At best they were a loose scattering of activists who knew of one another by reputation. They had two things in common: their Southern heritage, and a critical perspective that made them believe the South could do better, had to do better, for itself and its citizens. Some of them had met occasionally, shared ideas, and tried in a variety of ways to influence the course of events. Most of them dreamed longingly of a South peacefully transformed from its feudal past to a freer, more prosperous, and more democratic future.

  Shortly after the general election that November, a substantial number of them met under one roof to consider how they might work together for the greater good of their native land. In the very act of meeting they did something memorable, something that had not happened before (and would not happen quite that way again). For numerous reasons, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham never lived up to its promise—but few of those who were present at the creation ever forgot the singular significance of that historic occasion and the part they played in it.

  Countless threads of thought and association and cooperation went into the weaving of this tapestry. It was to be the most diverse gathering of Southerners anywhere, for any purpose. People were there from every level of government, from management and labor, from the churches and the universities and the press, from the radical left to the moderate right, from plantations and tenant farms, from the ranks of blacks and women so often excluded. Indeed, so many different factions were involved that it seems almost impossible now to sort out the various sources of cause and effect.

  One of the principal contributors to the birth of the conference was Joseph S. Gelders, a young, middle-class liberal from Birmingham’s small but solid Jewish community. In the tradition of intellectual accomplishment that has long been a hallmark of Southern Jewry, Gelders reached maturity with a quick mind and an active interest in social issues. He went to public school in Birmingham, attended the University of Alabama and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and served in the army during World War I, all with respectable ease if not flying colors. He held several jobs in Birmingham before returning to the University of Alabama in 1929 to finish his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and he remained there to teach physics until 1935.

  By then more interested in politics and economics than in the sciences, Gelders was deeply troubled by the pervasiveness of poverty and racism in the depression-wracked South, and because of his outspokenness on such matters, the university declined to renew his contract. Upon moving to New York, he became active in the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, an organization that rallied intellectuals to the support of working-class people and victims of racial oppression. In years to come it would be listed repeatedly as a Communist front; in the summer of 1936, when Gelders returned to Birmingham as its Southern representative, the committee was viewed with alarm as one more among many militant pro-labor organizations in that teeming center of industrial strife.

  Almost immediately he took up the cause of a local Communist Party official in jail for possessing literature deemed by the authorities to advocate the violent overthrow of the government. Not long after Gelders and others staged a public protest of the man’s treatment, their dissent was answered with a terrorist reprisal. Late one September evening, as Joe Gelders was returning home from a meeting, three men abducted him at gunpoint, drove him into the rural Alabama countryside, stripped him naked, and beat him to within an inch of his life. When he finally recovered, a grand jury heard him positively identify two of his assailants as former strikebreakers at a local steel mill; instead of returning indictments, the jury seemed almost to applaud the assault on a “red” who deserved what he got.

  If Gelders had been a militant revolutionary bent on destroying the established order, his treatment might not have seemed so shocking; after all, Birmingham was a tough town in those days, and violence there was commonplace. But the thirty-seven-year-old activist was no flamethrower; he was a respectable member of the community, a man whose convictions were appreciated and even endorsed by a number of important people in the Birmingham power structure. Joe Gelders was a familiar hometown fellow to those people, not a clandestine Communist; even if they disagreed with his tactics, they acknowledged that his motives and his methods were open for all to see, and they admired his commitment to the poorest of the poor.

  Undeterred by his own vulnerability to danger, Gelders continued to work for social reforms, and at every opportunity he promoted an idea that had become important to him: a regionwide conference aimed at drawing a broad panoply of Southern progressives to the cause of civil liberties. In 1937 he met H. C. Nixon when the two men served on a committee investigating a labor-management conflict in Gadsden, Alabama. Early the next year, at the scene of a worker strike in Tupelo, Mississippi, Gelders and Lucy Randolph Mason of the CIO discovered that they had a mutual interest in such issues as voting rights and equal protection of the law. Back in Birmingham, where the CIO leadership was forging alliances with black workers and the local NAACP chapter, Gelders helped to organize a right-to-vote club to register black voters in advance of the May 1938 Democratic primary.

  That same spring, Gelders spent five weeks drumming up support in New York and Washington for his dream of a Southern conference. He had gone in part because Lucy Mason had offered to discuss the proposal with her friend Eleanor Roosevelt and, if possible, to get Gelders an audience with the First Lady. As it turned out, she did better than that; early in June, Mason took Gelder
s to the Roosevelts’ home in Hyde Park, New York, for a meeting with both Mrs. Roosevelt and the President.

  This was the time when FDR was planning his frontal attack on Senator Walter George and several other anti–New Deal Southern reactionaries in Congress who were running for reelection. All through the late winter and early spring, he had been conferring with his trusted advisers, plotting retaliation. Georgia native Clark Foreman, a Harold Ickes aide in the Public Works Administration, had helped the President find a candidate to run against George. During their conversations, Foreman passed on to FDR an idea that had surfaced at one of the Southern Policy Committee dinner sessions at Hall’s Restaurant: A document enumerating the South’s major economic problems should be prepared and circulated as a call to battle against the feudal oligarchy that was killing New Deal reforms and keeping the region in paupery.

  The idea appealed seductively to Roosevelt’s Machiavellian taste for political maneuvering. Here was a new and promising Southern strategy. This could be a document by Southerners about the South’s problems and needs, a sort of reformers’ manifesto that calmly and judiciously stated the grim facts without directly waving such emotionally charged red flags as race relations, union organizing, and land reform. With it, the President could go directly to the people, over the heads of their entrenched leaders. If there was a liberal opposition in the South, surely this was the time to call it out—and if the effort failed, there would at least be some Southern shoulders to bear the defeat with him. (The historian Harvard Sitkoff later offered a blunter assessment of FDR’s stake in the conference: “If it succeeded, he would have a liberal, united party supporting him; if it failed, he would be free of the campaign’s taint and would still be able to work with Dixie politicos.”)

  Roosevelt sent Foreman to Lowell Mellett, director of the National Emergency Council, a governmental policy-planning agency, with instructions to prepare the document. Quickly they set up a working group of scholars and writers (most of them recruited through the Southern Policy Committee) to produce the chapters, and a twenty-two-member task force of Southerners to oversee their work. The drafters, with input from Arthur Raper, George S. Mitchell, H. C. Nixon, and numerous others, rushed to complete the job by early summer; often they ended up in late-night sessions at Mellett’s home or that of Clifford and Virginia Durr, nearby. An Alabamian and a New Deal lawyer active in the SPC, Cliff Durr wrote one of the report’s fifteen chapters, as well as the President’s cover letter of introduction, which included this now-famous line: “It is my conviction that the South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem—the Nation’s problem, not merely the South’s.”