by John Egerton
Next to the poll tax, exclusive party membership proved to be the favorite restrictive tool of the political bosses. There were so few Republicans and splinter-party members in the region that the Democrats could control elections simply by excluding certain groups (blacks in particular) from the party, and thus from participation in primary elections. In the 1920s, the Texas legislature passed several laws barring blacks from voting in Democratic Party primaries, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned them one by one—finally and decisively in a landmark 1944 case, Smith v. Allwright. Even so, most other Southern states kept up their rearguard attempts to disenfranchise black citizens, and in general to discourage political participation by the poor.
Election returns provided a dramatic picture of the consequences of all these antidemocratic manipulations. In the 1940 general election, populous states such as New York, Illinois, and California counted about half as many votes as they had people (for example, Illinois, with a population of close to eight million, cast more than four million votes). In stark contrast were the Southern states, where an average of only fourteen percent of the population voted. Dead last was South Carolina; not even one in twenty citizens went to the polls there. As for black adults, they almost fell off the charts; less than five percent regionwide were registered to vote, and in the most repressive states, such as South Carolina, fewer than one in a hundred could cast a ballot. (Before the Civil War, no blacks in the region were allowed to vote, but they became a majority of the electorate in five states during Reconstruction, when more than 670,000 blacks from Virginia to Texas were enfranchised; by 1920 their voting strength in the Deep South was almost back to zero.)
Unchallenged one-party segregationist rule kept power in the same hands. Even when there was a changing of the guard (old politicians did sometimes die, retire, or lose elections), new ideas seldom accompanied the new faces. At the state level, governors came and went according to the laws of succession, and so there was a predictable turnover. In the U.S. House and Senate, the officeholders, once elected, tended to stay in the Club forever, building up seniority and mastering the art of political manipulation. Either way, though, the quality and character of Southern politicians seldom showed much improvement over the long-established pattern of belligerency, bigotry, and buffoonery. There were always a few exceptions laboring in obscurity, but the rule remained firmly in place.
John Nance Garner, the arch-conservative vice president, retired to Texas in 1941, and that was also the year that W. Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour salesman and hillbilly bandleader, was elevated from the Texas governor’s office to the U.S. Senate in a special election to replace the late Morris Sheppard. O’Daniel defeated Congressman Lyndon B. Johnson in that hotly disputed race by a narrow margin, but Johnson continued climbing up through the House ranks under the tutelage of Speaker Sam Rayburn. Their liberal Texas colleague Maury Maverick had been involuntarily retired to San Antonio in 1938. Another Texan, chairman Martin Dies of the House Un-American Activities Committee, announced his surprise retirement in 1944, although he would return a decade later. Conservative John L. McClellan was elected to the Senate and moderate Brooks Hays to the House from Arkansas in 1942 (the forty-three-year-old Hays had made two unsuccessful runs for governor and one for the House before that). Two years later, Hattie Caraway, the history-making (and able) female senator from that state, lost her reelection bid to Congressman J. William Fulbright.
Tennessee gained a couple of progressive New Deal enthusiasts in the House when Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore were elected in 1938, but Alabama lost one when William Bankhead died in 1940. Alabama’s Senator Lister Hill and Representative John Sparkman were also considered dependable New Dealers on most issues, and to a lesser extent so were Congressman Luther Patrick and Senator John H. Bankhead. All in all, some of the Southern states that historically had been rated as inferior frontier regions—Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas—had managed by the 1940s to send some fairly progressive people to Congress. Far less impressive, by comparison, were the royalist delegations from the Atlantic seaboard states (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia), where colonial pride and vanity often bred an altogether unwarranted superior air of self-righteousness and an outright hostility to genuine democratic political participation.
North Carolina, for example, had filled its Senate seats with Josiah Bailey, an unreconstructed Old South Rebel, and Robert R. Reynolds, an early defender and proponent of Hitler—and when the voters decided in 1944 that Reynolds had to go, they replaced him with former governor Clyde R. Hoey, a devotee of the Bailey school of unfettered class privilege. South Carolina also made a big change that year, rejecting Cotton Ed Smith after thirty-six years of dubious service, but in his place elected former governor Olin D. Johnston, a slightly more polished man but one whose social, economic, and racial views were every bit as reactionary as the bombastic Senator Smith’s.
Elsewhere in the South, antidemocratic feudal barons so completely dominated the delegations that the token few dissenting moderates were seldom seen or heard. Virginia, the mother of presidents, virtually belonged to its monarchs, Senators Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd, for life; Georgia was almost as totally ruled by Senators Walter George and Richard B. Russell (though Governor Eugene Talmadge had his own machine in place until Ellis Arnall upset him in 1942). Mississippi Senator Pat Harrison’s death in 1942 brought in James O. Eastland, a ranting demagogue who would prove to be as rabid as his unbalanced colleague, Senator Theodore Bilbo. When you added to all these the senatorial excesses of such incumbents as Tom Connally of Texas, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, and Allen Eilender of Louisiana, you got a depressingly familiar picture of negative leadership that perpetuated the inferior status of the South. The House of Representatives was equally as devoid of Southern statesmen, the few honest plodders notwithstanding. In this long-suffering region, politics was a game played by older and more privileged white men—sometimes for the entertainment and humor of larger numbers of citizens, but almost never for their benefit.
As unrepresentative of the population as the South’s congressional delegations were, however, they were only marginally worse than the North’s, in whose ranks all but two members were white and the overwhelming preponderance were males. The state legislatures were not much better: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York had among them only twenty-two black legislators—and in the rest of the states combined, there was a grand total of just six more. More than ninety-nine percent of the nation’s elected senators and representatives, state and federal, were white.
It wasn’t enough just to be a white man, of course—as President Roosevelt understood all too well. He entered the war years resigned to a sharp cutback of his domestic reform programs. It pained him to realize that the Southerners, more than any other group, had done him in—and in both houses of Congress, they poured salt on his wounds by dismantling one New Deal program after another. Out went the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Youth Administration in 1943; the Farm Security Administration was decimated, and would be finished off right after the war, along with the Fair Employment Practices Committee. A backlash against the rise of labor unions rumbled through Congress and the state legislatures, and the Senate once again turned back liberal efforts to pass laws against poll taxes and lynching.
Sometimes even the more positive legislative proposals turned sour when Roosevelt’s enemies worked their mischief. Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi, chairman of the committee handling veterans’ affairs in the House, undercut Roosevelt’s efforts to simplify voting by soldiers as the 1944 election approached—apparently out of fear that this would open the franchise to blacks. A few months later, the Negrophobic congressman succeeded for a time in blocking passage of the GI Bill of Rights because its education and unemployment compensation provisions would send too many blacks to school and encourage them to refuse low-paying jobs.
Few members of Congress could match R
ankin’s choleric and abusive diatribes against blacks, Jews, foreigners, Communists, and liberals (although his Mississippi senatorial colleagues, Eastland and Bilbo, were cut from the same bolt of coarse cloth). It is a measure of the House’s tolerance—and its staggering insensitivity—that it would allow the malicious congressman to rant and rave against “niggers” and “kikes” without so much as a whisper of protest. (Rankin, admitted one Northern member of the House, “holds the same fascination for me that a big fire does. I hate to think of the waste and destruction, but I simply can’t resist the entertainment.”) It was not just his words that were harmful, though; the abusive, hot-eyed Mississippian posed a serious threat to the people he hated. As an original sponsor and a staunch defender of the House Un-American Activities Committee, he masterminded a parliamentary maneuver in 1945 that turned the witch-hunting body into a standing committee with almost unlimited investigatory powers, and for the next three years he was its most reckless and feared member.
But not even the Rankins in Congress could slam the door on progress and turn the nation back to its nineteenth-century ways. The soldiers did eventually get to vote (nearly three million cast absentee ballots), and so did more and more civilians, and the GI Bill not only passed into law but revolutionized home-buying and college-going in America; within four years, more than four million ex-GIs would flood onto the nation’s campuses, and post-high-school study would never again be thought of as an elite privilege for the fortunate few. Once again, the New Deal had opened opportunity to the “forgotten” folks Roosevelt declared he had come to serve back in 1932.
There were a few other bright lights to cheer the President. The citizenry of the South, white and black, remained steadfastly in his camp, returning to him favorable majorities of seventy-five percent or more at the ballot box and in public-opinion polls. The Tennessee Valley Authority, one of Roosevelt’s proudest achievements, was bringing navigation, flood control, and electric power to that vast river basin in the upper South—although the agency had attracted fierce opposition from private power interests and right-wing politicians in and out of the region. (The House sponsor of the TVA Act and an unwavering champion of cheap power for rural areas—including his own home district—was none other than Mississippi’s John Rankin.) And in the federal courts, dozens of Roosevelt appointees—including seven to the Supreme Court by 1942—were leading a quiet judicial evolution toward a more responsive and progressive philosophy of government.
Nevertheless, it took grave danger abroad to save FDR and the New Deal from utter defeat at home. The experienced and inspiring President was so firmly established as the people’s choice when war threatened in 1940, and again when the Allies invaded Europe in 1944, that his political enemies could not dislodge him. They could and did undercut his attempts to reform America, though, and in Washington they waved the bloody flag of resistance and rebellion in the costly ongoing struggle for democracy. Out in the Southern provinces, the story was pretty much the same.
The political machine was a common substitute for a broad-based and active electorate in many a Southern city and state. In the vacuum created by the assassination of Huey Long in Louisiana, a prolonged power struggle finally put control of the splintered regime in the hands of New Orleans Mayor Robert S. Maestri, a wealthy slum landlord and major financial backer of the Kingfish. Long, a nominal Baptist, had built his political kingdom by forging a union of north Louisiana Protestants and south Louisiana Catholics, bankrolled primarily by immigrant Jews and Italians (Maestri and others) in New Orleans. But the Long legacy made politics and criminality almost indistinguishable, and by 1940, several of the main cogs in the machine, including Governor Robert W. Leche and Louisiana State University President James M. Smith, had been sentenced to prison terms for corruption. Leche’s departure elevated the lieutenant governor, Earl K. Long, Huey’s younger brother—and thus advanced the checkered career of yet another volatile member of that singularly explosive and unpredictable political family.
Congressman Maury Maverick’s combative independence from the political machine that ran San Antonio caused him to lose his reelection bid by 493 votes in the 1938 Democratic primary. Undaunted, he went home and challenged the machine head-on—and, to the surprise of many, won the mayor’s office in 1939. Maverick had by then earned a national reputation as a fighting liberal. He was the sole Southern member of Congress to vote for the anti-lynching bill in 1937. A pro-labor, pro-civil-liberties New Dealer, he was a leader in the fight against the poll tax and a strong believer in federal government activism in such fields as housing, health care, and education. FDR supported and encouraged this political gadfly in both his Washington and his San Antonio office; so did Hugo Black, Jonathan Daniels, Walter White, Virginius Dabney, Sherwood Anderson, and John P. Davis—a very mixed bag of left-of-center operatives. His enemies also provided a revealing measure of his liberalism. Among the loudest were a quartet of Texas reactionaries: Governor O’Daniel, Congressman Dies, Senator Connally, and Vice President Garner.
As mayor, Maverick helped the large, poor, and politically quiescent Mexican-American population of San Antonio find its voice. Ever a champion of free thought and expression, he bucked powerful opposition to allow the Communist Party a permit for a political rally in the city auditorium in 1939, and he bore the brunt of criticism when a violent mob broke up the meeting, vandalized the facility, and injured fifteen policemen. And yet, for all his progressivism, the feisty Texan was slow to abandon his traditionally paternalistic views about blacks, who in San Antonio made up a small but potent bloc in the tight grip of the machine. Never able to control them himself, Maverick sometimes went to extremes to keep blacks out of party politics—and thus he presented an embarrassing contradiction as a liberal defender of the Texas white primary until it was ruled unconstitutional in 1944. Indicted himself (and acquitted) on the ironic charge of paying voters’ poll taxes in return for their support, Maverick lost his mayoral reelection bid in 1941 and never again enjoyed victory at the polls.
Puzzled and somewhat embittered by the unwillingness of African-Americans to accept his peculiar reasoning on the white primary, Maury Maverick was a long time getting over his hurt (though he did finally come around). “Lord God,” he exclaimed to a close confidant in 1945, “I have spent my life fighting for minorities. But what have they done for me? They have shit on me. But I hasten to say, having washed, I am ready to go on defending them. Every now and then, though, I get tired of that stuff.”
Race and radicalism hardly figured at all in the Virginia clash of the Byrd machine with a progressive governor just before the war. James H. Price’s worst sin was to run for governor—and win—without the permission of Senator Harry Flood Byrd or his lordly Senate colleague Carter Glass, now an octogenarian. Mild though his opposition to the machine truly was, Price became the object of a vendetta aimed at destroying his legislative program and leaving him so damaged personally that he couldn’t muster a serious challenge to Byrd in the 1940 senatorial primary.
Both aims were achieved. The moderate Price administration was a tiny blip of anti-Byrd progressivism—one of the few to be seen in Virginia during the Winchester apple baron’s forty-year reign as governor and senator (1925–65). Byrd and Glass were a stubbornly old-fashioned team of antidemocratic mules behind whom the Old Dominion meekly and dutifully plowed the same dusty furrows. In years to come, misguided reverence for the reactionary duo would inspire shameful acts of massive resistance to federal authority in Virginia—a century after the Civil War supposedly had settled the sovereignty question once and for all.
The New Orleans and San Antonio examples might suggest that vice and corruption are inevitably the handmaidens of the political machine, but the Byrd organization in Virginia proved otherwise. You could fairly accuse Harry Byrd of being parsimonious, puritanical, dictatorial, vindictive, and reactionary in the extreme, but you’d have a hard time making him out to be a crook. It wasn’t what he stole that held Virg
inia back—it was what he thought, said, believed, and led his subjects to do. Edward H. “Boss” Crump, the longtime political boss of Memphis and most of Tennessee, had a similar reputation for honesty—and yet he was a Byrd of a different feather.
Crump arrived in Memphis as a country boy from Mississippi in 1894, and he was thirty-four when he won his first race for mayor in 1909. In those rough-and-tumble times, Memphis was a reckless river town with an astronomical murder rate nearly seven times the national average. Crump was a progressive reformer with a talent for influencing people; from the start, he concentrated on building organized blocs of voters (including blacks, who made up half the population), and though he left the mayor’s job in 1916, he kept on courting voters in the city and surrounding Shelby County, in the west Tennessee congressional districts, and finally in the entire state.
With veteran senator and fellow Memphian Kenneth D. McKellar as his ally, Crump demonstrated his strength by keeping Protestant, Prohibitionist west Tennessee in the column of the Yankee Catholic Al Smith in 1928, and two years later, Crump won a congressional seat for himself. But the feisty, red-haired little battler (the “Red Snapper,” some called him) was bored by the stodginess of the Club, and after serving only one term he “retired” to his kingmaker role. FDR could handle things in Washington, he said; Memphis and Tennessee needed progressive leadership back home.