by John Egerton
Until the end of World War II, Boss Crump was unassailable. His well-oiled machine ran a clean, efficient, honest city government and a powerful Democratic organization that anointed governors and senators with authority. His ties to Roosevelt got cheap TVA power for Memphis even though the city wasn’t located in the Tennessee Valley. Crump managed to keep both the captains of business and industry and the leadership of the AFL (but not the CIO) in his camp; he also kept close ties with an unbeatable combination of Baptists, Catholics, Jews, and blacks, all within the social confines of religious and racial segregation.
Opposition newspapers in Memphis and Nashville railed at him as a dictatorial bully, a ruthless despot, a poll-tax defender (he routinely arranged payment for voters), and a self-appointed guardian of public morals (he kept a bluenose censor of movies and plays on the city payroll). Jennings Perry, an associate editor of the Nashville Tennessean, focused an entire book (Democracy Begins at Home) on the manifold evils of the Boss Man’s poll-tax machinations. But it was all for nought. Crump delivered a huge majority to Roosevelt in 1944 and loyally shored up McKellar’s sixth election to the Senate in 1946, even though the arch-conservative senator had long since become a bitterly obstructionist foe of FDR and the New Deal. Not until he was past seventy, and the postwar social revolution was at hand, would E. H. Crump finally lose his magic touch with the Tennessee electorate.
Eugene Talmadge’s third occupation of the Georgia governor’s mansion in 1941 followed his unsuccessful attempts in 1936 and 1938 to unseat either Walter George or Richard B. Russell from the U.S. Senate. The power of incumbency appeared to make George and Russell unbeatable, so Talmadge resigned himself to a slightly different sort of political machine, one that left national government to others while holding the state capitol in perpetuity. A “county unit” method of tabulating votes kept political power in Georgia weighted heavily in favor of the sparsely populated rural counties. Talmadge calculated that he could thrive by playing the role of a rustic country hell-raiser up against the big-city newspapers and other sophisticated institutions.
But the tyrannical excesses of the hot-tempered governor boiled over when he clumsily attempted a witch-hunt for liberals and other heretics at the University of Georgia, and in the gubernatorial election of 1942—the first in Georgia to award a four-year term to the winner—Talmadge was upset by the state’s thirty-five-year-old attorney general, Ellis G. Arnall. (Among those who helped bring about the changing of the guard were the Constitution’s editor, Ralph McGill, who wrote some speeches for the young challenger, and the President of the United States, who invited Arnall down to the Little White House at Warm Springs and gave him advice and encouragement.)
Throughout his term of office, Arnall acted and spoke with refreshing candor about Georgia and the South. In the legislature he pushed through prison and parole reforms, a constitutional revision plan, repeal of the poll tax, voting rights for eighteen-year-olds, and reductions in the powers of the governor’s office. He called his predecessor a demagogue, a racist, and a bigot, and he faulted the South for self-pity, inertia, evasion of reality, and blaming its woes on “the damyankee.” All in all, the young governor did more to rescue his state and region from the defeatist mire of colonial dependency than anyone else had done in decades, if ever.
One clear sign of Arnall’s serious intent to change things was his hiring of Daniel Duke, a well-known young Atlanta-area county prosecutor, to be his assistant attorney general for criminal prosecution. Duke had a Jimmy Cagney feistiness about him. He first won notoriety in 1941 at a clemency hearing for some Ku Klux Klansmen he had sent to prison earlier on flogging charges. Knowing that Governor Talmadge had agreed to testify at the hearing as a character witness for the convicts, Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield, a reformed ex-Talmadgeite, told the combative Duke to confront the governor with the leather whip the men had used to flog more than fifty victims. Hartsfield then phoned a tip to Ralph McGill, and Duke told the plan to his father-in-law, Tarleton Collier, editor of the Atlanta Georgian. At the hearing, photographers from both papers and the wire services were ready and waiting when Duke brandished the lash in front of the astonished Talmadge and exclaimed, “You could kill a bull elephant with this!” The shock effect momentarily silenced the governor, and his testimony was ineffective.
Duke went on to serve Arnall with the same hard-hitting prosecutorial aggressiveness. For the first time, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the attorney general’s office actually tried to break up Klan cells, rather than giving them aid and comfort. Arnall even went so far as to hire a young Florida journalist, Stetson Kennedy, as an informer in the Klan to expose its criminal acts. With strong support from the press, the Arnall administration served notice on Georgia’s secret societies that terrorist acts would no longer be tolerated. The message certainly helped, but it didn’t put a stop to lynching and other atrocities.
Nor did it completely liberate Arnall himself from the old bugaboo of racism. Ambitious for higher fields of service, he spoke and wrote widely about his vision of a progressive new South. But when his liberal message was interpreted as an attack on racial segregation, he felt compelled to “clarify” the remarks with assurances that “we in the South do not believe in social equality … we believe that segregation is conducive to the welfare of both the white and colored races.” And then, when his term ended and he couldn’t succeed himself, Ellis Arnall could only stand aside and watch as Eugene Talmadge once again rode to victory. Georgia was close to breaking out of its ancient Confederate mentality and turning toward genuine reform—but the time was still not at hand.
As the Republican and Democratic conventions approached in 1944, an alliance of thirty black citizens prominent in church, civic, education, and labor organizations signed a widely circulated advertisement warning the two parties that they would have to take affirmative action against discrimination to win the minority vote. The NAACP’s top brass headed the roster of signees, but some Southerners were also included: Emory Jackson of Birmingham, Maynard Jackson, Sr., of Atlanta, and Z. Alexander Looby of Nashville.
One more sign of movement against the Democratic Party’s entrenched white power structure bobbed quietly to the surface in South Carolina during World War II. There, for the first time in any Southern state, a group of middle-class black citizens organized a political challenge to the exclusively white institutions of privilege and control. They had taken the initial step at a meeting in Columbia in November 1939, when delegates from seven local branches came together to form the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP, and to declare that “All the blessings of life, liberty, and happiness are possible in integration, while in segregation lurk all the forces destructive of these values.”
On May 23, 1944, many of the same delegates, meeting again in Columbia, founded the South Carolina Progressive Democratic Party as a vehicle to force open the political process in their state and in the nation. Although V. O. Key, in his classic 1949 study, Southern Politics, didn’t find this black initiative significant enough to mention, it was an important signal to the Democrats nationally that their party would eventually be forced to live up to its name.
The first chairman of the PDP was thirty-four-year-old John Henry McCray, editor and publisher of the Lighthouse & Informer, South Carolina’s leading black weekly newspaper. His associate editor and close ally in the political venture, Osceola McKaine, had recently returned to his native state at the age of fifty after a rare odyssey as a merchant seaman out of Boston, a combat soldier in France during World War I, an organizer of veterans in Harlem during the Renaissance era, and a cabaret owner in Belgium for more than a decade. Admitting that he had come home with “at least a splinter on my shoulder,” the spirited McKaine nevertheless concluded there was no more Jim Crow segregation in South Carolina’s cities than in the North—but it was still far too much to suit him, and he didn’t hesitate to say so.
McCray and McKaine, together with state NAACP ch
airman James M. Hinton and others, launched the PDP after the white South Carolina state legislature converted the Democratic Party into a private club to preserve its racial exclusivity. Among the Carolinians who supported the PDP and helped make it a force to be reckoned with were two black Republicans, physician Robert W. Mance and businesswoman Modjeska Simkins, both longtime critics of racial discrimination. A Jewish couple, Jennie and Jules Seidman, were also actively involved, giving the PDP a biracial image.
Just before the 1944 Democratic National Convention, the PDP came out in support of the reelection of President Roosevelt (a stance the South Carolina “club” of white Democrats had refused to take), and they sent an alternate delegation to Chicago to challenge the regulars. Failing that, they went home and put up a slate of Roosevelt electors after the whites announced that their electors would be uncommitted independents. The PDP also qualified McKaine as its general-election candidate for the U.S. Senate, challenging Governor Olin D. Johnston, who had defeated Cotton Ed Smith in the primary. The tiny percentage of registered black voters and an unknown number of whites mustered an official total of more than three thousand votes for McKaine, but PDP poll-watchers charged that whites had used intimidation and outright fraud to rob him of a legitimate tally of some eight thousand. Even with such a total, Osceola McKaine still would have lost to Johnston by about ten to one—but the very fact that blacks had taken part in the process at all was a symbolic victory, a blinking neon arrow pointing toward the future.
The election of 1944 was Roosevelt’s last hurrah. It was also a showcase for renewed hostilities between whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, the North and the South. Senators and congressmen across the South were in open revolt against the President and his urban/labor/black/Jewish/Catholic/ethnic band of liberals. With each new (or old) progressive idea—anti-poll-tax legislation, the FEPC, desegregation of party primary elections, political action committees in organized labor—the Southerners grew more certain that their power was waning. They lashed out in anger, threatened rebellion, tried to bump the President aside, considered forming a new party. Even the most moderate of them—Pepper of Florida, Hill of Alabama—resorted to public affirmations of white supremacy in order to get themselves reelected. But once again, FDR parlayed his enormous popularity with ordinary people into victory over the Southern political conservatives and their Republican soul mates, whose candidate was New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey, a compulsively neat and cautious politician described by the writer John Gunther as “one of the least seductive personalities in public life.”
The triumph—by three million popular votes and a four-to-one margin in the electoral count—was not as easy as it looked. Right-wing governors Frank M. Dixon of Alabama (nephew of the novelist Thomas Dixon) and Sam Houston Jones of Louisiana made a serious attempt in 1943 to corral Southern extremists like themselves into a new regional party, and in 1944 a rebellious Southern faction nominated Virginia’s Harry F. Byrd for president at the Democratic Convention (but could muster fewer than a hundred delegates to the cause). Takeovers of the Democratic party apparatus were seriously plotted in at least three states (a rebel ticket of independent presidential electors got 135,000 votes in Texas), and no state in the region remained happily in the bosom of FDR’s “solid South” at election time.
It was against this background of ideological and philosophical conflict that one last Rooseveltian political drama was played out in July at the convention in Chicago. The President didn’t even put in an appearance; he was away on “war duties,” underscoring his leadership role as the tide was turning in our favor in Europe and the Pacific—and besides, he looked every bit the sick man that he was, hollow-eyed and thin, and being seen would only call attention to his obvious incapacities. At the same time they were supporting his nomination almost by acclamation, the Democrats were whispering odds in the corridors that he wouldn’t live out the term.
All of which made the vice-presidential nomination a matter of more than casual interest. Just as the national conference of the NAACP was ending in the Windy City, the Democrats arrived. One of the latter—and no friend of the former—was James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, the veteran lawmaker–jurist–presidential counselor who was then serving as director of the Office of War Mobilization. He would, he announced to the press, be a candidate for vice president. Byrnes didn’t dwell on the fact that the job was presently held by Henry A. Wallace, who had indicated no desire to step aside and who had broad-based support from many groups, the NAACP among them.
Roosevelt, too, was content to keep Wallace on the ticket, but he was under intense pressure from conservatives in the party—including most of the Southerners in Congress—to dump him and choose someone else. Wallace had moved sharply leftward since leaving the Department of Agriculture, and his liberal views on labor, race, and Russia made him anathema to the right-wingers. Other names were being suggested: Senator Barkley of Kentucky, Justice William O. Douglas of the Supreme Court, Senator Truman of Missouri, Congressman Rayburn of Texas, and Jimmy Byrnes. The President, still the peerless master of political art, shrewdly accorded each of the named prospects—including Wallace—a measure of hope. Then, quoting a “wise man named Murphy,” he smilingly told the press, “The convention will decide.”
Truman was the only one on the list who said publicly that he didn’t want the job. Byrnes clearly did; in a clever early move of his own, he asked Truman to place his name in nomination before the Missouri senator’s own prospects had been aired. Byrnes was gambling boldly. He had drifted out of the Roosevelt inner circle since the late thirties, even though FDR had later appointed him to the Supreme Court and then to important wartime administrative posts. Their differences weren’t personal as much as philosophical; Roosevelt’s activist approach to government was okay with Byrnes in foreign affairs, but he didn’t like it at home—not in the South, at least—and he had openly aligned himself with the anti-labor, anti-black Southern cabal midway through the President’s second term. Still, Byrnes had served FDR long and well, and he was hoping for short memories among the liberals. Then the word got out that Walter White of the NAACP, Sidney Hillman of the CIO, and the big-city political bosses of New York and Chicago had all turned thumbs down on his candidacy. Without rejecting Byrnes outright, FDR responded to questions about his candidacy by telling party leaders to “clear it with Sidney.” The phrase was widely quoted as a Roosevelt code that meant the dapper little South Carolinian didn’t have a prayer.
Byrnes felt betrayed by the President’s men, and abandoned by FDR himself. To be told that his hard-line racial views made him a political liability was simply too much for this “Assistant President” who, the press said, had exercised more power than any other appointed White House figure in American history. Later, when Roosevelt spoke to the convention by phone from a cruiser in the Pacific, Jimmy Byrnes was just about the only man in the hall who sat sourly on his hands. After a decent interval, he would resign from the executive staff and return to South Carolina.
In the balloting, Wallace led the first round, with Truman a close second and others (including Barkley and Alabama senator John Bankhead) far back. In the second round Truman inched ahead, and then a sudden flurry of switched ballots threw the nomination to him. Byrnes never had the pleasure of hearing the crusty senator from Missouri tout Byrnes’s candidacy to the delegates. (He did, however, come back to the White House later to serve the new President as his Secretary of State.) Considering all the dramatic turns of events that took place in presidential politics and in the South over the next ten years, we can only wonder how different things would have been if, instead of President Harry S. Truman, we had had President James F. Byrnes.
3. Leaders, Followers, Scouts
On his return by rail to Washington after spending the Thanksgiving holiday at Warm Springs in 1938, President Roosevelt stopped to make a speech at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The Carolina Political Union, a guest lecture s
eries planned and directed by students, had attracted to the campus an impressive lineup of national newsmakers and controversial personalities over the previous two years; they had ranged from bureaucrats and diplomats to Communists and Klansmen, and most had even come at their own expense. In that glittering showcase of big names, the President of the United States was easily the prize catch.
Alexander Heard, a senior political science major, had invested much effort in the long pursuit of FDR during his year as chairman of the Political Union, but by the time the President was finally scheduled to appear, Heard had graduated and gone on to Columbia University for further study. He was present on that rainy December afternoon, though, having caught a train down from New York for the occasion, and he looked on proudly as his successors in the union presented Franklin D. Roosevelt and university president Frank Porter Graham to a turn-away throng at the gymnasium. Viewing the pomp and ceremony as a spectator rather than a participant, Heard could sense the elements of quality and honor and prestige that made President Roosevelt and President Graham and UNC itself such important symbols of hope in the South and the nation.
In the same month that the North Carolina campus basked in the glory of a presidential visit, events elsewhere foreshadowed the continuing struggle for equity and quality that confronted the South and its institutions. The economic and social disparities that had caused the South to precede the nation into the Great Depression were now determining that it would be the last region to escape its punishment. Further discouragement was generated by the seeming inevitability of war, with all its uncertainties.
In Washington, shifting alliances notwithstanding, discord still marred relations within the three branches of government. Congress was gaining momentum in its ongoing tilt to the right; the reactionary Southern bloc, strengthened by heavy liberal-Democratic losses in the November elections, was preparing to resist even more aggressively the President’s agenda of domestic reform. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court appeared to be falling in step with the White House as justices elevated to the bench by Roosevelt reached majority status. In Gaines v. Missouri, announced on December 12, the judges put the states on notice for the first time that they must either attain a meaningful standard of equality under segregation or remove the barriers that denied some citizens complete freedom of opportunity. FDR’s six appointees outvoted the two holdover Republican justices in that case. Few in Congress applauded the decision, and most of the Southerners were predictably sour about it.