by John Egerton
While he was away in military service, Carter tried his hand at fiction, and in 1944 a New York publisher brought out his Winds of Fear, a novel of racial “hate and suspicion and intolerance” in a mythical but all-too-real town somewhere in the South. In the book’s dramatic climax, a young white man faced down a lynch mob. Later, “at the recollection, his spirits rose again; at least he had confronted the Thing, and the Thing had been for the moment beaten. If you stood against the Thing, people would eventually listen.”
Hodding Carter was just beginning to define the Thing that loomed in the South’s path when he wrote those words midway through the war. Like McGill, it would take him a while to decide when and where to stand—but in due time he would be Mississippi’s leading white advocate of social change.
Jonathan Daniels had a longer and more eventful preparation for the postwar drama. Born in Raleigh and brought up for part of his teenage years in Washington, where his father worked with FDR in the Woodrow Wilson administration, young Jonathan earned two degrees at the University of North Carolina, passed the bar, wrote a novel, went to Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship, married twice (his first wife died), wrote for Fortune magazine, and was Washington correspondent for the News & Observer before taking over as editor of the paper in 1933, when he was just thirty-one years old.
Having waltzed through the early twenties in a mildly experimental flirtation with the radical left (perhaps in rebellion against his straitlaced and conservative father), he settled into a moderating ten-year editorial stint at the paper with his brothers, Frank and Josephus, Jr., running the news and business departments. (The elder Josephus, meanwhile, had returned to government service as a New Deal diplomat.)
Like so many other Southern editors of his time, Jonathan Daniels was a prolific writer—for his paper, for magazines, for the book trade. In the summer of 1937 he traversed the region to gather material for A Southerner Discovers the South, published in New York the following year. In it and all his other writing in the thirties, he spoke with much the same ambivalent voice as did his moderate-to-liberal colleagues in the press, particularly with regard to the constantly nettlesome issue of race. The contradictions of the culture were mirrored in his own vacillating shifts from narrow paternalism to occasional flashes of genuinely democratic and egalitarian conviction.
When the war started, Daniels turned the paper back to his father and went to Washington for three years, part of which he spent serving FDR as an administrative assistant and adviser on race relations; he was the White House press secretary when the President died in April 1945. Standing so close to the center of power, he gained many valuable experiences in those years—with the Roosevelts, with Will Alexander and other Southern whites in the administration, and with black public officials such as Robert C. Weaver and Mary McLeod Bethune, as well as Ted Poston, who worked for a time in his office. Jonathan Daniels was not entirely liberated from the old Southern habits of segregation when he went home to Raleigh in 1945, but he was comfortable with diversity, and he certainly knew that momentous changes were bearing down urgently upon the South. He must have known, too, that when the crunch finally came, the only real choice open to him would be to leave the segs and take a lonely stand on the other side.
In December 1944, thirty-three Southern editors and writers met in Atlanta to open a discussion aimed at increasing participation in the electoral process by simplifying voter registration, opening primary elections to blacks (as the Supreme Court had recently decreed in a case from Texas), and eliminating the poll tax. The objectives were remarkable in themselves, standing as they did in direct opposition to the prevailing dogma of the white political leadership, but the makeup of the group of eventual signees was even more astonishing. Chaired by Mark Ethridge of the Courier-Journal, this self-styled Committee of Editors and Writers of the South deliberately included representation from the left, right, and center, among whom were at least ten women and ten blacks. Editors of large and small newspapers, publishers of magazines and journals, independent and academic writers, and even a few expatriate Southerners working in the North made up the list.
Ted Dealey, the conservative publisher of the Dallas Morning News, signed on with the likes of Frank Porter Graham, Lillian Smith, Charles S. Johnson, H. C. Nixon, P. B. Young, Clark Foreman, James Dombrowski, and Helen Fuller. The names of Dabney and Daniels headed the big-city editors, along with Louis I. Jaffé, Jennings Perry, Nelson Poynter, and C. A. Scott. The published report, called “Voting Restrictions in the Thirteen Southern States,” was signed by a total of sixty-two people—all in all, an impressive representation of the best-known liberals and moderates with Southern ties. (Missing, though, were the names of McGill and Carter, Howard Odum and Francis Pickens Miller, John Temple Graves and George Fort Milton, W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter White.)
Calling themselves “a completely independent committee unaffiliated with any other group” (though the suggestion for such a body had come from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare), the signers declared that “editors and writers have more than the usual obligation to understand and expound correctly the social forces which govern us.” Their well-documented report showed that fewer than half as many potential voters in the South as in the other states of the nation had participated in the 1944 presidential election. In the eight states that still required payment of a poll tax, fewer than one in five adults had voted.
There was significance in the fact that a nonpartisan assembly of articulate Southerners had recognized and publicly identified a principal cause of their region’s chronic and crippling disadvantage in national life. In essence, this was their declaration: A handful of undemocratically chosen white men control the political machinery, the economic wealth, and the social structure of the South; all the others—the women, the blacks and other minorities, the white men with little or no money or property or education—are thereby deprived, in greater or lesser degree, of their constitutional right to take part in the democratic process.
In calling for these restrictions to be lifted, the editors and writers were not endorsing any particular prescriptions for social improvement—but they were, most emphatically, making a public declaration of opposition to the status quo. As individuals, some of them had spoken out before—but as a diverse and representative group from across the region, they were flying a novel flag in Southern journalism; whether it signaled cooperation or rebellion, hope or desperation, victory or surrender, no one knew for sure.
In any case, though, it was not a banner that stayed aloft for long. Like farmers, writers are difficult to harness—too individualistic and independent and stubborn to sit comfortably in choirs. Still, their valiant attempt to harmonize on a new song of the South is worth recalling, if only because—like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare—it put so many known and respected citizens on record as recognizing the problem, if not the solution. That they were not able to go beyond this initial step toward reform of the electoral system is not so much an indication of their weakness as a measure of the power of political reaction in the South of the mid-forties.
The evolving thoughts and opinions and convictions of the South’s leading newspaper editors in those years of transition are still accessible to us, thanks to their books and the books that others have written about them. McGill and Carter, Dabney and Daniels, Graves and Milton, Ethridge, and others who came on the scene in the twenties and thirties have been read and reread for clues to the enduring enigma of recent Southern history. Not so well known—but in some ways more enlightening—were the journalists who wrote for the South’s monthly and quarterly periodicals, or for Northern magazines that had a continuing interest in Southern subjects.
Small circulation and avid readership characterized such established journals of the South as the Virginia Quarterly Review, Social Forces, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and others. (Another of more recent vintage was the Southern Review, edited at Louisiana State University by Robert Penn Warren and C
leanth Brooks.) As the depression ended and the war began, some new publications appeared with more of an emphasis on social activism. Phylon, a quarterly “journal of race and culture” edited by W. E. B. Du Bois at Atlanta University, was launched in 1940; the Southern Patriot, a tabloid published by the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, first appeared in 1942; South Today (formerly the North Georgia Review), published and edited by Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling from their home base near the mountain village of Clayton, Georgia, began a ten-year run in the mid-1930s. Someone, it seemed, was always launching a new regional publication with a name like Southern Packet or Southern Visions.
Jim Dombrowski left the Highlander Folk School in 1942 to take over staff leadership of the SCHW (which had by then relocated from Birmingham to Nashville), and one of his principal duties was to serve as editor of the Southern Patriot. The periodical attempted to play down its organizational identity, emphasizing instead an all-out effort to win the war against fascism and prepare for postwar justice and equality at home. Phylon (Greek for “race”) showed early strengths in the guiding hands of Du Bois, with sociologist Ira De A. Reid as managing editor and three Harvard- and Chicago-trained social scientists—Horace Mann Bond, Rayford W. Logan, and Allison Davis—as contributing editors. The first issue featured an excerpt from Sharecroppers All, a forthcoming book by Reid and Arthur F. Raper depicting the besieged South as a threadbare tenant hoeing cotton on the nation’s back forty. “From race and attendant class demarcations stem the South’s economic feudalism, one-party system, white primary, and poll taxes,” they wrote. “The result has been the disinheritance and disenfranchisement of nearly all Negroes, a majority of the whites, and of the region itself in national affairs.”
Lillian Smith had spent the decade of the thirties experimenting with fiction and learning the hard lessons of small-time magazine publishing—all the while running a mountain camp for affluent white girls—when her views on race began to crystallize following a trip to Brazil and two years of study as a Rosenwald Fellow. A middle-class Florida merchants daughter, she had trained briefly to be a teacher, then a pianist; for three years in the early 1920s, she had taught in a Methodist mission school in China. Along the way, from a diversity of experiences outside the Southern monolith, she acquired a deep empathy for exploited people.
At the end of 1942, Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling renamed their seven-year-old magazine South Today, and Smith marked the occasion with an open letter “Addressed to Intelligent White Southerners,” enumerating “things to be done … NOW … for racial democracy.” (Heading the list: “break the taboo of silence … the taboo of action … take an open stand … to bring non-segregation quickly and harmoniously” into being throughout the South.) It was a significant declaration; for the first time, a white Southerner living and working in the South had come out forcefully in public print in favor of abolishing the Jim Crow laws and other racially discriminatory practices.
Northern magazines often were not much further along in their racial views than those in the South. The American Mercury, edited by Lawrence E. Spivak, frequently published articles and stories by both whites and blacks from the South, among them Zora Neale Hurston, Saunders Redding, Virginius Dabney, and Gerald W. Johnson—but in the early 1950s the magazine would turn sharply to the right, with William F. Buckley and J. B. Matthews leading a feverish anticommunist attack. The Saturday Evening Post generally took a conservative view of Southern life—more so than, say, Collier’s or The Atlantic Monthly or Harper’s. Time and Life and Fortune, the flashy magazines of Henry Luce, tended to look down upon the South with a mixture of pity and disdain; Newsweek did the same.
The most liberal of the Northern magazines were also the smallest: The Nation, the Progressive, Survey Graphic (for which twenty-three-year-old North Carolina native George C. Stoney produced a detailed and critical series of articles on the poll tax and other Southern voting problems in 1940). Another was Common Ground, a journal of interracial and international opinion published quarterly in New York beginning in 1940. Pearl Buck, the West Virginia-born novelist and winner of the 1938 Nobel Prize for literature (and a dedicated advocate of racial equality), was one of the principal figures behind the magazine; another was social critic and South-watcher Langston Hughes, the black poet and playwright.
And then there was The New Republic. Its reporting and commentary in the forties didn’t differ much from that of The Nation and other journals, except in this respect: Two Southerners, Thomas Sancton and Helen Fuller, served as managing editor through much of this time—and Sancton in particular was an outspoken integrationist in the same spirit as Lillian Smith.
A native of New Orleans, Sancton had worked for papers there and in New York, as well as for the Associated Press, prior to winning a Nieman fellowship to Harvard in 1941. He joined The New Republic as a staff writer the following year, and soon became its managing editor—a job he kept for only a year before returning to live and work in the South. In his brief tenure with the magazine, he wrote with skill and feeling—and uncommon insight—about race relations in America. Sancton had a knack for crafting arrestingly descriptive passages such as this one: “A Harlem tenement is a hundred delta cabins, plus tuberculosis.” Once, discussing a novel with a racial theme, he made this observation:
… the Negro is going to take a new status in American fiction, as he has in life. Serious white writers in increasing numbers will enter Richard Wright’s field of protest. The Negro’s own fight for political and social equality is forcing this change in literature. In white men’s books he is going to stop being a “nigger” … and become a person. … Negroes are people. They suffer just as intensely as white people; they get just as hungry. What has happened to them is a vast, cruel story. The South was built by their toil and suffering. So were Northern fortunes. So were English cotton-textile cities like Liverpool and Manchester. The Southerners must start to tell it right.
A war is being fought all around the globe, by many nations and all races, to determine whether people are going to be free to be people, not more, not less.… Before this war, our writers, even our artists, could indulge themselves—and the rest of us “ofays”—in the luxury of telling fables about Negroes; but now they must begin to tell it straight.
5. Speaking Their Minds
Strange as it seems, the war years were a time of extraordinary ferment in literature. Even as Southerners and other Americans at home and abroad were preoccupied with the global conflict, more than a score of notable nonfiction books about the South and almost as many works of fiction came to public notice. From John Steinbeck’s Oklahoma dust bowl drama, The Grapes of Wrath, in 1939, to Richard Wright’s autobiographical Black Boy, in 1945, the books poured forth in rapid succession. Steinbeck’s novel and the popular movie that followed captured the universality of the tenant farmer/sharecropper’s plight, while the novelistic memoir by Wright was praised by one Northern critic as an “honest, dreadful, heartbreaking story of a Negro childhood and youth” in the South. Like the Mississippi-born author’s 1940 novel, Native Son, Black Boy became a national best-seller.
The fictional torch that had been carried since the 1920s by a handful of resident Southerners (Ellen Glasgow, James Branch Cabell, Julia Peterkin, T. S. Stribling, and others) was gradually being passed to the next generation. In Mississippi, William Faulkner was still turning out novels (Go Down, Moses appeared in 1942, and several more would follow, adding to his fame); Erskine Caldwell continued to write Southern fiction (but nothing memorable) from exile in the North; and death brought Thomas Wolfe’s career to an early end (though more of his writing would still be published). All the while, new writers kept appearing out of the Southern landscape, and their books—so often developed around themes of spiritual and intellectual isolation, of decadence and loneliness and loss of faith—were further evidence that the new wave of realism had taken hold.
Pale Horse, Pale Rider brought literary acclaim to Katherine Anne Por
ter, a Texan; Carson McCullers was only twenty-three and a small-town resident of Georgia when she wrote The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter in 1940; Allen Tate, the Agrarian enfant terrible, won respect for his novel, The Fathers, and his friend and colleague Robert Penn Warren was about to burst forth as a major American writer. Two more Kentuckians who had studied writing at Vanderbilt, Jesse Stuart and James Still, displayed contrasting styles—Stuart with Taps for Private Tussie and a host of other books of romanticized idealism, and Still with River of Earth, foremost in his much smaller but more resonant body of realistic fiction. When Eudora Welty wrote The Robber Bridegroom in 1942, she had already found the Mississippi themes and subjects that would dominate her entire career.
Theatrical drama from two writers with strong New Orleans ties also attracted attention. The Little Foxes, by Lillian Hellman, was staged in 1941, and Tennessee Williams wrote The Glass Menagerie three years later. (Both plays were made into movies.) Like others who passed through before them (Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter), Hellman and Williams eventually found New Orleans inhospitable to the literary spirit, and left for friendlier quarters in the North. William Bradford Huie, the young Alabama writer, made a similar exit soon after Mud on the Stars, his novel set at the University of Alabama, was published in 1941. Huie eventually returned to live and write in the South, as did Margaret Walker, a young black writer with Alabama and Louisiana roots. William Attaway, son of a black Mississippi doctor exiled to Chicago, built his 1941 novel, Blood on the Forge, around the lives of black and white migrant Southerners working in the Illinois steel mills.