Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  The early 1940s had not been kind to W. T. Couch. Tiptoeing past forty, he was no longer the cocky, self-confident boy wonder who had taken the university press by storm back in 1927. Gone was his dashing, daring style of radical activism; he was more cautious and tentative now, more alarmist, more erratic. In 1938 he had plunged into the Southern Conference for Human Welfare with boundless enthusiasm; two years later, Frank Porter Graham had to plead with him to get him to the conference at all. Once there, he lost a shouting match over an irrelevant foreign policy resolution on fascism and communism—and suffered further indignity when a pro-Communist delegate shoved him down in a struggle for the microphone. Shaken and outraged, Couch resigned and went home. Events were not turning out as he had hoped and expected. The radical initiative he had once proudly joined was being torn apart, pulled to the right by Nazi Fascists and to the left by Communists and Socialists—and somehow the race issue seemed hopelessly tangled up in all that. Couch lapsed into self-delusion; he let himself believe that Rayford Logan would somehow steer a course back to a pragmatic accommodation with Jim Crow.

  By the end of May 1943, Logan and Couch had reached agreement on a prospective list of thirteen essayists that included Du Bois, Wright, Hughes, Randoph, and White, all identified as being “extreme left” or “left of center,” and five academics (F. D. Patterson of Tuskegee, Gordon B. Hancock of Virginia Union, Charles S. Johnson of Fisk, Charles H. Wesley of Wilberforce, and Leslie P. Hill of Cheyney), all classified as “extreme right” or “right of center.” Some declined and others were substituted. In the end, fourteen writers ranging from Du Bois and Hughes at one extreme to Patterson and Hancock at the other were formally invited to declare what they thought “the Negro wanted.”

  When the manuscripts arrived, Couch was almost speechless with shock. One after another, without a single exception, the essayists declared that black Americans wanted the same constitutional guarantees that white Americans took for granted. Like proud soldiers they marched in, counting cadence: “First-Class Citizenship” (Logan); “Full Equality” (Roy Wilkins of the NAACP); “Certain Inalienable Rights” (Mary McLeod Bethune); “Full Participation in the American Democracy” (F. D. Patterson). Du Bois spelled it out as “full economic, political, and social equality with [all other] American citizens, in thought, expression and action, with no discrimination based on race or color.” The heart of the matter, declared journalist George S. Schuyler, was “the Caucasian problem.” One and all, from the radical left to the conservative right, they called for an end to segregation.

  Desperately, Couch looked for an exit. Might Logan want to find another home for these essays? No, thanks, said Logan. The publisher pressed harder, but the editor, citing their contract, hinted that he might sue if it was breached. Finally, Couch opted to write his own “publisher’s introduction” for the front of the book, hoping to soften its abolitionist tone.

  He would have been wiser to stand back in silence. In fifteen rambling pages of aggressive self-defense laced with rhetorical questions and didactic answers, he managed to lash himself to the mast of segregation and white supremacy, characterizing it not as a social force too powerful to subdue but as a biological fact that ought to be accepted as right and realistic for the foreseeable future. Gratuitously, Couch denounced the recently published and widely acclaimed study of race relations, An American Dilemma, as a misguided and harmful distortion of such concepts as equality, freedom, and democracy. Recalling wistfully the subservient acceptance of segregation advocated by Booker T. Washington a half-century earlier, Couch concluded that a rebirth of the Tuskegee founder’s ideas was what the South sorely needed now.

  It was a sad postscript to the distinguished publishing record of W. T. Couch at the University of North Carolina. Within a year he would be gone to Chicago and another university press directorship. In his wake, Southerners white and black could find, if they cared to look, a singular catalog of social and cultural literature, culminating with What the Negro Wants, that vividly chronicled the struggle of black Americans for their constitutional rights and foreshadowed the demise of legalized segregation. Ironically, the man who was most responsible for that catalog now appeared to repudiate it.

  And he was not alone. Virginius Dabney, Mark Ethridge, and John Temple Graves were just a few of the many notable Southern whites who applauded Couch’s smug assertion of Anglo-Saxon superiority and purity, and the natural inferiority of Africans. Rayford Logan and his essayists and the other black critics who joined the debate were contemptuous of the self-evident contradictions. “They are NOT Southern Liberals,” Arna Bontemps said of Couch and the others in a letter to Langston Hughes. “They are old-line Southerners … educated men who must somehow justify their way of life if they are to keep their own self-respect.” Couch, Bontemps concluded, “is not really a seeker after truth.”

  Perhaps it was fear or envy, as much as anything else, that drove Couch to attack An American Dilemma; ostensibly it was an academic treatise on the state of black-white relations in this country, but its friends and foes alike quickly perceived it as a smoking package of social dynamite. The book was a monumental collaborative work of investigative scholarship organized in the late 1930s by Gunnar Myrdal, a widely respected Swedish social economist, and published in the spring of 1944. The Carnegie Corporation, a New York philanthropy long engaged in programs of social improvement, funded the entire project. The foundation’s leaders had wanted “a comprehensive study of the Negro in the United States, to be undertaken in a wholly objective and dispassionate way as a social phenomenon.” Myrdal, forty years old at the time, was chosen to direct the effort precisely because of his distance from—and lack of preconceived notions about—America’s racial problems.

  He got his first look at the South in the fall of 1938 when he and two companions spent two months driving through the region. They attended political rallies (it was the season of FDR’s abortive purge attempt), took part in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, heard firsthand reports of lynchings and other atrocities, stared at the ugly face of racism and poverty and class exploitation. Back in New York, Myrdal told Carnegie officials he was “horrified” by the magnitude of the problems and the enormity of the task he had before him.

  The perceptive and engaging Swede made a show of seeking advice from such senior scholars as Du Bois and Odum, but he was careful not to get too close to them. Instead, he hired their protégés as his associates (Ira Reid and Guy Johnson, to name just two). All in all, the research team of more than a hundred scholars, consultants, and assistants was liberally laced with blacks (including Ralph Bunche, Charles S. Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Sterling Brown, and Horace Cayton) and Southern whites (Arthur Raper, Thomas Woofter, George Stoney, Guion Johnson—Guy Johnson’s wife—Clark Foreman, George Mitchell, and others).

  The sheer magnitude and scope of An American Dilemma, the pertinence of its subject matter, and the timing of its appearance near the end of the war were more than enough to assure its rapid elevation to the status of a classic. It may have been bought and quoted far more than it was read and studied, but one way or another, its meaning and import worked their way into the nation’s consciousness. Four salient features characterized the voluminous work: the torrent of facts documenting the depth and breadth of white racism; the misinformed belief of whites as a race in the innate inferiority of blacks as a race; the existence of an egalitarian American creed that stood in contrast to these facts and beliefs; and finally, consequently, the moral dilemma of how to reconcile the inequitable and discriminatory realities of our behavior with the ideals on which the nation was founded. Pointedly, Myrdal emphasized again and again that the dilemma was not just Southern but American.

  This was in no sense a conventional academic research project, and Myrdal was not your garden-variety social scientist (in fact, he criticized members of the fraternity for deceptively concealing their value judgments behind a façade of objectivity). Comforta
bly set up in that most coveted of roles—the outsider—Myrdal could do whatever his head and his heart suggested, regardless of the consequences. With virtually unlimited support from Carnegie and with his staff and consultants always at hand to help, he was free to look at the evidence, listen to the arguments, form his own opinions, and speak his mind. This he did, with enthusiasm and candor. Half a century later, some of his conclusions were still being debated, but the solid bedrock of fundamental veracity—unlike Couch’s rationalized assertions—would be unshaken by time. Myrdal qualified as “a seeker after truth.”

  He liked the United States—its ideals, its customs, its people, its diversity. He described its creed as an informal mix of hallowed beliefs gleaned from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the tenets of Christianity, and the popular culture. This was, people agreed, the land of the free, the home of the brave, the cradle of liberty; here you were entitled to freedom of speech and religion and the press, and words like justice, equality, tolerance, and democracy had meaning for everyone. The creed, the common body of beliefs, was the glue that bonded the polyglot nation together and made it utterly unique among the nations of the world.

  In stark contradiction to these American icons, as Myrdal saw it, were some harsh and sobering truths: A pathological condition of daily desperation marked the lives of most blacks, South and North. Their needs were vast—for jobs, housing, health care, education, the vote, protection of the laws, and an end to Jim Crow segregation and discrimination, a “flagrantly illegal” and disastrous state of affairs. White Southerners deluded themselves in thinking that Negroes were more or less content with segregation, happy with their lot; worse, many whites confidently thought that they, and only they, understood the black mentality and offered to the darker legions more friendship and protection than anyone else. Myrdal called such thinking the “convenience of ignorance” that allowed grievous injustices to flourish.

  There was more: Southerners white and black were obsessed with the race question, Myrdal declared. White preachments about racial purity belied the fact that seventy percent of all African-Americans had at least some traces of white ancestry—a consequence of white sexual aggression. Environment, not heredity, accounted for most differences between whites and blacks. Whites in the North blamed Southerners for racial discrimination, but the North was hardly any better, and in time would face problems just as serious as those that plagued the South. Blacks would find no salvation in black separatism, in voluntarily segregated institutions such as churches and schools, or in racial chauvinism. The great hope for America in the future was not revolution or the status quo but a responsible middle road to change, to integration and equality.

  These were breathtaking pronouncements, deserving of far more comment and criticism than they received. Beyond calling An American Dilemma “thorough and exhaustive,” Virginius Dabney offered little or no assessment of it. Even at that, he outdid Ralph McGill, Jonathan Daniels, Mark Ethridge, and most other Southern editors, who greeted it with silence. Howard Odum, reviewing the book in Social Forces, found fault with Myrdal for his optimism in believing the American creed would prevail over injustice, and for his failure to offer more concrete recommendations. Rupert B. Vance, an Odum colleague at North Carolina, acknowledged in the Virginia Quarterly Review that “what the Negro wants is integration in our national culture,” and he further declared that “the social myth that dies the hardest death in the mind of the South is the myth of the Negro as a happy and satisfied race.” He registered surprise, though, that Myrdal had “no course of social action to present” other than the vague suggestion that “things have to be settled by political means.”

  Black critics, on the other hand, were highly complimentary of Myrdal’s work. The comments of Du Bois were representative of most others. He called the book “a monumental and unrivaled study.”

  The South would take little notice of Gunnar Myrdal and An American Dilemma until a decade later, when the school integration issue he had so clearly foreseen finally penetrated the national consciousness. Like many other books before it, from James Weldon Johnson’s Negro Americans, What Now? in 1934 to What the Negro Wants a decade later, the Myrdal volume was a long-range forecast of what lay ahead for blacks and whites in the motherland of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  One more classic book of visions was birthed in the early forties, and no account of Southern social history would be passably complete without some consideration of it. The author was a little-known North Carolina journalist named Wilbur Joseph Cash—“W. J.” or “Jack” or “Sleepy” to his family and friends. The book, published in 1941, was The Mind of the South.

  When I opened The Mind of the South for the first time, the book was almost two decades old and Jack Cash had been dead for nearly that long. The year was 1960. At the age of twenty-five, I was confined against my will in a hospital room in Tampa, Florida, having landed there for an extended stay after an automobile accident. I had plenty of time to read and reflect, to think about what I was missing outside. On a little black-and-white television set, I watched John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson recapture the White House for the Democratic Party; a few weeks later, in his inaugural address, Kennedy would stir inside me (and millions of others) a deep sense of hope and expectation, a desire to do for my country. So much cried out to be done. In my homeland, my native South, the black minority was summoning the courage to challenge white supremacy with nonviolence, and the white majority was lashing back violently against adults trying to vote, college students at lunch counters, even little children at school and church.

  The impact of Cash’s book on me was about the same as if someone had rolled a hand grenade under my bed. In the very first pages, his voice seized my attention: “… the South is another land … there are many Souths … there is also one South … far from being modernized, in many ways it has actually always marched away, as to this day it continues to do, from the present toward the past. …” The Mind of the South echoed in my own mind like Jefferson’s proverbial fire bell in the night. As a comatose person might emerge from deep unconsciousness, I slowly began to hear and see and understand. Cash’s biographer Bruce Clayton said it well: “No one who reads Wilbur Joseph Cash is ever quite the same again.”

  Strange that a book of such perception and power should have come from the typewriter of a man like W. J. Cash. A giant in the minds of many who have read his book, he was actually an unimposing fellow who cut an unheroic, unromantic figure. Picture him in about 1938, before his book and his marriage gave him a brief period of happiness: He wore the melancholy expression of a misfit, a shy, withdrawn, moodily petulant bookworm with sad eyes blinking behind owlish, steel-rimmed glasses. Not yet forty, he was a rumpled bachelor lacking in style and social grace; he had lost his youthful slenderness and was losing his hair. He was a neurotic, a hypochondriac, a sickly man given to chronic bouts of depression, a lonely, tortured soul trapped between binding convention and a liberating imagination. One of seven children born to a fundamentalist yeoman couple in a Carolina mill village, he had somehow become an agnostic city dweller who drank and smoked too much, an intellectual without an academic base, an eccentric journalist yearning to write novels. For almost a decade he had been working on a big-idea book of Southern social analysis, but most of the time his friends on the staff of the Charlotte News—and he himself—seriously doubted that he would ever finish.

  The Mind of the South was recognized early by H. L. Mencken as a potential book buried in Cash’s disordered but penetrating thoughts (this after the young Carolina journalist had sold a freelance article by that title to Mencken’s American Mercury in 1929). The Baltimore editor attracted Alfred and Blanche Knopf to Cash and his idea as a project for their New York publishing house, and for almost twelve years the Knopfs patiently endeavored to coax the book from him. The wait was certainly worth it. What they got was not journalism or scholarship or history, but a man
y-layered dissection and anatomy of the Southern white male rendered in a brilliantly original, provocative, judgmental, and disarmingly personal narrative to which even its few panning critics (Donald Davidson most conspicuously) conceded certain undeniable virtues.

  The book was not perfect. It was more about the Carolina piedmont than about the South writ large; its analyses of women and blacks revealed Cash’s lack of close association with both; it could have benefited from a little more documentation—some hard data, some citations, some notes—and at the very least, it needed a bibliography. Sometimes the Cashian flights of rhetorical verbalizing were like Roman candles, a triumph of style over substance.

  But forget all that. W. J. Cash evoked the South as few writers before him had done. Drawing from a full bag of literary devices—first- and second- and third-person perspectives, monologue and soliloquy, satire and irony, dialogue and description, detachment and engagement—he could turn a phrase, paint a picture, spin a yarn. He had an organized sense of where he was going with his argument, and he knew how to keep it moving. Above all, he had a point of view; he made independent observations, passed judgment, came to conclusions. Like Myrdal’s Dilemma and the nonfiction works of Du Bois and other writers, Cash’s Mind had a moral dimension. Myrdal, with all his credentials and an army of aides, had made his pronouncements from the distant safety of New York and Stockholm; in contrast, Sleepy Cash was just an ordinary guy standing alone in the heart of darkness, saying things about his beloved and benighted Southland that made his own countrymen wince—and then nod in reluctant agreement and even admiration.