Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Some of the Alabama sponsors quickly ran for shelter. Congressman Patrick, Senators Lister Hill and John Bankhead, and Governor Bibb Graves all pleaded ignorance of what one critic called “the insidious nature” of the SCHW. Birmingham’s postmaster, Cooper Green, another of the planners, denied he had been a delegate and swore his allegiance to segregation.

  Louise Charlton was not so easily intimidated. Her faithful service to the Democratic Party had secured her appointment as U.S. commissioner in Birmingham—a quasi-judicial position—and her progressive views had made her a natural choice to preside with Frank Porter Graham at the first SCHW meeting. Once the big guns were gone, the reactionaries seemed intent on singling her out for punishment—thinking, perhaps, that as a woman and a middle-level party official, she would offer little opposition.

  They were in for a surprise. In a formal statement the next day, Mrs. Charlton stood up to the “little Hitlers” who had met at City Hall, saying these were the same “anti-labor, anti-education, anti-Roosevelt group of do-nothing critics” whose “shopworn smoke screen” hid yet another attack on the much-maligned black minority. “Birmingham has had the honor of being the city where a great and historic liberal American movement had its birth,” she said, and the conference was “attended by the greatest Democrats in the South and in America, and financed from their pockets.” Someday, she predicted, “Birmingham and the South will count the conference as one of its golden achievements.” She expressed personal pride, as chairman of the assembly, in having served with others “to begin a regional program for lifting the level of human life.”

  Judge Charlton had been present at the City Hall inquisition, and her fellow citizens, women and men alike, had treated her rudely. That was bad enough—but worse was her knowledge that far more extreme reactions lurked throughout Southern white society. The feared Big Mules of Birmingham and the rest of Alabama—the men who controlled politics and business—were not in the habit of tolerating democratic dissent. No one had expected them to roll out a welcome mat for the Southern Conference. Now that the gathering was over, the hunt for its planners was just beginning.

  As hostile as the reactionary Birmingham critics were, though, they were not by any means the only group that posed a threat to the SCHW. In fact, considering the kind of “friends” it had on the left, you could easily conclude that the conference had no real need of enemies. The Alabama politicians resigned before the gavel of adjournment fell, and right behind them were other elected officials—Florida Senator Claude Pepper, incoming Governor Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, -Democratic National Committee-man Brooks Hays of Arkansas, and Francis Pickens Miller, a member of the Virginia legislature and head of the Southern Policy Committee.

  Miller, a Southern liberal of the patrician Virginia gentleman class, had gone to the Birmingham conference with misgivings about its radical temper and a suspicion that it aimed to undercut the SPC and other, more moderate reform efforts. Spying there another Virginian he knew to be a Communist, and hearing calls for racial and social reform that sounded altogether too aggressive to suit him, Miller not only refused an office in the organization but packed up and left two days ahead of adjournment.

  Mark Ethridge’s verbal account of the meeting to Howard Odum was not quite so alarming, but it was enough to convince Odum that the SCHW might ruin his plans for a regional research council. Within a week, Ethridge had written to Frank Graham—at Odum’s private urging—to suggest that “twenty-five or so representative Southerners” meet under Southern Policy Committee auspices during the Christmas holidays and draw up a legislative agenda to present to Congress. While he was at it, Ethridge mildly complimented SCHW as one of several initiatives aimed at Southern problems—but of course, he added, “the ultimate solution is the regional council originally proposed by Dr. Odum.”

  Graham was too shrewd a politician to align himself against Ethridge and Odum—or with them, for that matter. He had his own agenda, and it was not exactly shrouded in secrecy. In essence, Graham wanted everybody to get into the game—and if some, like Odum, had doubts about the Birmingham gathering, maybe they would find other ways to become active. In the meantime, Graham had agreed to lead the SCHW, and for the next two years he would shelter it from incessant attacks by anticommunists and others. Lucy Randolph Mason was one of many progressive Southerners who stood with him throughout. “After the Red-baiters got in action,” she wrote to Graham in early December, “I knew you would feel compelled to accept the chairmanship. … You bring to the Conference leadership something that no one else in the South could give.”

  That something extra was Graham’s genuine empathy for the least fortunate, his strength of character and integrity, and his stature as the preeminent spokesman for Southern liberalism. “For years I have known that the South cannot be saved by its middle-class liberals alone,” Mason told him. “They must make common cause with labor, the dispossessed on the land, and the Negro. Some liberals may find it too shocking to have the other three groups so articulate about their needs. But this is the basis of progress.”

  Ethridge and Miller went on to invite about four dozen people to their rump session in Atlanta in January 1939. Two women (Miller’s wife, Helen Hill Miller, and Lucy Mason) were on the list, along with one black man (Charles S. Johnson). The rest were all white men, most of them wary critics of the Southern Conference. Graham didn’t attend, but Mason and Johnson did, along with Ethridge and Barry Bingham and labor leader William Mitch; those five also remained active in the SCHW for at least another year or two, out of loyalty and respect for Graham. The others in attendance generally sided with Miller and Odum in their criticism of the Birmingham reformers (“irresponsible ideologists and front-page seekers,” Odum sneered).

  But the Atlanta meeting came to naught. Miller’s fadeout Southern Policy Committee and Odum’s yet-to-be-born regional think tank couldn’t generate much of an alternative to the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. Bitterly, Miller washed his hands of the regional reform movement (an exit that was complete after he lost his Virginia legislative seat in 1941), and turned his attention to international affairs. After the war, he would come back to Virginia for one more dip in the political waters. As for Odum, he had to bide his time and wait for another opening.

  To the right and left of Miller and Odum and their followers were other SCHW detractors who eventually came together in a curious duet that made up in fervor for all it lacked in melody and harmony. From Martin Dies and Joe Starnes of the House Un-American Activities Committee and from a bombastic right-wing magazine called Alabama came shrill cries that as many as six hundred “dyed-in-the-wool Communists” had attended the conference and were in total control of it. And then, from Buck Kester, H. L. Mitchell, Frank McCallister, and others on the left came whispered charges—just as damaging—that the conference had been conceived, “beyond a shadow of a doubt,” by Communists and fellow travelers.

  Frank Graham was catching it from all sides. For the multitude of irate strangers who deluged him with anticommunist complaints and demands that he resign, he drafted a generic letter of polite but firm refusal. For all those who had taken part in the conference and might truly know who was what, he posed a challenge: Give me facts—names, proof—or be honest enough to say you have none. To Kester he wrote:

  I had asked that my name not be considered for any administrative position. … Nevertheless, I was elected. I would have resigned except for the fact that the special interests in Birmingham set out to smear the Conference in a very ruthless way and concentrated their attacks on Judge Louise Charlton. In the face of pressure and demands that I resign, I then refused to resign. I am glad that I did not resign. I do not object to members of any political party—Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, Communists, or what-not—coming into an open democratic meeting so long as it is open and aboveboard. Nor do I think we should run when we find out that a handful of Communists joined the Conference or would like to manipulate it or
claim it as their own. … I refuse to run in the face of Communist intrigue on one side or smearing by powerful and privileged groups on the other.

  H. C. Nixon, the SCHW executive secretary, acted on Graham’s orders to ascertain how many Communists had attended. “Only four,” he at first replied, and then amended the count to six. The same names kept popping up: Joe Gelders, Howard Lee, John B. Thompson, John P. Davis, Rob Hall, Donald Burke. The last two of these acknowledged party membership; the first four, when questioned directly, denied it. Graham was satisfied that he had not been deceived, and that in any case the organization was in no danger of becoming a tool of the Communist Party. The critics were after it, he concluded, “not because it is one percent Red but because it is fifty percent Black.” (Actually, about one-fourth of those who paid the one-dollar conference registration fee were black.)

  In retrospect, the charge that Communists controlled or even seriously influenced the 1938 SCHW meeting seems farfetched. By no criteria could it be fairly pegged as a radical assembly. Almost three-fourths of its delegates and about ninety-five percent of its chosen officers were white, middle-class Southerners, and virtually all of them were New Deal Democrats. Their headquarters in the Tutwiler Hotel was snuggled in the bosom of segregated comfort, and no one, white or black, even hinted that black delegates ought to be allowed to cross that threshold. Aside from their disapproval (hardly unanimous) of the city’s enforcement of its segregated-seating ordinance, the conference skirted discreetly around any other word or deed that smacked of “social equality.”

  The biggest threat to the survival and effectiveness of SCHW was not its enemies inside and out, right and left, but rather its long-term inability to raise membership and money. The CIO labor unions were a major force behind the organization and the top contributor to its first convention budget, but they were not sustaining patrons—nobody was. Membership dues and publications sales produced a little income, but not much. Gifts and donations came to less than two thousand dollars the first year, and annual income from all sources didn’t top twenty thousand dollars until after the war. In all that time, the organization was never out of debt, never able to keep up the paltry salaries of two or three staff members, never even sure its utilities and telephone wouldn’t be cut off. Labor leaders talked a good game, but put up very little hard cash. Various New Deal units could also be thought of as unofficial founding sponsors, but they offered no material help (although Eleanor Roosevelt was an annual participant and a faithful contributor). The Southern Policy Committee was still another fair-weather friend, as conspicuous in the beginning as it was invisible after Francis Pickens Miller’s exit.

  H. C. Nixon lasted less than a year as the director, giving up his seldom-paid forty-dollar-a-week salary for a temporary teaching job in Oklahoma and then, in 1940, joining the political science faculty at Vanderbilt (thanks in large part to a supporting salary grant from the ever-helpful Edwin Embree, director of the Rosenwald Fund). Finding himself once again in a conservative academic community—and in an untenured position at that—Nixon seemed to back away from the populist activism that had characterized his earlier involvements. He seldom looked back at the Southern Conference after he left, except to lament its failings. He did put in a brief appearance at one session of the 1942 gathering in Nashville, but showed no enthusiasm for it. Later, when three of the delegates—old friends and former associates—drove out to his home for a visit, they came away convinced that he was no longer sympathetic to their cause.

  In its first four years of existence, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare raised the hopes of thousands of progressive citizens in the region, but its concrete accomplishments were few. Its goal of organizing thirteen active state branches and one in Washington fell far short of the mark. A youth group called the Council of Young Southerners was established in Nashville under the direction of Helen Fuller and Howard Lee, but Fuller soon left for Washington, and Lee spent much of his time fending off rumors of his alleged Communist ties. By 1941 the council—or the League of Young Southerners, as it was then called—had all but faded out. Another ongoing SCHW effort, a civil rights committee headed by Joe Gelders, Maury Maverick, and Virginia Durr, focused its efforts on a national campaign to abolish the poll tax in the eight Southern states that still had such a levy. Georgia did repeal its tax in 1945, but the others held out until the fifties or later.

  The Southern Conference couldn’t come up with enough money to hold a convention in 1939, and after Nixon left, Graham finally named Howard Lee to replace him, other nominees having declined. Lee had support from some respected Southerners, including Brooks Hays and Barry Bingham, and he flatly denied in a formal letter to Graham that he was a Communist. But his political awakening as an Arkansas sharecropper’s son had come at the hands of the controversial Claude Williams, and some of his subsequent associations cast further suspicion on him. As soon as the announcement was made that he would be the SCHW’s executive secretary, Lee was bombarded with new charges and Graham was pulled deeper into the morass.

  Gamely, Graham and Lee and the SCHW executive committee pressed on. They scheduled the second general conference for three days in April of 1940 at the Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, and with careful advance planning they managed to bring it off smoothly. Two old journalistic hands, editors Julian Harris of the Chattanooga Times and George Fort Milton of the rival News, gave sympathetic support. With Frank Graham presiding, close to a thousand delegates, a fourth of them black, came together in the unsegregated auditorium to hear Eleanor Roosevelt and a host of other liberals, white and black, recite the familiar litany of Southern problems and hoped-for solutions. The Thomas Jefferson Award was given to old soldier Will Alexander, who still lived and worked in Washington but also retained nominal leadership of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta.

  The only real snag in the proceedings developed at the opening session when W. T. Couch introduced a non-sequitur resolution condemning Communist aggression in Europe. The ensuing debate was emotional and divisive, with Couch finally storming out in anger—but Graham showed once again why so many delegates felt his leadership was indispensable. His draft of a substitute resolution denouncing “the violation of human rights and democratic liberties … by all Fascist, Nazi, Communist, and Imperialist powers alike” was overwhelmingly approved by the assembly. Then, with such worldly issues finally put aside, Graham called the delegates’ attention to the more relevant concerns of the Southern region. “There are many people in the South who are willing to unite in building a better civilization,” he declared. “We must gird ourselves for a struggle that may last two or three generations, and we ourselves must pay the price for keeping this fight alive.”

  It was largely through the influence of Frank Graham that Lillian Smith came to the Chattanooga meeting and later accepted a seat on the SCHW executive committee. Gordon Clapp, general manager of the Tennessee Valley Authority and thus a prominent New Deal figure, also came aboard. Clark Foreman, another New Dealer, was chosen again as the conference treasurer. Numerous others, from Lucy Mason and Myles Horton and John P. Davis to Louise Charlton and Mark Ethridge and Charles S. Johnson, were there at least in part because Frank Graham was carrying the colors. But Graham, having accepted a draft for a two-year term, was insistent that a new chairman or president must now be picked to replace him. The names of Barry Bingham, Will Alexander, and even Howard Odum were put forth, but no consensus developed, and the decision was put off.

  Finally, a month or so after the conference adjourned, the executive committee chose John B. Thompson, a Presbyterian minister and professor at the University of Oklahoma, to take Graham’s place. Thompson’s Tennessee roots, Union Theological Seminary degree, and Highlander Folk School ties were well known to the SCHW board, but only belatedly did they learn that he was also president of American Peace Mobilization, a pacifist group that some of its critics said was a Communist front. When his name was added to those of Howard
Lee and Joe Gelders, Thompson seemed in the eyes of many to tip the scales toward substantial if not dominant red influence in the SCHW. Along with the other two, he explicitly and emphatically denied any Communist affiliation, but the trio’s leadership was compromised by the ongoing furor that enveloped them. Thompson held on to complete his two-year term, but Lee and Gelders were forced to resign their posts in the summer of 1941.

  Mark Ethridge and Barry Bingham severed their ties to SCHW out of concern about the communism issue, but Tarleton Collier, their colleague at the Louisville Courier-Journal, stayed on—and later even filled in briefly as acting president of the conference. After Lee’s departure, the labor movement loaned the services of Alton Lawrence to SCHW to keep its office running, but Lawrence (who once had been bailed out of a North Carolina jail by Frank Graham following a student demonstration in support of striking textile workers) turned out to be yet another suspected Communist. Finally, in a last-gasp effort to keep the conference from self-destructing, the executive committee in January 1942 hired James A. Dombrowski from Highlander to take over as executive director of the SCHW.

  As a self-described Christian Socialist with a longtime commitment to radical causes, the forty-five-year-old Dombrowski was hardly a safe choice for the job. He and Myles Horton had kept Highlander in the spotlight as an activist labor school, and not only the Dies Committee and the FBI but the progressive Nashville Tennessean and some of Highlander’s own staff members described the school unflatteringly. The Tennessean, in a six-part series in late 1939, called it “a center, if not the center, for the spreading communist doctrine in thirteen southeastern states.” Two departing Highlander staff members, Zilla Hawes and Franz Daniel, also wondered aloud whether Horton and Dombrowski had naively become “dupes” and “stooges” of the Communists.