by John Egerton
The South had questions of its own. Nobody knew if the men and women in uniform or in war production would come back to the farms and small towns and take up where they had left off. Probably nobody imagined—not many, anyway—that King Cotton was permanently dethroned, that tenant farming and sharecropping would be replaced by corporate farming, or that the South in one short generation would be transformed from an overwhelmingly rural and agricultural society to a predominantly urban-industrial one. And only the dreamers gave much thought at all to what the white and black citizens of the region would do, if anything, to reduce discrimination and raise the living conditions and expectations of the vast multitudes of poor and needy people who lived among them.
The time for dreamers to become doers was almost at hand. Liberals and conservatives alike could see the new world a-coming; they had to know that, one way or another, the mighty wave of reformation that was sweeping across the world would not skip over them. Southern progressives, white and black, dreamed not only of the liberation of Europe and Asia but also of the liberation of their homeland from the feudal barons. There would be a fight for control of the South, a fight to redefine it and say what it stood for, as there would be virtually everywhere. Old Dixie was firmly in the grasp of the oligarchy now, as it had been for nearly three-quarters of a century—as it had been, you could almost say, forever—but in the postwar emergence of a victorious and renewed society, the South’s liberals would have the best chance since the days of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to take their case to the people.
Claude Pepper and Mark Ethridge and Ellis Arnall were prominent among those who were saying things like that in speeches and magazine articles and books. “There is no section of the country that needs liberalism so much as the South,” Pepper told an Atlanta audience shortly before Roosevelt died. Ethridge, speaking in the same city a month later, declared that nothing but “aggressive liberalism” could save the region from further decline in the fast-moving and competitive postwar world. Arnall, the young Georgia governor whose term of office would end after the 1946 election, got national attention with his predictions of a dawning liberalism in the South. When the war ended, he was putting the finishing touches on a book, The Shore Dimly Seen, to convey his progressive ideas to a larger audience.
Most of the Southerners who had helped to invigorate the New Deal with liberal ideas had left the government by the time FDR died. Ethridge was long since out of the Fair Employment Practices Committee and back at the Courier-Journal in Louisville. Clark Foreman had moved to Nashville as president of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. George Mitchell and Ira Reid were on the Southern Regional Council staff in Atlanta. Will W. Alexander had shifted his primary work station to Chicago, where he would remain as a principal figure in the Rosenwald Fund until it gave away all its assets and voluntarily dissolved in 1948. Aubrey Williams, perhaps the most liberal of them all, moved back to Alabama to publish the Southern Farmer in 1945 after the Senate, with its Dixie reactionaries in the lead, refused to confirm Roosevelt’s appointment of him to head the Rural Electrification Administration.
Will Alexander, in league with Edwin Embree and Charles S. Johnson, took the Rosenwald Fund out in a blaze of glory. Over a twenty-year period, they had awarded fellowships to more than a thousand blacks and five hundred whites, most of them young Southerners whose potential for productive service had caught their eye. The three men, honoring their own strong Southern ties, had turned the largesse of Julius Rosenwald to the service of many a Southern school and social reform initiative. Toward the end, they addressed larger issues of segregation—in the nation’s capital, in the Federal Council of Churches, in the U.S. armed forces. In all of those arenas, Rosenwald funds and ideas were instrumental in bringing about change.
As he neared retirement age, Alexander prepared to go home to the South. While he was away from his family all those years, Mabelle Kinkead Alexander, his wife, had raised their two sons in Atlanta and then, with her husband’s blessing, had moved to Chapel Hill. There, Howard Odum helped her find a little farm to buy, and she supervised the building of a house that she and Dr. Will would share after he retired. Her project and his career would wind up at about the same time, and they would be there together, enjoying the simple pleasures of country life, just as the South and the nation entered the heated election season of 1948.
It may have been more than coincidental that the New Deal agencies most committed to assisting minorities and the poor and to being fair and nondiscriminatory in their employment practices were headed by Southern liberals: Alexander at the Farm Security Administration, Clark Foreman (under Harold Ickes) in the Public Works Administration, Mark Ethridge as chairman of the Fair Employment Practices Committee, Aubrey Williams and Mary McLeod Bethune at the National Youth Administration. Certainly it was no coincidence, either, that those agencies were among the primary targets of the Southern reactionaries in Congress. Almost from the start, they had exhibited an undisguised hostility toward all do-good programs and the bleeding hearts who ran them, but they reserved a special disgust and hatred for any and all “traitors to the South” whose egalitarian ideas deviated from the code of white supremacy.
In his gentle and affable manner, Alexander had given a humanitarian dimension to his tenure in the labyrinth of government. While many others were struck dumb and blind by a vast and impersonal bureaucracy, his eye was always on the sparrow; he saw more virtue in putting a roof over the heads of one struggling sharecropper family than in codifying all the arcane laws and regulations and directives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Having fought the evils of sharecropping and tenant farming for most of his years in Washington, he found himself at the end of his FSA days defending small family farm operations against the crushing juggernaut of corporate agribusiness.
In a sense, nothing had really changed. The South had gone from plantation slavery to planter-controlled tenant farming to what would eventually become high-tech corporate farming. Tractors and cotton-picking machines and other modern implements had given planters an excuse to evict tenants; when they needed seasonal cheap labor, they turned more and more to prisoners of war, to migrant workers recruited from Mexico and the Caribbean, to prison contract labor, or to former tenants held against their will for nonpayment of debts. All the evils the Vanderbilt Agrarians should have attacked but didn’t in their 1930 manifesto on rural life were now beginning to crowd the yeoman farmers off the land. When Alexander looked around and saw that the American Farm Bureau, the federal land-grant colleges of agriculture, and even some branches of the USDA (such as the Extension Service) were often arrayed with the planters and other big-time commercial operators against the small-scale tillers of the soil, he knew that he had lost the battle if not the war. He resigned from the Farm Security Administration in 1940, but filled other emergency posts in the government on a temporary basis through much of the war before moving on to Chicago.
If Alexander’s exit from Washington was quiet and undramatic, Aubrey Williams’s was more like a theatrical display of thunder and lightning. His enemies in the Senate, led by Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, thought they had disposed of him in 1943 when they abolished the National Youth Administration, of which he was the director. Williams left the government briefly to work for the National Farmers Union, but FDR wanted him back, and in January 1945 the President nominated him to head the Rural Electrification Administration, an agency in constant hot water with the nation’s private power and utility interests. Roosevelt’s “forgotten man,” out there holding back the dark with a kerosene lantern, could not have wished for a more willing and able advocate—or a better man—than Aubrey Williams.
But McKellar and his allies were determined to stop him. They had just fought a losing battle to prevent former Vice President Henry Wallace from becoming Secretary of Commerce, and they were in no mood to swallow another bitter pill. At hearings before the Senate Agriculture Committee, the McKellar forces went after the no
minee with a vengeance. They alleged that he had criminally misused public funds, and fumed that he advocated equal employment even when it meant “whites are forced to use toilets with the blacks”; further, they charged that as a teenager, he had “denied the divinity of Christ.” Then they brought out the “communism file,” ever the favorite weapon of antidemocratic adversaries; Williams was accused of “being a member of either four or five of the Communist-front organizations.”
He was a combative witness, never yielding ground. He challenged the committee “to produce one single iota of evidence” that he had ever been connected in any way with the Communists. He flatly denied ever having misspent public money. He refused on principle to discuss his religious beliefs, saying they were “a matter between myself and my God.” He said the ability to perform a job ought to be the only requirement for getting it, even if that meant toilet-sharing. “I am a Southerner,” Williams declared, in his best Alabama voice. “I was born in the South, and I have been proud of the fact … but I have been saddened that the South has not progressed as the other sections of the country have.” One of the main reasons, he asserted, was that the bosses pitted working-class whites and blacks against each other and kept both groups from advancing or getting fair treatment.
The fight spilled over onto the Senate floor. Williams was not entirely without Southern support; Claude Pepper, Lister Hill, and Alben Barkley were for him, and so too, surprisingly, were Allen Eilender of Louisiana and Clyde Hoey of North Carolina. Broad-based approval came from labor and from a national “Friends of Aubrey Williams Committee” that included Mark Ethridge and Jonathan Daniels. But McKellar, Bilbo, and company had all the rest of the Southern votes, and they brought more than enough others along with them. When the count was finally recorded after weeks of jockeying, it came out fifty-two to thirty-six against Williams. The New Deal liberals had taken another heavy hit.
Bitterly discouraged—and soon to be shocked and depressed by the death of the President he so revered—Aubrey Williams packed his bags and left Washington. In his eyes, and in those of many of his supporters, it was the race issue that had done him in. His home-state senators—Hill, who braved the wrath of the Big Mules to vote for him, and John Bankhead, who went the other way—both indicated that a little less candor on his part would have brought him at least half of the nay-saying Southerners, enough for a narrow victory.
But nobody really expected less candor from Williams; no doubt all of them, friends and enemies alike, would have lost their respect for him—or their fear of him—if he had equivocated. He would go on speaking out against race and class discrimination and for his all-souls vision of democracy. And besides, he said, it was not his racial views but those of McKellar and Bilbo and all the others of their ilk that contradicted the ideals and principles of American democracy—the very principles for which our troops had been fighting and dying around the world.
As America and its allies gradually gained the upper hand in Europe and the Pacific, discrimination against black citizens on the home front had the double-barreled effect of escalating both black protest and white reaction. On the one side, there was a spreading sense of outrage that discrimination based solely on skin color was locking people out of jobs, housing, hospitals, schools, and even most combat units fighting fascism and imperialism abroad; on the other, retaliation and repression seemed to be the motivating instincts of whites who blocked the routes of upward black mobility.
For all the differences that separated Southern from Northern blacks and Southern from Northern whites, the deeper meaning of these conflicts was that America was dividing more along racial than regional lines. Urban riots and other manifestations of violence in the war years were as likely to surface above the Mason-Dixon line as below it. Job discrimination was a problem in all industries, regardless of their location. It was the U.S. armed forces that segregated blacks or excluded them altogether, and it was the Red Cross—American, not Southern—that segregated blood. In the upper echelons of the New Deal, there were some Yankees whose pronouncements on white supremacy sounded every bit as bigoted as any run-of-the-mill Southern politician’s; Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, a New Yorker with degrees from Harvard and Yale, blamed racial tensions on “the deliberate effort … of certain radical leaders of the colored race to use the war for obtaining … race equality and interracial marriages.”
White residents in every section of the country were at best deluded about the extent of racial bias, and at worst actively engaged in aggressive stimulation of it. Three out of every five whites, according to opinion polls, thought Negroes already had all the rights and opportunities they deserved, and were satisfied with what they had. Even in the North and West, a clear majority of whites expressed a preference for segregation, considered the lowly position of blacks to be a direct consequence of their own inadequacies, and anticipated no significant improvement in their status after the war.
But for depth and breadth of hostility, the white South still easily swept the field. Notwithstanding the emergence of such groups as the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and the Southern Regional Council, the vast majority of white citizens in the old Confederate states and those bordering them had no positive urge to join in any expression of interracial solidarity, no matter how conservative its aims. The lion’s share of them may simply have been too timid to risk the disapproval of their neighbors, but it was the rest—the demagogues and ideologues of right-wing extremism—who stole their courage.
The U.S. Congress was stymied and silenced by its rebel faction of Southern Democrats and their reactionary (mostly Republican) cohorts. The states were operated in blatantly undemocratic fashion by governors and legislators whose allegiance was not to the people at large and least of all to the blacks, but to the planter-banker-businessman oligarchy whose feudal domain the South truly was; local governments were almost as unresponsive. The scattered few individual exceptions—a Claude Pepper here, an Ellis Arnall there, a white liberal or even a black minor official yonder—only proved the rigid rule: Segregation reigned supreme. A tiny handful of journalists and ministers, college presidents and professors, civic and charitable group leaders, did sometimes speak out against violence and injustice, but only a minuscule fraction of them openly challenged segregation itself—and they were vilified and ostracized for doing so. The Ku Klux Klan, the German-American Bund, and the shirted factions of fascism had more standing in the average Southern community than any outspoken integrationist. In the South, almost anything could be done in the name of white supremacy.
The black press, organizations such as the NAACP and the National Urban League, and a host of individual African-Americans grew increasingly bold in their demands for simple justice, and their “Double-V” slogan—victory in the fight for democracy both here at home and overseas—became the proud watchword of virtually all Americans of color. The NAACP nearly tripled the number of its local chapters and increased its membership ninefold between 1940 and 1946. With growing confidence, the Crisis and other black publications spoke for these rising numbers with ringing declarations: “We want democracy in Alabama and Arkansas, in Mississippi and Michigan, in the District of Columbia—in the Senate of the United States.”
What may have angered black men the most—and at the same time underscored their patriotism and courage—was being rebuffed in their demand for a full and equal combat role in the war. It took a storm of protest to bring about the reactivation of two segregated infantry divisions, spiritual descendants of the celebrated “buffalo soldiers” of the nineteenth century and World War I. By mid-1944 the army had close to three-quarters of a million blacks in uniform, more than half of them posted overseas—but only a handful of the thousand-plus black officers were assigned to combat units. In Europe and Africa and in the Pacific, the black soldiers stood tall; in the Ninety-second Division alone, more than six hundred men won combat medals in North Africa and Italy, and General Mark Clark, under whose command they foug
ht, described their service as “glorious.” Generals Patton, Eisenhower, and MacArthur had similar praise for their units of black soldiers. Said MacArthur in 1945, “Their patience, their fortitude, their courage, and their complete devotion to their country mark them as belonging to the nation’s noblest citizens.”
I said almost anything could be done in the South in the name of white supremacy. But not absolutely anything. There was a limit, and Mississippi’s outrageous senators, Theodore Bilbo and James O. Eastland, finally reached it in June 1945, just before the war was over, with a broad-brush fusillade of slanderous and defamatory blasts at black soldiers and various others not blessed with white Anglo-Saxon Protestant purity. In the slow heat of a Southern filibuster (ultimately successful) to prevent a vote on the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, the Mississippians and their allies indulged in their usual excesses of oratory. It was Eastland, though, who plumbed new depths.
He had been told, he said, by “numerous high-ranking generals” what he already knew to be true: that “nigra soldiers” in the U.S. Army had been “an utter and abysmal failure” in the war—deserters, cowards, quitters, rapers of white women. They had “no initiative, no sense of responsibility, and very low intelligence.” They had “disgraced the flag of their country.” In just four years as a senator, James Eastland had proved himself to be every bit as rabid a racist as Bilbo and their House colleague John Rankin—even though that took some doing. (When an Italian-American woman from Brooklyn “with four brothers fighting the Nazis” wrote him a critical letter, Bilbo shot back a snide and abusive reply that began “Dear Dago”; to another critic, he wrote that his mission was to stop the 13 million blacks and 5 million Jews in America from “running roughshod over the rights and freedoms of the 120 million white American citizens.”)