Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Folsom, Senator Hill, Senator-elect Sparkman, the labor movement, and the Birmingham and Montgomery newspapers all called for defeat of the Boswell Amendment, but the voters, particularly in upper-class and working-class white precincts, sided with the racists; it was ratified by a margin of about twelve thousand votes. If that outcome sobered and quieted most of the amendment’s opponents, it had little effect at all on Jim Folsom; with a wink and a wave, he went about his daily rounds delivering his populist message as if nothing had happened. Big Jim Folsom cast a long shadow across the length and breadth of the state.

  He was an overgrown country boy with roots in the Pea River valley of southeast Alabama and later ties to Cullman in the north. In 1946 he was thirty-eight years old, a strapping six feet eight and well over two hundred pounds, a veteran, a former insurance salesman, a perennial candidate (having lost two races for Congress and one for governor). The voters had never seen or heard anyone quite like “Kissing Jim” Folsom. He was a handsome, mischievous widower who charmed the ladies; a gentle, garrulous giant who liked the common people (and made sure they knew it); a good-humored and easygoing fellow with a taste for liquor, an expansive instinct for camaraderie, and no apparent hangups about race or class. For the first time in Alabama politics, here was a leader who talked about making life better for everybody. What’s more, he went about his business as a public figure in a humorous and entertaining way, sometimes leading a hillbilly band and brandishing a suds bucket and a corn-shuck mop which he promised to use in Montgomery to scrub out the capitol and wash away “the political ring that is strangling Alabama.”

  For all his shortcomings as an organizer and a manager, Folsom had a message that resonated with the rank-and-file citizens of the state: better schools for the young, paved roads for the isolated, jobs and unions and the ballot for working people (white and black), and pensions for the elderly. There was “no such thing as too much democracy,” Big Jim assured the people. The message was nothing short of alarming to the industrialists, planters, bankers, lawyers, publishers, and others who made up Alabama’s privileged establishment. They nearly panicked when he led a field of five candidates in the first primary. Then, on June 4, they were stunned and shocked when James Elisha Folsom, populist prophet of a new Alabama, posted a sixty-thousand-vote victory in his final hurdle to the governor’s office.

  From his first day there in January 1947, he faced a wall of opposition—much of it from the reactionary right-wingers who hated his reformist ideas, some of it from honest critics who faulted his inexperience, and some, too, from liberal supporters who despaired of his fragmented and undisciplined attempts to turn laudable ideals into sound and effective programs. Folsom’s performance never matched his promise, but the people were starved for democracy, and they never lost hope in him; when he was again eligible to run for the office in 1954, they gave him their votes once more.

  Who, indeed, could understand Alabama, or know what to make of a character like Folsom? And who could ever explain how a state with two progressive senators and Big Jim in the governor’s mansion could have its Democratic Party so vanquished by renegades in 1948 that the Harry Truman–Alben Barkley ticket would not even be allowed a spot on the ballot?

  No, all the theatrics and controversy of postwar politics in the South took place in the cities and the statehouses; sometimes, tense scenes of high drama were played out in small towns, between the forces of entrenched power and groups of reformers who dared to challenge their tight control of public affairs. Athens, Tennessee, was one such stage. The McMinn County seat, a hilly town of about seven thousand people midway between Knoxville and Chattanooga, echoed with explosions and gunfire in the early evening of August 1, 1946, as a band of ex-GIs declared war on a corrupt courthouse gang that ran the county.

  The racial clash in Columbia, Tennessee, was still a fresh memory—in fact, the trials of people arrested in that incident were just then coming to court—when the remarkable chain of events surrounding a heated election campaign boiled to the surface in Athens and attracted nationwide attention. Though the affair was not at all typical of Southern confrontations in that volatile season of postwar adjustment, the intensity of it did emphatically underscore the pervasive yearning of common folks for democratic reforms—and the inclination of veterans in particular to act impulsively, decisively, even violently, on their instincts and convictions.

  McMinn was one of the predominantly white east Tennessee counties that opposed secession in 1860 and voted Republican for seventy-five years after that. Finally, in 1936, Democrat Paul Cantrell was elected sheriff, and over the next ten years, he and a handful of men displaced the Republican “royal families” that had built a political oligarchy there over the years. For all their surface differences, the two factions were remarkably similar in their use of machine power to sustain corruption and subvert the democratic process. By 1946, Cantrell, having moved up to county judge and then to a state senate seat, was the unchallenged boss of a courthouse gang that ruled by fraud and force; the Republicans offered little more than token resistance, and the majority of citizens had no voice or standing in either party.

  As more and more veterans came home from the war, they met with increasing harassment from local law-enforcement officers, particularly a strong-arm cadre of about fifteen deputy sheriffs who had a “fee system” incentive for making arrests. The deputies, reinforced on election day by special officers imported from surrounding counties, kept a tight rein on voting and then took the boxes of paper ballots to the jail, where no prying eyes could watch the machine count them and announce its re-anointment.

  In the spring of 1946, a small number of Athens veterans led by James Buttram and Ralph Duggan met quietly to form the GI Non-Partisan League. In May they drew four hundred ex-servicemen, including a few blacks, to a mass meeting at which a slate of five candidates was chosen to run in the August county election. Two of the five were Democrats and the other three Republicans, among them the challenger for sheriff, thirty-year-old Knox Henry, an ex-sergeant in the air force. The local Republican Party, having no other candidates, endorsed this slate. After a tense and torrid summer campaign, the Cantrell machine and the aggregation of GI rebels came to the showdown on Thursday, August 1.

  Close to two hundred deputized lawmen patrolled the precincts, and soon they clashed with poll-watchers deployed by the veterans. By early afternoon, reports of assaults and arrests were circulating. At one polling place, two veterans being held at gunpoint jumped through a plate-glass window and escaped; at another, several deputies were disarmed and beaten by GIs who took them far out into the country, relieved them of most of their clothes, and left them stranded. An hour or so before the polls closed, an elderly black man, Tom Gillespie, was assaulted by deputies after casting his vote, and when he tried to run away from them, one of the officers shot him in the back. At least three veterans were in custody when the balloting ended at 4:00 p.m. Promptly at closing time, the ballot boxes were picked up and rushed to the jail.

  Hours before that, though, some of the GIs had gone home to put on their battle fatigues and pick up weapons; others managed to get arms and ammunition from the nearby National Guard armory. Buttram and Duggan, the GI organizers, talked on the phone to Governor Jim Nance McCord in Nashville—himself a “Boss” Crump machine candidate for reelection that same day—but the governor, who had rushed troopers and guardsmen to Columbia the previous February, declined this time to intervene.

  The events of the afternoon were a call to combat. For three hours after the polls closed, the men milling restlessly around the GI Non-Partisan League headquarters seemed to be waiting only for someone to lead them. At about seven o’clock, twenty-one-year-old Bill White, wearing a navy uniform, got up and told the others he had “faced a thousand bullets for democracy” and he was ready to face some more “to get those ballot boxes back.” When he started toward the jail, two blocks down the street, the men fell in behind him with pistols, rifles and
bayonets, submachine guns, hand grenades, tear gas, dynamite, and one .50-caliber machine gun.

  Nobody knew exactly how many veterans and other combatants were in the streets of Athens that night, but the most-repeated estimate was two thousand, with another thousand or so spectators gathered out of range to watch the battle. The disciplined ex-servicemen deployed a company of about sixty men to the front line. They surrounded the jail. Shouted demands for the ballot boxes were answered from inside by shouted refusals. The commandos waited for darkness, some of them remembering, with a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration, how they had felt before the invasion of Normandy or the Philippines. At ten after nine, they opened fire.

  Fifty-five deputies were barricaded in the jail with three GI hostages. The sheriff and the rest of the deputies had escaped and fled, along with Paul Cantrell and his courthouse followers. The shooting continued until well past midnight. Finally, an ex-army demolition expert planted four dynamite sticks on the front porch and blew away the door to the jail. Within minutes the besieged deputies came out with their hands on their heads. Twenty of them were wounded badly enough to need hospitalization, but no one was dead. The veterans suffered no casualties.

  To the cheers of the spectators, the victorious servicemen marched their prisoners around the town square and then took them back into the jail and locked them up. C. M. Wise, the deputy who had shot Tom Gillespie in the back, was handled roughly by his captors, as were some of the others. A lynch-mob mood was in the air, but Ralph Duggan, in a stirring speech to the troops, reminded them that their mission was to recover the ballot boxes, and they had accomplished that. The boxes were promptly broken open, and enough of a count was made to ascertain that the reform slate had won an overwhelming victory. The winners were declared on the spot. Then, three respected local citizens were named to a committee to run the county government until the new officials could be sworn in.

  Out in the streets, meanwhile, a jubilant mob using axes and firebombs destroyed fourteen automobiles belonging to the deputies. The rampage was halted when, at three in the morning, the GIs announced that the jailed deputies would be released and guaranteed safe conduct to their homes. Only C. M. Wise was kept in custody. (Later, Wise would be the lone combatant in the Athens hostilities against whom criminal charges would be brought. He pleaded guilty and was given a one-to-three-year sentence in the state penitentiary. Gillespie recovered from his wound.)

  When daybreak came, Athenians, in a mood of relief and optimism, started cleaning up their battered buildings and streets. The Reverend Bernie Hampton, chairman of the three-member interim government committee, spoke for many others when he said, “I am prouder of my community today than I have been at any time since I came here.” George Goodwin, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal, captured the same spirit. “What happened here,” he wrote from Athens two days after the battle, “was more than mob violence. It was a revolution—a revolution in which the better element of this community threw off a ten-year-old yoke of armed intimidation and corruption.” (Two years later, Goodwin would receive a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the postwar South.)

  It would be immensely satisfying to report that the revolution in Athens, Tennessee, in August 1946, sent the torch of democracy out to every community in the South, there to burn forever with a clear blue flame—but nothing as dramatic as that ever came to pass. Some dividends did accrue to Athens and McMinn County: There was a greater level of citizen participation in government, elections were obviously cleaner, the sheriff’s office was reformed, and the courthouse was purged of machine-style politics. But the GI Non-Partisan League didn’t become a permanent new organization of grassroots democracy in action. Within a year or so, the Democrats and Republicans had politics all to themselves again, and eventually the Republicans regained their pre-1936 dominance.

  Even as the Athens insurrection was reaching its climax, Governor Jim McCord and Senator Kenneth D. McKellar were riding the Crumpmobile to another predictable Tennessee reelection victory party. Broad-based democratic participation as direct and dramatic as McMinn County citizens enjoyed that summer was utterly foreign to the experience of voters in Nashville and Memphis. Still, city sophisticates there found the Athens incident humorous; many of them dismissed it as a hillbilly coup, a zany drama much like the overthrow of some remote South American dictatorship.

  They missed the point. There was an imperishable message buried in that east Tennessee uprising, and though it would lay smoldering for almost two decades, it would not be extinguished. The essence of it was simple and straightforward: The ballot is the birthright of every citizen, and no force, however powerful, can forever separate any person who has not forfeited that right from the full and free exercise of it.

  The emergence of a few reform-minded governors and mayors, the court-ordered opening of primary elections to black voters, and the return of veterans to challenge the status quo in local and state politics were all signs of the postwar awakening, the stirring to consciousness, that was being seen and heard and felt across the South. The Athens episode notwithstanding, this was not a revolution, not by any realistic yardstick of regional change. It was nothing more than a turning, a modest realignment—and even that was susceptible to reactionary opposition. Still, the signs of movement were there to raise hopes—or fears—that the old patterns of power and control would never again be the same.

  “This time the Negro is in Southern politics for keeps,” wrote University of Florida political scientist William G. Carleton in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the spring of 1946. Court decisions and simple arithmetic were his assurance of that. There would be no sudden, sweeping transformation to democracy, he said; “the Bilbo type” would not disappear all at once, “but their number will be whittled down little by little.” Southern liberals “will not, like Hugo Black, need to be elevated to the Supreme Court in order to speak their real views on race prejudices.”

  Part of Carleton’s optimism was traceable to voter registration numbers. In 1860, no blacks had voted in the South. Eight years later, after the Civil War, more than 700,000 cast ballots—a total that exceeded the vote of Southern whites. By 1900 the black vote was back to near zero again. In 1932, at the dawning of the Roosevelt era, only about 50,000 Southern blacks were registered—less than one percent of the voting-age population. Gradually over the next twelve years, the number rose to approximately 250,000—five percent of the potential. In 1946, as Carleton and others clearly saw, there was a sudden surge of new registrations, and two years later, an estimated fifteen percent of adult black Southerners—some 750,000 people—would be included on the voter registration rolls.

  It was the warning siren set off by numbers like these that caused white supremacists in the Deep South to purge voter lists, raise court challenges, adopt new laws and constitutional amendments—do anything, in short, to prevent the large African-American minority from regaining the power of the franchise. The success of these tactics would be borne out by one overriding fact: In spite of the increases in minority voter registration, fewer than half a million black Southerners—not even one of every ten of voting age—actually managed to cast ballots in the crucial 1948 elections. It was no coincidence, either, that in the same year you could count the number of elected black officials in the region on the fingers of one hand.

  No single issue, no reform, was more important to all sides than the ballot. To blacks and white liberals, the right to vote was the prerequisite to every other reform the South so desperately needed. To white conservatives everywhere, from the county courthouses to the halls of Congress, the specter of a full and free franchise for five million African-American adults in the Southern states was terrifying to contemplate.

  4. Old-Guard Politics

  The peculiar set of historical circumstances that created the Southern bloc in Congress in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still worked to maintain that tight little circle throughout the Roosevelt-Truman era, and for a doze
n years or more beyond that. Repeatedly in these pages, the pillars of that construction have stood out in sharp relief: the poll tax, the white primary, one-party politics, race-class ideology, the seniority system in Congress. An elaborate mythology sustained the motley assortment of ensconced Southerners in Washington, and provided their faithful followers with a stone tablet of sacrosanct beliefs: the Lost Cause, the common Yankee enemy, Jim Crow segregation, states’ rights, the solid South, and the undefiled purity of the white female.

  What appealed to the political mind of the Southern officeholder in that century-long winter of the soul was not democracy but its opposite: the concentration of power in as few hands as possible. The way to get power and keep it, so the wise men said, was to control the size of the electorate by excluding blacks, discouraging low-income whites, and maintaining the subordinate status of women—and then to rule with enough force and fear to stifle dissent. The incumbent Southern politicians talked a lot about state sovereignty, but what they practiced was the sovereignty of kings and lords and masters, the reign of a chosen few over the many.

  All the veneer of solidarity and the rhetoric that propped it up could easily lead you to the belief that the Southerners in Congress were true lodge brothers, if not blood kin, and that they thought and acted as one on all the important issues of the day. Occasionally a stray sheep—a Claude Pepper, a Lister Hill—might get past the fence and mingle with the wolves on an issue like health care or federal aid to education, or on a confirmation vote for a liberal nominee like Aubrey Williams. But the emergence of civil rights as a public policy issue in the 1940s caused the Southerners to tighten their grip on the strays. Thereafter, whenever a subject was directly and unavoidably racial and unanimity was deemed to be vital to a successful defense against it, even the most liberal of Southern senators found it almost impossible to break ranks. Not one of them endorsed the Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision affirming the voting rights of African-Americans, or the recommendations of President Truman’s special panel on civil rights in 1947, or the President’s civil rights legislative package the following year.