by John Egerton
Behind that façade of unanimity, however, the Southern senators were a jumble of contradictions: statesmen and party hacks, prudes and lechers, teetotalers and sots, courtly gentlemen and court jesters, cavaliers and rogues, the pious and the profligate. Striking differences in demeanor separated a fire-breathing racist demagogue like Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo from a tight-collared reactionary like Virginia’s Carter Glass or Walter George of Georgia. Bombastic Texan Tom Connally, an internationalist, and his clownish colleague Pappy O’Daniel, an isolationist, had precious little in common but their arch-conservatism. Just as reactionary, and as dissimilar, were North Carolina’s senators, Josiah Bailey and Robert R. Reynolds. Alabama’s John H. Bankhead, Jr., was a diplomat and a scholar, a benevolent Saint Francis sowing seeds of peace and brotherhood, in comparison with a tempestuous rabble-rouser and buffoon like his Senate Agriculture Committee colleague Cotton Ed Smith of South Carolina. Next to all of these, Florida’s Pepper and Alabama’s Hill could not help but seem like a couple of left-wing radicals on every subject except race, and even on that they were considered soft—and suspect.
You might wonder why the Dixie senators remained Democrats when the big-city bosses and labor chieftains and Northern blacks were gaining a foothold in the party during Roosevelt’s last years. The answer is simple: Seniority and one-party rule back home assured them of a permanent power base in Congress, and they were loathe to give that up. The Democrats sank to a twenty-year low in the midterm elections of 1946, losing fifty-five House seats and twelve in the Senate. But while relinquishing control of both houses for the first time since the Herbert Hoover years, the party saw its Dixie members grow in relative strength, retaining virtually all their seats while the Northerners and Midwesterners were being routed. When the Democrats rode Harry Truman’s coattails to a surprise victory in 1948, the Southerners—most of whom hated Truman for his civil rights initiatives—would find themselves back in the catbird seat.
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Between 1944 and 1947, five Southern senators with 108 years of collective tenure—Glass, Bailey, Bankhead, Bilbo, and Smith—were removed from the Club by death or defeat. But five others with exactly the same number of cumulative years in office—Connally, George, Richard Russell of Georgia, Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia—would still be there into the fifties or beyond, piling up more than forty additional years of service while maintaining their rigid opposition to social change.
What’s more, the old right-wingers who departed as the postwar period was beginning didn’t exactly open the gates to a horde of liberals (the few exceptions notwithstanding). Among the new reactionaries of the forties who would last about as long, on the average, as their spiritual forebears were James O. Eastland and John C. Stennis of Mississippi, Olin D. Johnston of South Carolina, Spessard Holland of Florida, and John L. McClellan of Arkansas. (Joining them early in the fifties would be more soulmates, including Herman Talmadge of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.) On balance, the Senate in, say, 1955 would be less progressive and more reactionary than it had been in 1937.
The departure of Pepper and short-termer Frank P. Graham in 1950 would mark a low ebb for liberals in the Senate, even though a few men had risen to join them with something more than a racist screed as their calling card. Alabama voters chose John Sparkman to succeed the respected John Bankhead, and he complemented Lister Hill rather well. Lyndon Johnson, an opportunistic Texas New Dealer, moved up from the House in the wake of Pappy O’Daniel’s merciful departure. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee advanced from the House with Johnson in 1948, and four years later, Kefauver’s fellow Tennessean and former House colleague Albert Gore finally and thankfully sent Kenneth McKellar home from the Senate.
The performance of Congress in this period of gradual transition from depression and war to domestic renewal was not etched in glory, particularly with respect to the South and its social and economic needs. Fair employment guarantees, anti-lynching legislation, the demise of the poll tax, and new programs in education, housing, health care, and veterans’ affairs were all introduced and debated, but the Southern oligarchs saw to it that no transforming changes were embraced by the South, especially if they benefited the black minority. In the House, John Rankin of Mississippi celebrated twenty-five years on the job with a pledge to hold fast against any hint of creeping equality for those unfortunate enough to stand outside the protective tent of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism. And in the Senate, if there was any one person who symbolized the rigid and enduring intransigence of white racism, it was Rankin’s sulfuric brother in bigotry, Theodore G. Bilbo.
No word or deed from “The Man” was outrageous enough to weaken his hold on the voters of Mississippi, and no scandal could dislodge him from his perch. Short, jug-eared, potbellied—a “runt” by his own description—Bilbo dressed like a country undertaker, swore like a drunken sailor, ranted and raved like a sidewalk preacher. His rural audiences, sick and tired of being a national laughingstock (an image derived in large measure, paradoxically, from the senator’s antics), lapped it up as he viciously picked his enemies apart in a hoarse, raspy voice dripping with Southern syrup and smoking with Bilbonic acid. He was an orator, a comedian, a skillful entertainer—all talents highly prized throughout the rural South—and thousands of people, including some blacks, turned out to watch the spectacle, if only to find out what bellicose extremes he would resort to next.
Since 1934 he had honed his act as a lonely martyr who stood toe-to-toe with Yankee politicians, the urban press, and even Delta planters without giving an inch. No one mistook the depths of his bigotry, but that was only half of what accounted for his seemingly invincible strength. The other half was his crafty and calculated identification with the struggling white farmers of Mississippi’s hill country and piney woods against the aristocratic planters of the Delta. The two factions had no serious quarrel about race; blacks made up over half of the state’s population, and neither the “peckerwoods” nor the planters showed any inclination to free them from the bonds of white supremacy. But, as V. O. Key, Jr., observed in Southern Politics, Bilbo “went down the line for the New Deal,” while its social programs were anathema to the landed gentry who ruled the Delta (a vast territory, wrote Key, where “no great middle class … dulls the abruptness of the line between lord and serf”). Playing his anti-black, anti-planter tune to perfection, Bilbo masqueraded as a progressive. To William Alexander Percy, fuming in helpless frustration on his Delta plantation, the senator was “a little monster, glib and shameless, with that sort of cunning common to criminals which passes for intelligence.”
Not until Roosevelt was on his deathbed and the Democratic Party was veering to the right did Bilbo abandon all pretense of populist progressivism and vent his spleen on a reactionary crusade to preserve white supremacy. On a national radio broadcast in 1946, he said he was still a Klansman (“once a Kluxer, always a Kluxer”), and he threatened repeatedly during his reelection campaign that summer to punish “any nigger” who tried to vote. By his count, only about two thousand of the more than one million blacks in Mississippi were registered, but even that tiny number galled him.
His bigotry bedeviled more than just Mississippi; as chairman of the Senate committee on the District of Columbia, Bilbo was the ex officio mayor of Washington, and he did everything he could to keep the city segregated. His own long-term solution to America’s race problem was embodied in a bill he introduced in the Senate: the “Greater Liberia Act.” It called for the purchase of colonial lands in Africa and the mass deportation of millions of African-Americans to those lands.
As he and four opponents (none of whom challenged his racial views) roamed the dusty back roads of Mississippi seeking white votes in 1946, Bilbo concentrated his fiercest attacks on white Southerners who deviated in any degree from the segregationist party line. Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall was “the South’s public enemy No. 1.” Lillian Smith and her no
vel about an interracial love affair “sickened and disgusted” him. President Truman, “a Southerner by ancestry,” was “a traitor to his heritage.” And as for Hodding Carter, the Greenville editor who had long been his adversary, Bilbo wrote him off as nothing but “a miserable little Quisling … as bitter an enemy to our customs, ideals and way of life as any Russian.” (That must have come as quite a shock to Carter’s readers and his peers in the press; he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize that year for his editorials against racial intolerance.)
“I could have taken the easier road, but I’d have been a traitor to the South, to my people, to my white blood,” said Bilbo, clad in his well-tailored martyr’s cape. He breezed to victory in the first primary, carrying all but six counties and polling more votes than all his opponents combined. Before the general election, an intrepid handful of Mississippi’s eighty thousand black ex-GIs who had been systematically denied the right to vote sought in federal court to have the primary results invalidated, but the challenge was shunted aside. In Washington, members of both parties who were fed up with Bilbo said they would investigate charges that he had helped war contractors win bids and then had taken kickbacks from them. He was denounced publicly as “a disgrace to the Senate,” and in an unprecedented move, his colleagues refused to administer the oath of office to him in January 1947, pending the outcome of the investigation. (They did, however, approve continued payment of salaries to him and his staff.)
Discouraged, tired, and too sick to serve (he was suffering from cancer), the sixty-nine-year-old firebrand packed his bags and headed south to Mississippi, vowing to return and demand his seat as soon as he was well. From “Dream House,” his mansion on the Pearl River near Poplarville, he wrote and self-published a book that year that summarized his views on race, the fundamental obsession of his life. Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization was “an S.O.S. call to every white man and white woman in the United States of America for immediate action” to save their race. Bilbo, with the most serious intent, concluded that annihilation would be preferable to “intermingling”; better to see civilization “blotted out with the atomic bomb,” he wrote, “than to see it slowly but surely destroyed in the maelstrom of miscegenation, interbreeding, intermarriage, and mongrelization.”
As he lay dying from cancer of the mouth and throat in August 1947, Bilbo sent word for Leon Lewis, a black journalist with the Associated Negro Press, to call on him in his New Orleans hospital room. Their conversation, as reported by Lewis, was a model of Southern manners and civility—and evasion. “I don’t hate your people, nor do I deliberately fight their progress,” Bilbo told his visitor. “In fact, I feel I’ve done more for their progress in Mississippi than any other individual.” While acknowledging that he was “honestly against the social intermingling of Negroes and whites,” Bilbo expressed a belief that interracial unity and progress were possible in the South—where, he said, “there is room for all of us.” Was this a deathbed confession, a bid for absolution? If so, it was totally out of character—and as weak as it was tardy.
Congressman John Rankin was one of six ardent segregationists who ran in a special election that fall to fill Bilbo’s seat, but he finished far back in the pack with only twelve percent of the vote. The winner was a rather quiet and colorless country judge named John C. Stennis. Even Mississippi, it seemed, needed a respite from the racial wars.
It was abundantly clear by the summer of 1947, two years after World War II ended, that the South would never be led on a progressive march into the modern era by its politicians. From Capitol Hill to the far-flung county seats and town councils, Southern lawmakers seemed more inclined to march back to the days of feudalism. Of all the region’s senators, congressmen, governors, legislators, mayors, and councilmen, only a tiny handful had shown themselves ready and eager to step out front with reformist ideas and initiatives. Plans that might benefit minorities or women or the have-nots were especially controversial, and thus avoided.
More often than not, law schools, bar associations, and the legal profession itself—from whence most lawmakers came—seemed to line up on the side of resistance. The American Bar Association, historically and traditionally a lily-white group, resisted integration long after its national governing board finally relented in the late forties and let a token few black attorneys become members. There were exceptions to such rigidity, of course. Black attorneys working through the NAACP were consistently in the forefront of social reform, pressing to make the revolutionary tenets of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights instruments of that renewal. From New York and Washington, the bar association’s leading attorneys, Thurgood Marshall and Charles Houston, directed a twenty-year attack on segregation prior to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954. Only a persistent few resident black lawyers had managed to take up practice in the South, but from their thin ranks came several who acted with skill and courage to give the NAACP team the vital help it needed in rooting out Jim Crow discrimination. Equally as courageous and as helpful to the cause were the few white attorneys, scattered here and there, whose understanding of the law compelled them to cut against the grain of white opinion in those lonely years before Brown.
But the overwhelming majority of lawyers had no enthusiasm for the philosophy of social action rooted in law—in fact, it seems that most of them were resistant, even hostile, to such a notion. If the South was going to free itself from the dead hand of conservative tradition, it would have to find its standard-bearers elsewhere—in the White House, perhaps, or in the federal courts, or among the intellectuals in the university and the church, or in the black minority, or among left-wing activists. Help had been sought from these sources before, with results that were far short of spectacular, but signs of ferment could be found in many places, and so there was a sense of hope and anticipation, even in the face of discouragement.
The reactionary character of the lawmakers and much of the legal fraternity stood in negative contrast to one small but lofty segment of the profession—namely, federal judges. Not that all of them were liberals by any means, but think of this: From the mid-1930s on, the impetus for dismantling Jim Crow laws and expanding legal and constitutional protections against discrimination in the South came repeatedly from the studied opinions of jurists on the federal bench; even more remarkably, most of them were conservative white men of comfortable means and mature years, men born and raised and educated in the region—Democrats in the main, but some Republicans as well—and all of them, every one, having risen to the bench from service in the mainstream of political and social orthodoxy that many whites reverently worshiped as “the Southern way of life.”
A historical antecedent of this phenomenon was the career of Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. Born into a Kentucky pioneer family in 1833 and named for the most notable chief justice of the Supreme Court, he was appointed to that tribunal by Republican President Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877, and for thirty-five years his was an eloquent voice of conscience against the erosion of civil liberties. It was Harlan’s heroic, lonely dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 case that established “separate but equal” segregation as the law of the land, that would still be seen a century later as a beacon illuminating the most fundamental of constitutional principles. “The common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law,” he wrote. “Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. … The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.”
After the mid-1930s, with Harlan’s words as a background echo, the Supreme Court came more and more to the aid of individual citizens who had been denied their civil rights. Appointees of Franklin Roosevelt would make up a majority of the nine justices by the end of the thirties. Over the next three decades, the judicial branch of the federal government, through its careful interpretation of
the laws of the land, gradually moved the nation’s public policies and social practices into closer alignment with its constitutional principles. With Southerners Hugo Black of Alabama and Stanley Reed of Kentucky prominent among them, the justices took on some cases that dealt directly with the racial dilemma: exclusion of blacks from juries, segregation in colleges and universities, limitations on the right to vote. Later, when Harry Truman was in the White House and his appointees had joined the court (among them Tom C. Clark of Texas and Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky), decisions were handed down against restrictive covenants in housing, segregation on interstate buses and trains and in railway dining cars, and further efforts by the states to restrict voting rights.
But this was the U.S. Supreme Court speaking, a high and mighty tribunal in the most literal sense. Its members deliberated in monklike isolation, above the sound and fury; seldom were they exposed to the raw emotions of contending parties whose conflicts they were adjudicating. The sort of trench warfare that took place in the courts below was a lot messier and more abrasive, and the judges, ruling alone rather than collectively, were much more vulnerable to criticism. It was there, in the federal district courts of Shreveport and Austin, Nashville and Richmond, Tampa and Macon and Columbia, that the real drama of judicial give-and-take was played out. It was there, too, that a chosen few conservative white men sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States were compelled by conscience and professionalism (and, to be sure, by a dislike of reversals on appeal) to extend the fruits of democracy to all citizens. Some were galled by the necessity, others liberated by it. All were prodded by that instigating band of roving lawyers who lived in the bracing faith that the Constitution was on their side: Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP.