by John Egerton
Thomas Hoyt Davis, the judge who decided the Georgia white-primary case, was one of those home-guard jurists in the trenches. Born and raised in a small town near Atlanta, he had gone to college at Mercer, a venerable Baptist institution in Macon, and then had “read for the law” (an acceptable route into the profession in his day) in the office of Walter F. George of Vienna, fifty miles south of Macon. Davis settled there, eventually becoming a partner in the firm and filling coveted legal posts in the state and federal governments after George became a U.S. senator in 1922. Throughout the New Deal years, Davis was U.S. Attorney for the middle district of Georgia, headquartered in Macon. One of President Roosevelt’s last acts in the spring of 1945 was to name him to the bench in that district.
Hardly had Judge Davis donned his black robe when the Reverend Primus E. King of Columbus, supported by the NAACP, sued local election officials for depriving him of the right to vote in the 1944 Democratic primary—the only meaningful election in a state like Georgia, there being no effective opposition party. King sought damages of $5,000 and a judgment against the practice of exclusion. The case was scheduled for hearing in the federal courthouse in Macon in September 1945.
Both sides showed an acute understanding of the significance of this legal skirmish. A pressing home-front issue was being raised just as the world war ended. The black petitioners, armed with the entitling language of Smith v. Allwright, were determined to win the ballot; the white defenders, alarmed by this threat to their continued political control, were desperate to keep the large black minority subordinate. Judge Davis, at fifty-three a lifetime member of the ruling class, was being called upon to listen and interpret and finally to resolve the conflict with the wisdom of Solomon.
For three sweltering days, his courtroom was jammed with a racially mixed—and segregated—audience of interested Georgians from around the state. A young white attorney from Macon, Harry S. Strozier, gave the main argument on behalf of Reverend King and the NAACP, contending that the right of any citizen to vote in a primary, no less than a general election, was “a right secured by the Constitution.” Defense attorneys claimed that it was not the state but the Democratic Party, as a private organization, that had control of the process.
“What alternative do the Negroes have?” Judge Davis asked, and he pressed the point until (said one newspaper account) “counsel for the defense was forced to admit that under the present interpretation of the state primary, Negroes have no other alternative than to organize a party of their own or join some white group who may wish to fuse with them.”
A month later, T. Hoyt Davis delivered a twenty-nine-page decision in favor of Primus King, awarding him only a token $100 in damages but citing Smith v. Allwright to declare that the denial of his right to vote in any state-sanctioned election on account of his race was a violation of the Constitution. It was a signal victory for black citizens in the South, and for all Southerners—one small foothold at the start of a long and difficult climb to political equality. It isn’t clear from the record how costly the decision was to Judge Davis personally, but his friends and associates (including his mentor, Senator George) could hardly have seen it as other than a breach of trust at best, and at worst an act of treason. Unfortunately for the judge, he would not be remembered by scholars for this quiet act of valor, but for a later and less worthy decision declaring a 1957 federal voting rights act unconstitutional.
Still, the price of courage was not nearly so great for the Georgia jurist as it was for another federal judge, J. Waties Waring of Charleston. Raised in refined if somewhat threadbare gentility among the bluebloods of South Carolina’s queen city, Waring had all the right credentials for a patrician son of the Old South. His Episcopalian lineage reached back to seventeenth-century Charleston. His paternal forebears were slaveowners, aristocrats, Confederates, noblesse-oblige paternalists. Julius Waties Waring, proudly bearing a venerable family name, went through private school and the College of Charleston, read the law and then practiced it in a prestigious firm on Broad Street, joined all the right clubs and fraternities and exclusive societies, married and worshiped and voted as was expected of him—and did it all within the splendid isolation of the warm cocoon that enveloped historic old Charleston. Everything he wanted was there, and most of it within walking distance of his comfortable home on Meeting Street. He was sixty-one years old when South Carolina’s senators, Cotton Ed Smith and Burnet Maybank, both of whom he had supported and served, gave their blessing to his selection as a federal district judge. The courtroom he presided over, beginning in January 1942, was a five-minute walk from his front door.
For three years, Judge Waring gave his conservative neighbors little cause for concern. He did support black teachers in a couple of equal-pay cases, the first in 1944, but in the main he stayed safely within the tradition of his surroundings, building a solid reputation as a careful and efficient jurist. Then two of his actions shocked and outraged Charleston society. The first was his divorce and remarriage in June 1945; the second was his ringing declaration in July 1947 that South Carolina’s frantic efforts to bar blacks from the Democratic primary were unconstitutional.
Waties Waring was feeling trapped in a lifeless marriage in the early forties when he met and fell in love with a Northern society matron who wintered in Charleston with her husband. After a time, the judge told his wife he wanted a divorce, and she sorrowfully but dutifully went to Florida and severed the marriage. (So unheard-of was divorce in South Carolina at the time that the state didn’t even have laws on the subject.) His lover did likewise, and so, in a period of less than two weeks, Charleston was consumed with gossip about the judge who had ditched his old wife of thirty-two years and taken a new one, a twice-divorced Yankee fifteen years his junior.
Whether the Warings subsequently resigned from the Charleston social register or were expelled from it depended on whom you asked. Elizabeth Avery Waring, smart and attractive and supremely self-confident, gave no sign of wanting to be an inoffensive Southern lady; as the walls of rejection and isolation went up around her, she was abrasive and aggressive in the best Yankee tradition, and that confirmed the low opinion that others had formed about her. For his part, the judge was equally defensive and disdainful. He turned inward, working harder than ever at his job and spending all his free time with his new wife.
In 1946 he was on the bench in Columbia—and Elizabeth Waring was in the courtroom—when the white policeman who had blinded Isaac Woodard with a billy club was tried for violating the black ex-GI’s civil rights. The acquittal of Linwood Shull and the cheers of the white spectators sent Mrs. Waring to her hotel room in tears and nudged her husband closer to a break with his racist heritage. Over the next year or so, he did a number of small things that revealed changes in his thinking. He desegregated the seating and the jury roster in his courtroom, made the use of courtesy titles standard procedure, and hired a black bailiff, John Fleming, to call sessions to order. Several of his rulings indicated his growing concern about segregation and white supremacy. At home, he and his wife began to read some books that took on a new importance for them—Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash.
In June 1947, Waring presided at the trial of George Elmore, a black merchant who had sued election officials for denying him the right to vote in the 1946 Democratic primary; the Columbia businessman was represented by Thurgood Marshall. Barely two weeks after the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Texas in 1944, South Carolina’s Democratic hierarchy, called to arms by Governor Olin D. Johnston, had systematically stripped all references to primaries from the state’s legal documents, in keeping with Johnston’s vow to maintain white supremacy at all costs. (That was also the year that John H. McCray, Osceola McKaine, and other South Carolina blacks organized the Progressive Democratic Party, tried to seat a delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and offered McKaine as a general-election opponent to Johnston in the fight for Co
tton Ed Smith’s vacant seat in the Senate.) The white Carolina Democrats succeeded in keeping blacks out of the primary in 1944 and again in 1946. It was this blatant lockout that Elmore and the NAACP challenged in the spring of 1947, and that Judge Waring focused his wrath upon when he ruled in the case.
On July 12, the judge cut the last slender cord that tied him to the ruling elders of Charleston and South Carolina. “Negroes are voting in Texas and even in Georgia,” he wrote. “I cannot see where the skies will fall if South Carolina is put in the same class with these and other states.” He called it “pure sophistry” to say the state Democratic Party was not operating under statutory control. Racial distinctions had no place in the election process, he declared, and added, “It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.”
For good measure, Waring issued another ruling the same day in a higher-education discrimination case initiated by a black plaintiff. If the state didn’t open a law school at its public college for Negroes, he said, it would either have to admit qualified black applicants to the University of South Carolina law school—or stop providing legal education to anyone.
White Charlestonians reeled from the double blow. The Charleston News & Courier, whose editorial page editor was the judges nephew, Thomas R. Waring, Jr., heaped scorn on the decisions and the man who had written them. The judge and his Yankee wife were already pariahs in the clubs, the newspapers, the church, the neighborhood; now they were persona non grata in the state Democratic Party and the University of South Carolina as well. It mattered not at all that several South Carolina papers—the Morning News in Florence, the Record in Columbia, the News in Greenville—agreed with the voting decision and called on the Democratic Party to obey it. Nor would it matter that the ruling would be upheld on review by the appellate court in December and allowed to stand by the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 1948. All that really counted to the ruling elite of Charleston and South Carolina was that one of their own, a native son, had sold them down the river.
J. Waties Waring had come late to his epiphany, but once he saw the light of racial justice, he focused on it with all the energy and fervor of a new convert. There would be much in the months ahead to test his faith, for the worst—and the best—was yet to come.
Nothing takes place in a vacuum; every unfolding development has a context, and eventually, it all connects. Some things may simply happen willy-nilly, but what makes them meaningful or insignificant is the chain of circumstances to which they are linked in time and space. Like the Congress and the courts, the President of the United States was at least as much a passenger as he was an engineer on the train of postwar events. That fact shaped and colored what Harry S. Truman thought and said and did about the South in those years of turbulence and realignment.
He had not wanted to be President in the first place, and having the job didn’t do much to change his mind. Harry Truman was as plain and old-fashioned and uncomplicated as a Missouri mule—and as set in his ways, to the point of being rigid at times. His critics saw him as a petty, hot-tempered little tyrant whose combative demeanor hid deep feelings of insecurity. Even those who liked him saw his flaws; one said he was a modest man with a lot to be modest about. He had the misfortune to be an ordinary fellow from the heart of middle America whose soft-shoe dance with hat and cane happened to follow the classic theatrical performance of a renowned Yankee patrician who exuded charm and charisma. Two decades later, Lyndon Johnson, with a similar tough act to follow, would sing the same lament.
Truman had no patience with fakery and pretense. His understanding of original sin freed him to be a Baptist who swore and drank whiskey—but never condoned cheating or lying or infidelity. He was as scornful of liberals with soft hands and clean fingernails as he was of reactionaries who wrapped themselves in the flag or a white sheet. Liberalism to him was no scholarly abstraction, no romantic indulgence; it was a practical philosophy of fairness for all, a populist notion that rewarded honest effort instead of bootlicking or buck-passing. His Fair Deal domestic agenda was more than just a me-too imitation of the Roosevelt master plan—it was the unadorned essence of what the new President truly wanted to deliver: a fair deal for everyone. The difficulty he encountered in doing that was less a reflection on him than on those who blocked his way.
In the first three years of his presidency, Truman made some historic and highly controversial decisions that sparked intense criticism from all sides. He ordered the atomic bomb dropped, not once but twice, taking the lives of almost a quarter of a million people; he steered the United States into full support of the new United Nations; he championed the Marshall Plan for European recovery and the American occupation of Japan; he supported the UN partitioning of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; he articulated the Truman Doctrine of Soviet containment; he rapidly dismantled the mighty American war machine. On the home front, he outraged the left wing by requiring government workers to sign a loyalty oath renouncing any ties to communism—and infuriated the right wing by desegregating the armed forces and endorsing his civil rights committee’s broad condemnation of racial segregation in American life. He may have agonized over these decisions before he made them, but he was not consumed by nagging doubts or recriminations or pangs of guilt about them afterward. That was his way, like the mules: Keep plowing a straight furrow, and don’t look back.
It was inevitable that someone so resolute, so blunt-spoken and hard-headed, would clash with many of the movers and shakers who vied for power in the public arena. The nation’s postwar economy was reeling from a wage-price squeeze and soaring inflation, from shortages, strikes, and high unemployment. In his efforts to address these problems, the President fell into serious conflicts with labor leaders and corporate bosses, with members of Congress, and even with some of his own cabinet officers (including Secretary of Commerce Henry A. Wallace, whom he dismissed in September 1946). The right-wing press, from Henry Luce’s Time magazine in New York to Colonel Robert McCormick’s Chicago Tribune to the William Randolph Hearst empire on the West Coast (but not many Southern papers), regularly gave Truman unshirted hell; his enemies on the left, from the Americans for Democratic Action to the Communist Party, were hardly more charitable.
All this turmoil left the President feeling betrayed and abandoned by his friends no less than his enemies. He clearly didn’t like his job, and plenty of people didn’t like the way he was handling it; the ever-expanding public-opinion polls showed that his support had eroded to less than one-third of the electorate, and those results were emphatically confirmed when the Democrats suffered massive losses in the 1946 midterm elections. And with all he had on his plate, he still had to come to terms with his Southern colleagues in the administration, in Congress, in the courts, and in the states of the region. Their agendas and his had to be reconciled. The process would be wrenching, and the outcome would forever separate him from the diehard defenders of white supremacy.
The Southerners in Congress had gone into the postwar period with a sense of confident assurance that Truman would help them keep a tight rein on the region. They were counting on him as an ally, and no wonder: He was a borderline Southerner with a slaveholding heritage, and a descendant of Confederates with long memories; the word “nigger” rolled off his lips as easily as it did those of his Southern poker-playing cronies on Capitol Hill. But somehow, they failed to heed his commitment to fair play, and misread his expressions of moral outrage at the epidemic of racial violence that gripped the region in 1946. They thought he was just playing to the minority crowd, the nagging liberals, as politicians occasionally had to do. They thought wrong.
He did get off on the right foot with them, though, by calling James F. Byrnes back from South Carolina to be his Secretary of State. Byrnes’s long and varied experience in the federal government made him a logical choice for the post, even though he had left the White House staff in Roosevel
t’s waning months embittered by the President’s choice of Truman, and not him, as a running mate to replace the deposed Henry Wallace. The fact that there was no spillover of bad blood between Truman and Byrnes made it possible for the new President to reach out to the former presidential adviser. Byrnes, in league with his Southern friends, had long since shown his stripes as a narrow reactionary on domestic issues, but he was highly experienced in foreign affairs, having been at Roosevelt’s side in all his dealings with the European allies, and Truman desperately needed such a practiced hand.
Jimmy Byrnes leaped at the chance to get back to the fount of power (first in line of succession to the presidency, actually, because there was then no vice president; the law was changed in 1947 to move leaders of the House and Senate ahead of cabinet officers in this hierarchy). Privately, Byrnes had little respect for Truman—or so the President’s daughter, Margaret, would declare in a later book, in which she also noted Byrnes’s “extravagantly high opinion of himself.” The President was not unaware of his Secretary of State’s feelings, or of his ego, but he was able to keep things in perspective. Byrnes was “able and conniving”—but Truman needed him.
Other appointments won favor with the Southern bloc, among them Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky to be Secretary of the Treasury and Tom C. Clark of Texas to be Attorney General; both men would later be elevated to the Supreme Court, Vinson as Chief Justice. At the same time, Truman upset the Southerners by naming William H. Hastie to be governor of the Virgin Islands, a U.S. territorial possession in the Caribbean. It was one more first for the black attorney who had held several administrative and judicial posts under FDR, and who would move up to the federal appellate court in 1949. Ralph Bunche was another black official whose public service Truman continued, at the State Department; from there he went on to the United Nations, where he would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950 for his mediation of the Arab-Jewish conflict in Palestine.