by John Egerton
No one Truman appointed was more fiercely attacked, however, than David Lilienthal, a liberal Midwesterner who had been a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority since 1933. The President wanted him to head the new Atomic Energy Commission, and thereby to control the secrets of the atom bomb. Tennessee Senator Kenneth McKellar, calling the TVA “a hotbed of communism” and Lilienthal the ringleader of the nest, tried every trick in his obstructionist bag to stop him, but Truman got his way.
A subtle but significant shift away from right-wing reaction could be detected in Harry Truman’s pattern of appointments, and in the more general tone and character of Southern newcomers to national prominence. Kentucky, for example, seemed to blossom with bright young men of political promise. Senator Alben Barkley, a close friend of Truman’s, was a stimulus to this surge of moderation, and so were Fred Vinson and Stanley Reed when they served together on the Supreme Court. But the younger Kentuckians were equally as impressive: Paul A. Porter, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission; Wilson W. Wyatt, chairman of the National Housing Agency; Edward F. Prichard, Jr., chief counsel of the Democratic National Committee; and A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the ex-governor and senator from Kentucky who in 1945 became commissioner of baseball—where he would help to open the way for Jackie Robinson and other black athletes to play in the major leagues.
By no act of subterfuge did Harry Truman pursue his liberal agenda; with characteristic directness he simply spelled it out, bit by bit, and the Southerners kept waiting, in a state of puzzled confusion, for the man to come to his senses. In the fall of 1945 he sent a domestic policy message to Capitol Hill calling for an expanded federal housing program, a universal health plan, a strengthening of federal wage and hour legislation, and a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission—the last like a red flag waving before the enraged Southern bulls. Practically every Southerner in Congress except the maverick Floridian, Claude Pepper, detested the very idea of the FEPC; strict equality in the job market was to them a surrender of a fundamental white advantage that they were determined to fight for to the bloody finish. Truman never gave up the effort to achieve permanence and power for a federal antidiscrimination agency overseeing employment, but the goal would not be achieved for many years to come.
What could the bemused Southerners possibly make of their President? He expressed disgust for “professional liberals,” calling them “intellectually dishonest … fakers … phonies,” and he didn’t like it at all when someone called him a liberal or a progressive—but that’s what he was. He revered the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, but included him at times—and Eleanor, and Claude Pepper—on his critical roster of phony liberals. Even more perplexing was Truman’s mixture of racist stereotyping and egalitarian thought, both exemplified in a single statement he once made in reference to Jimmy Byrnes and his colleagues: “Why does a South Carolinian hate to eat at a table with a nigger? It’s a prejudice, it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s there.”
The white supremacists would never understand Truman—and many blacks and white liberals would not get a much clearer fix on him, either. In the fall of 1946, with the election returns showing huge gains for the Republicans and a sharp tilt to the right in his own party, with mounting problems of labor unrest at home and Communist aggression abroad, with his fortunes fleeing and his critics right and left raking him over the coals, the President did a most remarkable thing. On December 5 he announced the formation of a fifteen-member Committee on Civil Rights to study and recommend new legislation aimed at protecting all segments of the population from discrimination and intolerance. (Edwin Embree and his Rosenwald Fund colleagues Charles S. Johnson and Will Alexander had suggested such a study in 1943, but no one at the White House was receptive to the idea then.) Walter White of the NAACP wrote later that Truman’s advisers warned him that this initiative “was nothing short of political suicide”—whereupon the Missouri mule gripped the bit firmly between his teeth and plowed on.
He had not acted impetuously or desperately, but deliberately, with anger building in him like steam in a kettle. One after another, the Southern racial atrocities of 1946 came and went in newspaper stories until the very frequency of them dulled the sense of shock and outrage they provoked. The blinding of Isaac Woodard in South Carolina, the “race riot” in Columbia, Tennessee, the quadruple lynching in Walton County, Georgia, the torching and dismemberment of John C. Jones in Minden, Louisiana—these and other lethal assaults, most of which targeted black men who had served their country in uniform, were finally more than Truman could take. “We’ve got to do something!” he told Walter White and others in a biracial delegation that called on him in mid-September.
A few days later he met with another delegation that included the fiery Paul Robeson, and the two men took an instant dislike to each other. Robeson had just electrified a New York rally with this challenge: “Are we going to give our America over to the Eastlands, Rankins, and Bilbos? If not, then stop the lynchers! What about it, President Truman? Why have you failed to speak out against this evil?” When they met at the White House, the question hovered over them, though Robeson didn’t repeat it directly and Truman didn’t acknowledge that he had heard it. That abrasive encounter shook the President, but he must have realized that White and Robeson—one using honey, the other vinegar—had served up to him the same indicting question: Why hadn’t he spoken out? The answer he decided to give was to appoint the new civil rights committee, with Charles E. Wilson, president of the General Electric Company, as its chairman. When they met with him to get their marching orders, Truman told them to deliberate without fear or favor, and then to bring him back a written report with recommendations for new laws and procedures to protect civil rights.
The committee included only two blacks—Sadie T. M. Alexander, a city attorney in Philadelphia, and Channing Tobias, a New York foundation officer and former YMCA executive. Two white Southerners were on the panel: Frank Porter Graham, president of the University of North Carolina, and Dorothy Rogers Tilly, a race-relations activist in the Methodist Church and the Southern Regional Council. The other ten members, like Charles Wilson, were prominent non-Southern white men. Throughout most of 1947, as the committee and its supporting staff worked on the study, President Truman’s time and energy were drawn elsewhere—to wrangles with the rebellious new Congress, and to rising concerns about Communist aggression in various parts of the world. In January, James F. Byrnes resigned as Secretary of State, citing poor health, and went home to South Carolina—not to retire but to position himself for a new role in domestic politics. On the national scene, communism loomed ever larger as a threat to peace and security. As Americans reacted with heightened alarm to what commentators had come to call “the red menace,” the President was under heavy pressure to take some sort of direct action.
Responding to the advice of Attorney General Tom Clark, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and others, Truman signed an executive order in March 1947 requiring all federal employees to swear an oath of loyalty to the United States and a vow of enmity to the doctrine of communism. In the hope of mollifying his political foes, the President had agreed to hand them this seemingly innocent tool. They would soon give him, in return, ample cause to wish he had never tried to soothe them.
Three months later, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Truman addressed ten thousand people assembled for the annual conference of the NAACP—the first such appearance a U.S. president had ever made—and said forthrightly that full civil rights and freedom must be guaranteed to all Americans. This nation could no longer tolerate the continued existence of insult, intimidation, violence, prejudice, and intolerance, he declared: “We cannot wait another decade or another generation to remedy these evils. We must work, as never before, to cure them now.” The historian David McCullough, writing almost fifty years later, said the speech was “the strongest statement on civil rights heard in Washington since the time of Lincoln.”
In late October, the Pr
esident’s Committee on Civil Rights issued its long-awaited report: To Secure These Rights, a 178-page document dissecting the manifold scourges of segregation and offering detailed recommendations to “cure the disease as well as treat its symptoms.” The policy of “separate but equal” development was a failure, the committee said. Citing Justice John M. Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson (“Our Constitution is color-blind”), the committee said the achievement of real equality in a segregated society “is one of the outstanding myths of American history.” To dispel the myth, the panel flatly recommended “the elimination of segregation, based on race, color, creed, or national origin, from American life.” It then followed with a number of specific proposals, including a federal anti-lynching law, abolition of the poll tax and other impediments to voting, creation of a permanent commission on fair employment, an end to all forms of segregation in the armed forces and in the District of Columbia, an end to segregation in public housing and public accommodations, and a cutoff of federal funds to all recipient bodies that continue to practice segregation.
Never before had an official agency of the United States government uttered an explicit rejection of racial segregation and its philosophical and legal foundations. President Truman, in his acceptance of the report, strongly endorsed its findings—and thus placed the executive branch in formal and official opposition to segregation for the first time. Six and a half more years would pass before the judicial branch crossed that great divide; the legislative branch would follow in fits and starts a decade after that. To Secure These Rights—its title lifted from the language of the Declaration of Independence—should have marked Wednesday, October 29, 1947, as a day to remember in the nation’s long pursuit of its venerable and elusive ideals, but the nation hardly took notice of it at all.
The South, too, would little note nor long remember the day. Its liberal remnant of black and white activists would take heart from the document and the Presidents endorsement of it, but many moderates would consider it too radical. The newspapers found fault, the scholars counseled caution, the churches were silent. The Southern Regional Council commended the men and women who made the study and the President for commissioning it, but added its voice to the mild dissent appended to the report by Frank Graham and Dorothy Tilly, its two Southern members; they favored “the elimination of segregation as an ultimate goal,” but opposed the imposition of it by means of federal laws and sanctions.
Still, a corner had been turned. As 1948 drew nearer—a crucial election year, a fateful year in many respects for the future of American democracy—the tattered factions of liberalism, almost as much at war with one another as with their true adversaries on the far right, faced the coming fight with faint hope and a deepening sense of dread. They had won some allies, gained some ground, established a solid base of support for their progressive ideas—but the ultraconservative minority, in the vanguard of which was the South’s radical leadership, still dominated political and social thought and action in the region. The liberals simply didn’t have the numbers to overcome their opponents. But they had sufficient resources to make a fight of it.
Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill (left) visiting with Carl Sandburg on the poet’s porch at Connemara, near Flat Rock, North Carolina (Illustration Credit 24.1)
Paul Christopher and Lucy Randolph Mason, two of the South’s most effective figures in the labor movement, worked closely with such homegrown progressive enterprises as Highlander Folk School near Monteagle, Tennessee. (Illustration Credit 24.2)
Mass arrests of black residents by Tennessee national guardsmen and state highway patrol officers followed the February 1946 outbreak of racial violence in Columbia. (Illustration Credit 24.3)
After a day and night of election-related violence in the McMinn County seat of Athens, Tennessee, in August 1946, ex-GIs bent on ousting the corrupt local government captured the jail, locked up some of the county’s public officials there, and overturned their cars in the street. (Illustration Credit 24.4)
About twenty men deputized by the McMinn County sheriff ended up in jail after they failed in their attempt to prevent local citizens from observing the vote count. The deputies barricaded themselves in the jail with the ballot boxes, but surrendered after a six-hour gun battle with reform-minded ex-GIs.
Using his full name, interim governor Herman Eugene Talmadge signed a Georgia white-primary bill into law on February 20, 1947, hoping thereby to circumvent federal court decisions affirming the right of blacks to vote. Among the watching legislators were Senator Iris F. Blitch (seated), later elected to Congress, and House Speaker Roy V. Harris (hand on document). (Illustration Credit 24.5)
Combat veteran Isaac Woodard was permanently blinded when he was viciously beaten by South Carolina policemen shortly after his military discharge in 1946. (Illustration Credit 24.6)
Walter White of the NAACP examining a cut on the head of Albert Harris after the young Louisiana mob victim and his father (left) arrived in New York in August 1946. Harris was beaten and left for dead near Minden, Louisiana; ex-GI John C. Jones, who was with him, was killed with a blowtorch and a meat cleaver by the lynch mob. (Illustration Credit 24.7)
Stetson Kennedy, author of Southern Exposure and an undercover agent in the Ku Klux Klan, posed in Klan regalia for this late 1946 photo promoting his book. (Illustration Credit 24.8)
Former Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall (left), in New York in early 1947 for the publication of his book, The Shore Dimly Seen, met Stetson Kennedy face to face for the first time. Kennedy had worked as a state undercover agent in the Klan during Arnall’s administration. (Illustration Credit 24.9)
When Paul Robeson came to Columbia, South Carolina, in October 1946 to take part in the Southern Negro Youth Congress, local black leaders were as much in awe of his outspoken racial and political criticism as of his legendary singing and acting skills. (Illustration Credit 24.10)
Bandleader and composer Duke Ellington, in Louisville for a public performance, greeted shop owner Horace Roth (left) and an appreciative crowd at Variety Record Shop, February 5, 1948. (Illustration Credit 24.11)
About a hundred Southerners, black and white, made a pilgrimage to Charleston on November 26, 1950, to honor Judge J. Waties Waring and his wife Elizabeth for their contributions to the cause of racial equality. In the courtyard outside the Warings’ Meeting Street home, the group gathered for this picture. Kneeling in front of the judge is his court bailiff John Fleming. (Illustration Credit 24.12)
June 1946 dummy issue of Pace, a prospective Southern news magazine, with U. S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson of Kentucky on the cover. (Illustration Credit 24.13)
William Faulkner, informally dressed and out of the spotlight, at the Oxford, Mississippi, world premiere of Intruder in the Dust, the movie based on his novel, in October 1949. (Illustration Credit 24.14)
Before his campaign for the presidency, Henry Wallace (third from left) sought support from liberals. On a visit to Austin, Texas, in 1947, he was photographed with Clark Foreman (left), humorist John Henry Faulk, and James Dombrowski of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (right). (Illustration Credit 24.15)
“Lend a Hand for Dixieland,” a Southern Conference for Human Welfare fund-raising drive, was kicked off in New York in September 1946 with actor Orson Welles and boxer Joe Louis as honorary co-chairmen. Louis (right) was the star attraction at a dinner attended by (from left) SCHW leader Clark Foreman, entertainers Frank Sinatra and Carole Landis, and others. (Illustration Credit 24.16)
Several board members of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare were photographed at a January 1946 meeting in Durham, North Carolina. Seated are James Dombrowski and Clark Foreman (holding newspaper); standing (from left) are Lucy Randolph Mason, Virginia Foster Durr, George S. Mitchell, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Alva W. Taylor, and Tarleton Collier. (Illustration Credit 24.17)
Southern Conference for Human Welfare and Southern Conference Educational Fund representatives c
onvened this assembly of regional progressives at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello estate in Virginia on November 20, 1948. SCEF president Aubrey Williams is center-right in photo, wearing hat. The group signed a Declaration of Civil Rights rejecting all forms of racial segregation. (Illustration Credit 24.18)
Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, was serving his first term when the Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress in 1946. (Illustration Credit 24.19)
Senator Estes Kefauver, Democrat of Tennessee, wearing the coonskin cap that became his victory symbol in the 1948 election (Illustration Credit 24.20)
A tired but happy Lyndon B. Johnson, having won a seat in the U. S. Senate with an eighty-four-vote victory over Coke Stevenson in the Texas primary, posed with his friend Tom Clark, the U.S. Attorney General, outside President Truman’s campaign train in San Antonio on September 27, 1948. (Illustration Credit 24.21)
Francis Pickens Miller (center), running against the Byrd machine for governor of Virginia in 1949, sought out the votes of industrial workers on a campaign swing through the state in July 1949. (Illustration Credit 24.22)
Longtime Memphis political boss E. H. Crump was a frequent visitor and bettor at the race-track in Hot Springs, Arkansas, throughout his political life. (Illustration Credit 24.23)