by John Egerton
On the domestic scene, the United States was drifting to the right in reaction to world events. The Soviet Union, never esteemed by American conservatives, was quickly relegated from World War II ally to Cold War adversary. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, and other forces within the federal government stepped up their activities as spy chasers, and countered the espionage work of the Communist world with secret ventures of their own. Tensions between management and labor over jobs and wages deteriorated into verbal and sometimes violent battles punctuated by slanderous assertions of treason; the American labor movement was under heavy pressure to disavow communism and take a patriotic turn to the right. Suddenly, anticommunism was not just a rumbling bass note, like distant, rolling thunder; it was a howling crescendo in American political life.
For many a left-wing organization like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the consequences were enormous. It was not that they changed their ways of thinking and acting, and took up a more radical and adversarial and unpopular stance; what really changed were the rules of the game. The pressure for political and social conformity increased, and dissent was equated with disloyalty. In the South, anticommunism raced through the culture like an electrical current. Its power to shock and stun was demonstrated in dramatic fashion by the example of SCHW and its relationship to organized labor.
The most intimate ties had always bound the SCHW to the labor movement, and particularly to the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Many Southern CIO leaders, including William Mitch, Paul Christopher, and Lucy Randolph Mason, were influential figures in the Conference. The SCHW also tried to stay on good terms with the rival American Federation of Labor, and even saw itself as a potential bridge for the eventual reconnection of the two confederations. In April 1946, the more liberal CIO announced the beginning of its second “Operation Dixie” organizing drive (it had conducted another such campaign four years earlier), and the following month, the AFL started a Southern drive of its own. But labor was already feeling the pinch of anticommunism, and when Van A. Bittner, director of the CIO’s Southern initiative, announced the plan to the press, he went out of his way to say they wanted no help from Communists or Socialists—and added, “That goes for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare and any other organization living off the CIO.” AFL leaders, guarding the right flank, quickly upped the ante by characterizing the CIO itself as a hotbed of communism.
Those two blows—one from the CIO’s Bittner, and the other delivered by George Googe of the AFL, a former vice president of SCHW—were devastating to Clark Foreman, Jim Dombrowski, and others who thought their relationship with the unions was unbreakable. Helplessly they saw Mitch and Christopher and Mason lose influence in the CIO as Bittner climbed. The unions not only cut off most of their financial aid to the SCHW; they also fell away from their prior commitments, nurtured by the conference, to embrace integration and racial equality. As Foreman put it later, “the leaders of ‘Operation Dixie’ resorted to opportunism in the hope of making the CIO respectable in the South.” Needing even less prodding from the right, the AFL did the same.
The loss of union money and members had many repercussions for the conference. The field organizing work of Osceola McKaine and Witherspoon Dodge, so successful in the beginning, was now at a standstill. The two men had been recruiting members not only for the SCHW but for the unions as well—and pushing voter registration for good measure. The labor movement had funded these efforts. But McKaine and Dodge struggled through the summer without receiving salary checks or expense money; finally they had to resign.
The Southern Conference had suffered a crippling reversal of fortune, swift and unexpected, but the full effect wouldn’t set in until later. In the fall of 1946, the leadership decided to move the organization’s headquarters from Nashville to New Orleans (thinking, mistakenly, that the cosmopolitan old city might provide a less hostile environment). The fourth South-wide convention of the SCHW—and the first since the 1942 meeting in Nashville—was booked into the city auditorium of New Orleans for three days, beginning November 28.
More problems arose. City officials, giving in to local protests, canceled the auditorium lease to prevent a racially integrated assembly, and only a last-minute move to the hall of the local carpenters’ union saved the day. Fewer than three hundred official delegates registered, though upwards of twelve hundred people attended the opening session. The speakers included Senator Claude Pepper, Walter White of the NAACP, Mary McLeod Bethune, Aubrey Williams, and Georgia’s lame-duck Governor Ellis Arnall, recipient of the Conference’s Thomas Jefferson Award. For the first time, Frank Porter Graham and Eleanor Roosevelt were absent; there was no telegram of support from the White House, as in past years, and the CIO delegation was greatly diminished. But the most troubling development arose after the convention adjourned, at a meeting of SCHW’s officers and executive committee.
To Jim Dombrowski’s complete surprise, Clark Foreman proposed— and the committee affirmed—a plan to widen the distinction between SCHW and the Southern Conference Educational Fund, which had been established earlier in 1946. In effect, Foreman wanted SCHW, under his leadership, to become a national political action committee for left-wing causes (including Henry Wallace’s bid for the White House); the Washington and New York chapters would serve as its principal bases. Dombrowski didn’t figure in those plans; his role would be to direct SCEF and its narrower regional agenda. The way he and many others saw it, he was being offered a sop, a consolation prize.
In their five years of close association, Foreman and Dombrowski had not grown closer. They were quite different in temperament and personality, with Foreman more of a political schemer (even his friends acknowledged that he was sometimes aggressive, ruthless, devious, manipulative), and Dombrowski more inclined to the quiet, persistent, stubborn pursuit of an idea or a principle. In the months that followed, the reorganization was delayed, and a compromise preserved the status quo while each man rallied support from within the organization. More people departed, including Mrs. Bethune, Lucy Mason, and Margaret Fisher, director of the conference’s strongest state chapter, in Georgia. Thus stalemated, the SCHW limped through the first half of 1947 with its loyalties divided and its resources drained.
By late spring, Foreman was poised to refocus the energies of the SCHW into the Wallace campaign, which was by then a virtual certainty. Dombrowski was still resistant to reorganization, but at length he did agree to leave SCHW in favor of SCEF. Before either of them had made a move, however, one more problem landed in their laps. In an apparent effort to embarrass both Henry Wallace and the SCHW, the House Un-American Activities Committee in June published a lengthy report, allegedly based on nine years of undercover work, condemning the Southern Conference for Human Welfare as a “most deviously camouflaged Communist-front organization.”
Condemnation of the report was widespread, from the Southern press to the Harvard Law Review, but great harm was done nonetheless. Among the many people smeared by innuendos, half-truths, and unsupported assertions of fellow-traveling and disloyalty were Foreman and Dombrowski, Frank Porter Graham, and Herman Clarence Nixon, one of the original organizers of the conference. Nixon’s untenured faculty position at Vanderbilt University was jeopardized when publisher James Stahlman of the Nashville Banner, a university trustee, tried—but failed—to get him fired. Ralph McGill, who had a weakness for the soft soap of the red-hunters, also took up the attack on the SCHW, suggesting in his column that the organization was Communist-infiltrated. He later printed a partial and narrowly technical retraction of his assertions after being threatened with a lawsuit.
A long season of anticommunist reaction had begun in the United States. That probably would have been enough, by itself, to destroy a small and vulnerable organization like the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, but its demise was hastened by self-inflicted wounds. Still and all, SCHW would hang on until the end of 1948. Ironically, the Southern Co
nference Educational Fund, the orphaned “weak sister” in Clark Foreman’s scenario, would last for a lot longer than that.
The new rules of the Cold War game were especially penalizing to the Southern Conference, but they were also hard on the more moderate Southern Regional Council, and on others interested in reformist ideas and progressive change. SRC had a fairly strong and diverse base in Atlanta, primary support from academic and religious circles, and good connections with the press; moving cautiously, it played for time and a change in the political climate. Elsewhere in the region, few if any organizations made much headway in advancing a liberal agenda in the overheated months of 1947 and 1948.
The Southern Tenant Farmers Union had entered the 1940s in a state of impotence and disarray, buffeted by internal conflict over socialism and communism and external hostility to unions of any kind, let alone one that practiced racial equality. Thanks largely to the sympathetic help of Aubrey Williams, the National Youth Administration director, Mitchell worked for a couple of years with the NYA in Washington before resuming leadership of the shell-shocked STFU. In 1948 the tiny union was saved from oblivion by its eleventh-hour conversion into the National Farm Labor Union, an affiliate of the AFL; Mitchell would run it on a shoestring from a slum-area office in Washington for twelve years before returning to the South. Though the irrepressible Mitchell was active in the labor movement for almost two more decades, neither he nor the Southern Tenant Farmers Union would be instrumental in the region’s postwar struggle for reform.
Howard Kester, one of Mitchell’s closest allies in the STFU and another of the old-school radicals of the 1930s, went through a similar eclipse after the war. Throughout the forties and early fifties he held a variety of jobs, mostly in the South, all the while keeping an active hand in the tiny Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, which he and a handful of others had founded back in 1934 as a liberal expression of their religious faith. Kester was a pioneer among white Southerners working openly for racial integration, starting as a student YMCA leader in the 1920s. His low profile in the postwar years may have resulted in part from a loss of stamina after more than twenty years of activist involvement. No doubt it was also a consequence of the growing hostility to social progressivism in the South.
And then there was the Highlander Folk School. Others, like Don West and Jim Dombrowski, had come and gone from the Tennessee training center for adults, but cofounder Myles Horton remained. By war’s end, Highlander was serving mainly as an instructional component for organized labor. Lucy Mason and Paul Christopher of the CIO were members of its board, and so was George Mitchell of the Southern Regional Council, a former CIO official. The AFL also made use of the school’s facilities, and both groups accepted (though at times without much enthusiasm) Highlander’s commitment to racial inclusion and equality in its operations.
When the Cold War blew its frosty breath on labor, Highlander got the same stiff-arm treatment from both the AFL and the CIO that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare received. When the going got tough, labor turned out to be disappointingly similar to other institutions (the church, the university, the press): strong on ideals in the abstract, but weak on their actual defense. And there was another similarity: Many Southern labor officials who worked for change in the region in the thirties and forties—Mason, Christopher, William Mitch, Ernest Delpit, H. L. Mitchell, and others who followed their liberal example, including Steve Nance, John Ramsey, and William Dorsey—proved to be more committed to the ideals of racial and social equality than were the institutions for which they worked. Most of these men and women continued as individuals to support and serve Highlander, the SRC, the SCHW, and other liberal initiatives in the region long after the CIO and the AFL had abandoned ship.
In all of the organizations that struggled to extend and expand the liberal-progressive initiatives of the thirties into the post-World War II period, a familiar litany of common failings could be heard. Whether radical or moderate, aggressive or low-key, they were plagued by a chronic shortage of money and members. None of them managed to raise funds in the South as successfully as they did among liberals in the North, and none could have survived for long without those Yankee dollars. What’s more, they couldn’t put together anything that approached the dimensions of a mass movement in the South—and without the numbers, they couldn’t get the press or the populace to take them seriously as an influential force for change.
Failing these two crucial tests, the Southerners then reduced their prospects for success still further by fighting among themselves almost as tenaciously as they battled their common enemies. From one small and resource-poor group to the next—and even within the ranks of some, like the Southern Regional Council and the two wings of the Southern Conference—people who desperately needed to join forces often spent their energy drawing swords against one another. For the right-wing reactionaries who were starting to play their anticommunism card, this competitive and divisive behavior of their enemies was a welcome windfall.
7. Anticommunism, Southern-Style
On Monday, March 4, 1946, President Harry S. Truman and Winston S. Churchill left Washington’s Union Station on a special train bound for Fulton, Missouri, where Churchill, the wartime prime minister of Great Britain, was to deliver a major address the following day. The event had been in the planning stages for weeks. Westminster College in Fulton, a tiny Presbyterian school for men, had enlisted Truman, Missouri’s favorite son, to write a note of encouragement on the formal invitation. To their surprise and delight, Churchill promptly accepted.
His ruling Conservative Party had suffered a stunning election loss to the Labourites in mid-1945, demoting him unceremoniously from prime minister to leader of the opposition. But the Churchill name and face and voice were still virtually synonymous with Great Britain itself, and his personal popularity and influence had hardly diminished at all. As he followed postwar developments around the world, Churchill had grown increasingly worried about Communist ambitions and intentions. For months he had wanted a high-visibility forum in the United States to say what was on his mind about East-West relations; Truman’s presence on the Missouri platform with him would ensure maximum exposure.
With a dozen White House staffers and more than forty members of the press in the traveling party, Truman and Churchill settled into the Ferdinand Magellan, the late President Roosevelt’s armor-plated private coach, for the overnight journey. An ample store of supplies had been laid on: liquor, food, playing cards, Churchillian cigars. Before the train had crossed northern Virginia, the two luminaries had shed their coats and their formality; it was “Harry” and “Winston” the rest of the way. They and some of their aides kept a friendly game of poker going until about three o’clock in the morning.
The spirited socializing masked Churchill’s seriousness of purpose. His speech had been carefully prepared and thoroughly discussed in advance by both British and American officials, including Truman. They all knew this was to be no windy, platitudinous little talk, but a serious exploration of what should be the U.S.-British response to world communism. Churchill would later call the Westminster speech the most important of his career—a remarkable assessment, considering his fame as an orator.
Standing before the assembled crowd in his scarlet Oxford robe, he entered into the substance of his remarks with praise for his wartime ally Joseph Stalin and the people of Russia. But then, speaking in that universally familiar tone and cadence that were his trademark, Churchill proceeded to lay out his principal theme: An “iron curtain” had descended across the continent of Europe; behind it, to the east, was the “Soviet sphere,” largely controlled by the Communist Party from the Kremlin in Moscow; the “expansion of their power and doctrine” was a threatening development that called for a strong, vigilant union of the democratic states in the West as a bulwark against Communist aggression.
Thus, in a little college gymnasium out in the heartland of America, the Cold War was acknowledged and joined, more o
r less officially, by the most famous spokesman in the Western world, and by his guide and host, the President of the United States. The speech was criticized in the press and in Congress for its harsh, somber tone. Up to that point, public opinion in the United States still favored an accommodation with the Soviets, our allies in the war. But right-wing reaction against communism had blossomed in this country almost simultaneously with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and now it was stronger and more virulent than ever. Churchill’s pronouncements gave the anticommunist movement a measure of hope and respectability; from that day on, Stalinist Russia would be held up to the American people as an outlaw state, and the stigma of communism would become a national obsession.
We know far more now than we did then about Joseph Stalin and his dictatorship. Oppression, forced labor, denial of basic human rights, mass extermination of “enemies of the people”—all these and more were brutal elements of the terror that reigned in the secret world of international communism. From a post-Cold War perspective—and especially from the vantage point of the winners—the evils of Stalinist butchery and Communist imperialism are a stain on human history; they cry out for condemnation.
The Soviet strategy for expansion in the wake of World War II was no mirage; what alarmed Churchill (even more, apparently, than it did Truman and his Secretary of State, James F. Byrnes) was a pattern of aggression that would soon be apparent all around the globe. The Communists seemed to be everywhere, grabbing for power—in Czechoslovakia, in Korea, in Iran, in Greece and Turkey, in France and Italy. Within a few years, the Communist Mao Tse-tung would finish pushing the Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek out of China, and one-fourth of mankind would be added to the swelling red sea. Even in the United States there were Soviet spies and espionage agents at work, sent here to steal secrets, to probe the weaknesses of the established government, and to look for vulnerable pressure points where internal disruption might be fomented.