by John Egerton
All this extreme and extended reaction must have come as a profound shock to Truman—and to Clark Clifford, who had seemed so confident that the party regulars in the South wouldn’t break away. (He was, as it turned out, partly right; the rebellion took hold in four states—South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—but leaders elsewhere in the region confined their protest to verbal harangues and held on to their Democratic Party privileges.) The President took the heat without flinching, but he avoided the subject of civil rights for a time, and it was clear that the punch he had thrown and the blows he had taken in return had not whetted his appetite for more. Still projecting a confident air, he formally announced his candidacy on March 8.
Trouble seemed to await him at every turn. Ominous rumors of war echoed around the increasingly hostile relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. In April, Congress passed the Marshall Plan, a multibillion-dollar economic assistance and recovery program for war-torn Europe, but conservative Republicans moaned that it was too costly, and Henry Wallace Progressives complained that it was too militantly anticommunist. In May, Truman went against the advice of Marshall and gave U.S. approval to the partition of Palestine and the emergence there of a new Jewish nation, Israel. And in June, just as the Republicans were about to nominate Thomas Dewey and Governor Earl Warren of California—two highly regarded progressives in the liberal wing of their party— the Soviets raised the Cold War stakes by blocking the United States and its allies from land access to Berlin. The President’s response was to order an airlift of supplies to the cut-off city—a daily lifeline that would be maintained for almost a year. In foreign affairs no less than at home, it was a tense time of conflict for the accidental President.
Not all the news was bad. Labor-management conflicts were declining; a strike of coal miners ended quickly, and a walkout of railroad workers was averted altogether. The American economy had rebounded from the postwar period of adjustment, and a booming phase of productivity and growth was bringing prosperity to farmers, industrial workers, stockholders, and consumers. Eerily, the euphoria occasioned by an expanding economy floated above the nervous concern, bordering on paranoia, that more and more people felt about communism and the threat of another war. With so much trouble and danger lurking everywhere, the times looked and felt almost too good to be true—so much so that not much credit for the strong economy rubbed off on the President. As summer began, he looked like the lamest of ducks, with his left wing amputated by the Wallaceites, his right one cut off by the Dixiecrats—and some of his so-called friends about to roast the carcass.
Virtually all of the Southerners who remained in the middle with Truman made no attempt to conceal the fact that they would like to see him head for Missouri as soon as a new President was inaugurated. Some were every bit as vitriolic as the most hostile defectors, but lacked their willingness to resign and take up arms with the mutineers; Senators Russell and George of Georgia, McKellar of Tennessee, Connally of Texas, and Byrd of Virginia were the most conspicuous of these in-house rebels. Alabama’s moderate senators, Hill and Sparkman, didn’t take public delight in carving Truman up, but they paid him a personal visit to tell him they wouldn’t support him, and they urged him to step down.
Claude Pepper may have delivered the unkindest cut of all. The liberal Floridian had stayed with Truman when the Wallaceites pulled out— hoping, apparently, that a Truman-Pepper ticket might materialize. But when that seemed unlikely, Pepper and other members of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action tried to spark a movement to draft General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the war hero, as the man to push the President aside. Pepper even suggested dropping party labels and more or less anointing Eisenhower by acclamation. But the general refused, firmly and emphatically. (The act was not as altruistic as it seemed; Truman, as commander-in-chief, had given Ike an order to stay out of the 1948 political picture. The general’s statement of refusal to be a candidate was written for him by Truman aide Clark Clifford.)
Pepper then tried to run up a trial balloon touting his own candidacy—a gesture more futile by far than Wallace’s, or even Thurmond’s. Eventually, Pepper and the ADA came around to Truman in the November showdown, but the President never forgave the liberals for their fair-weather friendship—or the Florida senator for his transparent ambition.
These were just some of the machinations and intrigues to be revealed in that most uncommon of political campaigns. Truman spent half the month of June on a “nonpolitical” trip to California and back by train— partly to get in some caboose campaigning, and partly to get away from his critics (and this was before the Eisenhower-Pepper-ADA adventure). The Republicans met in Philadelphia while he was gone, and their choice of Dewey over Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, a classic conservative, was another bit of bad news for the President. Instead of conceding the votes of urban blacks in the North, the GOP had apparently decided to fight for them—and most black newspapers in the country, historically Republican as they were, would endorse Dewey. By the time 1948 was half over, Harry Truman and the Democrats were being buffeted on all sides by their enemies—and the nomination, the campaign, and the election still lay ahead.
Some things are hard to figure. Why would the President’s strategists counsel him to move out front on civil rights? The Progressives were already out there, and the Republicans were sure to play their old “party of Lincoln” tune—and the reactionary Southerners could be counted on for knee-jerk opposition to just about anything short of a return to slavery. On the face of it, you have to wonder how Truman thought he could outpoint all three of his adversaries on this issue. And why would the Republicans put up a moderate-to-liberal ticket instead of a more conservative one when they knew that Truman, an announced candidate and probable nominee, had already bet the farm on the most far-reaching civil rights program ever?
People who probe for deeper meaning in politics—planners, advisers, pollsters, pundits—are generally more inclined toward making educated guesses about the future than they are to offering informed explanations about the past. Politics, like economics and weather forecasting, is a very inexact science. But if you look upon the jockeying of candidates and political parties (those seriously intent on winning, anyway) as a search for the center, and if you think of civil rights as a middle-of-the-road issue in a democratic society, then the moves of the strategists and candidates and parties in 1948 begin to seem more logical.
Both major parties, anticipating a close election, saw the heavily populated states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois as the crucial contests—and in all of them, the newly emergent black vote was vital, perhaps decisive. Furthermore, they saw Henry Wallace on the left and the rebellious Southern Democrats on the right as the boundary poles that defined the playing field, and their instinct was to stay inside the lines and close to the center.
Truman had alienated his liberal wing by adopting a hawkish and aggressive foreign policy, and also by ordering a loyalty oath in response to the anticommunist hysteria; instinctively, he wanted to refurbish his image and restore some balance by giving a more liberal tone to the rest of his domestic program. As for the Republicans, their natural inclination was always to slide to the right, but they had to have some moderate and liberal votes in order to put together a majority, so they too were inching back toward the center.
And there the two parties met—backed into each other, you might say—somewhere near the middle of the field. Contrary to the preachments of the Southern reactionary leaders, that was the natural location of the civil rights issue as a question of public policy in America. The nation’s founding documents contained all of the resonant words: liberty, justice, equality, freedom. Since the Civil War, it was understood—written into the law, in fact—that the rights and privileges of citizenship belonged to every American. When the Supreme Court narrowly construed equality so as to permit its guarantee in separate facilities and services for whites and blacks, only th
e Southerners and some of their border neighbors wrote that arrangement into their laws—and then withheld the right of equality from the black minority.
Through all these twists and turns, the ideal of civil rights and civil liberties remained a fundamental principle of national life. Whether or not they abided by it, the Democratic and Republican parties dutifully gave it lip service. Not even in this overheated postwar season of presumed and alleged disloyalty did they repudiate the principle. Neither the Truman Democrats nor the Republicans ever seriously claimed that the effort to improve the civil rights of minorities in the United States was a wicked plot hatched by the Communist Party and carried out by its secret agents; on the contrary, they often felt a need to say and do more to ensure people’s rights, in order to negate the effect of Cold War propaganda exposing segregation and white supremacy.
Only in the South were people called subversives and conspirators for demanding the right to vote or the equal protection of the law. Elsewhere in the country, those suspected of communism were left-wing activists: writers, intellectuals, moviemakers, labor leaders. Almost all of them were white. They were accused of spying, lying, stealing government secrets, aiding and abetting foreign powers. Only in Dixie did the alleged sins of aggrieved blacks and their white allies read more like a recitation from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than an actual bill of criminal particulars.
Throughout the presidential campaign of 1948, events in the South revealed that reactionary extremism was spreading faster than the drive for political and social reform. It was the emergence of the latter, in fact—and particularly the issue of racial equality—that lit the fuse of the former. A classic illustration of this activist imbalance was provided in February at a conference on civil rights convened by the Southern Regional Council, and the sudden and extreme response it drew from right-wing elements in Georgia.
The council’s continuing struggle to have a secure financial structure, a broad-based constituency, and a clear consensus on objectives grew no easier as the end of the forties approached. The organization was operating on an annual budget of less than $50,000—and half of that came from the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which was about to terminate its philanthropic services. George S. Mitchell, the SRC’s executive director, was supposed to be getting a salary of $7,500 a year, but he was instead lending money to the council to cover its debts. Acknowledging that it had to have “the broad support of the people” to generate a movement that could bring about “a more prosperous and more democratic South,” the SRC was now appealing openly for rank-and-file members, but the response was disappointing. By the end of 1948, only about 2,700 people were on the rolls, and many of them were there in name only.
To make matters worse, the council was no nearer to agreement on what its official position should be on the question of segregation. In general, its black members wanted the organization to take a public stance against Jim Crow laws, while most of its whites, doubting the effectiveness of government coercion, were still hopeful that a combination of forces would eventually bring about that result voluntarily. Those two positions were exemplified by charter members P. B. Young of Norfolk and Virginius Dabney of Richmond, both of whom had more or less dropped out of the organization—Young because he concluded that the council would never speak out against segregation, and Dabney because he feared that it would.
It was in this atmosphere of stalemated inertia that the SRC convened a regional meeting in Atlanta in late February of 1948 to review the civil rights issue. (At about the same time, the council also published a booklet called “The Condition of Our Rights,” a state-of-the-South report on race relations that gave documentary proof of pervasive discrimination against blacks in the “separate but equal” society.) About four hundred people from eleven states attended the conference. Dorothy Tilly, whose identification with the SRC and the Methodist Church was now broadened by her membership in the Truman Committee on Civil Rights, was one of the speakers. (She spent much of 1948 traveling in the South, urging support for the committee’s report.)
In reviewing the work of the civil rights committee and the current state of Southern race relations, most of the speakers at the Atlanta meeting called for a comprehensive program of change—though not for the general eradication of segregation laws. Resolutions were passed urging an end to lynching, employment discrimination, and all barriers to the ballot, including poll taxes—by federal legislation, if necessary. A majority of the delegates also asked President Truman to revoke his executive order on loyalty probes of federal employees. And, in the day’s only direct reference to Jim Crow laws, they passed a resolution recommending that segregation in graduate and professional schools, public and private, be eliminated. The plan of the Southern governors to support regional higher education programs in certain fields through the newly formed Southern Regional Education Board was “designed to perpetuate the present pattern of segregation,” they declared, and should be opposed.
At an evening session of the conference, Ralph McGill appeared on a panel with several of the delegates and expressed what had become a virtual litany of liberal white editors across the South: A rising tide will lift all boats; growth and expansion and modernization of schools, housing, and health care are our first needs; industrialization and unionization will open employment opportunities; fairness and justice in law enforcement, the courts, and the jails and prisons must be guaranteed; inequality is an unacceptable condition and must be eliminated, but segregation is not and won’t be.
(A few days earlier, McGill had asserted on a national radio program that the Southern Regional Council, “including its Negro members,” was officially on record in opposition to federal legislation against lynching, poll taxes, and job discrimination. Walter White of the NAACP, listening in New York, expressed his outrage at the claim, and drew denials from George Mitchell and several black council members. The SRC had never opposed federal laws in the area of civil rights, Mitchell said; it had, however, urged the South to assume responsibility itself for guaranteeing the rights of its citizens.)
The booming voice of right-wing reaction in Georgia was raised six days after the SRC conference in an issue of the Statesman, a weekly paper published in the Atlanta suburb of Hapeville. (Its editor was listed as “The People” and its associate editor as Herman E. Talmadge.) The paper devoted its entire four-page news section to the SRC event; it was essentially one long diatribe, with pictures, against the “white and negro political agitators from over the South” whose “battle cry is EQUALITY NOW!” Several other right-wing papers, politicians, and pressure groups echoed these attacks on the “subversive” council.
Having been ousted from the governor’s office by the state supreme court in 1947, Herman Talmadge was primed and waiting for the upcoming special election in which he was challenging the incumbent, M. E. Thompson. At stake were the last two years of the term that Herman’s father, Gene Talmadge, had won before he died in 1946. Herman himself referred to this as “the restoration,” as if he were a king being returned to the throne—and in the 1948 balloting, he did give Thompson a royal licking. (Also in the race as a protest candidate was the Reverend Joseph A. Rabun, the ousted pastor of Eugene Talmadge’s Baptist church in south Georgia; he finished far behind.)
Though he had been thwarted in his attempts to lock black voters out of primary elections in the state, Talmadge vowed to use voting-list purges, literacy tests, and any other means at his disposal to hold the black vote to a minimum. “There are many good white people in our counties who can’t read or write,” he said, “but they own farms and they do their own thinking,” and therefore should be granted the right to vote. But no more than “ten or fifteen percent of our Negroes” should have the same right, he added. Blacks made up about one-third of the Georgia population at that time.
The restoration of Herman Talmadge was just one of many signs that the South was nowhere near establishing a favorable climate for political and social reform. Instead,
what seemed imminent as the spring and summer primaries approached was a nightmarish breakaway gallop by the Southern Democrats. When the political leaders of tiny Jasper County in rural South Carolina resigned en masse from the national Democratic Party as a protest against racial liberalism, Newsweek magazine took the occasion to assert that the South’s rebellious governors and senators “were not stirring up a popular revolt. They were reflecting it.”
That may have been true—but the leaders were vigorously fanning the flames. Governor Wright of Mississippi sounded an ominous note in May, just as the Dixiecrat radicals were getting organized. In a statewide radio speech, he said white Mississippians would never tolerate desegregation, no matter what the federal government said or did. Then, specifically addressing the state’s blacks, who made up more than forty-five percent of the population, he said, “If any of you have become so deluded as to want to enter our white schools, patronize our hotels and cafes, enjoy social equality with the whites, then kindness and true sympathy requires me to advise you to make your home in some state other than Mississippi.” Wright didn’t spell out what the consequences would be for those who stayed.
John A. Griffin, a thirty-six-year-old member of the Emory University faculty and administration in Atlanta, was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship in 1948 to complete his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin. One of the highlights of that year for him was a convocation and ceremony in Chicago to mark the formal closing of the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Thirty years after the late president of Sears, Roebuck and Company endowed it, the fund had spent its principal, as specified in the philanthropist’s will, and was preparing to suspend operations. Griffin, a native Georgian and a lifetime Southerner, was one of a relative handful of the fund’s beneficiaries fortunate enough to be present for the finale. His recollection of it was still vivid and particular more than forty years later.