Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  The white liberals in Georgia, and their black allies as well, were strung out along a continuum that stretched from Lillian Smith on the left to Ralph McGill on the right. Smith’s views were expressed in a long letter published in the New York Times early in April of 1948. “I cannot be heard in Georgia,” she complained, “even in the letter columns”—to which the Constitution replied in a snippy note on its letters page, “We have no record or recollection of ever having received a letter from her.”

  In tone and content, Smith’s message in the Times was at least as hard on liberals as on reactionaries. “Georgia, U.S.A., still has a lot in common with Georgia, USSR,” she wrote, citing one-party totalitarian rule as an indicator. But that didn’t explain why Southern liberalism “maintains its old grim silence” while the demagogues, with “the same tricks Stalin uses,” give their docile masses “an external enemy to hate (the damyankee), an internal enemy to fear (the Negro),” and an iron curtain to hide the mess from public view. “It is only the liberal who can win against the demagogue, whether Fascist or Communist,” she declared. But, she continued, while the demagogues are “fanning hate, giving the green light to violence by their almost traitorous incitements against their own national government [the liberals], stand by silently,” leaving the way open for the Communists to exploit the situation. “It is our caution, our lack of energy, our moral impotence and our awful if unconscious snobbery, that make demagoguery unafraid of liberalism,” she concluded. “We just don’t love human freedom enough to take real risks for it.”

  Ralph McGill hated communism too, but that didn’t bring him any closer to Lillian Smith, whom he ignored in public and dismissed in private as a shrill, meddlesome radical. Though he ridiculed the Dixiecrats, McGill also kept up his attacks on the NAACP and Walter White, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Henry Wallace, and the civil rights program of President Truman—particularly the call for a permanent federal agency to ensure and enforce fair employment practices.

  More revealing, though, were the Atlanta editor’s articles in national magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post. There, he sounded much more like a regular liberal Democrat. “Examination reveals the Truman recommendations, aside from the FEPC, to be relatively mild,” he wrote in the Post in May of 1948. “It is highly probable that had not the South reacted so immediately and with such violence, Negro leaders and organizations would have protested the proposals as weak and mealy-mouthed.” Few Southerners seemed to realize, McGill said, that with the opening up of the ballot to blacks, “the Supreme Court has already smashed the old political pattern. No amount of feudal party loyalty will put it back together again.”

  Between McGill and Smith, Georgians who longed for the South to face up to its caste and class and color problems tried to find some program to follow that they could think of as neither a suicidal sellout to the left nor a reactionary cop-out to the right. The only such program around, and the one that almost all the liberals finally embraced (including, ironically, both McGill and Smith), was the national Democratic Party that Harry Truman would lead into battle in November. That’s also where most of the Southerners writing for national publications came out, including Henry Lesesne in the New York Herald-Tribune, Thomas Stokes in his syndicated column from Washington, and Helen Fuller and Thomas Sancton in The New Republic. Sancton said the Dixiecrats, in mounting “a challenge as serious as the Populist movement” of the 1890s, were intent upon “making a cruel amalgam of the Russian question and the race question.”

  Alabama’s traditional liberals were so fragmented that they made their Georgia neighbors seem like one big happy family. At one end stood the backsliding John Temple Graves, the Birmingham columnist who had introduced Hugo Black at the first Southern Conference for Human Welfare meeting; his pitch now was a reactionary call for Southern politicians to “seize the balance of national power” by bolting from the Democratic Party and holding out for concessions to preserve and protect white supremacy. “This is the witching hour,” he wrote. “Not since the War Between the States has there been such an opportunity” for the Southern ruling class to prevail.

  And at the other end was Aubrey Williams, the New Deal Populist turned publisher. In Montgomery, he and another native Alabamian, editor Gould Beech, bankrolled by a couple of wealthy Northerners, Marshall Field and James P. Warburg, had given the sagging Southern Farmer a new lease on life. The monthly tabloid was now an entertaining farm-family magazine and a liberal political journal rolled into one, and its paid circulation soared to more than a million copies. At first critical of Truman for his anti-Soviet foreign policy and his domestic surveillance of federal employees, the paper came around to support the President in the 1948 election. (The fifty-fifty partnership of Williams and Beech had broken up, in the meantime, because of financial and personal differences.)

  It was Truman’s stand on civil rights, more than any other single factor, that kept Williams in the Democratic camp, much to the consternation of friends like Virginia Foster Durr, who was a protest candidate for the U.S. Senate on the Progressive ticket in Virginia that fall. Even Williams’s collegiate sons, Aubrey Junior and Morrison, were actively working for Wallace. But the elder Williams had long considered race relations the South’s paramount problem, and because of that he wouldn’t desert Truman. “The central evil in the South is segregation,” he editorialized in the Farmer. “Until decent Southerners face this fact, little progress will be made toward solving any other problem in the South.” The same deep concern had also drawn him back into an active role in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in 1946, and when the SCHW folded in 1948, Williams ended up as president of its surviving subsidiary, the Southern Conference Educational Fund.

  To Hodding Carter in Mississippi, the abolition of segregation was still unthinkable. Sounding on almost every point like his friend Ralph McGill, he criticized the secessionist talk of the Dixiecrats, opposed the Klan and other white extremist groups, prodded the states to invest heavily in a good-faith effort to make separate truly equal, and insisted that the South was making progress in race relations and would correct its problems without federal coercion. Mississippi politicians ganged up on the hot-tempered Carter more viciously than the Georgians attacked McGill, and he answered their fire with hot lead of his own. Unlike McGill, the Greenville editor said he would “likely turn Republican” if the GOP chose Dwight Eisenhower as its nominee. After Ike said no, Carter hoped the Democrats would draft the general in place of Truman, and when that failed, he said Dewey—“the best of the candidates”—would win easily.

  In Oxford, Mississippi, far from the sound and fury of the 1948 political campaign, the reclusive and enigmatic William Faulkner finished his latest novel just as the dogwoods and azaleas brought a blaze of color to the woods around Rowan Oak, his home. Intruder in the Dust, his first book in six years (“a blazing novel about murder and violence in a small Southern town,” the dust jacket proclaimed), would soon prove to be his most commercially successful effort to date. His Hollywood connections had secured the sale of movie rights before publication. Was this Faulkner for a mass audience? Not quite. Was it Faulkner in a studied attempt to be current and contemporary? Perhaps. Was it Faulkner in a struggle with his own conscience and the conscience of the South? Undoubtedly. Others before him had been driven by the urge to decipher the South, to plumb its depths and explain them to whoever would listen. The Vanderbilt Agrarians Richard Wright, William Alexander Percy, W. J. Cash, Lillian Smith, and others had all tried, in vastly different ways, to say what it was, what it meant. Faulkner, too, had tried, but never this directly.

  Intruder in the Dust is a tightly strung murder mystery about an elderly black farmer accused of murdering a lower-class white man, about the efforts of certain others to unravel the crime and prevent a lynching, and about a garrulous, paternalistic old white lawyer whose instinct is to defend the accused. Interspersed with the action are lengthy conversations, mainly between the lawyer
and his sixteen-year-old nephew, whose role in the climax of the case is pivotal. In these rambling exchanges, the lawyer—and, we are tempted to assume, Faulkner himself—clearly shows his own mixed emotions about the South’s racial crucible.

  “I’m writing about people, not trying to express my own opinion,” the author told an interviewer in Japan after the book was out—but he added that Intruder would be a good place for someone reading his works to begin, because it “deals with the problem which is important not only in my country, but, I think, important to all people.”

  As in all of Faulkner’s complex prose, there are many twists and turns. At one point, the lawyer, Gavin Stevens, ruminates about his client, Lucas Beauchamp, in such a way that the two men come to represent not just themselves but the whole South, white and black. Finally, Stevens says:

  We—he and us—should confederate: swap him the rest of the economic and political and cultural privileges which are his right, for the reversion of his capacity to wait and endure and survive. Then we would prevail; together we would dominate the United States; we would present a front not only impregnable but not even to be threatened by a mass of people who no longer have anything in common save a frantic greed for money and a basic fear of a failure of national character which they hide from one another behind a loud lip service to a flag.

  And then, near the end of the drama, as Stevens and his nephew try to puzzle out what has happened, the lawyer delivers this impassioned homily:

  Some things you must always be unable to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.

  It was Faulkner the scout, the explorer, formulating his report to the advancing South, telling us in lines too cryptic for our understanding—or his—what was waiting just over the mountain.

  10. Truman’s Triumph

  For Harry S. Truman, the big fight was almost at hand, and though he came to it gamely, bravely, there was no denying that the pugnacious little bantamweight from Missouri was facing overwhelming odds. The clash was shaping up less like a championship match in the ring than a mugging in the street. Henry Wallace and the leftists had broken off in one direction, Strom Thurmond and the rightists in another. A. Philip Randolph was threatening massive civil disobedience by blacks against continued segregation in the armed forces, even as Russia’s blockade of Berlin raised the specter of a military conflict. First the Republicans and then the Democrats had tried to draft General Eisenhower for a tour of duty in the White House, and the GOP had gone on to pick Thomas Dewey and Earl Warren from its progressive wing to deliver the knockout blow to an already staggered and bleeding stand-in president, the candidate nobody wanted.

  The weather was appropriately stormy and steamy when the Democrats arrived in Philadelphia on July 12, and there was no air-conditioning in the convention hall to soothe their frayed nerves and hot tempers. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action, led by brash young Hubert H. Humphrey, the mayor of Minneapolis, promised to beef up the platform committee’s civil rights plank—partly to counter a mild statement by the Republicans on that subject, and partly to tighten the screws on Truman, whom the ADA had wanted to throw overboard for Ike.

  From a lackluster beginning, enlivened only by Senator Alben Barkley’s rousing keynote address, the convention stumbled into a dreaded Wednesday-afternoon showdown on civil rights, with the battle lines drawn in three or four directions. Finally, after a bitter floor fight, the liberals prevailed—and in the end it was Humphrey, borrowing specifics from the pages of Truman’s own civil rights committee report, who carried the day with a ringing exhortation “for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly in the bright sunshine of human rights.”

  Three attempts to soften the plank with amendments failed, and then the convention voted by a narrow margin to adopt the ADA version and put the party on record with the strongest pledge of racial equality it had ever made. With that, all of the Mississippi delegation and half of Alabama’s stalked out into a drenching rainstorm on the hard sidewalks of Philadelphia.

  The carefully orchestrated walkout would be remembered years later by one of those who departed, Mississippi newspaper publisher J. Oliver Emmerich, as an ill-advised acting out of the late Senator Bilbo’s “cotton-field philosophy” of aggressive and obsessive racism. It was not just lower-class whites—“the rednecks, the coonasses, and the hillbillies”—who were fueling the Dixiecrat revolt, said Emmerich; it was “the political elite as well,” and they deserved much of the blame. Without the money and power of “the most prestigious and responsible leaders of the Deep South,” this second futile attempt at secession from the national consensus probably wouldn’t have happened at all—and if it hadn’t, perhaps the rebellion of the ensuing quarter-century might also have been resolved more constructively.

  Strom Thurmond stayed in the hall to second the nomination of Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the only remaining challenger to a Truman victory (and a hopeless one at that). Except for thirteen North Carolina delegates who voted for the President—and a lone maverick from Florida—all of the remaining Southerners threw in with Russell, but they were alone in their protest. It was past midnight when the formal balloting confirmed, by better than three to one, what the party had known when the long day started: that Harry S. Truman would carry the flag in November.

  Thurmond had emerged as one of the States’ Rights Party’s probable nominees in the autumn free-for-all, and as he left the hostile North for Birmingham and the promised Saturday convention of the new rebel party, he was still seething over the disagreeable turn of events. First, John H. McCray and his Progressive Democratic Party of South Carolina had embarrassed the governor by showing up in Philadelphia with an all-black delegation and raising a credentials challenge against the white party regulars. Then, back home, federal judge J. Waties Waring had refused once and for all to let those same South Carolina white Democrats lock black voters out of the upcoming primary election. And to top it all off, there was Harry Truman, a “half-breed” Southerner and a traitor to the cause of white supremacy, crowing in proud satisfaction over his deliverance of the Dixie delegates into exile. (But Franklin Roosevelt had made many of the same promises of justice and equal opportunity to the blacks, a reporter reminded Thurmond; what was now so different and disturbing about Truman’s civil rights rhetoric? The governor shot back quickly and angrily: “Truman really means it.”)

  With the old Kentucky warhorse Alben Barkley at his side, the once and future President finally emerged from a smoky, stuffy back room at the Philadelphia convention hall shortly before two o’clock in the morning to accept his party’s reluctantly proffered nomination.

  They should replay the scene time and time again for today’s media specialists and public-relations experts and campaign consultants, just to show them what hell is really like. Picture this: The far right has decamped to Birmingham, and the left hasn’t shown up at all; the most primitive television facilities imaginable have done almost nothing but heat up the hall with blazing lights; the interminable process of nominating and seconding and voting creeps in its petty pace from tedium to apathy; most Americans and even a great many of the delegates have long since given up and gone to bed; the remaining friends and enemies of an unpopular President wait in marginally sober judgment of the man, for whom they lack both confidence and enthusiasm.

  As the band goes “Wild About Harry” and placards bob lackadaisically in the exhausted crowd, floodlights focus on a floral Liberty Bell display suspended high above the floor. At the climactic moment, forty-eight white pigeons—low-budget substitutes for doves of peace, one for each state in the Union—fly free from a cage inside the bell. Having been cooped up in the stifling pen for hours, the liberated birds are disoriented and delirious; they come bursting like crazed bats into the cavernous hall
, careening and crying, fluttering and defecating, in frenzied confusion. Some of them fly into the huge fans that stir the stale, humid air; others swoop close to presiding officer Sam Rayburn, and he swings his gavel to ward them off. (One of the birds was later said to have left its calling card on Rayburn’s bald pate; the stone-faced Texan never saw anything funny in the apocryphal tale.)

  And just then, onto this surrealistic stage of comic madness steps a smiling Harry Truman, dapperly dressed in a white linen suit and white shoes, as cool and confident as a Broadway hoofer, lacking only the hat and cane to fit the part. And here begins what one clever wag would call “the greatest comeback since Lazarus.”

  His acceptance speech was pithy, pungent, stinging, and blessedly short, delivered off the cuff, without text or notes. He blasted the Republicans, ignored the Progressives and Dixiecrats, extolled the virtues of the Democrats, and vowed that he and Barkley would win the fight against “the common enemy.” Then, in the first of many surprise maneuvers he would pull out of his hat during the campaign, Truman announced that he was calling the Republican-controlled Congress into special session ten days hence (that would be Turnip Day in agrarian Missouri, a time to sow, wet or dry) to deal with inflation, the housing crisis, aid to education, and civil rights—all issues the Republicans “are saying they are for in their platform.”

  The crowd went wild. Just when he seemed to be finished, their little fighter was up off the canvas, bobbing and weaving around the ring, throwing fresh punches. Miraculously, he had found his second wind.

  Not since the Southern Conference for Human Welfare’s first meeting there, ten years earlier, had so many people jammed and wedged themselves into Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium. It was Saturday morning, July 17, 1948, and the overflow crowd of more than six thousand white Southerners had come to carry out their threat of rebellion against Harry Truman and the Democratic Party’s national hierarchy. The States’ Rights Democrats, as the rebels liked to call themselves (or Dixiecrats, as the press had taken to calling them), had come steaming down from Philadelphia filled with righteous indignation and hostile intent. Their party had been stolen from them, their leaders bitterly complained; now it was time to strike back.