by John Egerton
They were a curious hybrid of somebodies and nobodies, bosses and “hands,” the powerful and the impotent. Those who wheeled and dealed and tossed out quotable quotes to the press were mostly politicians, lawyers, planters, bankers, mill owners, oilmen; those who shouted the rebel yells of approval were laboring-class wage-earners and middle-level managers whose deepest anxieties were more economic—and perhaps more racial—than political. All eleven of the Southern states plus Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Maryland had delegations in the hall, and a scattered few others were there from Pennsylvania, Illinois, California, and elsewhere. There were no blacks at all, of course, and very few women. One of the Birmingham papers described the convention as having “all the pent-up fever of a giant, boisterous revival meeting.”
The governors of Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, South Carolina, and Virginia were all on hand. Mississippi was also represented by both of its senators, James Eastland and John Stennis, and by most of its members of the House of Representatives; no other state—not even Alabama, the host—had a delegation of its congressional members in the hall. (Jim Folsom did deliver a greeting and some vague words of encouragement, but the Alabama governor, who had briefly touted his own candidacy against Truman, was considered too unpredictable for any faction to embrace.) Among the Birmingham notables present were two men who had figured prominently in that first Southern Conference gathering ten years earlier: newspaper columnist John Temple Graves, now a born-again Dixiecrat, and “Bull” Connor, the arch-segregationist police commissioner (and a leader of the delegate walkout in Philadelphia). Also in on the Philadelphia and Birmingham proceedings was a young country lawyer and member of the Alabama legislature named George Corley Wallace.
Three men who played central roles in this meeting and the subsequent activities of the States’ Rights Party were Walter Sillers, speaker of the house of representatives in Mississippi; Horace Wilkinson, a right-wing Birmingham lawyer; and Gessner T. McCorvey, state chairman of the Democratic Party in Alabama. Sillers headed a solid phalanx of Mississippi public officials who had cast their lot with the rebels. Wilkinson and McCorvey had no such consensus in Alabama, but their control of the Democratic Party was virtually absolute. In defiance of party loyalists, including Governor Folsom and Senators Lister Hill and John Sparkman, they conspired to put before the Alabama voters a November election ballot that listed the States’ Rights Party ticket under the traditional Democratic rooster emblem—and excluded the Truman-Barkley slate altogether.
Former Alabama Governor Frank M. Dixon opened the convention with a saber-rattling keynote address that set the tone for what followed. Truman’s civil rights offensive was a blatant attempt to destroy the South, he cried, “to reduce us to the status of a mongrel, inferior race.” When he vowed to fight this new wave of Yankee invaders, the crowd erupted in a frenzied roar of approval, and the tumult grew louder and more uncontrolled as the day went on. The morning line favored Dixon or Arkansas Governor Ben Laney or Mississippi Governor Fielding Wright as the presidential candidate, with Strom Thurmond for vice president, but by afternoon the Dixon and Laney fortunes had fallen. A consensus materialized around a ticket led by Thurmond, with Wright as his running mate. The delegates roared their approval on the first ballot. Senator Eastland predicted a two-man race between Thurmond and Thomas Dewey. And what about Truman? Why, he “won’t carry a single state,” the Mississippian predicted.
For all their unity in mounting this opposition drive, the Southern anti-Truman Democrats were seriously divided on a key point of strategy. All of the Mississippians, some of the Alabamians, and a few others were driven by philosophical and ideological extremism to declare their undying hostility to the Democratic Party for its overtures to blacks and other “undesirables.” Many others, while sharing those racial views, doubted that a secessionist third-party movement could be successful, and preferred instead to simply lock their states’ electoral college votes in a “ransom” account—available, if needed, as bargaining chips to break a Democrat-Republican deadlock. All of Georgia’s political leaders, including Senators Richard Russell and Walter George and the gubernatorial front-runner, Herman Talmadge, steered clear of the Dixiecrat rebellion for just such doubts and fears as these, and so did Virginias Senator Harry Byrd. The same thinking may have led Ben Laney to withdraw from consideration as a party candidate. Governors William Tuck of Virginia and Beauford Jester of Texas, two of the early cheerleaders for a rebellious third party, also backed away from the movement.
Strom Thurmond, exceedingly ambitious and opportunistic, was prepared to go either way. In considering the possible consequences of third-party leadership, he had to weigh whether it would help or hurt him if he decided to challenge South Carolina’s Olin D. Johnston for his U.S. Senate seat in 1950. Concluding that he would in all likelihood gain favor with white voters in South Carolina no matter how the 1948 race turned out, Thurmond readily accepted the Dixiecrat nomination.
His strategy was, first, to raise the specter of a black invasion of the South’s lily-white temples of segregation—churches, schools, theaters, swimming pools, bedrooms—and then, denying racial motivation, to “defend as a matter of principle” what he described as a federal assault on states’ rights. In his acceptance speech, Thurmond repeated his crowd-pleasing line that there were “not enough troops in the army” to force desegregation down the throats of the white South. To reporters, he would say over and over that he wasn’t preoccupied with white supremacy—what really worried him were the dangers of “police state tactics … a federal gestapo … a totalitarian state and … the threat of Communist infiltration.” Meanwhile, Fielding Wright, a true believer in white supremacy, would be free to carry heavier weapons, and to fire them at will.
The throng of Dixiecrat partisans quickly finished their work inside the Birmingham auditorium, and they were in boisterous high spirits when they came pouring out onto the Eighth Avenue sidewalk in the late afternoon sunshine. Soon they were heading for home or for the party’s headquarters at the Tutwiler Hotel, a few blocks away. There the rump-session festivities were kicked off with as much lighthearted camaraderie as a football crowd might generate, and the parties went on far into the night.
It remained for a strike force of anonymous individuals, acting under a cloak of secrecy in behalf of all Dixiecrat partisans, to climax the evening with a chillingly familiar ritual of symbolic terror. Sometime after dark, a dummy wearing a Harry Truman name tag was lowered from the hotel balcony above Twentieth Street, suspended by a noose around its neck. TRUMAN KILLED BY CIVIL-RIGHT read a crudely lettered sign pinned to the dummy’s coat. The mock lynching of the President of the United States was a visible reminder to the South, and to all who watched from afar, that this was no game; this was war. The spirit of white supremacy—to some an inspiration, to uncounted others a shame and a curse— was alive and well in Birmingham.
A few more pieces had to slip into place before the fall lineup would be complete. In the last week of July, the Progressive Citizens of America met in Philadelphia and formally nominated Henry A. Wallace for president and Idaho Senator Glen H. Taylor for vice president. Clark Foreman, head of the then-moribund Southern Conference for Human Welfare, served as the party treasurer and a chief strategist; C. B. “Beanie” Baldwin of Virginia, a former director of the Farm Security Administration, was the campaign manager. Wallace received with mixed emotions his subsequent endorsement by the Communist Party, U.S.A. Then, when the labor movement cut its ties to the Progressives and both the CIO and the AFL refused to give him their support, the maverick Midwesterner must have known that his literal revolt was not going to get very far. But that would not keep him from running hard.
Norman Thomas, onetime boy wonder and now the grand old man of the Socialist Party, signed on for his sixth and last symbolic try for the White House, and a scattering of tiny splinter parties came in too. Finally, in the dog days of a blistering late summer and fall, the presidential sweepstakes began in
earnest.
When the Turnip Congress was called to order by its Republican leaders on July 26, Harry Truman was out sowing his victory garden, and it promised to yield a bushel of surprises. To begin, he chose that same Monday as the day to sign two executive orders, one declaring a policy of nondiscrimination in federal employment and the other requiring “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services.”
Almost everyone was caught off guard. Thomas Dewey, sitting on a huge lead in the polls, said little, having decided to follow a cautious, hands-off strategy on civil rights issues. Henry Wallace, whose party had explicitly condemned “segregation and discrimination in all of its forms and in all places,” denounced the Truman move as “an empty gesture,” but it clearly stole the Progressives’ thunder. As for Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats, they were left to thrash about in helpless rage, outfoxed and outflanked once again by their adversary in the White House. Even A. Philip Randolph was unprepared for the announcement, and though he wasn’t convinced that the President was sincere, he did announce in mid-August that his threatened civil disobedience campaign had been called off.
On the second day of the special session, Truman appeared before both houses to tell the lawmakers what he hoped they would accomplish in the two weeks set aside for their deliberations. Housing and inflation topped the President’s list, but he also mentioned civil rights high up on a longer slate of concerns. Before him as he spoke sat a sullen audience dominated by the controlling Republicans and the small but powerful bloc of Southern Democrats, both of whom would have gone to any lengths to deprive him of a victory—as Truman knew all too well.
Neither he nor the minority of liberals who supported his proposals had any illusions of solid accomplishment coming from this brief assembly. It was politics, pure and simple—an elaborate charade, a parlor game called “Democracy at Work.” The trick was done with smoke and mirrors, and all the players knew the secret, the hidden answer; only the audience was in the dark. As in a game of chess, a certain protocol was observed, an obligatory order of act and response. First the President moved; then the Republicans countered with a foredoomed piece of legislation (in this instance, a bill to abolish the poll tax); then the Southerners filibustered, and all efforts to limit debate were futile. Quick as a wink, the two weeks were up and it was time to adjourn. Thereafter, at every stop on the campaign trail, each candidate blamed the others for the predictable stalemate that all but Henry Wallace had helped to bring about.
Even though Dewey remained comfortably ahead in the polls, neither he nor the other two major challengers ever seemed able to knock Truman off his game. He played the advantage of incumbency to perfection. When his opponents accused him of being too aggressively hawkish in his posture toward the Soviets, his supporters countered by pointing to the Berlin airlift as a humanitarian peacekeeping mission. Domestic alarm over Communist infiltration—an epidemic of hysteria that the President himself had fed with his order mandating employee loyalty investigations—focused more critically on Henry Wallace and the House Un-American Activities Committee than it did on Truman.
Just three days before the Progressives opened their nominating convention, twelve members of the Communist Party, U.S.A. were indicted in New York under the Smith Act, a broad 1940 statute that made it unlawful for any person to advocate or teach the overthrow of the government by force or violence. The timing of the arrests was said by more than one critic to have been orchestrated by the President, but he heatedly denied it. Both Attorney General Tom Clark and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover were clearly to the right of Truman on the issue of communism, and so were Thomas Dewey and Strom Thurmond; Wallace’s alignment on the opposite flank conveniently made the President appear, once again, to be safely anchored in the center.
He was accused of playing politics on the military desegregation order, too—and as far as his timing was concerned, there can be little doubt that he acted with one eye on the campaign. But who saw any political advantage in taking the initiative on such a controversial issue? A 1946 national opinion survey had found that two-thirds of all white Americans believed blacks were already being treated fairly in the society at large. Congress passed a new Selective Service Act in June 1948 that left segregation in place, and Truman signed it into law. Southerners in both houses were fighting tooth and nail against any modification in the racial rules of the armed forces, and most of the military top brass were also dragging their feet on the issue. Just about the only person pressing Truman to take action was A. Philip Randolph—a forceful and persuasive man, to be sure, but not one who wielded great power. Some of the President’s advisers did see political capital to be made from a liberal stance on race, but prudence might have led them to suggest waiting until after the election to take Jim Crow out of uniform.
But on the substance of the issue, Truman was completely in accord with several convincing points of fact and logic: Racial discrimination was America’s Achilles’ heel in the struggle against communism; segregation was tremendously wasteful and inefficient, and nowhere was that more apparent than in the armed forces; the civil rights committee had recommended a year earlier that the government “end immediately all discrimination and segregation based on race” in the military; and, having triumphed in a war with foes who lived by a master-race ideology, there was no way the United States could go on practicing such a philosophy itself. Whether or not these arguments made for smart politics or effective public policy in 1948, the commander-in-chief decided that he was ready to act on them. For a man who was looking like a double-digit loser in the polls, it was a bold decision.
The front-runner, ex-Governor Dewey of New York, was considered a progressive Republican—which was to say, well to the left of the Robert Taft wing of the party but still to the right of Truman. Dewey was a stiff, cool, polished little man with a self-important air that didn’t endear him to the common folks. As far as the South was concerned in this election, he more or less wrote it off, concluding that Truman would get what Thurmond didn’t. Nevertheless, the GOP had measurable support in Virginia, Florida, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Texas, and Dewey got some press endorsements in those states. The Houston and Dallas newspapers saw at least as much to like in Dewey as in Truman; the Richmond and Norfolk papers favored the Republican with compliments, if not with their formal blessing; Hodding Carter in Mississippi, after his pleas to Eisenhower were unavailing, eventually gave Dewey and the Republican Party a “soft” nod of approval. (Joe Louis, who earlier had lent his name to the cause of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, also gave Dewey a celebrity endorsement.)
Henry Wallace’s campaign attracted substantial support from the left flank of American politics, from liberal activists (including some Southerners) who felt that Truman had not been faithful to the Roosevelt legacy. In many ways, Wallace foreshadowed the effort of Eugene McCarthy twenty years later: a liberal Midwesterner trying against great odds to revive the spirit and promise of a fallen hero’s unfinished dream. Racial equality was just one of Wallace’s idealistic goals (and a latter-day one at that, since he had not had much to say on the subject until the last year or so of his vice presidency), but when he rode into the South on a campaign swing in late August, race was just about the only subject that he or anyone else seemed to have in mind.
For the first time, a candidate for president of the United States was going around the Deep South attacking segregation, one-party politics, and the denial of civil rights. Wallace wouldn’t address segregated audiences or patronize segregated hotels and restaurants. His seven-state Southern tour was like a crusade in enemy territory, and he and his biracial campaign crew of young and dedicated associates got a taste of regional hostility that they would long remember. Southerners associated with the campaign—Palmer Weber of the CIO Political Action Committee, Louis Burnham of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Virginia Durr of the National Committee to Abolish the Poll Tax, Clark Foreman of the Southern Conference for Hu
man Welfare, Beanie Baldwin, and others— had seen it all before. Unseasoned Northerners, though, wondered if they had stumbled into a war zone.
“They were terrified,” Weber told an interviewer forty years later. “They knew they had been to the edge of hell.” In North Carolina on the first day, Wallace was pummeled with eggs and tomatoes. After witnessing a stabbing and several near-riots, some campaign strategists counseled retreat, but the candidate said no. On they went to Birmingham, where a welcoming party of club-toting whites jeered and heckled the motorcade; police stood by as the mob rocked the candidate’s car and chanted, “Kill Wallace!” Still, when he finally stood before his audience, he told them that “greedy men, the Big Mules … have ruled the South for generations and kept millions of common people in economic poverty and political bondage.” And the worst of it, he said flat-out, was race, “the major obstacle” to Southern progress: Segregation was not only an economic and political and social travesty—it was a sin, a violation of “the fundamental Christian and democratic principles in our civilization.”
This courageous foray was an inspiration to black voters, Palmer Weber told Thurgood Marshall when the trip was over. The “Negro communities were electrified and tremendously heartened to see one white man with guts willing to take it standing up.” A few Southern liberals and leftists, inspired by Wallace’s willingness to face the lions, qualified as protest candidates in the Democratic primaries or on the Progressive Party ticket in the fall, among them Virginia Durr and Howard Carwile in Virginia and Joseph Rabun and James L. Barfoot in Georgia. (For his daring act, Barfoot, a University of Georgia professor, was promptly notified of his dismissal from the faculty.) In the end, though, the Progressive Party’s campaign in the South had more to do with symbolism than substance; in November, Henry Wallace could muster fewer than four thousand votes in any Southern state except Florida, where he got about twelve thousand.