Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  On balance, the 1948 election appeared to settle the bitter warfare between the liberal-leaning, forward-facing national Democratic Party, with its borning consciousness of inequality, and the reactionary, backward-looking Southern right wing of the party, with its obsessive devotion to white supremacy. The Truman regulars had won a tremendous victory nationally, and even in the South—especially in the South. Harry Ashmore wrote in the aftermath of the election that the Dixiecrat movement “was one of the most conspicuous failures in American political history.” The naked appeal to racial prejudice and fear was no longer effective, he said; “white supremacy, in its classic form at least, is a dead issue.” With more and more blacks voting, the practical result would be “the passing of the one-party system”—but also the demise of Dixiecrat racism under the guise of states’ rights.

  Without a doubt, the Dixiecrats were indeed a one-issue party with a narrow sectional base; they were a defensive army of white supremacists motivated by bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that some men and women—nonwhites, that is—are created unequal. But far from being decimated by their 1948 defeat, they looked ahead hopefully to a merger of conservative Southern Democrats and right-wing Republicans, united (in the South, at least) around the philosophy of states’ rights and white supremacy. Southern Republicrats, Helen Fuller called them in The New Republic; their goal was “to take over the existing Democratic Party organization. They are already campaigning for 1952.”

  The initial impression that the Truman Democrats had won a huge victory in the South, thereby silencing the conservative threat, would prove to be premature. The States’ Rights Party and the Republicans were soundly defeated separately, but together they were a force representing fifty percent of the existing Southern electorate—and together they would surely be in the years to come.

  11. One Last Chance for Change

  Just at the moment of Harry Truman’s triumph, the South got one more golden opportunity—in retrospect, its last best chance—to take control ot its own social reformation. In the same year that the ruling white Nationalist Party of South Africa succeeded in imposing a policy of racial domination known as apartheid, the ruling white nationalists of the American South had failed to win voter approval, in the region as well as the nation, for policies of a similarly racist nature. Truman’s victory may have been something less than a mandate for integration, but Strom Thurmond’s defeat was certainly a clear sign that the Southern white majority was not willing to proclaim its second rebellion in a century for the lost cause of white supremacy.

  The Dixiecrat defeat was only one sign among many that transforming changes were sweeping through the postwar world, and no country, however remote—certainly no region of the United States—would be sheltered from the cleansing winds. The United Nations was soon to adopt a pathfinding Declaration on Human Rights that was fundamentally incompatible with the practice of racial segregation. The armed forces of the United States were already launched on a desegregation course that in just five years would be declared a mission accomplished. African-Americans were emerging from invisibility in the professions, in labor unions, in the academy, in the church, and in the pages of newspapers and magazines. (On August 8, 1950, Jackie Robinson became the first African-American to appear on the cover of Life—fourteen years and more than seven hundred issues after the magazine was founded.) Federal court rulings were consistently opening the way for blacks to enjoy the same rights and liberties that most whites took for granted. In the practice of law, in the rules of courtroom procedure, and in the ranks of police officers—even Southern police officers—there were hopeful signs that some movement toward racial equality was beginning.

  All these portents of accelerating change, highlighted by the Democratic political successes of Truman and the little band of “New South” moderates who rode into office with him, pointed to 1949 and the soon-to-begin second half of the twentieth century as a fruitful season of significant development in the South, much as 1933 and the early Roosevelt years had been. It was this prospect that Harry Ashmore, now emerging as a progressive young New South spokesman, alluded to when he wrote that the Dixiecrat defeat had exposed white supremacy as an ineffective and fading political issue. Just before Lillian Smith’s incisive new book, Killers of the Dream, was published in 1949, she predicted in a newspaper column that “in five years there will be little legal segregation left in the South.”

  Aubrey Williams, writing from Alabama, came to a similar conclusion in a post-election article citing numerous signs of the South’s receptivity to racial reform. All of the states bordering the region were acting on court orders or on their own to desegregate their colleges and universities, he noted, and four Southern governors (Folsom of Alabama, Scott of North Carolina, McMath of Arkansas, and Warren of Florida) had spoken out clearly in favor of several features of President Truman’s civil rights program. In Alabama, three federal judges—lifelong residents, not outsiders—had found the state’s notorious Boswell Amendment to be an unconstitutional device aimed at denying the vote to black citizens. In the South at large, the voters themselves, white and black, had “flatly refused to snap up the Dixiecrat bait.”

  With characteristic optimism, Williams professed to see a bright new Southern dawn on the horizon. “The Dixiecrats are on the run,” he declared. “Despite the yapping of the politicians and the hysterical echo of the press, despite even the failure of many liberals to do anything but shout ‘Leave us alone!’ there is a break in the South. And one is justified in concluding that this break is a sign that the infamous structure of discrimination and segregation is beginning to crumble.”

  Even so cautious a strategist as Howard W. Odum, the venerable University of North Carolina sociologist, seemed convinced at the beginning of 1949 that the time had come for the South to move forward. Writing in the Southern Packet, the monthly journal of intellectual thought published in Asheville, he put forth an agenda “for the creative South to work out its own positive, practical adjustment” to the problems of segregation, and to make the region “a more useful part” of the nation. He called on the South to abide by the decisions of the federal courts; to adjust to national civil rights legislation; to stop “prevailing lawlessness by violence and by evasion”; to extend greater opportunity to all Southerners in the workplace; to equalize educational facilities; to provide graduate and professional instruction in the same institutions for qualified individuals of both races; to eliminate segregation in transportation “and other public services”; to guarantee the vote to all citizens without hindrance; to support federal laws against lynching and poll taxes; to “help all southerners see the justice” of these reforms; to “help the whole nation understand the problems—human, political, and economic—in changing a biracial civilization rooted in two centuries” of white privilege; and finally, to “stop being afraid of democracy.”

  New circumstances had led him to a revised assessment, Odum wrote. The presidential election, the clear civil liberties trend in the courts, social pressure from the rest of America and the world, and the South’s own manifest desire “to find ways out of its multiplying dilemmas” were all compelling reasons for a comprehensive program of change. The new mood of the black minority was also a factor: “It is as if some universal message had reached the great mass of Negroes, urging them to dream new dreams and to protest against the old order.”

  In his own awakened conviction, the aging dean of Southern social scientists saw the region and the nation “facing their greatest domestic dilemma of the century … failure to meet which might very well destroy the soul of the South and cripple a great nation.” His agenda for “the second half of an epochal century” was a call for reappraisal and action that went far beyond anything Odum had ever spelled out before, but the magnitude and urgency of the problem—and the fleeting availability of the opportunity—demanded such a response. “God helping us,” he wrote, “we can do no other.”

  It would be easy to
read too much into these post-election expressions of “now is the time” optimism and reformist energy. In point of fact, a small minority of powerful white men still controlled the political and economic machinery of the South, from the backcountry courthouses to Capitol Hill, and they were not about to share their power, much less surrender it, simply because others told them they should. Their hold on the national Democratic Party had been substantially weakened, but their grip on the party reins in their states and in the region was almost as tight as ever. Seven of the states still relied on the poll tax to limit voting by blacks and low-income whites, and almost all Southern election officials used a variety of devices to screen out potential voters whose color or class or gender made them unwelcome to the oligarchy. In spite of court-ordered increases in voter registration, only about one-tenth of black adults in the region were actually allowed to cast ballots in 1948.

  Even in defeat, the Dixiecrats managed to retain their bases of local and regional strength, and no serious breach developed between them and their colleagues who chose for a variety of reasons not to declare themselves in open rebellion against the party of Roosevelt and Truman. The only real difference between Strom Thurmond and someone like Herman Talmadge or Olin D. Johnston (whom Thurmond would challenge, incidentally, in the 1950 South Carolina Senate race) was that Thurmond was more willing than the others to declare war against an incumbent president. Still, he was not the most extreme of the Dixiecrats; Thurmond tried harder to disguise his white supremacy behind the constitutional rationale of states’ rights than did some of his more rabid allies, such as Fielding Wright of Mississippi and Gessner McCorvey of Alabama. But whatever differences they had, one from another, the South’s political and economic rulers could still come together themselves—and bring a majority of their white followers along with them—to chant an ancient mantra, a virtual pledge of allegiance. It played as strongly with the Dixiecrats as it had a century earlier with the Confederate rebels. It was a hostile, hateful boast, a battle cry: “This is white man’s country.”

  When he was back in his office in the South Carolina capitol, Governor Thurmond was not treated by the white citizenry as a failed and discredited bolter; in the eyes of most whites, he was a returning hero, the stronger and more admirable for having shaken his fist at the President, the Yankees, the liberals, and the black minority. What he exhibited and his constituents applauded was a prideful arrogance, at once defensive and belligerent, and it would plague the benighted South for years to come.

  Tallulah Bankhead, daughter of the late Congressman William B. Bankhead of Alabama, had lent her celebrity to the campaign for Harry Truman’s election, and the actress was on center stage, reveling in the sweet taste of victory, at the inauguration festivities in January 1949. From the presidential box in the reviewing stand at the inaugural parade, she glared at Governor Herman Talmadge as he rode by in his official car; Truman had his back turned at the time. Then, when Governor Thurmond passed in review and doffed his hat to the President, the stone-faced Truman responded with an icy stare. That would have been embarrassing enough for the subdued rebel—but the uninhibited Tallulah, never one to hold back her feelings, put sound effects on the silent snub with a conspicuously loud and lusty boo.

  Harry Truman had earned the right to savor that moment. All the dire threats and derisive outbursts of his adversaries—Eastern liberals in his own party, Republican conservatives, Southern reactionaries—had ended in public humiliation for the detractors and a satisfying last laugh for the President. Now, with a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, he was ready to move forward with his own liberal agenda. His legislative program called for increases in social security and the minimum wage, federal aid to education, repeal of the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, national health insurance, low-cost public housing, and enactment of the civil rights measures he had first put forth a year earlier. “I stand squarely behind those proposals,” he declared in his State of the Union address on January 5.

  In those first days and weeks of the new administration, there were numerous indications that the momentum for civil rights reform generated in the campaign and the election was still a driving force. For the first time in history, all of the inauguration events were unsegregated. Walter White of the NAACP and most of the black press were effusive in their praise of Truman and full of great expectations for the future. In speeches to labor and civil rights groups and in meetings with his national committee investigating racial discrimination in the District of Columbia, the President emphasized again and again his determination to implement reforms. To Thurmond and the other defectors, he offered an olive branch of reconciliation if they would pledge to support the party platform—and when most of them declined, Truman and the Democratic leaders in Congress quietly concluded that the spoils of victory ought not to be lavished on unrepentant Dixiecrats. Some of the rebels lost their committee seniority; others, including Thurmond, were removed from the Democratic National Committee.

  But the liberals’ hopeful and promising prospects in January would gradually fade to dust, finally ending in fruitless and frustrating defeat for a bitterly disappointed President Truman, for black Americans in general, and for Southern progressives of both races. From the day Congress convened in January 1949, the coalition of Southerners and right-wing Republicans was busily working its will against the legislative agenda.

  Through a series of complex parliamentary moves, they made it harder than ever for sponsors of legislation to get their bills through committee and onto the floor for a vote. The House Rules Committee, after being stripped of its power to bottle up legislation indefinitely, soon managed to recapture that leverage. In the Senate, the not-so-loyal opposition cleverly engineered a change in the cloture rule that made it more difficult to limit debate and force the members to vote. Liberal efforts to undo that damage were stymied by the very thing they sought to control: a filibuster. It consumed most of the first two weeks of March. As usual, the Southerners were the backbone of it, with all except Claude Pepper of Florida and freshman senator Frank Porter Graham of North Carolina taking part (Graham was absent, sick with pneumonia). The twenty obstructionist Southerners, joined by a minimum of fourteen Republicans, could thus block virtually anything Truman proposed—and they didn’t hesitate to do exactly that.

  One after another, the President’s civil rights bills and other measures were finessed into oblivion: the plan to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, anti-lynching and anti-poll-tax legislation, federal aid to education, national health insurance, reform of labor laws. Only the public housing act was passed—and at that, fewer than half of the units it called for would actually be built.

  All through 1949 and 1950, Congress fiddled while Truman burned in a helpless rage, knowing that the Southerners and their Republican soulmates were extracting their pound of flesh for his disloyalty to their club. At one point, House Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, no civil rights enthusiast himself, pointedly evaded a rare opportunity to bypass the rules committee and let a bill get to the floor for a vote. Others, thought to be a shade more moderate than their colleagues—Senators Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, Senators Johnson of Texas and Kefauver of Tennessee, Senator Fulbright of Arkansas and his colleague in the House Brooks Hays—were all parties to the obstruction. Finally, on July 12, 1950, the last attempt to pass a fair employment practices bill succumbed to yet another filibuster (even Frank Graham was with the Dixie diehards this time), and the curtain fell ingloriously on a dismal scene of stalemate and impotence.

  To make matters worse as these unproductive months were slipping away, Harry Truman found himself increasingly drawn to foreign affairs. The yearlong airlift finally broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin in May 1949, but after that one success the administration would have few others. In October, the bad news broke that the Russians had developed an atomic bomb. China was, for all practical purposes, a new red star in the Communist orbit. Former State Department official A
lger Hiss was tried twice on charges of passing government documents to the Soviets; first left in limbo by a hung jury, he was convicted in January 1950 and sent to prison. Congressman Richard M. Nixon of California, a vigilant member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused Truman and his Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, of a softness and tolerance for Communist infiltrators in the government. In February, Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin bulled his way to instant notoriety during a West Virginia speech by making the sensational and unsubstantiated claim that he had “here in my hand” a list of 205 policy-level employees of the U.S. Department of State who were known to be “members of the Communist Party and members of a spy ring.” The paper McCarthy waved before his audience that night turned out to be his laundry list, and he never produced the names to back up his charge, but he had loosed the red genie, and not for years would it be lured back into the bottle.

  For every diligent public servant from the President on down, Joseph McCarthy was the embodiment of a terrifying nightmare brought to life. He was a demagogue running amok, feeding on his own paranoia and that of the already alarmed general public. Like a spider, he spun from the menacing threat of Russia and China an ominous web of suspicion and intrigue that entangled and immobilized the entire federal government and all private groups and individuals who gave any resistance to the frenzied offensive.