Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  An obsession with communism seized the troubled consciousness of the nation and derailed the Truman administration’s legislative agenda so completely that it was hard to imagine what more could happen—until it happened: In June, Communist forces from North Korea invaded South Korea, where the United States and the United Nations had “vital interests.” After just five years of a troubled peace (during which the U.S. defense budget had been slashed to allow funding of domestic programs and to reduce the federal debt), American GIs were back on the battlefield again, and the beleaguered government had another war to finance. If ever there had been a chance for Truman’s legislative program to be seriously considered and acted upon, it was gone now, swept away by the fierce winds of suspicion at home and armed conflict abroad.

  Most congressional Republicans were egging McCarthy on in his witch-hunt. Defiant Dixiecrat John Rankin of Mississippi had been relieved of his duties on the House Un-American Activities Committee, but his non-Southern colleagues were managing quite well without him. In September, the Internal Security Act, a measure that stopped just short of outlawing membership in the Communist Party altogether, breezed through both houses and weathered a Truman veto. The new law required registration of Communists and “Communist-front” organizations, detention of suspected reds during national emergencies, and closer scrutiny of immigrants.

  Gearing up for his 1950 run for the Senate, Strom Thurmond told the South Carolina electorate that he and his fellow Dixiecrats wanted to give them a choice “between the candidates who are following the President and those who are willing to stand up and be counted in opposition to his un-American, Communistic and anti-Southern programs.” With such rhetoric as this, Southern politicians had been blasting all and sundry advocates of social change since Franklin Roosevelt’s first day in office. But now the attack was taking on a new and different complexion. For the first time, non-Southern politicians were stirring up the American people with a frenzied assault on “subversives” and “fellow travelers” from New York and Washington to Hollywood, and virtually no one was strong enough to stand the heat. Here was a potent weapon being used in the North to enforce political conformity; if it was effective against sophisticated Yankees, why wouldn’t it work against the racial liberals who had established a foothold in the South?

  The Southerners in Congress and in the statehouses knew perfectly well that communism had failed miserably in its efforts to win support from blacks and liberal whites in the region; the few visible exceptions scattered about in Alabama, North Carolina, and elsewhere emphatically proved the rule. On any given day, you could have held a Communist Party convention in the South in a boxcar or a school bus, if not a phone booth. But the very idea of racial equality was so alien to the ruling elite that they could easily imagine its proponents to be reds. In any case, if calling them Communists would stop them, that was all that mattered. When other measures were losing their effectiveness, the reactionaries found that Joe McCarthy and the Republican right had handed them a new club, a blunt instrument to force the dissidents into line. From 1950 on, they would swing it with ever-increasing frequency.

  On the home front, governors and legislators and local elected officials ruled with every bit as much manipulative skill as their counterparts showed in controlling the legislative process in Congress. The very structure of state and local governments in the South assured a high level of inefficiency, waste, misrepresentation, neglect, and corruption. A half-century of one-party rule by little cliques of handpicked white men, often without so much as a hint of periodic reapportionment, had produced encrusted oligarchies of rural barons who reigned as if by some divine right. As different as they were from each to the next, all of the states in the region suffered to some degree from gross imbalances such as these. In general, legislatures had more power to obstruct democracy than did governors—but more often than not, the two branches either checked each other into stalemate or collaborated to protect their mutual interest in the status quo.

  Given the circumstances, the wonder is not that so few moderate or liberal or progressive men (and, rarely, women) were able to win and retain office, but rather that any at all could do it. For Governors Arnall, Folsom, McMath, and Scott to win statewide races, or for Pepper, Hill, Sparkman, and Kefauver to capture and keep seats in the Senate, was a tribute to the better judgment of the voters. What’s more, Arkansas chose Sid McMath for a second two-year term in 1950 over the former governor, Dixiecrat Ben Laney, and in Alabama that same year, Birmingham arch-segregationist Bull Connor finished sixth in the primary race for governor, while Lister Hill was being returned to the Senate.

  It was in 1949 that North Carolina’s new governor, Kerr Scott, appointed Frank Porter Graham to fill a vacant Senate seat. In Virginia that same year, Francis Pickens Miller, a moderate patrician who had organized the Southern Policy Committee in the late 1930s, challenged the Byrd machine’s candidate, John S. Battle, for the governor’s office. Promising to “set Virginia free” from the iron grip of Harry Byrd, Miller came close to winning, even though the Richmond newspapers withheld their support and the Byrd forces smeared the challenger as a captive of labor, blacks, and Communists. In comparison to Byrd, Miller seemed more liberal than he truly was—but he was a choice, at least, and not an echo.

  In spite of these thrusts against the conservative grain of Southern politics, the rebellious and reactionary segregationist mind-set was still the rule, not the exception. Herman Talmadge’s capture of the Georgia governor’s office in 1948 and his reelection in 1950 put the state back onto the race-baiting course his father had followed before the Ellis Arnall upset of 1942. Arnall had been the hope of liberal reformers, but he declined to run again in 1950, and years later he acknowledged that “Herman had pulled everybody so far to the right that there was no way I could have won.” During his six-year tenure, Talmadge took every opportunity he could find to segregate and restrict black Georgians in the schools, the courts, the workplace, and the voting booth. He also led a majority of Southern governors in expressing a formal resolve to fight President Truman and his “unconstitutional civil rights legislation by every means at our command.”

  The Dixiecrat leaders were, if anything, madder than ever after their 1948 defeat, and even though their grassroots support was eroding, they showed no signs of giving up. Horace Wilkinson of Alabama, one of the rebel stalwarts, swore that he would “rather die fighting for states’ rights than live on Truman Boulevard in a nigger heaven.” Leander Perez, a hard-bitten parish political boss from Louisiana, went to Washington in 1949 to open a liaison office for the party, and quickly joined with Ben Laney of Arkansas and Birmingham columnist John Temple Graves in a concerted effort to build an alliance with right-wing Republicans.

  Strom Thurmond’s unsuccessful attempt to unseat Senator Olin Johnston in 1950 was read by some as an indication that the Dixiecrat revolt was over, but that didn’t necessarily mean that the aims of the rebels were no longer attractive to white voters. On the contrary, the repeated successes of a dozen or more old-guard defenders of white supremacy and the return to public life of James F. Byrnes as governor of South Carolina in 1950 were unmistakable signs of the continued vitality of arch-conservative reaction in the South.

  These were the dominant and prevailing sentiments of the Southern political oligarchy at the turn of the half-century. The fire-eaters of the Bilbo-Eastland school and the urbane sophisticates like Byrnes had only one sure thing in common: They could put aside their differences and sign a blood oath to “keep the Negro in his place.” They had seen and heard more than enough to convince them that the old order they cherished was threatened as never before—and it was that perceived peril, more than anything else, which accounted for their unity, their extremism, and their obsessive preoccupation with race.

  It is no great feat to recognize these characteristics from the distant perspective of nearly fifty years; what is truly remarkable, however, is that Valdimer Orlando Key, Jr. (who went
, understandably, by the initials V.O.), saw them at the time they were taking shape, and wrote about them with great clarity in his classic 1949 study, Southern Politics in State and Nation. The book came about after a University of Alabama political scientist, Roscoe C. Martin, secured a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to finance a three-year study of the electoral process in the South. Martin then persuaded Key, a forty-year-old fellow Texan with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, to assemble a staff and direct the project. Key was on the faculty at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore at the time, and soon would move to Yale.

  In microscopic detail, Key and his team of research assistants dissected and analyzed the Southern body politic from Virginia to Texas, amassing mountains of data and interviewing an average of fifty people in each of the eleven states. University of North Carolina alumnus Alexander Heard, just out of the navy and bound for Columbia University to finish his Ph.D., spent three years on the project as Keys principal field worker, interviewer, and draft writer. Though its seven hundred pages were heavily salted with statistical analysis, Southern Politics was a refreshingly candid, informative, readable volume—even, at times, entertaining. The study carefully compared the differences and similarities among the states and concluded that their common denominator was the solidarity and power of wealthy and conservative whites in the 180 majority-black counties of the region—the so-called Black Belt.

  “The South may not be the nation’s number one political problem,” Key wrote, “but politics is the South’s number one problem”—and “if the politics of the South revolves around any single theme, it is that of the role of the black belts.” The one-party system, the factionalism, the machine bosses of state and city, congressional solidarity, malapportioned legislatures, the Dixiecrats, the minuscule electorate, the poll tax, and other impediments to voting—all these and more were traceable to one fundamental fact: “that the black-belt whites succeeded in imposing their will on their states and thereby presented a solid regional front in national politics on the race issue.”

  The appearance of white unity for the sake of preserving the racial status quo gave rise to the myth of the solid South, Key suggested, but in fact there was much diversity of thought within the region. In the cities and the “rim” states surrounding the Deep South, in the hill regions with their populist traditions, in the labor unions and other institutions, and in the black population, he wrote, “an underlying liberal drive permeates southern politics,” and it “will undoubtedly be mightily strengthened” as the principles of democracy take root. “The Dixiecrats beat the drums of racial reaction in 1948 without impressive results; the Dixiecrat movement may turn out to have been the dying gasp of the Old South.”

  The unflattering frankness of Southern Politics was made all the more remarkable by the fact that Southern scholars at a Southern institution had produced it. It was, however, apparently too hot for a Southern university press to publish, and so it was issued at a safe distance, from a commercial house in New York. The result, ironically, was that many more people saw the book or read reviews of it than would have otherwise—reviews that characterized the political South as a sick patient in need of a psychiatrist, or a threadbare emperor in need of a suit of clothes.

  It was almost time to call the roll and close the book on the forties, and on the first half of the twentieth century. V. O. Key had taken the measure of the South’s political institutions, and various of his fellows in other fields were also leaving benchmarks of summary and conclusion. From the Deep South to the District of Columbia and beyond, the march of time and events had jolted an awakening land out of its colonial lethargy. Here was the South in search of itself, trying to discover and come to terms with its own identity and purpose—and displaying in the process all of its traits of character and personality, the best and the worst.

  Some were distressingly familiar echoes of the inescapable past: racism, demagoguery, violence. The reappearance of an intemperate Talmadge in the Georgia governor’s office was soon followed by an upsurge of the Ku Klux Klan. One young country editor, twenty-four-year-old Amelia Knoedler of the Unadilla Observer, outraged by blatant acts of terrorism in her town, blamed the governor personally for creating a climate that allowed race hatred and lawlessness to breed. There were lynchings yet again in two rural Georgia counties, and for the twenty-sixth time in less than two decades, according to the Atlanta Journals count, the murderers went unpunished. “Georgia is sabotaging its own sovereignty,” the paper declared. Terrorist acts were also reported in several Southern cities, including Miami, Chattanooga, Birmingham, and Knoxville.

  Protestant and Catholic church bodies in most Southern states debated and sometimes passed resolutions condemning racial discrimination and injustice. The association of Southern Baptists in Virginia, following the lead of their sisters and brothers in North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, narrowly approved a committee report candidly confessing “that we are prejudiced on this question … that we are fearful, that we are afraid—for political, or ecclesiastical, or social reasons—to follow the way of Christ … in our relation to all races.” For local congregations and individual ministers, it was much harder to stand alone against the extreme hostility that often sprang up close around them.

  For many Southerners of both races, the matters of color and caste and class—the problems and the solutions—were essentially religious questions, moral and ethical in nature. Others preferred to think of racism as a political or economic problem, or an educational one. To Lillian Smith, “the terrible curse of segregation” was at root a psychiatric disease, mentally and psychologically crippling to whites and blacks alike. In Killers of the Dream, her fervent and intense book of autobiography and analysis published in 1949, she described and defined the illness at length and exhorted her readers to overcome it. Few of the South’s white liberals, including Ralph McGill, could find much to like in the book, leading Smith to retort that “75 per cent of the ‘liberals’ in the South seem to favor segregation.” McGill and some others dismissed her as a strident, preachy, pedantic, sanctimonious woman. Perhaps she was—but rare was the Southerner of either race or sex who could give her credit in those years of the forties simply for being right.

  One who did—and who was himself a besieged “prophet without honor”—was federal judge J. Waties Waring of Charleston. He and his second wife lived in a virtual state of internal exile from all except a few black friends and occasional visitors from outside the city. In large measure because of his rulings against the South Carolina white primary, the judge’s national reputation for courage soared even as his local stock plummeted.

  Elizabeth Avery Waring was, if anything, more combative than her husband. In 1950 she drew screams of outrage for a speech she made at the black YWCA in Charleston—touted in advance to the press—in which she declared that Southern whites were “a sick, confused and decadent people … full of pride and complacency, introverted, morally weak, and low.” Her bristling words opened new and deeper wounds. From as far away as Mississippi came a hot retort from Hodding Carter that Mrs. Waring was “as guilty of bigotry and deliberate inflammation of racial feeling as ever Bilbo was.”

  There followed a cross-burning on the lawn, pistol shots in the garden, and rocks smashing through the windows of the fashionable Waring home on Meeting Street. A delegation of black South Carolinians and liberal whites from other states, including left-wing stalwarts Aubrey Williams, Clark Foreman, and James Dombrowski, came to call on the Warings and to honor the judge for his “great and good works.” It was also in that same month of November 1950 that the NAACP’s legal director, Thurgood Marshall, came before Judge Waring for a pretrial hearing in a school discrimination case from rural Clarendon County, South Carolina. It was to become one of the most significant civil rights cases in the long history of the federal judiciary.

  The U.S. Supreme Court had rendered two opinions earlier in 1950 that stopped just short of declaring the old Plessy
doctrine of “separate but equal” to be an outmoded and unworkable relic. The court implied in the case of Oklahoma plaintiff G. W. McLaurin—and declared explicitly in the case of Texas plaintiff Heman Sweatt—that Plessy v. Ferguson “can never provide the equality required by the Fourteenth Amendment.” In Virginia, a federal district judge ordered a county to equalize funding of its separate white and black public schools or be prepared to see them merged. In Atlanta, a suit was brought by black plaintiffs asking the district court to declare the city’s segregated schools unconstitutional. According to one informed estimate, it would take more than a billion dollars to bring the South’s black schools to parity with its white ones. Some states scrambled to address the problem, but its solution by appropriation in the poverty-ridden region was demonstrably impossible. Gradually, inexorably, the wall of segregation was cracking apart.

  In all but five Southern states—Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and South Carolina—there was either token desegregation of graduate and professional schools or serious talk of it by the end of 1950. The quasi-independent Southern Regional Education Board, formed by the several states after the war to facilitate interstate cooperation in higher education, was dogged in its formative years by suspicions that the unofficial aim of the governors in creating it was to perpetuate segregation. The SREB staff, headed by John E. Ivey, Jr. (and made up almost entirely of graduate school alumni of the University of North Carolina), was at first on the receiving end of some of that criticism, but in a 1949 desegregation lawsuit in Maryland, the staff advised the board to intervene on behalf of the plain tiff. It did, declaring that it was “not the purpose of the Board that the regional compact … shall serve any state as a legal defense for avoiding responsibilities” regarding desegregation. Thereafter, the SREB gradually distanced itself from the segregationist label, even though charges of obstruction would still be raised against it, and another fifteen years would pass before the last racial barriers fell in the universities of the Deep South states.