Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Having two aunts and an uncle who worked for the federal government in Washington, I was privileged on summer trips there to see the big house on Pennsylvania Avenue where President Truman lived, to dine at the famed Willard Hotel (my grandfather had been there, at a Gridiron Club dinner in the early 1920s, when a disastrous fire struck), and to ride a bus up the broad “Main Street of America” to the Capitol, where my old neighbor from Paducah, Vice President Alben Barkley, presided over sessions of the United States Senate. Five or ten minutes of droning speeches there was enough for me, though; the real Senators, in my book, were the guys who played baseball out at Griffith Stadium, and that’s where my cousin Jack and I preferred to be.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that there was a lot more action and excitement to be found in the cities than in little country towns like mine. Not that there weren’t plenty of things for teenage boys to do out there in the heartland. Sports and girls were the two principal interests, with school, church, home chores, and even odd jobs for pay ranking far down the list. My first regular job was as a delivery boy for the Louisville Courier-Journal. At times, the responsibility of it weighed as heavily on my skinny shoulders as a bag full of Sunday papers. We still depended on the C-J, reliable old gray lady that she was, to keep us informed—as well as on Life and Look, The Saturday Evening Post, and the Readers Digest. All in all, we were not devoid of cultural assets, far from it; even in Cadiz you could get some sense of what the larger possibilities were.

  Fantasy as well as reality filtered in to us via the radio, the movies, phonograph records, books and magazines, and the mesmerizing novelty of television. I actually knew a kid whose father had bought a TV set—the first in our town. We watched the Cleveland Browns on winter Sunday afternoons. Sometimes we couldn’t tell whether the snow on the screen was a storm blowing in over Lake Erie or just poor reception in that primitive dawn of video transmission.

  By the time I graduated from high school, in 1953, I felt that I had seen and done more than most youngsters coming up in the rural South—or the rural North and West, for that matter. Along the way, I had developed a taste for adventure, a love of travel, and a fascination with the endless variety of life in the greater U.S.A. But still I was oblivious to the political, social, and economic issues that gave off a low rumble like summer thunder all across the South as the U.S. Supreme Court deliberated at length on the school desegregation question.

  My first job out of high school was a three-month stint as a lowly file clerk in the fingerprint archives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One day as I was waiting for an elevator, I saw J. Edgar Hoover himself—a man known to me in legend as the crime-busting king of the G-men. Through my supervisor I learned that I could have a personally autographed photo of “the big Boss,” free for the asking. It turned out to be the only memento I took back to Kentucky with me when I returned in the fall to enter college. The FBI director’s aggressive pursuit of Communists and other radicals was no secret in that anti-red decade. It would be years, however, before the public learned about his clandestine surveillance of black leaders, his “black is red” logic in harmony with Southern reactionaries and others of the radical right, or his cozy relationship with some of the same organized-crime figures to come under the scrutiny of a Senate subcommittee headed by Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver in the early fifties. Hoover was above criticism in those days; to impressionable kids like me (not to mention most adults), he was as clean and pure as Dick Tracy, a straight-arrow cop who could do no wrong.

  The summer I went to work in Washington, Dwight D. Eisenhower was just settling in at the White House, and Harry Truman had retired to his home in Missouri. The Republican Party controlled both houses of Congress. The Korean War had claimed two million lives, of whom more than thirty thousand were American servicemen, and hostilities continued despite a tenuous negotiated truce. While the United States and the Soviet Union solemnly debated a proposed United Nations ban on nuclear weapons, both major powers were secretly testing hydrogen bombs, some with up to twenty-five hundred times more explosive power than the atomic blast that had destroyed Hiroshima. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Russians, were executed at Sing Sing prison in New York; I read about that in the Washington Post one morning on my way to work.

  Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, after winning election to a second term in 1952, soon reached the height of his powers (but not the depth of his disgrace) as a public official. In his capacity as chairman of a permanent investigations subcommittee, he went about irresponsibly hurling sensational charges of subversion and disloyalty at a wide assortment of Americans in and out of government. Millions of angry, frustrated citizens, from Presidents Truman and Eisenhower to the lowest level of Civil Service employees, found it almost impossible to counter the demagogic senator’s broad-brush smear tactics. As time passed, his adversaries grew hesitant, cautious, fearful, silent—not because they were convinced, as McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover asserted, that the nation was infested with hundreds of thousands of closet Communists and other traitors, but rather because they longed to placate and tame and finally to subdue the fanatical witch-hunters.

  The McCarthy virus would not soon be arrested; it was keeping the FBI busy, and giving new life to the discredited House Un-American Activities Committee, with its heritage of invasive snooping passed down from Southern reactionaries like Martin Dies of Texas and John Rankin of Mississippi. And, beginning in 1951, there was yet another team of spy-seekers in the game: the Internal Security Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chief flamethrower was James O. Eastland, the spiritual heir to Mississippi’s racist godfather, the late Theodore Bilbo.

  Whistling and singing, the Class of ’53 marched blithely right into the midst of all these tumultuous happenings. It wasn’t the sound of silence that got our attention; what my generation heard were the swelling heralds of a new age reverberating all around us. In spiritual company with most American teenagers of the post–World War II era, we were, as the talk had it, grooving on the popular music of our day. We may have given dutiful tribute to the authority figures closest to us—parents, teachers, preachers—and even shown some fleeting attentiveness to the politicians and others who spoke from a higher platform. But in my recollection, the musicians and their music elicited far more respect and admiration from us than did anyone in an adult leadership role. In truth, we marched to a different drummer—or guitar, or brass horn—and the beat was its own reward.

  The music of the fifties foretold a time of turbulent change. It was a rich and yeasty mixture of traditional and modern sounds—jazz and swing, bop and pop, country and Western, rhythm and blues, rock and roll—and a great deal of it had Southern roots. The first decade after the war was an especially fertile time of musical creativity. I still think reverently of such artists as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and Peggy Lee, Nat “King” Cole and Ella Fitzgerald, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, Mahalia Jackson and “Leadbelly” (Huddie Ledbetter). All but a couple of those were native Southerners, either black or white, but in those days I didn’t think about where they were from or what color they were—only that I liked the music they made.

  Late at night I tuned in to WLAC in Nashville and listened to “Hoss” Allen and Gene Nobles spinning rhythm-and-blues platters from Randy’s Record Shop in Gallatin, Tennessee. I never would have believed that they were white guys who just sounded black (not many blacks believed it, either). In the mainstream of pop music, the incredibly sensuous and exotic voice of Eartha Kitt singing “C’est Ci Bon” had me convinced that she was French, and I assumed that she was white; in fact, though, she was young and black and Southern—not long out of her teens, but a far piece from her origin in the tiny cotton-field hamlet of North, South Carolina.

  A diverse variety of Southern musical traditions began to merge and cross-fertilize in the fifties. The folk music of the mountains and the fields, bla
ck blues and white honky-tonk, jazz and its derivatives, and church music in its many forms met in an ongoing instrumental and vocal exploration that would always produce a tension between traditionalists and innovators—and some very creative new music in the bargain. One consequence of the fusion would be the rock-and-roll revolution, which was then almost upon us. Among my favorite performers in that musical explosion of the mid-fifties were three young Southerners—two white, one black—whose artistry both blended and transcended race and color: Elvis Presley, “Little Richard” Penniman, and Jerry Lee Lewis. (One reason I identified with them, I’m sure, is that they were among the first of my generation—depression babies—to make it in the big time.) Ray Charles was coming on strong, too—black, blind, and brilliant. A teenage refugee out of south Georgia and north Florida, he could play and sing anybody’s music—his own best of all. I marveled at his genius.

  To think of all those performers in racial or regional terms made no sense at all; the music they created was simply beyond such classification, and though it had Southern roots, it was rapidly being nationalized by means of radio, television, records, and live performances on the road. The music was becoming integrated, in the fullest and truest sense of that word: united in its diversity, enriched and strengthened by a process that combined separate parts into an expanding whole, yet not robbing those individual elements of their distinctiveness and their integrity.

  If music spoke to the possibilities of union, literature brought a more troubling message—or so, at least, did the premier novel of the mid-passage years: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published in 1952. Deeply symbolic and metaphorical, Ellison’s narrative traced the odyssey of an anonymous and nameless young black Southerner out of his oppressive motherland and into the forbidding, white-dominated world of the urban North. It was more, much more, than the authors thinly disguised autobiography; it was a universal tale of alienation and the search for identity, and it won critical praise, capped by the National Book Award.

  Growing up on the black side of Oklahoma City, Ellison developed a boyhood appreciation of music and literature, and when he went to Alabama in 1933 to enroll at Tuskegee Institute, he aspired to a career in music. But three years later, seeking a respite from the dehumanizing racism of the Deep South, he took a summer job in New York and never returned. In the offices of the Federal Writers’ Project, Ellison came under the influence of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes; it was with their encouragement (and with the help of a Rosenwald Fellowship and other kinds of support) that he was able to spend seven years writing the novel that would not only define his career but also the essence of the African-American experience after 330 years on this continent. The title alone spoke volumes: To be black in contemporary America was to be unseen and unvalued—ignored—by the white majority.

  Once again, as they had in the thirties and forties, creative artists were preparing what amounted to a scouting report, an early forecast of the social climate. Out of the depths of their exploration and creativity, they were giving us a portent of variegated and interdependent but still inequitable things to come. And as before, few people heard and heeded these inner voices of admonition.

  The turn of the midcentury provided a timely occasion for individual and collective stock-taking, the sort of backward and forward gazing that newspapers and magazines are wont to do. In the pages of the Southern press, the picture that came across in this largely numerical accounting was a mixture of positive and negative elements, heavily weighted to the former.

  The population of the eleven-state region had increased by almost 5 million during the 1940s, to a total of more than 36.5 million. Virtually all of the growth was among whites; blacks had a net gain of only 196,000 people for the ten-year period, and now numbered slightly more than 9 million, or one-fourth of the South’s census—down a full five percentage points in just twenty years. An estimated 2 million blacks left the rural South during the decade. By far the most of them had “gone up North,” as it was commonly explained, but a substantial number, along with a great many whites, had moved into the urban South. Consequently, by 1950 there were thirty cities in the region with 100,000 or more people, ten of them with at least a quarter of a million. Just a half-century earlier, in the vast sweep of land south of the Ohio River, from the Atlantic Coast to the Southwestern desert, only New Orleans, Louisville, and Memphis could boast of a six-figure population.

  Along with urban growth had come an industrial boom that would have made Henry Grady and the New South advocates of the 1880s swell with pride. World War II was responsible for much of it, bringing munitions plants and other war-production facilities that remained in peacetime (as did many military installations). Petrochemicals, textiles, wood-pulp and tobacco products, furniture, and soft drinks (led by the Atlanta-based Coca-Cola empire) were among the industries that helped to lift the South out of cotton serfdom. New nonfarm jobs and the higher wages they paid caused personal income in the region to increase by 225 percent in the 1940s, and for blacks the gains were even more dramatic—close to 400 percent. Life was at least relatively better for the generality of Southerners. Unemployment stayed consistently below five percent for whites in the midcentury years (but for blacks it was higher).

  Still, the numbers concealed a chronic and pervasive pattern of inequity. For every ten dollars received by the average wage-earner elsewhere in the United States, the Southern worker got about seven. Black males employed in the South typically made only about half as much as their white counterparts. Unemployment was high and headed higher among the multitude of unskilled workers, particularly blacks. Job discrimination blocked many women and virtually all nonwhites from a vast array of attractive career opportunities. Efforts to correct these problems by guaranteeing fair employment practices through federal legislation were completely stymied by the ad-hoc coalition of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans in Congress.

  The on-again, off-again efforts of the national government to keep prices and wages from flying out of control were only marginally successful; while strike-plagued industries and labor unions blamed each other for the scourge of inflation, the value of a dollar fell to half of what it had been in the late 1930s. Inevitably, impoverished areas like the South were hardest hit—yet their political bosses in Washington and their economic bosses at home steadfastly opposed governmental economic planning, not to mention federal solutions to the problems of employment, education, health, and poverty.

  The resistance of Dixie senators and representatives to Washington’s intervention wasn’t necessarily philosophical; when the primary beneficiaries were people like themselves—white, male, upper-class, conservative, and by their lights patriotic—the lawmakers could be exceedingly generous. They saw to it that their South got more than its share of military and agricultural largesse, but outside of those two pipelines there was precious little infusion of federal funds into the region. One notable exception was the Tennessee Valley Authority, by far the largest single government program of economic and social uplift below the Mason-Dixon line. It had the appealing virtue of earning a large portion of its budget from the sale of electricity. Even so, the agency stayed in hot water with the power lobby and with right-wing critics who opposed its “socialistic” policies and longed to do it in—or, better yet, convert it into a “free enterprise” utility. TVA had almost as many Southern detractors in Congress as it had defenders.

  On the surface, the South showed signs of growth and progress similar to those in other parts of the country. The affluent new suburbs of Dallas and Houston and Atlanta were not unlike New York’s and Chicago’s. Consumer goods were the same for everyone who could afford them, whether they lived in California or the Carolinas. In 1951 alone, the number of American homes with television sets quadrupled, from three million to twelve million, and the South was in on that revolutionary development, too—not only as a “consumer” of the appliance, but also as a recipient of the homogenizing and culture-shaping content
of TV programs.

  This was not a time of intense regional or national preoccupation with the chronic problems of the South. The Truman administration and both houses of Congress had too many other pressing concerns, the war in Korea and the threat of Communist infiltration at home being foremost among them. What’s more, Americans from every race, class, and region faced real or imagined worries—the Bomb, communism, unemployment, debt, divorce, social upheaval—and they were tired of war and postwar strife. And then, all too soon, there we were again, mired in another overseas military operation—this one euphemistically called a “police action.”

  The people had had enough conflict to last them a lifetime; they longed for rest, for peace and quiet—but Joe McCarthy was telling them they had to be watchful and suspicious, for even their most trusted associates might be spies. Almost no one wanted to stir up any more trouble. As long as the South was tagging along with the rest of the country, no elected officials and few others in public life seemed at all inclined to raise such troubling issues as the continuing denial of basic rights and opportunities to blacks, or the ongoing disadvantage of the South in the nation. That, they reminded one another, was the very sort of disruptive talk the Communists were using so deceitfully to undermine our confidence.