by John Egerton
Elsewhere, the rabidly extreme candidates fared poorly. Bull Connor, the race-baiting Birmingham police commissioner, finished a distant sixth in Alabama’s 1950 gubernatorial primary (although the winner, Gordon Persons, turned out to be another white supremacist). In Mississippi, a reactionary editor, Mary Cain, ran fifth in a 1951 contest for governor after she advocated closing the schools to avoid desegregation. White Southerners had already done too much for blacks, she said, and the time had come to get tough.
It was not yet the season for massive resistance, though; that disaster was still waiting to happen, down the road a piece. It wasn’t the season for modest progress, either. This was the season to tiptoe and whisper, to close your eyes and cover your ears. In a match between two patrician gentlemen, John S. Battle defeated Francis Pickens Miller in the 1949 Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, after receiving the nod of old-guard Senator Harry Flood Byrd. Then Battle stood by helplessly in 1952 as Byrd, nemesis of all things progressive since the 1920s, cold-shouldered Adlai Stevenson and the Democrats, assuring victory in the state for Eisenhower and the Republicans. (Byrd also won his own race for reelection that year by handily defeating the luckless Francis Pickens Miller.)
In Texas, a latter-day Dixiecrat, Governor Allan Shivers, hopped on Ike’s coattails in 1952 and thus ensured his own reelection and a Texas win for the general—but as in Arkansas and Virginia and elsewhere, race wasn’t an important factor in the campaign. (Anticommunism was, though, and Shivers covered that base too, going out of his way to hail Joe McCarthy as a paragon of patriotic Americanism.) In Louisiana, Governor Robert F. Kennon also endorsed Ike. A right-wing tide was rising in the South, sure enough, but those who were swept along by it found no Communists in their path, and most of them wouldn’t take the race issue seriously until after the Supreme Court had decided the school segregation cases.
Alabama, Florida, and North Carolina all elected soft-shell conservatives, not breast-beaters, as their governors in the years just prior to 1954. South Carolina replaced Strom Thurmond with ex–New Dealer James F. Byrnes—no classic demagogue in the Ben Tillman–Cole Blease tradition, but a more dignified Republicrat who considered white supremacy “the very soul of the South.” Voters in the border state of Maryland twice elected a liberal Republican, Theodore McKeldin, and Kentucky also picked moderate leaders in the fifties—first Lawrence Weatherby and then A. B. “Happy” Chandler, the former governor, senator, and commissioner of baseball. In Frank G. Clement, Tennessee elected a sanctimonious orator with progressive instincts that pegged him a high notch above the Boss Crump surrogates who had run the state for so long. (Both Chandler and Clement would prove to be temperate and constructive leaders when the desegregation controversy surfaced in their states.)
Also on the side of the law, but handling (or mishandling) matters in his own inimitable way, would be Alabama’s James E. Folsom. Big Jim’s second turn as governor, from the campaign in 1954 to his waning days in office in January 1959, was a study in Southern eccentricity. He was a good-hearted, glad-handing populist sport with a genuine empathy for “the little man,” white and black, and he built a huge following in Alabama that puzzled and frustrated the reactionary politicians who had seized control of the Democratic Party during the Dixiecrat revolt. The state’s moderate senators, Lister Hill and John Sparkman, were closer to Folsom than to the arch-conservatives, but they were almost as wary of the governor, a man of exceptional entertainment value and few inhibitions.
Two weeks after his victory in the 1954 Democratic primary, the U.S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the school cases, and Folsom’s path from that point on would be strictly an uphill struggle. He managed to avoid direct comment on the ruling for a while, but finally indicated his acceptance of it as the law of the land. By then, Alabama whites were rallying for another lost cause, and Folsom found himself increasingly vilified and isolated.
Typically, though, he kept on being Big Jim; it was the only role this irrepressible character knew how to play. When Harlem congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., made a visit to Montgomery in the fall of 1955, Folsom sent his chauffeur out to meet him and bring him to the mansion for a drink. The image of these two roguish politicians sipping scotch with their feet up on the furniture was enough to drive most of the white citizens of Alabama over the edge; Southern hospitality was one thing, but this was outrageous. In 1956 the governor gave a quiet nod of approval to the Montgomery bus boycott and the desegregation-of the University of Alabama; in neither case was he openly supportive of the black cause, but considering the belligerent defiance of his successors in the office, the governor’s acquiescent response was remarkable—and more than enough to burn a few more of his bridges. By the time his term was up, many of his white constituents had branded him as a traitor, and they were ready to run him out of the state.
In stark contrast to Folsom’s personality and to his tempestuous second term was the reign of James F. Byrnes in South Carolina. During his long and lofty tenure in the three branches of the federal government, Byrnes had acquired the manipulative skills of a master politician and dressed them in the cool formality of a sophisticated diplomat. In 1950 he decided, at the age of sixty-eight, to offer his services to the voters as Strom Thurmond’s successor in the governor’s office. If I said the overwhelming preponderance of white voters were grateful to elect him and swear him in, that would be an extreme understatement; more precisely, they exhibited an eagerness to acclaim and anoint him.
To have so few of the stereotypical behavior traits that were a dead giveaway of the reactionary racists, Byrnes was disappointingly close to them in his thinking. He was a chronic, absolute, unquestioning believer in the natural inferiority of the African stock, and not even a paternalistic sense of compassion or fair play softened his views. Never an out-front motivator of the masses, he had quietly retired from the Truman administration in 1947, pleading poor health—and then had worked hard behind the scenes for the President’s defeat. Byrnes was never an avowed Dixiecrat, but he was an unreconstructed closet Rebel in his heart of hearts, and the reason, pure and simple, was race.
During his four years as governor, he redirected a large portion of the state’s education budget into a capital spending program for black schools, hoping desperately to ward off court-ordered desegregation; by any measure, the effort was a transparent failure. He endorsed Eisenhower in 1952 and every Republican candidate thereafter, until his death in 1972. With deep and unremitting bitterness, Byrnes became totally alienated from the U.S. Supreme Court and the national Democratic Party—institutions he had served ably and faithfully during his long and varied public life—and he remained forever unreconciled to them.
At the Southern Governors’ Conference in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in November 1951, Byrnes was busily trying to coax his disaffected fellow governors into the Republican camp when a most remarkable thing happened. A white native of his own state, Greenvillian Harry S. Ashmore, then editor of the Arkansas Gazette in Little Rock, stood before a luncheon microphone at the invitation of the host governor, Sid McMath, to speak on race relations in the South. It was the first time that subject had ever been broached at the convocation of governors. The speech was not exactly a ringing declaration of war against segregation, but it was straightforward enough. The handwriting was on the wall, Ashmore told the stone-faced executives, and the same old negative response to every attempt at reform would no longer do:
Some of us have suffered under the delusion that the South is the victim of an evil conspiracy, and that if we could only remove a few key men from power our troubles would be over. That is … dangerous nonsense. For every genuine radical or cynical political opportunist who exploits the race issue for his own ends, there are ten thousand sober, sincere, essentially conservative Americans who have accepted the proposition set forth in the civil rights program proposed by President Truman and embodied in the platform of the Republican Party. And the more we strike back in blind reaction t
o their demands, the more convinced they become that we are all misbegotten racists who will respond to nothing less than federal coercion.
When he finished, Ashmore heard applause from Governor McKeldin of Maryland, from McMath, and from a few renegade back-benchers in the press. Georgia’s Herman Talmadge had stalked out in the middle. Jimmy Byrnes, asked for a reaction by Johnny Popham of the New York Times, could only sputter in disbelief, “Why, I believe I know that boy’s family!”
And so, wrote Ashmore later, “the governors went forth to help pull down their own temple—refusing to face the problem they themselves counted as paramount, and worse still, trying to convince the world that it didn’t exist.” Neither political party was prepared to confront the issue of race, he concluded, yet, ironically, the positions of both had been shaped by the South—by its “inaction in the days of grace, and by blind defiance when time began to run out.”
The Southern politicians in Congress eased through the early fifties with much the same spirit of inaction as their office-holding brethren back home. Most of them had been less visible in the Dixiecrat Party than were the governors and state Democratic Party officials. After the movement’s crushing loss, though, it was the Southern delegations in Washington that got revenge by destroying President Truman’s legislative program—and that proved once again, if any more proof was needed, that it was the senators and congressmen who held the reins of power in the South.
They were much better at impeding change than leading it. Instead of forging a new party, or even shifting their allegiance to an old one, they hunkered down with their like-minded colleagues across the aisle, and on the first day of the pivotal Eighty-second Congress in January 1951, they displayed the strength, the will, and the parliamentary skill to take back the political initiative they had all but lost to Truman and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.
Most political analysts and pundits were in agreement after 1948 that the Southern white majority had three choices. The first—a separate party—had already failed once, and none but the most unyielding white supremacists saw any future in it. The second—a merger with like-minded Republicans—was widely predicted. The third—a pragmatic accommodation with blacks in a broader and more progressive Democratic Party—was the hope of most blacks and many whites, but not enough to make it happen.
Realistically speaking, the proponents of social change were too few, too divided (not to say competitive, or even hostile toward one another), and too circumscribed by the superior numbers and rigidity of the opposition to have any serious prospect of gaining political power. Neither was the Dixiecrat remnant viable; it had dwindled to a few fanatics obsessed with fear and hatred of the black minority, and there were simply not enough of them at that time to sustain a disciplined movement. After the 1950 elections, when they suffered still more humiliation, the last survivors had to search for another strategy.
Between these two camps was the ruling white majority of conservative Southern Democrats. In truth, they were much closer to the Dixiecrats than to the liberals, and most of them would slide to the right as the middle eroded. They had a great deal in common with the Northern Republicans: Both were against the growth and centralization of federal power, against broadening the franchise, against federal solutions to most (but not all) social problems, against a “welfare state” to aid the poor, against any program that smacked of socialism or communism. The Southerners freely embraced the Republicans’ obsessive anticommunism and put it to work for them; the Republicans in turn acquiesced in the states’-rights demands of the Southern bloc, knowing that their hidden agenda was to keep segregation and white supremacy. The understanding they reached made wholesale party-switching unnecessary; simply by agreeing to work together for mutual goals, the two conservative factions ensured that in the South—and to a large extent, in Congress—power would remain in the same ideological orbit and the same upper-class hands.
It was widely anticipated by those in the know that the two traditional parties were on the verge of a major realignment along liberal-conservative lines, with the Republicans embracing this anti-federalist, North-South union of upper-crust conservatives and the Democrats becoming the progressive party of labor, blacks, ethnics, urbanites, Jews, Catholics—in other words, the eclectic host of American liberals.
It never quite happened that way. Not for another twenty years would there be a significant number of Republicans elected to office in the South—and when a genuine two-party system was finally in place, it wouldn’t be definable as a classic right-left split; there would be at least a hint of an ideological cross-section in each camp, reflecting to some extent the complex makeup of the national parties.
That Jimmy Byrnes and Harry Byrd could conspicuously spurn the Democrats in 1952 without being drummed out of the party showed not only how secure they were in their power but also how compatible the Democratic and Republican conservatives were in their thinking. Eisenhower won Texas, Florida, Virginia, and Tennessee, and he would add Louisiana to that list in 1956, but his success didn’t do a thing for the Republican Party in the South.
Numbers would tell the story: None of the old Confederate states would elect a Republican governor until Winthrop Rockefeller of Arkansas and Florida’s Claude Kirk won in 1966. State legislatures stayed Democratic too. In 1948 there was a grand total of 50 Republicans among 1,788 legislators in the eleven Southern states. That tiny fraction climbed to 62 the year Ike was elected; eight years later, it had slipped back to 60. (By 1972, though, almost 300 Southern Republicans would be serving in their state assemblies.)
Two east Tennessee Republicans were the only members of their party among 105 Southerners in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1948; there were 6 after the 1952 elections, but only 7 by 1960. Twelve years after that, GOP members would make up nearly one-third of the Southern bloc. No Republican would be elected to the Senate from a Southern state until John Tower of Texas won a special election in 1961. By 1972, 7 of the 22 Southerners would be Republicans—including South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who finally switched parties in 1966.
The rise of Republicanism and of two-party politics in the South was not a direct outgrowth of the Dixiecrat rebellion or the Eisenhower victories, but a later phenomenon; it would have more to do with Barry Goldwater in defeat and Richard Nixon in victory than with Ike. In the pivotal and decisive years between 1948 and 1954, the South remained firmly in the grasp of the same ruling oligarchy that had dominated throughout the Jim Crow era (the same in spirit, if not in personalities). Having weathered the threat of a liberal breakout on civil rights, the Southern Democrats whose power base was on Capitol Hill returned to business as usual with a collective sigh of relief.
In a club where tradition reigned, seniority meant prominence, and a good many of the Southerners had it. Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, Walter George of Georgia, and Tom Connally of Texas could count among them almost a hundred years of service in the Senate when they made their exits in the fifties. Harry Byrd of Virginia, Richard Russell of Georgia, Allen Eilender of Louisiana, and Lister Hill of Alabama had all been elected in the thirties, and all would serve for thirty years or more. Half a dozen others were elected in the war years, and most of them would still be there in the sixties or beyond: John McClellan and J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, Olin Johnston and Burnet R. Maybank of South Carolina, James Eastland of Mississippi, and Clyde R. Hoey of North Carolina. All of these men except Hill and Fulbright could fairly be called reactionary guardians of the old and inequitable Southern way of life, with its built-in advantages for white males of means; on the specific issue of racial equality, even Hill and Fulbright joined the others in their increasingly desperate effort to ward off change.
The postwar crop of Southern senators included a few more liberal or progressive thinkers. John Sparkman of Alabama was considered moderate enough to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate on the 1952 Democratic ticket. Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Lyndon Johnson of Texas were des
tined to be high-visibility Southern moderates-cum-liberals from the day they got to the Senate in 1948, and the same was true of Albert Gore, Sr., chosen by Tennessee voters over Kenneth McKellar in 1952. Kerr Scott of North Carolina, who as governor had picked Frank Graham for the Senate in 1949, got the seat himself in 1954 after Willis Smith, the man who beat Graham, died of a heart attack. It was also in the mid-fifties that Herman Talmadge defeated Walter George in Georgia and Strom Thurmond won election in South Carolina with write-in votes after the sudden death of Burnet Maybank.
The Democrats had come out of the 1948 election with comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress, but the margins almost evaporated in 1950, and with Eisenhower’s election in 1952, the Republicans narrowly took control of both the Senate and the House. It was an unhappy time of dissension and backbiting among the Democrats, punctuated by acrimonious quarrels rooted in race and ideology. But their ravenously ambitious and opportunistic young minority leader in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson, worked hard to pull the factions together—and to solidify his own base of power. In 1954 he would engineer a 67-to-22 vote of condemnation on Senator Joseph McCarthy that not a single Democrat would oppose. It was an unprecedented public judgment of the Club against one of its members—but by that time Truman was long gone, and with him had fled the last hope of progress on civil rights.
When the Democrats regained their one-vote advantage in the 1954 elections, Johnson became majority leader, and he would remain at the center of power in American politics for the rest of his career. By the late 1950s he would be a key figure—eventually the key figure—in the transformation of Congress from a citadel of white supremacy to a functioning institution of democratic government. But during his first four years in the Senate—which were also Truman’s last four in the White House—Johnson was at least tolerant if not supportive of the Southern reactionaries who did the President in.