Fear Itself (21 page)

A decade later, his press published
What the Negro Wants?
—a collection of essays edited by the African-American historian Rayford Logan and written by leading black intellectuals and activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, and Roy Wilkins. Couch, who had commissioned the book, felt compelled to write a defensive publisher’s introduction to answer the demands Logan and his colleagues had put for an end to segregation and “an equal share not only in the performance of responsibilities and obligations, but also in enjoyment of rights and opportunities” in voting, legal standing, employment, schooling, housing, and social security.
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Broadly, they endorsed the position that had been articulated by the polymath African-American author James Weldon Johnson, in 1935, when he had charted a course for blacks to become “an integral part of the nation.” Johnson had counseled blacks to gain strength and experience from “the system of imposed segregation,” but to “use that experience and strength steadily and as rapidly as possible to destroy the system.”
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Effectively speaking not only for himself but for his press and university, Couch strongly demurred. After awkwardly thanking the book’s contributors, he announced, “I disagree with the editor and most of the contributors on basic problems.”
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Like many southern moderates, Couch rejected biological reasoning about black inferiority. Equally, he repudiated the idea that recently had been articulated by Myrdal’s study, whose central theme Couch summarized as “the view that the Negro is not inferior to the white man, that he only appears to be so, that his condition is wholly and completely a product of race prejudice, and the consequent disabilities inflicted on the Negro by the white man.” Rather, citing Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria speech of October 16, 1854, which assailed slavery but rejected black equality (“What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this”), Couch endorsed a third position, “the theory that the Negro’s condition is produced by inferiority, but that this inferiority can be overcome, and the prejudice resulting from it can be cured.” He cautioned, however, that efforts at Negro development “must not be done in such manner as to weaken the barrier between the races.”
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Later in the decade, an influential book urged southerners to bolt from the Democratic Party because it had become an uncontrollable instrument for something worse. The Alabama lawyer and archsegregationist Charles Wallace Collins, like Phillips, proudly underscored in 1947 how the South was not like any other part of the country. There, “the doctrine of white supremacy is akin to a religious belief. . . . It is rooted in the very fiber of the southern soul.” Collins was not a fringe crank. Until 1927, he had served in major posts in Washington, including librarian of the Supreme Court, law librarian for Congress, and general counsel for both the Bureau of the Budget and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. He went on to become a leading figure in the Bank of America, and served as special counsel for the American Bankers Association. One purpose of
Whither Solid South?
was to analyze the capacity of what he identified as the South’s “three bars across the path of those Negroes whose aspirations embrace the entry into every phase of American society.” These he named the bar of blood, the bar of suffrage, and the bar of segregation.
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The first, the barrier of blood,
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was widely shared across the United States. As an indicator, Collins noted how the Red Cross distinguished white from black blood everywhere, on the understanding that white Americans, irrespective of region, would object to being given black blood, despite the absence of any chemical difference. Although such racism was national, the bar of blood, he stressed, was not as universal or as absolute as it was inside the South. By contrast, “its full pattern . . . which flows from the doctrine of white supremacy . . . is set only in the South where the mass of Negroes reside and where the white population is predominantly of British descent with hardly a trace of foreign born.” There, he was pleased to indicate, “white supremacy . . . is taken for granted and is not open to debate.” In the South, “white supremacy is a political doctrine. It is not a question of scientific proof.”
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If ideas and practices related to the meaning of race were not confined to the South, the other two barriers blacks confronted were, Collins wrote, unique to that region. The bar of suffrage followed from an absolute commitment to white supremacy, for “inherent in that doctrine” is “the principle that the Negro shall have no part in governing the white people.” The restricted franchise was the region’s most important political defense, for black voting promised a return to the dreaded conditions of Reconstruction. “If the Negro in the South were admitted to the polls simply on the qualifications of citizenship, age, residence, and sound mind, as many now advocate, he would gain political control over the richest agricultural regions of the Deep South—the lands of the old Cotton Kingdom . . . In States like Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana, many counties would be controlled by Negroes. The county offices would fall into their hands,” and, as a result, “the fate of the white people would be at the mercy of the Negroes.”
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The third barrier, the bar of legally required segregation, did not mean that blacks and whites lived entirely separate lives. After all, they were in daily contact, especially in urban and rural workplaces. What formalized segregation intended, rather, Collins acutely observed, was to make it certain “that the Negro could not aspire to social equality in intercourse with the whites.” Segregation was imposed everywhere that racial contact might be thought to entail social equality; hence blacks and white were kept apart when they ate, played or watched sports, attended movies or theatrical events, rode buses and trains, even when they had to use a public toilet.
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Collins might have added a fourth barrier, one he chose not to mention—the region’s pervasive climate of public and private violence, including vigilante lynching, what a historian of the Ku Klux Klan calls racist “thought in action.”
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Between 1900 and 1930, 1,886 such killings occurred in the United States. Though only nine states had none, the greatest number took place in the South—not just in Georgia (302), Mississippi (285), Texas (201), or Alabama (132) but also in Tennessee (76), Kentucky (68), and Missouri (41).
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This form of violence was ebbing by the early 1930s, but it hardly had disappeared. The United States witnessed 28 lynchings in 1933, the first year of the New Deal. In November, one year after FDR’s election, Lloyd Warner was burned alive before a cheering crowd of ten thousand in Princess Anne, Maryland, after the attempt to hang him had failed. David Gregory was lynched in Kountze, Texas, his body burned and his heart and genitals carved from his corpse. Cord Cheek of Columbia, Tennessee, was found hanging from a tree limb after a grand jury had refused to indict him for molesting an eleven-year-old white girl. Freddy Moore was killed in Assumption Parish, Louisiana, for the murder of a white girl (another man, who was white, later admitted to the killing).
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Moderates like W. T. Couch abhorred lynching. But this type of justice was a significant feature of the South’s racial order during the early New Deal, much as it had been since the close of Reconstruction. Lynching signified both an ultimate commitment to white domination and the region’s fixation on black sexuality. Even the erudite Collins, whose prose was very different from the brutal racist talk of the Klan or political figures like Theodore Bilbo, underscored the central role played in the white southern imagination by fears of racial mixing.

II.

I
F LYNCHING
was the least civilized means the white South used to protect its racial hegemony, electoral politics and congressional representation were perhaps the most. In the language of political science, “the critical intervening variable between agenda change and policy change is the congressional process.”
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It was just this space in the legislative process that the South commanded by virtue of its electoral system and its implications for congressional experience and seniority.

“For seventy years, the South has voted in the Negro question,” Anne O’Hare McCormick summarized in a remarkable 1930 series of articles on the South. “The Negro is its perpetual inhibition. The revenge of the slave is to place his masters in such subjection that they can make no decision, political, social, economical, or ethical, without reference to him. . . . Voteless, he dominates politics.” A dozen years later, Marian Irish’s study of the one-party system in the South underscored the inescapability of “the elementary determinant in the southern pattern,” which she described as “an intense negro phobia which has scarcely abated since Reconstruction. . . . No issue seems more important than the exclusion of negroes from public affairs. The Solid South is white; the one-party system has been devised primarily to perpetuate the political supremacy of whites.”
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This authoritarian and racist political system repressed groups and a diversity of views. Speaking of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the historian Morgan Kousser noted:

A third to a half of Southern voters had been unreconstructed oppositionists. Despite ingenious gerrymandering, a few white Republicans, Independents, Populists, and even Negroes sat in every session of every state legislature. Some non-Democrats filled congressional, gubernatorial, and senatorial seats. How much more rationalized was the South after 1900! Virtually every elected officeholder was a white Democrat.
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The polity they controlled was formally democratic. Even its domination by a single party did not make it a dictatorship, for the Democratic Party within the South was chaotic and anarchic, not centrally controlled or ideologically rigid. But it had powerful authoritarian tendencies and a strong exclusionary tilt. Rules designed to repress black political participation also kept white voting rates down. Poll taxes, as an example, arguably kept more poor whites from the polls than African-americans, often making “a travesty of many [southern] elections,” as “political machines and individual candidates commonly buy votes by paying the poll taxes of those who will ‘vote right.’” Across the country as a whole, nearly 60 percent of eligible persons voted in the 1940 presidential election. In the South, no state reached a 50 percent level. In Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and South Carolina turnout rates were at or below 20 percent.
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Midterm congressional elections attracted even fewer voters. In 1938, Mississippi had a population of 2,183,796, of whom 49 percent were African-American, yet all of its seven Democrats in the House—Ross Collins, William Colmer, Wall Doxey, Aaron Ford, Dan McGehee, John Rankin, and William Whittington—ran unopposed that year. Collins was elected with 11,540 votes, a good deal higher than Colmer’s 4,873, McGehee’s 4,834, Rankin’s 4,384, Doxey’s 4,134, Ford’s 3,502, or Whittington’s 2,172. In all, voters in Mississippi cast 35,439 votes. In neighboring Alabama, where four seats were contested (with the non-Democrats receiving 28, 12, 7, and less than 1 percent of the vote), the winning candidates in its nine districts secured between 10,266 and 17,903 ballots. Even the border states had relatively low turnouts. Successful candidates in Kentucky, for example, each running in a contested race (one of whom was a Republican), earned an average of 38,000 votes. In California, by contrast, no member of the House from any of its twenty districts, each contested, received fewer than 52,516 votes. Most winning candidates took many more, reaching a peak of 119,236. In the Twelfth District, Jerry Voorhis, later famously defeated by Richard Nixon, was supported by 75,003 voters, or 61 percent of the 123,363 votes cast in a three-way race.
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For each voter in Mississippi’s First District, which elected John Rankin, there were twenty-five who cast a ballot for Voorhis or his opponents in California’s Twelfth.
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Once the region’s elected representatives entered Congress, they acted as a distinctive unit on the national stage. Charles Wallace Collins was right to observe that “it is a well known fact that no person could be elected to any public office in the South who failed to subscribe to . . . the doctrine of white supremacy” in the form taken by segregation’s barriers to social equality. Even “the warmest southern friends of the Negro race,” he correctly noted about the era’s white moderates and liberals who favored gradual racial change, the elimination of poll taxes, and a growing black franchise, “do not favor the breakdown of the pattern of segregation in the South.”
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Collins was indubitably correct. The red lines that southern liberals would not cross had been crisply articulated in a
Virginia Quarterly
article just one month after FDR took office. Its author, R. Charlton Wright, was the recently retired editor of the Columbia, South Carolina,
Record
and had crusaded against “the tragic cost of thousands of lynchings, numerous race riots, and many acts of glaring injustice and inhumanity to the Negro.” His “Southern Man and the Negro,” a document on which he had been working since 1929, expressed “hostility to any and all approaches to the intermixes of the races,” chastised black leaders for “advanced radical” demands that “are not compatible with any attitudes the South will entertain, or tolerate in practice within its confines, while it can prevent them,” and underscored how “the white race cannot acquiesce safely in any compromises that would vitiate its age-long hereditary attitudes and convictions.”
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Collins recalled how Mark Ethridge, the liberal editor of Louisville’s
Courier-Journal
, pointedly sought to reassure a skeptical audience in Birmingham in 1942, soon after he had been appointed by President Roosevelt as the first chair of the new wartime Committee on Fair Employment Practices. “There is no power in the world,” Ethridge state, “not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied or Axis, which could now force the Southern white people to abandonment of the principle of social segregation. It is a cruel disillusionment,” he insisted, “bearing the germs of strife and perhaps tragedy, for any of their [Negroes’] leaders to tell them that they can expect it, or that they can exact it as the price of their participation in the war.”
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He might also have cited how the most racially liberal southerner in the House, Florida’s Claude Pepper, had explained his opposition to federal antilynching legislation in August 1937 by announcing that “whatever may be written into the Constitution, whatever may be placed upon the statute books of this Nation, however many soldiers may be stationed about the ballot boxes of the Southland, the colored race will not vote, because in so doing . . . they endanger the supremacy of a race to which God has committed the destiny of a continent, perhaps of the world.”
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