Fear Itself (22 page)

Refusing to acknowledge any incompatibility between the system of segregation and wider American values and visions, southern politicians sought to legislate without having to choose among their valued objectives. Most had brought an activist agenda to Washington well before the New Deal. The southern bloc strongly pressed the federal regulation of railroads by advocating repairs to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. It fought to reduce tariff rates, campaigned for stronger controls over credit and banking, and played a crucial role in creating the Federal Reserve System. It strongly championed antimonopoly policies to bring big corporations under control. It supported federal aid to agricultural education. Though often ambivalent about organized labor, southern congressmen also were prepared to promote union interests in the hopes of forging a farmer-labor alliance within the Democratic Party.
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In all, many of the South’s congressional initiatives were progressive.

This turn-of-the-century program culminated in the election of Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in 1912, followed by his promotion of these policies under the label of “the New Freedom.” Coming on the heels of the South’s institutionalization of racial segregation and black disenfranchisement, both with the sanction of the Supreme Court, Wilson’s presidency offered white southerners confirmation of their successful return to the union. “Long ago I had despaired of ever seeing a man of Southern birth President,” Benjamin F. Long, a superior court judge in North Carolina, wrote in March 1913 to Walter Hines Page, the distinguished North Carolina–born journalist and publisher newly appointed as ambassador to Great Britain. That development, he observed, marked “an era in our national life. With it we have the ascendancy of men of Southern birth and residence to the seats of power and responsibility such as has never been seen in our day.”
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As a Virginian and the first southern-born president since the Civil War, Wilson combined progressivism with aggressive racism by segregating federal departments in workstations, lunchrooms, and bathrooms, removing most blacks from supervisory positions in the federal civil service, celebrating the Ku Klux Klan by screening
The Birth of a Nation
in the White House before his assembled cabinet, and successfully resisting a condemnation of racial inequality in the Treaty of Versailles.
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During the Wilson years, the composite of racism and progressive liberalism came to dominate the Democratic Party, and, with it, the content and boundaries of social reform.
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Wilson had been elected in a three-party race, winning a majority of the vote only in southern states and one nonsouthern state, Arizona. As he took office, more than half the Democratic majority in the Senate was southern, and just over 40 percent in the House. Champ Clark of Missouri was Speaker of the House, with Oscar Underwood of Alabama serving as majority leader. Southern senators chaired twelve of fourteen committees, and southern representatives presided over eleven of thirteen.

Southern representatives pushed the Wilson administration in interventionist directions, driving it to move beyond an original and more moderate emphasis on lowering tariffs and opening markets. Southern members, Arthur Link has stressed, led a crusade advocating “government’s duty to intervene directly in economic affairs in order to benefit submerged or politically impotent economic interests.” In so doing, “they helped make Wilson an advanced progressive and helped to commit his administration to a broad program of welfare legislation.” Though historians have debated whether southerners in Congress were the lone prime movers, southern preferences and votes clearly played a central role in crafting and passing President Wilson’s legislative program.
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In all, “the imprint of the triumphant South on the domestic agenda of Wilson’s New Freedom,” the historian Michael Perman has rightly noted, was “indisputable.” Key legislation concerned with tariffs, economic monopolies, the currency, banking, farm relief, railroad regulation, and child labor “was brought forward and steered to passage by southern congressmen, while receiving overwhelming support from the southern delegations.”
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With the era’s Republicans more concerned with winning white votes in the South than with promoting the rights of their black supporters, and with the Democratic Party so tightly bound to the region’s segregated order, southern members were free in the main to vote their substantive preferences without much concern for the security of white supremacy.
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Understanding, however, that a growing federal role might well invite national oversight and supervision, they deployed their structural power in the legislature to block even the most limited of such efforts.

A revealing example concerns legislation that aimed to bring modern techniques to farmers through scientific education, the first federal government program to offer grants-in-aid.
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Sponsored in the Senate by Hoke Smith of Georgia and in the House by Asbury Lever of South Carolina, the bill expanded earlier programs based on federal farm stations managed by state agricultural colleges. Moneys were to be allocated in proportion to each state’s farm population, a stipulation designed by the sponsors to send the bulk of federal dollars to the South.
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Having been passed by the House in January 1914, the bill came to the Senate with a provision inserted by Congressman Lever that would effectively permit southern states to direct federal funds exclusively to white institutions. The language provided that “in any State in which two or more such colleges have been or hereafter may be established, the appropriation hereinafter made to such State shall be administered by such college or colleges as the legislature of such State may direct.” This designation, critics rightly observed, was designed to exclude black land-grant colleges and black farmers. During the Senate debate, Senator Hoke Smith explicitly argued that the administration of funds should be left in white hands, as they would “do more for the negro than the negro could do for himself,” and by James Vardaman of Mississippi, who insisted that agricultural extension work could be performed properly only by “the Anglo-Saxon, the man of proven judgment, initiative, wisdom, and experience.”
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An amendment advocated by the NAACP and sponsored by Senator Wesley Jones of Washington to guarantee Negro colleges a fair share was rejected by a 32–23 margin. Only two Democrats
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supported the effort to open the program to black schools. A weaker alternative, which shifted responsibility from state legislatures to governors and their secretaries of agriculture “without discrimination as to race,” but without any enforcement mechanisms, was endorsed without a roll-call vote.
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This provision did not survive the conference between the House and the Senate. There, the bill’s sponsors, Smith and Lever, blocked even this limited constraint on southern autonomy. When the act became law in May 1914, responsibility for allocating extension funds was assigned exclusively to each state’s legislature, and the antidiscrimination language had been removed.

During the 1920s, Alabama’s Oscar Underwood and Joseph Robinson of Arkansas led the Democratic Party in the House; Senate Democrats were led by Claude Kitchin of North Carolina until 1923, then by Finis Garrett of Tennessee. With no realistic threat to segregation on the horizon, southern members often allied successfully with western Republican progressives led by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin and George Norris of Nebraska. This coalition propelled reform legislation that included the Water Power Act of 1920 and the Merchant Marine Act of the same year, as well as tax laws that maintained the progressive income, inheritance, and excess profits provisions that had been brought in during World War I.
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It also passed the Maternity and Infancy Welfare Act of 1921, jointly sponsored in the House by the Texas Democrat Morris Sheppard and Iowa Republican Horace Towner, whose pattern of local administration sharply discriminated against black families in the South.
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The South’s Democrats also supported collective bargaining for unions in the railroad industry, and large-scale power projects, including the epic construction of Boulder Dam, a project that would not be undertaken until 1931. Their tax policies, in the main, grew more moderate after the 1924 Republican landslide, which weakened that party’s progressive wing, but even the more conservative southern Democrats, like Underwood, “sustained much more ‘progressive’ voting records than their Republican colleagues from New England and the mid-American states” throughout the 1920s.

III.

T
HE YEARS
immediately preceding the New Deal represented a high point for white southern security about the still-fresh arrangements of Jim Crow. Forty years had elapsed since the last major legislative effort to guarantee African-Americans political rights. In 1890 and 1891, Representative Henry Cabot Lodge, the Massachusetts Republican,
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proposed a federal-elections bill, which would have placed elections to the House of Representatives under national supervision, placing responsibilities for the conduct of fair elections in the hands of federal circuit courts rather than state election boards. After complicated legislative maneuvering, including a filibuster lasting thirty-three days, the “force bill” went down to defeat in the Senate. Debate ended after “the bill lost majority support primarily due to the machinations of a handful of silver Republicans who cared far less about civil rights than adopting currency legislation, which required close cooperation with Democrats.”
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Such was political life at the end of the nineteenth century.

In 1894, with the Democratic Party in control, the House and Senate repealed the remaining Enforcement Acts of Reconstruction, dating from 1870 and 1871, which had provided federal supervision for state elections. Strengthened by these confirmations that racial questions would take a backseat to other policies in Washington, the South pushed ahead with the systematic disenfranchisement and segregation of its black citizens, all the while pressing to achieve an assertive national policy agenda. North of the Mason-Dixon Line, Republicans took black votes for granted, offering little but the fact of not being Democrats, the party associated with slavery and white supremacy. Within the South, Republican acquiescence placed segregation and voting restrictions beyond question. As President Taft had predicted in 1909, this new stance, abandoning the cause of racial justice, made it possible for several members of the party to find favor with the electorate in some border states.
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Over the arc of an entire half century before the New Deal, every effort in Congress to protect black rights failed. A turn-of-the-century endeavor to reduce southern representation as African-Americans were purged from voting rolls and an attempt to pass federal antilynching legislation in 1922, a year marked by fifty-seven such killings, were particularly notable. With that bill “displaced by the indifference of its friends and the strategy of its enemies,” who successfully mounted a Senate filibuster, race disappeared from the agenda of national politics.
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Congress would mount no other efforts to deal with the deepening of Jim Crow and the persistence of lynching before the New Deal began.

By March 1933, the issue, at least on the political surface, no longer seemed to exist. As the southern region returned to more traditional voting patterns, southern racial confidence seemed safe. FDR—also a New York governor, but a Protestant opposed to Prohibition—won large majorities in every segregated state but Delaware. With Congress also swinging dramatically in a Democratic direction, the 1932 election was an all-too-often-overlooked watershed that thrust the South into a pivotal lawmaking position.

In Congress, southern members held three trump cards: uncommon longevity, disproportionate numbers, and a commitment to racial hierarchy more passionate than that of their opponents. Many key figures—including Senators Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, Walter George of Georgia, and Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, and House members Martin Dies of Texas, Robert Ramspeck of Georgia, and Howard Smith of Virginia—had already become congressional fixtures who were destined to serve over many decades. Often unopposed, southern Senators and members of the House amassed uncommon seniority, the key factor that produced access to the most influential committees and positions. When President Roosevelt was elected, congressional committees had grown more significant and entrenched than they had been during the Wilson years. Southerners chaired twenty-nine of the forty-seven committees in the House, including Appropriations, Banking and Currency, Judiciary, Foreign Affairs, Agriculture, Military Affairs, and Ways and Means, which handled all tax matters. In the Senate as well, southerners held sway; they headed thirteen of thirty-three committees, counting the most significant, including Agriculture, Appropriations, Banking and Currency, Commerce, Finance, and Military Affairs.
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With seniority also came experience; with experience, legislative skill based on the command of issues and rules. “With such knowledge and experience in national affairs,” moreover, “they become the logical leaders of the Party in Congress,” as Marian Irish noted in 1942, when Sam Rayburn of Texas was Speaker of the House and Alben Barkley of Kentucky was majority leader. In all, she concluded, “there is no doubt but that the one-party system enables the South to exert more influence in Congress than it could by any other political means.”
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Notwithstanding the relatively modest proportion of actual voters in the South, the representation of these districts and states in Washington remained unaffected. Each state automatically secured two U.S. Senate seats, a feature of the Constitution. In turn, seats in the House of Representatives were apportioned by population—the total population, irrespective of who was kept from voting and how many eligible persons actually appeared at the polls on Election Day. As a result, the South achieved numbers and influence in each chamber far in excess of its actual voters. Further, the southern presence in the House and Senate was sanitized. Once a member was sworn in, each chamber repressed any knowledge of racial exclusion, franchise-reducing rules, limited voting, or unopposed elections, let alone the pervasive atmosphere of violence that accompanied many, especially rural, southern elections. In Congress, each elected member was treated like every other. Each possessed the same prerogatives. Each was free to play by the same institutional rules.