Master of the Senate (42 page)

As a result of this order, and of the fact that there were not enough white workers to fill the jobs, northern blacks, unaccustomed to, and resistant to, the rigidities of southern segregation, flooded into the South. The haste with which the plants had to be geared up and manned made it unfeasible to build separate facilities, so that suddenly, in the very heart of the Southland, whites and blacks were eating together, using the same bathrooms and drinking fountains, sharing the same hospital wards. And there were also the huge new military training camps in the South, in which black men and white men were sleeping together in the same barracks.

Distressed by the fact that, by creating the FEPC through executive order, Roosevelt had bypassed the Senate, where the creation of the new agency could have been blocked, Russell saw it as an agency actively working to end segregation and thereby end the southern way of life. And then, in 1942, the House of Representatives passed a bill to eliminate poll taxes. Declaring that such efforts to use the war “to force social equality and the commingling of races in the South … are doomed to failure,” Russell blocked the House bill from coming to the floor of the Senate—but he was aware that the vote on cloture, generally so lopsidedly pro-southern in the past, had been much closer this time. And in 1944 there was another anti-poll tax bill, and further attempts to expand the funding and jurisdiction of the FEPC. “I am afraid we are going to get licked,” Russell wrote a friend, and although he wasn’t, the vote by which he defeated cloture this time was uncomfortably close; forces generated by the war were threatening the South he loved.

At first, the veil under which Russell’s feelings had been cloaked fell away only in private. There had always been scattered hints in private; years before,
while he was professing on the Senate floor that “I have no greater rights because I am a white man,” he had written in a letter marked “confidential”: “Any southern white man worth a pinch of salt would give his all to maintain white supremacy.” Now the tone in his letters sharpened when he wrote about whites and blacks using the same hospitals on Army bases. “It is a terrible mistake and I hope we will be able to convince the Army of it before it is widely advertised and becomes a serious issue,” he wrote in 1942. The races were even sharing the same maternity wards! “A deplorable situation,” he said. And there might be even worse situations. When, in 1942, a Savannah woman, indignant over the presence of black soldiers in nearby Army camps, wrote him that “It is not necessary to point out to you, a Southern gentleman, the tragic possibilities which this situation holds,” possibilities which she said “will be inevitable,” Russell replied that it was indeed not necessary. “I am fully aware of the very dangerous implications attending the concentration of negro troops from northern states in the South,” he said. “I feel about this matter just as any other Southern white man does, and certainly hope that we can avoid trouble.”

The whole question of blacks in the armed forces was troubling to Russell. Blacks had a limited usefulness in the military anyway, Russell felt; didn’t people realize that black soldiers were not as physically courageous as whites?—“In the last war in France … the use of colored troops for heavy fighting was not very successful.” For that matter, he was to say, they were not even as courageous as soldiers of some other non-white races. After the war, complimenting the Japanese-American Nisei units that had served with the American army for not “fading away in the face of enemy action,” he said, “It is a great pity that other minority groups do not emulate their example instead of fading in the face of enemy action.” Of course, he said, blacks should not be inducted into elite units like the Marine Corps, in which courage was especially essential. Not that blacks were not violent—“These people,” his sister Patience heard him say, “when they get mad, they kill. And they will kill without being provoked, to a great extent”—it was just that they were not brave. As one study of his racial views puts it: “In spite of an enviable battle record of some blacks in World War I, Russell refused to accept the idea that blacks were not inherent cowards.” And the commingling of black and white troops created other problems; it was not a matter of racial prejudice at all, he was to explain—at issue, rather, was the “health and morals of hundreds of thousands of American boys.” “There is no more intimate human relationship known to men than that of enlisted men serving together at the squad level,” he said. “They eat and sleep together. They use the same sanitary facilities.” And, he said, “the incidence of syphilis, gonorrhea, chancre and all other venereal diseases is appallingly higher among the members of the Negro race.” Not only is this difference true in civilian life, he said, but “it is likewise great between the units in the Army as compared with the white units, though both races have available identical systems of instruction and of hygiene to prevent venereal
diseases.” Having whites and blacks serve in the same units “is sure to increase the numbers of men who will be disabled through communicable diseases.” Special camps should be created for blacks “who do not meet the health requirements” to cure them of VD before they are allowed to join the rest of the Army.

And it wasn’t merely
killing
by blacks that Russell feared—as becomes apparent from a draft of a speech that he would later dictate to a secretary. In the draft he referred to newspaper stories from Portland, Oregon, about a fifteen-year-old white girl, the daughter of a Portland businessman, who had gone to a dance with a thirty-year-old black man, and was then abducted by him, held captive for ten days, and raped repeatedly by him and four other men.

“All of the men charged with the attack were past thirty years of age, and most of them were past forty,” Russell dictated. “All of them were Negroes.” He regretted, he said, that the
Congressional Record
did not print pictures. It was a shame that “the pictures of the defendants appearing at the head of the article cannot be printed in the
Record.”
Moreover, he said, there have been “other cases of a similar type … outside the South,” but they “are too sickening for the
Record.”
And, he said in the draft, it is “the system of social intermingling of the races that gives rise to these cases.”

This speech, however, was only dictated, never delivered; his opinion that “these people, when they get mad, they kill” was an opinion expressed only to friends and family. Russell almost never forgot the overriding strategic consideration: that, if the South was to win, it needed allies, and opposition to desegregation must therefore be made as respectable as possible in the North, respectable to Republican senators.

Nevertheless, the threat to the southern way of life grew steadily more serious during the war. Russell foresaw that blacks who had worked in defense plants and served in the armed forces were not going to return without protest to their prewar second-class citizenship. He saw all too clearly what was coming. Let the dikes be breached once, and the torrent would begin. “There is no such thing as a little integration,” he was to say. “They are determined to get into the white schools and into the white restaurants and into the swimming pools.”

He salvaged a 1944 Senate battle, the battle in which he was “afraid that we are going to be licked,” but only by a brilliant appeal to Republicans whose votes had earlier that year defeated his amendment to halve the FEPC appropriation. Pointing out—“scathingly,” Allen Drury wrote—“that for a party which condemned bureaucracy they were certainly inconsistent in wanting to leave the FEPC unchecked,” he “successfully embarrassed enough Republicans into changing their votes” so that on a second vote his amendment carried. And during this fight he wrote a friend that the growing strength of northern efforts to force schools, swimming pools and other public places to accept both races was bringing “our southern civilization” to the verge of collapse. “I am
sick about it,” he wrote. He jotted on an office notepad that if the North had its way, even “baseball [and] football teams would have to play negroes.” And, it was at this time, too, that a new word began to creep into his private correspondence: “miscegenation.”

It was also at this time that he began to see a new, red tinge in the black menace. A letter he wrote in 1944 claimed not only that the FEPC was administered “almost entirely by negroes”—but by Negroes with ties to the Communist Party. FEPC Chairman Malcolm Ross, he said, was “a wild-eyed radical lionized by the
Daily Worker.”
“The agitation to repeal the poll-tax laws was started by the
Daily Worker
,” he was to say.

Never forgetting that in the Civil War, the South had won battle after battle, only to be worn down at last by superior numbers, he feared that the pattern was being repeated in the Senate. He was able, year after year, to slash FEPC appropriations; he was never able to legislate the agency out of existence entirely. The margins of his victories were growing steadily narrower. And Richard Russell’s public statements as well as private letters were beginning occasionally to show less of the “moderation” and “restraint” that had always characterized them in the past, as if the veneer were cracking, just a little but enough to reveal what lay beneath. It was on the Senate floor now that Russell charged that an FEPC ruling against racial discrimination in hiring by the Philadelphia transit system—a ruling which touched off a strike by Philadelphia transit workers—was actually a Communist plot against the South; the strike, he said, had been deliberately instigated by the FEPC so that the Army could be called in to break the strike, thereby giving an “object lesson” to discourage others (meaning southerners) from resisting FEPC rulings. In 1948, racial tensions were rising sharply in the South. Demagogues running on “white supremacy” platforms had won postwar primaries in several states. Herman Talmadge, Eugene’s son, had won Georgia’s governorship after promising that “no Negro will vote in Georgia for the next four years.” Crosses were burning again on southern hills: Ku Klux Klan activity in general was increasing, as were the beatings and whippings of black men. President Truman demanded passage of legislation to make the FEPC permanent. And in 1948, with the threat more serious than ever, Russell’s rhetoric on the Senate floor sharpened.

Needing to make opposition to the FEPC bill respectable to win non-southern support, he argued, as always, that the bill was not necessary—the charges that Negroes in the South were discriminated against in employment were greatly exaggerated, he said; “this bill does not address itself to any condition which exists today in the United States of America”—and that there was no racial motive behind the South’s opposition to it.

The cry of discrimination, he said, is a “cry of ‘wolf, wolf.’… There has never been a greater fraud perpetrated upon the American people than the deliberate attempt that has been made to create the impression that we are opposing economic equality in fighting this bill.” Discrimination, he said,
worked against the best interests of the South—and the South was well aware of that. “It is said that southern Democrats are opposing [the bill] because they want to grind down and hold in subjection the Negroes.” Actually, “there is not a southern Democrat who does not know that the welfare of his people and the progress of his state are inseparably intertwined with the welfare and progress of the Negro population.” All the South wanted was the continuation of the system whose efficacy had already been proven: the separation of the races. “I am in favor of giving both the whites and the blacks equal rights, but not together. We are merely fighting to sustain in our country a way of life which both the white and the black man approve as being essential to harmony in racial relations in the South.” And it was precisely this that the bill was really intended to destroy, he said. “Those who drew the bill, those who gave it life, and those who gave the distortedness to the American people know that the main purpose back of this measure is to make it a force bill, to break down the segregation of the races which we have found essential….”

He also used the other argument most effective in appealing to conservative Republicans: that the FEPC was a Communist plot, “the entering wedge to complete state socialism and communism.” “There was a great build-up for the bill over the radio and through the columns of the press,” he said. “Every left-wing group in this country had each of its cells carefully instructed as to how to spread the propaganda in support of the measure. If the desire is to nationalize industry, here is the chance….”

But amid these familiar arguments, there were hints of other feelings—even if a hint might be only a single hyphenated adjective. “Mr. President,” Richard Russell said, “I do not mean to say there has been no imposition on any Negro in my section of the country, because I know there has been. There have also been semi-civilized Negroes who outraged the sense of decency of all white and colored peoples in their community by committing outrageous crimes.” He even raised publicly subjects he knew were better avoided, such as intermarriage between the races. “That, Mr. President, would mean a mongrel race,” which, he said, “would result in destroying America, because there has never been a mongrel race that has been able to stand.” And there would be other hints that emerged as if despite himself. Once he had assured the Senate of his belief that “I have no greater rights because I am a white man.” Now he told it: “Any white man who wants to take the position that he is no better than the Negro is entitled to his own opinion of himself. I do not think much of him, but he can think it.”

O
N
J
ULY 25, 1946
, on a lonely dirt road near Monroe, Georgia, in Walton County, about eleven miles from Richard Russell’s home, two young black couples, both recently married, were being driven home by a white farmer who had just posted six hundred dollars’ bail for one of the black men, twenty-seven-year-old
Roger Malcolm, who had been accused of stabbing his white employer in the arm during a fight. As the farmer drove onto a little wooden bridge, he saw a car blocking its far end, and as soon as he stopped, another car drove up behind him, its bumper nudging his, trapping him on the bridge. Other cars drove up, and about twenty white men got out, carrying rifles and shotguns. They had not bothered to wear masks. They took Malcolm and his friend, a twenty-six-year-old war veteran who had served in Africa and the Pacific—his discharge button had, by chance, arrived at his mother’s home that same week—out of the car, tied their hands behind them and marched them away. They were apparently going to leave the women unharmed, but one of the women, crying, called out to one of the attackers by name, so that he became afraid she would identify him, and they were pulled out of the car and led off, too. Then the four blacks were lined up in a row, each wife beside her husband. Three times the white leader counted, “One, two, three,” and there were three volleys; the bodies, riddled with more than sixty bullets, were scarcely recognizable.