Fear Itself (14 page)

Compared with the facts of Bilbo’s utterances, these speeches offered measured recollections, for no one in public life, certainly no other New Dealer, articulated racist commitments more openly and emphatically. During his first term as governor, the
New York World
had wired Bilbo to ask what he was doing to prevent lynching. He replied how “it is practically impossible, without great loss of life, especially at the present time, to prevent lynching of Negro rapists when the crime is committed against the white women of the South,” adding that the United States is “strictly a white man’s country, with a white man’s civilization, and any dream on the part of the Negro Race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.”
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From the 1938 consideration of the Wagner–Van Nuys bill to make lynching a federal crime to debates in the 1940s about the poll tax, absentee voting by soldiers, and the Fair Employment Practices Commission, Bilbo emerged as the Senate’s leading unashamed crusader for racism. Pleading against “mongrelization” in the antilynching debate of 1938, a process he claimed had destroyed white civilization over much of the globe, Bilbo took a page from Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
to assert that merely “one drop of Negro blood placed in the veins of the purest Caucasian destroys the inventive genius of his mind and strikes palsied his creative faculty.”
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During the filibuster to derail the bill, he sought to instruct his colleagues about “the difference in the intellect, in the brain, in the mind” between blacks and whites, making “the white man throughout all time . . . the superior race, the ruling race, the race of creating power, the race of art, the race of literature, the race of music that moves the soul.”
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Bilbo’s fulminations were hardly limited to African-Americans. The next year, he wrote to attack the “New York Jew kikes that are fraternizing and socializing with Negroes for selfish and political reasons” after the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism protested his views about race.
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In July 1945, he responded to a letter by Benjamin Fischler, a New York accountant who had objected to Bilbo’s efforts to prevent the Senate from voting to create a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, recalling that Jews had “denied and crucified Christ,” and, moreover, did not practice a “code of square dealing, especially in your business relationships.”
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Referring to the FEPC bill on the Senate floor as “a damnable, Communist, poisonous piece of legislation,” Bilbo fulminated about having learned that “some Catholics are linked with some rabbis trying to bring about racial equality for niggers. . . . The niggers and Jews of New York are working hand in hand.”
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He also observed during the course of that filibuster that “it has just occurred to me that the editor of the
Washington Post
is a Jew and that his wife is a Jewess . . . are the ones who have been back of this vicious legislation. Therefore, we find the editor of the
Washington Post,
a Jew, fighting against me, accusing me, and denouncing me and any other man who dares to disagree with him with regard to this proposed legislation, and calling us bankrupt men. I resent it.”
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Four months later, Miriam Golombeck, a student at New York’s Hunter College, informed Bilbo in writing that “a meeting attended by 600 Hunter girls had adopted a resolution calling upon members of Congress to institute impeachment proceedings against him” and had condemned his views as Fascist. Calling these students “‘Communists,’ ‘Negro gals,’ ‘mongrel,’ and ‘uneducated,’” he replied that “the mere fact that I believe in racial purity which every decent and self-respecting Negro ought to believe in does not make me a fascist.”
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Bilbo’s extreme rhetoric as well as his style of dress, which favored loud check suits and brash ties,
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were something of an embarrassment to more reserved political leaders, including many fellow southerners in Congress, though his racial and religious bigotry, while particularly excessive, was not radically different from common prejudices of the time, the difference being that others chose to express in polite or nonverbal ways what Bilbo so vocally conveyed in demagogic fashion. In any event, his extreme rhetoric did not prevent the legislature’s rules of seniority from doing their work when it was Bilbo’s turn, in 1944, to be designated chair of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, effectively making him the city’s mayor. He governed that segregated city, where nearly one in three residents was black, as he had ruled as governor of Mississippi. Immediately after his selection, Bilbo declared his intention to make Washington “a model city,” pledging to “press for the best police force in the nation, the best water system, elimination of slums, reduction of juvenile delinquency, and renovation of the city’s hospitals.”
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It was as if his crude nativist and racist sentiments had become both sanctioned and legitimized as his responsibilities grew. As committee chair, he did, in fact, secure a new hospital center for the city, improve transportation over the Potomac, enhance housing conditions, and build new parks, much as Mussolini had done in his Fascist petri dish. All the while, Bilbo worked assiduously to deepen the city’s Jim Crow arrangements, discharging his responsibilities much as the president of the local branch of the NAACP, Arthur Gray, had feared: “On the basis of Bilbo’s record and statements, Negroes cannot expect any kind of fair treatment under his administration of District affairs.”
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Shortly before Bilbo’s selection, students at Howard University, whose federal grants Bilbo worked unsuccessfully to block, pioneered the sit-in to protest segregation in the nation’s capital, a decade and a half before the sit-in at the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, set off a wave of such nonviolent protests. In the face of these demonstrations, Bilbo sought to enforce segregation in the city’s federal parks, convened discussions in his committee concerning “how to maintain racial discrimination at the National Airport” in Virginia (concerned that “Negroes can fraternize by eating in the white person’s dining room”), actively opposed home rule, and enforced barriers to black voting. Calling multiracial children “a motley melee of misceginated mongrels,” he strongly advocated a law to ban racial intermarriage in Washington, arguing that “the purity of the blood of the Anglo-Saxon, the Celt, and the Teuton in this America of ours is now being threatened.”
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Campaigning in Mississippi for reelection in 1946, Bilbo reported to his audience in Greenville about a meeting he had held with a delegation of black labor leaders in the District of Columbia in February 1944. The group, headed by the lawyer B. V. Lawson, included Dorothy Strange, administrative secretary of the Washington Council of the National Negro Congress, and representatives from the Fraternal Council of Negro Churches, the CIO, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the United Cafeteria and Restaurant Workers, and the Industrial Union Council. Having been reminded by the group that black soldiers “are fighting and dying to preserve and extend American democracy to all, regardless of race, creed, and color,” Bilbo rejoined by announcing an intention to “renew his ‘Back to Africa’ campaign for the Negro people,” stating, according to the delegation’s spokesman, that “Negroes can only hope for a continued practice of discrimination and oppression after the war. Liberia is the place where they must settle to obtain security and equal opportunity—not America.”
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In espousing such return-to-Africa views, Bilbo was resorting to a crude and unrealistic perspective that had waxed and waned, particularly during the nineteenth century, since the republic’s beginnings, a view that had at times been favored by such “enlightened” slave owners as Thomas Jefferson, and even by the Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln. Yet coming in the 1940s, the idea of a reverse movement to Africa was at best anachronistic, presenting a view that no longer had a national constituency, or even much support among other segregationists in the South.

Bilbo’s own recollection of the encounter was pungent:

You know, folks, I run Washington. I’m Mayor there. . . . Some niggers came to see me one time in Washington to try to get the right to vote there. The leader was a smart nigger. Of course he was half white. I told him that the nigger would never vote in Washington. Hell, if we give ’em the right to vote up there, half the niggers in the South will move into Washington and we’ll have a black Government. No Southerner would sit in Congress under those conditions.
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Bilbo’s public racism peaked during the 1946 Mississippi primary, just as the state’s white and black war veterans were returning home. He campaigned almost exclusively as the defender of the southern way of life, a bulwark against racial change that might be imposed from without. When
Life
ranked Bilbo the Senate’s worst member, he characteristically retorted that its publisher’s wife, Clare Boothe Luce, was “the greatest nigger-lover in the North.” When Eleanor Roosevelt spoke up for black rights, as she had in sponsoring Marian Anderson’s concert at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 and in supporting antilynching legislation in Congress, Bilbo insisted that she would like to compel “Southern girls to use the stools and toilets of damn syphilitic nigger women.” Characterized by such vitriolic rhetoric, this election, which followed the Supreme Court’s 1944
Smith v. Allwright
ruling that such all-white primaries were unconstitutional, was particularly tense.
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The combination of this judgment and the return to Mississippi of tens of thousands of black veterans, who, like white soldiers, were exempted from the poll tax because of their service in the armed forces, opened the possibility for substantial black voting. So severe were the repercussions in Mississippi that one might have thought that the era of Reconstruction was being exhumed. On June 22, Bilbo spoke from Jackson in a broadcast carried throughout the state just “hours after a Negro Army veteran charged that he had been beaten and flogged by four white men when he sought to register.” The former soldier, who had served for twenty-three months in the South Pacific, had asked to register at Brandon. “After he left,” the
New York Times
reported, “four men seized him, carried him to some woods, stripped him and flogged him with a heavy wire cable, and threatened him with death if he made another attempt to register.” Bilbo’s radio speech cautioned that “the white people of Mississippi were sitting on a volcano.” If blacks were to vote even in small numbers in the July 2 primary, more would the following year, “and from there on it will grow into a mighty surge.” During the campaign, he had observed “northern niggers teaching them how to register and how to vote.”
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He now implored every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls.” He asserted that “white people will be justified in going to any extreme to keep the nigger from voting. You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election. I don’t have to tell you any more than that. Red-blooded men know what I mean.”
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Bilbo published
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
, a racist screed published by a local Mississippi press, shortly before his death in 1947, a death commemorated by the striking Andrew Tibbs blues song “Bilbo Is Dead.” Warning that “the great majority of white Americans have failed to realize the intensity of [the] campaign for racial equality and the abolition of racial segregation in this Nation,” the ill senator, suffering from oral cancer, cautioned that “the race problem lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently . . . only by the physical separation of the races.”
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Bilbo’s rhetorical extremism, even in a Senate that regularly countenanced much racist talk, eventually put his membership at risk. Article 1, Section 5, of the Constitution of the United States states, “Each house shall be the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members.” In September 1946, a predominantly black group of fifty Mississippi residents contended that the July 2 primary should be declared invalid because Senator Bilbo had fostered the intimidation and acts of violence that had kept Negroes from the polls. Starting on December 2, a Special Committee to Investigate Campaign Expenditures convened four days of hearings in Mississippi. The two Republican senators, Styles Bridges of New Hampshire and Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, found in favor of the complainants, but they were outvoted by the three Democrats, each from a Jim Crow state—Burnet Maybank of South Carolina, Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, and the chairman, Allen Ellender of Louisiana. Having heard thirty-four white witnesses and sixty-eight black witnesses, the committee’s majority found that Bilbo was nonetheless entitled to his Senate seat even though his oratory had been “crude and in poor taste.” The majority wrote:

We are of the opinion that the record demonstrates conclusively that any difficulties experienced by the Negro in his attempts to register and vote in the July 2 primary resulted from the traditional feeling between white and Negroes and their ideas of the laws in that state as regards participation by Negroes in Democratic primaries and it would have been the same irrespective of who the candidates might have been. And we further feel that nothing that Senator Bilbo actually said was responsible in any way for any illegality shown in the evidence presented to the committee to have taken place in the Mississippi registration or voting.

Twisting the facts, and keen to protect a fellow southerner, the committee’s Democrats further found Bilbo’s campaign remarks to have been justified because of what they called “unwarranted interference with the internal affairs of the state of Mississippi by outside agitators, seeking not to benefit Negroes but merely to further their own selfish political ends.”
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