Fear Itself (20 page)

In fact, the process Lippmann had advocated came closest to fruition only at the very beginning of the Hundred Days, when the Banking Act conferred blanket powers, resembling those of wartime circumstances. But as an overall portrayal, the idea that Congress acted as if an Enabling Act had been passed is a vast exaggeration. Ironically, the most extensive legislative grant of executive power gave Roosevelt the power to cut the size of the federal government as he saw fit, not enlarge it. More broadly, FDR did not compel Congress to legislate. Rather, he persuaded members to pass his emergency program, and often he had to compromise, as he did to secure the Farm Act and in accepting a vast program of public works that he did not want.
¹²³
Speaking by radio in his second fireside chat on May 7, 1933, President Roosevelt explicitly sought to reassure the public in just these terms by stressing how, in passing the laws he had recommended, there had been “no actual surrender of power. Congress,” he underscored, “still retained its constitutional authority and no one has the slightest desire to change the balance of these powers.”
¹²⁴

Still, in placing the recovery program almost entirely in the president’s hands, Congress did flirt with what might be thought of as a functional Enabling Act. But flirt though it did, the institution also did not cross the line. Congress kept, and increasingly asserted, its legislative prerogatives. Even during the Hundred Days, the legislature dealt with the economic emergency through ordinary legislation, however novel and far-reaching, rather than by yielding lawmaking to the executive branch or declaring a state of exception. After the Hundred Days, congressional forms of dispute, debate, and decision survived and thrived. Intense differences of view about the proper role for government and the character of good public policy were located inside the institution, which the full range of perspectives and political actors respected as the legitimate place for decisions to be made. Congress thus was not a casualty of the country’s crises, but an instrument that sought to overcome them. Even the nineteenth-century ideal of a deliberate legislature where lawmakers sought to persuade one another by rational argument did not entirely disappear.
¹²⁵
Nor was there a lapse into dictatorship. Even when the New Deal governed at the beginning almost as an emergency government, this was not a dictatorship anything like the real thing. Rights were not suppressed, and the legislature did not abdicate.
¹²⁶
In all, the central place of Congress was maintained. Even more, the crucial lawmaking role that it undertook offered a practical answer to critics who thought the days of legislative institutions had passed.

America’s separation of powers and democratic lawmaking as core features of the rule of law persisted. This was a notable, even extraordinary, attainment. The New Deal managed, as a leading political scientist put the point in 1940 in Homeric terms, to “sail a precarious passage between the Scylla of sufficient power to solve a temporary but severe crisis and the Charybdis of this power becoming unrestrained and permanent.”
¹²⁷
It did so not by extreme constitutional measures, but by pioneering “a new model of emergency powers—the legislative model . . . [that] handles emergencies by enacting ordinary statutes that delegate special and temporary powers to the executive.”
¹²⁸

From this perspective, the New Deal can be understood as a period of democratic learning and adjustment. Though similar in some ways to paths traveled elsewhere, the New Deal’s course was different. While there were family resemblances to features of governance pursued by the period’s dictatorships, there was not an identity. Constitutional democracy was sustained, if bruised, in the world’s most long-lived liberal regime, with the legislative authority of Congress intact. Executive and legislative powers remained separate and divided. During the 1930s, as it responded to economic predicaments and offered many institutional inventions, the national government did not create an emergency regime side by side with the normal separation of powers system, even though it seemed, certainly at the start, that this departure from constitutional procedures might be necessary.

During the Roosevelt and Truman years, Washington successfully wrestled with the problem of how to find a durable and democratic role for Congress in the face of crises characterized by fear and an urgent need for action. The breakdown of so many democracies between the two world wars was marked by the failure to find productive answers to this challenge. Indeed, the very triumphant assertiveness of the dictatorships was rooted in their rejection of the need to find an answer, since they totally discarded the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century liberal idea of a separation of powers and promoted the utter collapse of a parliamentary system. The United States, by contrast, stood for the ways in which American democracy secured the capacities of Congress to make laws and oversee their consequences. Congress did not become obsolete or irrelevant. It was not an anachronism. To the contrary, it kept and utilized the authority that liberal principles and democratic practices required that it not cede to others.

During the administrations of Roosevelt and Truman, Congress firmly established itself as a forum where detailed answers could be crafted to the main substantive challenges of a historically dense and difficult era. The institution’s historical legislative functions were guarded zealously and in some respects expanded, often to the frustration of the epoch’s two presidents. Here, then, a course many thought not possible was pursued. It was the attempt to reconcile political representation, the cornerstone principle of liberal democracy, with the requirements of government in complex and frightful times. In that painful and uneven process, the legislature was recast and reinvigorated as a site of decision and governance. This achievement should not be underestimated.

V.

N
OR, HOWEVER,
should the vital role played by powers and preferences of the South’s congressional members. These were representatives with a difference.

No member of Congress at any time during the full New Deal era would have thought that the South did not comprise a discrete and coherent entity. Like that of other Democrats, the patronage, influence, and seniority of southern members depended on these members securing their party’s majority status. But as guardians of their region’s racial order, they assessed New Deal policies for compatibility with organized white supremacy.

Of course, southern members shared other interests. Mainly representing agriculture, they favored programs that would help specific crops: cotton, rice, and tobacco. They promoted free trade so that they could sell these crops and import low-cost machines and finished goods. With destitution more acute in the South than anywhere else in the country, they also sought to relieve agrarian and urban poverty. They largely approved robust federal spending and expansive fiscal policies. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what the historian C. Vann Woodward called a “paradoxical combination of white supremacy and progressivism” characterized the dominant strain of southern politics. This view identified the railroads, the banks, the utilities, and other northern-controlled capitalist firms as targets for regulation and reform.
¹²⁹
Operating in a mainly rural environment characterized by dispersed and isolated communities, southern representatives promoted administrative modernization, infrastructural development, and social policies to deal with the region’s hardships.
¹³⁰

But these and other policy stances were all filtered by one common concern, “the real basis for southern unity, the Negro,” as V. O. Key Jr.’s landmark
Southern Politics in State and Nation
put the point in 1949. Distinguished by a fervent commitment to make racial arrangements safe, “the one-party system of the South,” Key observed, “is an institution with an odd dual personality. In state politics the Democratic party is no party at all but a multiplicity of factions struggling for office. In national politics, on the contrary, the party is the Solid South; it is, or at least has been, the instrument for the conduct of the ‘foreign relations’ of the South with the rest of the nation.”
¹³¹
This was the basis on which the white South fought so vehemently to preserve the region’s system of white hegemony and fight against what they considered to be federal intrusion ever since the end of Reconstruction.

To be sure, the politicians advanced by the single-party South covered quite a range. Personal styles ran the full gamut from the cautious and cerebral (figures like Alabama senator Lister Hill, Georgia senator Richard Russell, and Arkansas senator William Fulbright) to the impulsive and flamboyant (characters like Louisiana’s senator Huey Long as well as Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo). They also did not share identical views about the full range of public policies, including those that concerned budgets and the desirable degree of federal economic regulation. In Congress, though, such differences did not so much disappear as enfold within a shared dedication to protect southern autonomy. Refusing to acknowledge any incompatibility between the system of segregation and wider American values and visions, they sought to legislate without having to choose among their valued objectives.

Washington’s responses to the era’s challenges were shaped in fundamental ways by how the representatives selected from within this region chose to legislate. Without their leadership, legislative experience, and votes, the New Deal’s efforts to secure American democracy and resist the globe’s dictatorships would not have happened. With southern support, liberal democracy could be redeemed, but only along a pathway constituted in critical respects by organized racism.

Like other members of Congress, southern representatives understood the pressing need to confront the central challenges of the time. They, too, grappled with how to remake capitalism and deal with issues of global power. Over the course of the New Deal, we will observe, these representatives frequently were the pivotal members of winning coalitions in the House and Senate, thus in a position to choose which solutions should form the basis for public policy.

Without southern votes, successful lawmaking that falsified claims about the incapacity of liberal democracy could not have happened, and American constitutional democracy would have stuttered. With the South’s active legislative participation, the New Deal produced results that otherwise would have been different. With their votes, a new American state was created.

PART II

SOUTHERN CAGE

4
American with a Difference

S
IX EXTRAORDINARY PARAGRAPHS
sit in the midst of an uncommonly turgid address delivered by William Howard Taft as he took the oath of office on March 4, 1909, a dozen years after the Supreme Court, in
Plessy v. Ferguson,
had sanctioned the South’s laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities, and twenty-four years to the day before Franklin Roosevelt would become president. The contents are striking. Taft proclaimed that the Republican Party—the party of Lincoln, of Emancipation, of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and of Reconstruction—would no longer champion the cause of black rights. “It is not the disposition or within the province of the Federal Government,” Taft declared, “to interfere with the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs.”

As he was assuming the presidency, the South was crafting a distinctive racial order suffused with beliefs and practices signifying white dominance and black inferiority in all spheres of life. Shielded by law and underpinned by violence, actual and implicit, Jim Crow applied an inferior and circumscribed status to every person coded Negro.

Politics served as an instrument to secure these arrangements. By 1908, the South had perfected a political system to guard white supremacy successfully even in counties with black majorities. A host of mechanisms ensured virtually no chance to vote for African-Americans, and a low-turnout franchise for white citizens.
¹
These devices included white primaries, declarations that political parties were restricted private clubs, poll taxes, property tests, literacy tests, and understanding clauses that tested for arcane knowledge of the provisions in state constitutions.
²

To be sure, race suffused the expectations and possibilities of whites and blacks across the country. The majority of whites outside the South, it is important to note, betrayed no particular passion for the cause of racial equality. Most opposed living with black neighbors, working with them as colleagues, or sending their children to integrated schools. Summarizing an early-twentieth-century tour of the South, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker accurately reported for
The American Magazine
that “the attitude of the North,” like the South, “did not believe in a democracy which had a place in it for the Negro.”
³
Notwithstanding, the South’s rigid and total racial system did set the region apart. There, the tension that marked the relationship between racial inequality and the country’s rights-based political system based on free citizenship—an association that had vexed the American republic from its first days—was more insistent and most acute.

In the conclusion of
Yankee Leviathan,
his magisterial treatment of how a modern American nation-state emerged from the carnage of the Civil War, the political scientist Richard Bensel reminded us that “the United States in the late nineteenth century was really two nations joined together by force of arms.”
⁴
It was this division that President Taft declared to have finally come to an end. “There was a time,” Taft noted, “when Northerners who sympathized with the negro in his necessary struggle for better conditions sought to give him the suffrage as a protection to enforce its exercise against the prevailing sentiment of the South.” No longer. That “movement proved to be a failure.” Consistent with the Fifteenth Amendment’s “attempt to secure the negro against any deprivation of the privilege to vote because he was a negro,” he argued, the South had succeeded in finding means to protect itself against “the domination of an ignorant, irresponsible element” by enacting “laws which shall exclude from voting both negroes and whites not having education or other qualifications thought necessary. The danger of the control of an ignorant electorate has therefore passed.” Leaving the South to its own devices, moreover, would reconcile whites to the Union and increase “feeling on the part of all the people in the South that this Government is their Government, and that its officers in their states are their officers.”

“The negroes,” Taft continued, “are now Americans.” With citizenship, “this is their only country, and their only flag.” Yet there was an unmistakable division between the “we” who were political actors and the “they” who were not. “We are charged with the sacred duty of making their path as smooth and easy as we can.” Carrying out this trust, he counseled, required caution, as “race feeling is so widespread and acute.” The government must practice restraint in appointing blacks to federal offices lest “the recurrence and increase of race feeling which such an appointment is likely to engender” outweigh the “encouragement to the race.” More broadly, Taft advised against any move that would diminish the prospects for the further development of “the already good feeling between the South and the other sections of the country.”
⁵

This declaration of federal inaction initiated a period, lasting well into the New Deal, when the federal government took a hands-off stance with respect to southern race relations. Other than their ability, sporadic at best, to move northward, southern blacks found themselves without power, trapped in a system of organized fear and humiliation, and faced no realistic prospect that Washington would act to underwrite or enforce their status as citizens of the United States.
⁶

I.

W
HEN
F
RANKLIN
R
OOSEVELT
spoke in March 1933 of the need to overcome fear itself, the South was still highly distinctive, having been protected by a quarter century of willful federal inaction. A combination of tradition, demography, and anxiety continued to place the race question at that region’s social, economic, and political center in a manner not present anywhere else, especially as the great majority of African-Americans who still lived in the region were compelled by custom and law to experience a rigid and circumscribed status.

As the New Deal drama began, the Mason-Dixon Line presented a real boundary. This frontier resembled the border that Alexis de Tocqueville had distinguished when he had visited the United States a century earlier. On January 4, 1832, he had set out, with Gustave de Beaumont, on a stagecoach route through the Deep South, which he called the “Midi,” echoing the common term for southern France. Covering a thousand miles in twelve days, he discovered an America deeply divided by the geography of slavery.
⁷
Tocqueville wrote:

On both banks of the Ohio stretched undulating ground with soil continually offering the cultivator inexhaustible treasures; on both banks the air is equally healthy and the climate temperate; they both form the frontier of a vast state: that which follows the innumerable windings of the Ohio on the left bank is called Kentucky; the other takes its name from the river itself. There is only one difference between the two states: Kentucky allows slaves, but Ohio refuses to have them.
⁸

When the southern historian Ulrich Phillips searched, in the late 1920s, for “the central theme of southern history,” he was drawn, like Tocqueville, to the banks of the Ohio River. “The northern shore,” Phillips wrote, “is American without question; the southern is American with a difference.”
⁹
It was that difference, we will see, that powerfully shaped not just whether but also how the New Deal grappled with fear itself.

A century after Tocqueville published
Democracy in America,
a still-distinct geography, marked not by slavery but by Jim Crow, took hold in Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and West Virginia.
¹⁰
Fifteen of these states had practiced chattel slavery on the eve of the Civil War. These, plus West Virginia, which then was part of Virginia, and Oklahoma, which achieved statehood only in 1907, all required racial segregation, until it was outlawed in public schools by the 1954
Brown
decision. Furthermore, these states prohibited interracial marriage as late as 1967, the year the Court ruled such bans to be unconstitutional in
Loving v. Virginia.
¹¹

In the 1830s, Tocqueville had already emphasized the baneful effects of slavery on economic and social life. He had told how “the traveler who lets the current carry him down the Ohio till it joins the Mississippi sails, so to say, between freedom and slavery; and he has only to glance around to see instantly which is best for mankind.” That person would see that in Kentucky, “on the left of the river the population is sparse; from time to time one sees a troop of slaves loitering through half-deserted fields; the primeval forest is constantly reappearing; one might say that society had gone to sleep; it is nature that seems active and alive, whereas man is idle.” But in Ohio, “on the right bank a confused hum proclaims from afar that men are busily at work; fine crops cover the fields; elegant dwellings testify to the taste and industry of the workers; on all sides there is evidence of comfort; man appears rich and contented; he works.”
¹²

Professor Phillips famously devoted his career to proving Tocqueville wrong. The slave South, he argued, had not been a land of industrial slackness. As efficient, profit-seeking economic units, plantations had resembled other American firms and enterprises.
¹³
The South also was not “a political entity with boundaries clearly marked by treaty, constitution, or law.”
¹⁴
If not its economy or its formal political frontiers, what, Phillips asked, made the South stand apart? How, then, was it American, but with a difference?

The answer, he argued, was the South’s commitment to white supremacy, the region’s single nonnegotiable value, the reason it was “a land of unity.”
¹⁵
Decades after Reconstruction, the South made no particular sense as a coherent unit without this connecting tissue.
¹⁶
From Delaware to Florida, from South Carolina to Oklahoma, “white folk [are] a people with a common resolve indomitably maintained—that it shall be and remain a white man’s country.” This, Phillips approvingly concluded, was both “the cardinal test of a Southerner” and “the central theme of Southern history,” whether “expressed with the frenzy of a demagogue or maintained with a patrician’s quietude.”
¹⁷

During the years Presidents Roosevelt and Truman governed, it would have been hard to find a contrary view. Phillips was hardly a racial moderate, and more fixed in his views than many leading intellectuals. But his outlook expressed the era’s common sense across the ideological and racial spectrum. This, for example, is how Ralph Bunche, the most important African-American member of the team that produced Gunnar Myrdal’s influential study,
An American Dilemma
,
¹⁸
defined southern distinctiveness at the start of the 1940s. Writing an extended report about the political status of the period’s blacks, Bunche took note of the region’s great heterogeneity, “except in its traditional adherence to the doctrine of white supremacy . . . and to the political derivative of that doctrine—a blind allegiance to the one party system.”
¹⁹

When the New Deal was getting under way, the director of the University of North Carolina Press, W. T. Couch, who took care to publish some African-American writers and offered a home to the South’s liberal regional studies movement centered in his university, similarly summarized white southern racial views:

There is no question as to what the dominant opinion is. It holds that the Negro is inferior to the white man, and shades all the way from the prevailing opinion of two centuries as given in the Dred Scott Decision to the less extreme opinion that the Negro, while inferior, nevertheless has some rights and should be encouraged to develop a culture parallel to and dependent on that of whites.
²⁰