Fear Itself (23 page)

After the economic and political upheavals of the late nineteenth century, the Democratic Party in Congress came to consist mainly of representatives from the South. From the Democratic Party debacle of 1896 to the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, Democratic congressional candidates outside the South were able to secure only some 40 percent of the popular vote, but the party’s vote totals within the South never fell below 86 percent.
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As a result, during the first three decades of the twentieth century, two out of every three Democrats in Congress were elected from southern constituencies.

With Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover in the White House in the 1920s and early 1930s, Republican majorities in the Senate and the House were constant, and often large. As a result, southern members dominated the Democratic Party in both houses of Congress. During this period, 67 percent of all Democrats in the Senate and fully 72 percent in the House hailed from the South.
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During the last Congress to serve before the Democratic Party’s landslide in the 1932 elections, 30 of the 47 Democratic members of the Senate and 136 of the 216 in the House represented southern constituencies.

The partisan transformation of 1932 altered the region’s place in the legislature. Across the country, Democratic Party candidates secured a remarkable 72.4 percent of the vote for the House of Representatives and won fully 63 percent of the ballots cast for the Senate. A House that had been divided between 218 Republicans and 216 Democrats (and one independent) after the midterm election of 1930 was replaced by a chamber with 311 Democrats and just 117 Republicans, so severe was the impact of the Depression and the Roosevelt landslide.
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In the Senate, the Democrats gained twelve seats, giving them a decisive majority of 59–36.
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When the Seventy-third Congress assembled in March 1933, the South no longer commanded a majority of Democratic seats; 46 percent of Democrats in the House and 49 percent in the Senate represented southern districts and states. These shares fell further when the party’s majorities grew in 1934 and 1936.

Still, southern power persisted. Nonsouthern Democrats could not pass legislation without southern support. At no time during the New Deal did the southern cohort drop below 44 percent of Democrats in the Senate and 41 percent in the House. These numbers were sufficient to block any initiatives they did not approve. During the heyday of the Roosevelt administration’s great legislative productivity, every law had to pass southern scrutiny. Even when the presence of Republicans in the House was reduced to a paltry 88 seats after the election of 1936, the 192 nonsouthern Democrats could not muster majorities on their own. Although only 16 Republicans served in the Senate that convened after that Democratic rout, the 43 nonsouthern Democrats likewise constituted only a minority of that chamber. Without southern acquiescence, the party’s national program could not pass.

Republicans began a steep comeback in 1938. That midterm election followed President Roosevelt’s failed effort to enlarge the Supreme Court, and took place in the context of labor unrest, a severe economic dip (unemployment nearly doubled in the nine months following August 1937, and farm prices fell by some 30 percent), and a foreign policy that many judged to lack a strategy to confront the dictatorships.
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Despite the Republican Party’s gain of eighty seats in the House, the Democrats maintained a comfortable majority, but its composition changed. Southern members once again commanded a majority of their party, 54 percent. Never again during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations did their share fall below half of all House Democrats. Party turnover in the Senate was slower, as the Republicans gained eight seats. A southern majority of Democrats did not emerge until the next election, in 1940. By the end of the Truman administration, fully 63 percent of Democrats in the Senate hailed from the South.

IV.

T
HE ASSUMPTIONS,
institutions, and practices within which southern congressional voting took place in the 1920s soon expired. The reform impulses of southern members had taken aim at northern capital in circumstances marked by national economic prosperity, a postwar disengagement from world affairs, and a federal system that relegated issues of property rights and the organization of the economy to the forty-eight states.
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When these circumstances altered during the New Deal, the South was confronted with difficult choices about policies and preferences, choices that grew more difficult as the period unfolded.

During the course of the New Deal, the character and content of policy majorities depended on these southern decisions. On its own, the region did not command a majority of the House or the Senate. Statistically, representatives from the South were no more central to getting legislation passed than other Democrats or Republicans. In a technical sense, each of these three sets of representatives was pivotal, as each group was in a position to provide the votes that were needed by at least one other to gain a winning margin. Overall, though, the South was the bloc most vital to lawmaking. Unlike other members of the House and Senate, whose substantive preferences and propensity to vote were located predictably on a left-to-right spectrum, southern members were more pliable and less predictable with respect to their views and votes. Unlike the others, they made policy decisions on the basis of two dimensions, not just one, those of partisanship and regional concerns. And when the latter was in play, it almost always took priority over commitments to the national Democratic Party and its policy preferences. The level of intensity felt for each was not symmetrical.
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Each time they prepared to cast a vote on the floor of the House or Senate, southern congressmen had to decide with whom to align. These decisions produced four types of roll calls, as shown in Figure 1. When they joined their Democratic Party colleagues with a high degree of likeness,
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but not with Republicans, their vote was “partisan.” When the three blocs behaved similarly, the result was “cross-partisan.” When southern actions differed both from those of nonsouthern Democrats and Republicans, the choice was “sectional.” And when Southern members sided with Republicans and against fellow Democrats, they became “disloyal.”

During the course of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, the House of Representatives cast 1,898 roll calls about public policy and the Senate 2,533.
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When these votes are sorted as partisan, cross-partisan, sectional, or disloyal, we discover a dramatic shift from the first decade of the New Deal era to the second. During the initial period, southern representatives overwhelmingly made partisan and cross-partisan choices. The picture the second decade presents is strikingly different. Figure 2 identifies how a much larger share of votes fell into the other two zones of sectional voting and, especially, party disloyalty.

FIGURE 1
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Types of Roll Call Votes Cast by Southern Members of Congress, 1933–1952

FIGURE 2
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Southern Votes in Congress, 1933–1952

This transformation is captured visually by the shift from a vertical to a diagonal slope in Figure 2. During the first half of the New Deal, southerners cast sectional votes and defected from the Democratic Party position 5 percent of the time. During the second half, by contrast, sectional voting doubled, to 10 percent of the total, and the decision to defect was taken fully 19 percent of the time. This dramatic transformation raises questions of three kinds. Why did southern congressional behavior change so dramatically? On which issues did the South move from partisan and cross-partisan to sectional and defection voting? What was the impact of these decisions on the character and content of lawmaking, and thus on the contours and prospects of American democracy? Parsing these questions in the remaining chapters, we will discover not just whether but how the South made the New Deal.

5
Jim Crow Congress

N
AMED FOR THE
Roman consul and dictator, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar was a nineteenth-century planter, lawyer, soldier, diplomat, and scholar. He resigned from the House of Representatives in 1860 to draft Mississippi’s Ordinance of Secession. During the Civil War, he fought at Bull Run, served as army judge advocate, and traveled to England and France as a Confederate envoy. He returned to the House with Reconstruction nearing its end, then was elected to the Senate after the Compromise of 1877, which restored home rule and withdrew federal troops from the South. Chosen by President Grover Cleveland to be his secretary of the interior in 1885, Lamar joined the Supreme Court three years later, the first southern justice since 1853.
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For his “effort to reconcile the North and South in the face of enormous calumny in the aftermath of the Civil War,” Lamar was selected by John F. Kennedy as one of eight U.S. senators to enter the pantheon of “profiles in courage.”
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As a strong supporter of white supremacy, and as a tireless campaigner for the restoration of white Democratic Party rule after Reconstruction, Lamar was also a hero to many New Deal–era southerners. These included the Southern Agrarians, the circle of literary intellectuals centered in Nashville, whose 1930 volume,
I’ll Take My Stand,
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resisted an industrializing “New South” and promoted a traditional and unified region. The Agrarians celebrated Lamar as “one of the truly great men in American history.”
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He inspired modernizing southern liberals as well, people who looked forward to a less provincial South. A leader of that group, Virginius Dabney of the
Richmond Times-Dispatch,
recalled in 1932 how Lamar had backed strong federal measures to bolster the region’s economy, including supporting federal subsidies to lower shipping costs to the South by rail, and how, with the close of Reconstruction, he had predicted that “the Southern people would now forget about the Negro as an issue and turn their attention to more important matters.”
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Across this range of views, leading southern thinkers and politicians in the early 1930s, including members of the House and Senate, were confident the time to realize Lamar’s forecast had arrived. Convinced that race no longer was an issue in national politics, they propelled policies that could realize a long-standing regional desire for economic rectification. In 1874, one of Lamar’s Senate colleagues, North Carolina’s Augustus Merrimon, had asked “Congress to inaugurate a policy” to redistribute “the industrial and capital interests of the country” from the “vast accumulation of capital and population in the Eastern States” to the South.
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Merrimon understood what the distinguished economist William Parker would observe a century later when stating that an alternative to the South’s disadvantaged status after Reconstruction “could hardly have occurred except . . . as part of a national economic and social policy which would have redistributed labor and capital within the nation.”
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For even as industrialization was proceeding elsewhere, the South remained overwhelmingly rural and poor, with depleted land, a quasi-feudal tenure system based on debt and fear, and many bankruptcies and foreclosures.
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The New Deal thus was a boon for a hardscrabble region that faced many barriers to economic development. These included a poorly educated and low-skilled white and black population, inferior roads, the outmigration of ambitious workers, a shortage of local investment capital, fewer native mineral resources than other regions, and a paucity of industrial research facilities. The South also experienced high freight rates, high tariffs, low commodity prices, and patterns of ownership that placed the control of financial, mining, manufacturing, transportation, and communications corporations mainly in the hands of northeastern capitalists, a pattern many southern commentators thought to be colonial in nature.
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Most of the region’s political leaders almost giddily propelled the New Deal’s radical economic policies, a program that offered the South the chance to escape its colonized status while keeping its racial order safe. They were reassured by its strong resemblances to Wilson’s New Freedom, in policy, personnel, and, it seemed, questions of race. Drawing on that history of reform and regulation, the region’s representatives saw a golden opportunity to advance progressive priorities in both the region’s and nation’s interest. Economic concerns, at last, could displace race in what Congressman Maury Maverick, a liberal Texan, celebrated in 1936 as “another southern rebellion.” This time, by contrast, it would be a rebellion “in which northerners—damned Yankees—lend assistance to the grandsons of the ragged troopers who starved and fought and died with Jackson and Lee. Both have found that they have a common enemy—and that enemy is not to be seen in terms of sectional cleavage but in terms of economic power.”
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Looking back with nostalgia from his professorial perch at the University of North Carolina a decade later, Howard Odum recalled how the region had assumed “a new sort of normal and logical participation in the total national effort” after 1933, without regional or racial issues coming to the fore.
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Somewhere, Senators Lamar and Merrimon were smiling.

They would also have been pleased to know that in the generation before the New Deal, a “powerful sentiment” had developed within the South “to dampen the rekindled fires of racial feeling and to discourage any further public discussion of race.” They almost certainly would have been impressed by how, in turn, the main concerns of the Democratic Party’s burgeoning nonsouthern wing found no place for racial rectification.
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At the start of the New Deal, racial segregation seemed immovable, almost natural. The country’s political class had come to terms with a system of differentiated citizenship based on race, a system in which some Americans, thought to be incorrigibly inferior, were accorded only limited rights. The conciliatory culture that celebrated the reunion of the sections after the Civil War remained vibrant across party lines. A white consensus that existing racial patterns should not be disturbed seemed durable, notwithstanding the ways the southern system contradicted the most basic commitments of the country’s liberal ideals and democratic political culture.

As the New Deal began, southern civil society appeared safe. The South’s daring policy positions were premised on this security. Southern members of Congress had little reason to fear the large number of their new nonsouthern colleagues in the House and Senate. Almost to a person, these newcomers had no particular focus on racial segregation, and no interest in confronting the legislature’s southern leaders. Not one Democrat in Congress was African-American.
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Few of the constituents of nonsouthern Democrats, or Republicans, were black. Effective lawmaking, they understood, demanded an alliance with their more experienced southern colleagues. And that, in turn, could not happen unless they overlooked Jim Crow.

Southern members of the House and Senate also had no cause to worry that the new president, who had been nominated with robust southern support, spent long periods in Warm Springs, Georgia, and had selected a segregationist Texan, John Nance Garner, as his vice president, would do anything but make the Great Depression a priority.
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His election brought comfort to elected southern officials who understood that his success would depend on overcoming the divisions that had split the southern and nonsouthern wings of the Democratic Party during the 1928 presidential election. During his long term of office, Franklin Roosevelt never pushed civil rights legislation.
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His staff had a southern slant. James “Jimmy” Byrnes, then a new Democratic senator from South Carolina and a key speechwriter and strategist for the 1932 campaign, “believed unquestioningly in the total supremacy of the Caucasian race.”
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The administration’s press secretary, the Virginian Stephen Early, “was always on the alert for any piece of legislation, White House appointment, or firm pronouncement that risked an impression of special concern for racial discrimination.”
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The Justice Department at the start of the New Deal studiously ignored all African-American pleas for help. Emblematic New Deal institutions, including the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority, were directed by explicit racists who limited black participation. Walter White, the secretary of the NAACP, famously reported how FDR explained why he would remain silent during the Senate filibuster of the antilynching bill first introduced in January 1934 by two of his party’s senators, Colorado’s Edward Costigan and New York’s Robert Wagner. “I’ve got to get legislation passed by Congress to save America. . . . If I come out for the anti-lynching bill, [the southerners] will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.”
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In all, southern lawmakers had no grounds to believe that anything threatening would be done to challenge segregation and white political domination beyond the occasional symbolic gesture. With no pressure about civil rights from their colleagues or from the president in the early New Deal, they “not only insisted on strict adherence to the imperatives of white supremacy in administering New Deal programs in their own section, but also imposed their prejudices on Capitol Hill.”
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Fusing white supremacy with American nationalism, most white southerners, including most politicians, saw little conflict between systematic racism and liberal democratic government. This combination controlled how the region stayed within the ambit of national politics through the instrument of the Democratic Party. “No wonder they thought they could pretty much shape a New Deal to suit themselves.”
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This equilibrium did not prove stable. Looking back, Odum ruefully remembered its collapse. “Then,” he wrote, “a strange thing happened, a sudden revivification of the old sectional conflict,” and a recovery “of the terms North and South.” By reopening “the old race conflict,” sectional divisions in national politics and especially within the Democratic Party had brought “the South to its gravest crisis and the nation again to one of its chief domestic problems since the Civil War.”
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The developments to which he referred did, in fact, change the course of the New Deal. Pressured in many unexpected ways, the white South became uncertain and unsure, perplexed about how simultaneously to maintain its commitments to racism and to a changing Democratic Party, its long-standing political home. As southern power grew more guarded and fearful, the New Deal moved from a first phase of radical reform to a second, in which its social democratic wings were clipped. A third and decisive phase followed. In the 1940s, southerners in Congress became an increasingly independent force, one whose decisions forged a double-sided procedural and crusading national state. With pivotal powers, these southern choices defined the country’s institutional realities and moral geography.

I.

T
HE EMBARGO
on racial issues after the decisive Democratic Party victory in 1932 opened up the attractive prospect that economic policies crafted in Washington might transform the region’s desperate plight without endangering Jim Crow. Of course, not every southern member was on board. On the Left, Louisiana’s senator Huey Long thought the program did not go far enough to constrain business and redistribute income and wealth. His Share Our Wealth movement, calling for confiscatory taxation on fortunes worth more than one million dollars and a guaranteed family income of more than two thousand dollars, generated a national, not just a southern, movement with mass support.
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Long, however, never mobilized serious congressional backing. Nor did a small group of adversaries at the other end of the region’s ideological spectrum, including Senators Carter Glass and Harry F. Byrd of Virginia, Thomas Gore of Oklahoma, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Josiah Bailey of North Carolina, who were deeply anxious about the growth of federal power. Just after the Hundred Days, Glass wrote to Walter Lippmann to decry the New Deal “as an utterly dangerous effort of the federal government to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of the nation.”
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