Fear Itself (25 page)

To stymie the bill, the South launched a filibuster, threatening to “speak night and day if necessary,” thus “delaying other important legislation.”
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The debate “was a godsend” to southern progressives, who could demonstrate to their constituents that notwithstanding their strong and often leading position regarding New Deal legislation, they would not be moved when it came to federal interference in matters of race.
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During the Senate’s consideration, it was widely understood that the debate would not lead to a roll call. Reporting how the “antilynching measure meets dogged hostility,” the
New York Times
commented that its “well-intentioned” sponsors were mistaken if they thought the proposal ever would come to a vote.
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Plainly exasperated by the members of his party who had insisted on bringing the bill to the floor, President Roosevelt pushed “for greater speed on his legislative program,”
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including a veterans bonus compromise bill sponsored by Mississippi’s senator Pat Harrison. Majority Leader Robinson initiated a series of procedural moves to kill the legislation by voting on adjournment. A vote on April 26 failed, but its narrow 33–34 defeat signaled that supporters of the legislation lacked the two-thirds that would have been necessary to stop the southern filibuster.

What is striking about this vote is not the overwhelming support by southern Democrats or the comparable degree of opposition by Republicans. It is, rather, the critical support for adjournment provided by nonsouthern Democrats, almost half of whom voted to support the South’s procedural move. With this demonstration, a decisive effort to adjourn easily passed by 48–32, with the majority composed of 44 Democrats and just 4 Republicans.
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“The effort to displace the Costigan-Wagner bill could not have succeeded without the support of northern Democrats.”
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As their southern colleagues knew all along, they were playing for audiences of constituents rather than making a serious effort to actually put an antilynching law on the books. The plea by South Carolina’s Cotton Ed Smith that the Democratic Party should rally to protect the South as “‘our pillar of a cloud’ by day and our ‘pillar of fire’ by night” was heeded.
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II.

T
HE
R
OOSEVELT
administration pursued a strategy of pragmatic forgetfulness with regard to racial matters as long as it could. Relying on southern intellectuals like Howard Odum and other students of economic and social regionalism, this policy consisted of two key rhetorical and intellectual elements. First was an equilibrium of silence. By excising the sharpness of Jim Crow’s racial dimension, the South was transformed analytically into a more ordinary, if poor, region that could be melded within a larger American sectional mosaic. The South itself, this perspective stressed, was no less internally complex than other regions. Delaware and Maryland were as different, say, from Louisiana and Georgia as Connecticut was from Colorado. Looking at such considerations, many New Deal contemporaries argued that the day of southern exceptionalism had passed. Odum, for one, took notice of how “‘North’ and ‘South’ in the early New Deal were no longer valid realities in the new America that was developing, except as they reflected a tragic past which the nation wanted to forget.”
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Regions still mattered, but not in a way that would make the South any more singular or remarkable than the Midwest, the Northwest, or any other area of the country. Moreover, as a historian of the Civil War, Ella Lonn, stressed in her presidential address to the Southern Historical Association, American similarities after the Civil War and Reconstruction had become vastly more important than North-South differences. “Fundamentally,” she explained, “we were one people. There were no barriers of language such as exist when two different nations engage in combat. Further, both sections were dominated by the same Anglo-Saxon traditions, both had the same English background and developed through the same pioneer experience.” In addition, “both sections were devoted to the same system of government.”
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A second feature of the strategy dealt with the conduct of policy research. Using the tools of modern social science, enlightened empirical scholarship conducted in settings like the Institute for Research in Social Science, which Odum led in Chapel Hill, amassed data that could be classified by many other categories than race. Drawing on southern regional studies, this approach chronicled the South’s distinct character and circumstances this way.
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Like Odum, a good number of leading white southern intellectuals who were racial moderates understood that any attempt to confront race head-on was doomed to fail.
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In these circumstances, they sought to find a vantage from which to explore southern realities while bypassing the region’s racial conundrums. They thought this course to be ethically advantageous. Such an equilibrium of silence, they believed, might shift the dominant language from an explicit and often embarrassing justification of white supremacy to a concern for the South irrespective of race. Segregation would stay, but there would be no need to talk about it.

This position offered New Dealers a way to discuss and assess the South without mounting a frontal assault on its racial system. On June 22, 1938, Franklin Roosevelt wrote to Lowell Mellett, the executive director of the National Emergency Council, to commission a report on the economic conditions of the South that would pursue this approach. The council had been created in 1935 to coordinate the recovery agencies of the early New Deal. Mellett was a political ally; a former editor at the
Washington Daily News,
he had angered his bosses at the Scripps-Howard newspaper chain by supporting FDR’s 1937 plan to enlarge the Supreme Court. Getting ready to purge recalcitrant southern members of Congress in party primaries for the 1938 midterm election, Roosevelt came to think that a report “on the problems and needs of the South” might prove politically useful. His formal request took an elevated tone, noting how “discussions in Congress and elsewhere in connection with legislation affecting the economic welfare of the Nation have served to point out the differences in the problems and needs of the different sections of the country.” As the report was being prepared, the president underscored “his intimate interest in all that concerns the South.” This consisted, he said, of a good deal “more than a sentimental attachment born of considerable residence in your section and of close personal friendship for so many of your people.” Addressing a July 4 gathering in Washington of the Conference on Economic Conditions in the South, a group of southern liberals who focused on the dire economic status of the region while staying largely silent about racial questions, Roosevelt recorded his “conviction that the South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem—the Nation’s problem, not merely the South’s.”
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The report underpinned the claim made by southern regional studies that only a reinvigorated New Deal could end the quasi-colonial status of the region. “If it is true that the South is ‘the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem,’” the historian B. B. Kendrick argued before the Southern Historical Association in Atlanta in November 1941, “the fundamental historical explanation of that condition is to be found in the fact that for more than three centuries this region has occupied the status of a colony.”
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The largely agrarian South in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth was relatively impoverished, and found itself integrated into the larger American economy on dependent terms dictated principally by northern capitalists. In such circumstances, white southerners, and especially plantation elites, fashioned a politics that was concerned simultaneously with advancing regional interests against this nationally dominant class and with protecting their distinctive racial civilization.

Issued on July 25, 1938, the fifty-nine-page
Report on Economic Conditions of the South
underscored the meaning of the region’s colonial status without addressing its racial complexion. It stressed the region’s poverty, and its underutilized human and physical resources. It sketched great deprivation. “Ever since the War between the States the South has been the poorest section of the Nation. The richest State in the South ranks lower in per capita income than the poorest State outside the region.” The average income in 1937 for all Americans was $604; in the South, it was nearly half that, at $314. The average southern farmer had a gross income of just $186 per year, compared to $528 elsewhere. More than half had no land of their own, but were sharecroppers or tenants. These had lower incomes still. On cotton plantations, “the average tenant family received an income of only $73 per person for a year’s work. Earnings of share croppers ranged from $38 to $87 per person, and an income of $38 annually means only a little more than 10 cents a day.” That very year, Congress had passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, establishing a minimum wage at twenty-five cents per hour, soon to rise to forty cents. Farm workers and maids, at southern insistence, had been deliberately left out.
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Southern poverty, the report concluded, was fully “comparable to that of the poorest peasants in Europe.”
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Public services, especially the schools, were terrible, well below the level “necessary in any civilized community.” Tax collections were meager, averaging, in the states, just $28.88 per person, compared to $51.54 in the country as a whole. With 28 percent of the population, the South contributed just 12 percent of income tax receipts. And the tax burden mainly fell, through sales taxes, on those least able to pay. As southern communities desperately sought to attract capital investment, they promised, and delivered, low-wage workers and low-tax environments. Education was pitiful. The section had one-third of the country’s children but just one-sixth of its revenues for schooling. Teachers in Arkansas were paid 80 percent less than teachers in New York. The latter state spent $141.43 per child in 1936; $27.47 was the amount spent in Mississippi, where “there were actually 1,500 school centers . . . without school buildings, requiring children to attend school in lodge halls, abandoned tenant houses, country churches, and, in some instances, even cotton pens.” Not surprisingly, southern illiteracy was high, at nearly one in ten persons.
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Health was deplorable, especially for those at the bottom—“a belt of sickness, misery, and unnecessary death.” The South lacked doctors, hospitals, and clinics. “Many counties have no facilities at all.” Pellegra, a disease of malnutrition, was rampant; so, too, were tuberculosis and pneumonia. Despite the region’s abundant water supply, water pollution was widespread. Flooding was common, often accompanied by malaria—which annually was infecting more than two million persons, especially in areas without adequate drainage. “More people in the southern area than elsewhere die without medical aid.”
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One cause of such poor health was the state of the region’s housing. Half of all the homes in the South were mere hovels, well below a minimum standard. Most lacked running water, and many water supplies were impure. Of all the farmhouses in the South, only 5.7 percent had water piped to the house, and only 3.4 percent to the bathroom. The great majority lacked not only indoor toilets but any system of sanitation.
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This document was compelling but deeply misleading. Without exception, all its data lumped blacks and whites together. The report made no mention whatsoever of segregation. Its powerful catalog of regional economic ailments reads as if the race issue did not exist. Yet the South’s racial order was an integral part of the region’s slow industrialization and backward agriculture, its low wages and poor public services, its keen opposition to unions and stunted strategies of economic development. Organized white supremacy was the foundation for virtually every aspect of southern economics, politics, and society.

The report’s silence was motivated by a devout but ultimately forlorn hope not just by the regional scholars whose views the document reflected but also by the national leaders of the Democratic Party that the New Deal might continue to set the race question aside. By the time the document appeared, however, this course already was proving impossible to sustain. By drawing attention to southern deprivation, the New Deal’s most focused effort on the South undermined its own presuppositions. It sparked a defensive response by southern politicians and promoted a closer examination of how racial disparities helped constitute the forces it described. By 1938, the willful amnesia and quiet accommodation of racism on the part of New Deal leaders were becoming untenable.

III.

A
S HAS
been noted, southern racial security did not last, and anxiety, if not outright paranoia, became more palpable as the decade was coming to an end. The most important reason was the growth of a far more ambitious and often more militant labor movement than had been anticipated when Congress passed the National Industrial Labor Relations Act in 1935.

A roiling working-class insurgency raised the stakes. At the heart of the corporate economy—in the automobile, rubber, textile, and steel industries—factory workers were seizing factories to demand recognition for the unions affiliated with the newly established Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Rubber workers took over the Goodyear plant in Akron, Ohio, in November 1935, in January 1936, and, again, in February. Organizing huge picket lines and arming themselves with clubs and sawed-off billiard cues to resist efforts by police to end the disturbance, those involved in this “epic struggle” won a settlement for the new United Rubber Workers (URW) union on March 21.
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At year’s end, starting on December 30, workers seeking recognition for the fledgling United Automobile Workers (UAW) occupied the General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan. Sitting down and locking themselves in, the workers at Fisher Body Plant No. 1 and Chevrolet Plant No. 4 fended off tear-gas assaults by the police, and ignored court injunctions to leave until their union was recognized, as it was on February 11. By the close of 1937, the UAW had recruited half a million members.
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That year also witnessed a mass sit-down strike at Republic Steel and Youngstown Sheet and Tube that was broken up by state troopers. In all, during the period between September 1936 and May 1937, “sit down strikes directly involved 484,711 workers and closed plants employing 600,000 others.”
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According to official government statistics, 1937 alone witnessed 2,200 strikes for union recognition, with the participation of 941,802 workers, which led to success for 711,060. An additional 262,000 workers won union recognition that year through the electoral process sanctioned by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.
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