Fear Itself (27 page)

A second jarring proposal was the resurrection of the Costigan-Wagner bill about lynching in the spring 1937 by New York’s Joseph Gavagan, a white House Democrat whose district included largely black Harlem (whose first African-American representative, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., was not elected until 1944). With the bill bottled up in the Judiciary Committee, led by Hatton Sumners of Texas, Gavagan pried it loose with a discharge petition that carried 218 signatures, a majority of the chamber. Such a procedural move had not been attempted in the House during the earlier New Deal antilynching effort.
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Three days later, on April 15, 1937, the House passed the bill by an overwhelming margin, 277–120, with nearly unanimous nonsouthern Democratic support. This was the first civil rights bill sponsored by Democrats ever to pass the House. But it did not survive a six-week filibuster that opened in November 1937 in a Senate with a huge Democratic majority. With solid southern opposition, two cloture votes to end debate failed on January 27 and February 16, 1938. All but one, then three, of the chamber’s sixteen Republicans also opposed cloture. Unlike the southerners, they expressed support for the bill. But they announced an unwillingness to give up what their leader, Charles McNarry of Oregon, called “the last barrier to tyranny,” the protection filibusters could offer to intense minorities.
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The black press speculated that Republicans wanted to prevent Democrats from passing legislation they had failed to advance when they had a majority, and that they were exacting retribution for the shift of the black electorate to Roosevelt and congressional Democrats. The
Washington Post
’s analysis claimed that the Republicans had calculated an advantage to demonstrating Democratic divisions by keeping the antilynching question alive, and thought they could appeal to black votes by stating strong substantive agreement with the bill while allowing it to go down, with a Democratic majority taking the blame.
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A hallmark of growing southern anxiety was the intensification of rhetoric in the House and Senate compared with the prior debate.
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As before, southern members argued that the proposed law was unconstitutional, unnecessary, and unfair because it singled out a specific region and only one type of violent behavior. But there was more to be said. Declaring that “the color line in the South is a permanent institution,” Georgia’s Edward Cox identified the bill as “but one of a series that is intended to be put upon the country in an effort to break the spirit of the white South and, in time, bring about social equality.”
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Georgia senator Richard Russell likewise argued that the bill heralded a wider assault on “the rights of the Southern states,” which would culminate in “social equality between the races which includes wiping out all segregation of the races in schools and colleges and churches and hospitals and in homes and in every public place.” Byrnes of South Carolina agreed, arguing that to “vote for this bill . . . will require acquiescence to . . . [such] subsequent demands.”
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Explicitly racist speech grew more frequent. Louisiana’s Allen Ellender and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo remonstrated about “mongrelization.” Ellender offered an account of the fall of civilizations as a result of racial crossbreeding. Bilbo told the bill’s supporters that “upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for this measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white southern men will not tolerate.”
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Mississippi’s John Rankin opined that “decent white people are not going to sit supinely by and let these brutes outrage defenseless women in this manner, law or no.” These habitually racist speakers were not alone. They were joined in this line of talk by a range of usually more contained figures, including Representative Sumners and Senator Byrnes.
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In 1935, southern members had still been able to count on fellow Democrats not to pass such legislation. This was no longer true. Georgia’s Malcolm Tarver asked, “When an overwhelmingly Democratic House supports by a sectional vote such a legislative monstrosity as this Gavagan bill, it is time for the people of the South to ask themselves, ‘What protection have we from the unconstitutional interference with our handling of our race problems?’”
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With Georgia’s Paul Brown identifying the legislation as “little more than an emotional appeal to large groups of Negro voters in the North,” and Rankin calling it “a bill to make Harlem safe for Tammany,” many southern members denounced their colleagues for betraying their southern partners.
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“For more than 100 years,” Cox declared, “the people of the South have kept life in the Democratic Party. At times they have been its only friends, and now when the party has grown strong and powerful, it turns upon them and proposes to deal to them this wicked and cowardly blow.”
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Even the most progressive southern member of the Senate, Florida’s newly arrived Claude Pepper, spoke out for states’ rights, and complained, if in more measured and empirically accurate prose, that “this tragic proposition is out of harmony with the spirit of that philosophy which has prevailed in the national life of this country since the 4th of March 1933, known under the terminology of the New Deal.”
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FIGURE 2
.
Southern Votes in Congress, 1937–1942

Southern voting patterns in Congress increasingly began to shift. Party loyalty grew less sure. Compared with the nearly straight-line party voting during President Roosevelt’s first term, the six years that preceded World War II witnessed a still modest but unmistakable change.
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In the House, partisan and cross-partisan voting declined by 10 percent; 14 percent of roll calls now elicited southern defection to the Republicans or sectional voting. In the Senate, the level of such voting reached 9 percent, twice the level of the earlier period. In the main, partisanship still ruled the day. But as we will see in chapter 10, this turn away from party voting on a growing number of roll calls by southern representatives, especially on proposals dealing with labor markets and trade unions as well as some aspects of social welfare, brought into question those features of the early New Deal that most resembled European social democracy. Simultaneously, as discussed in chapter 11, the South rejected German appeals of racial solidarity and stood in the front line of those in Congress who supported active responses to the growing military might of the German, Italian, Japanese, and Soviet dictatorships. These were the first glimmerings of the essential role southern representatives would soon play in fashioning a new national state with two distinct facets.

IV.

T
HE WAR
years witnessed the growth of an ever-more-obsessive anxiety about race by vigilant southern legislators. The Democratic Party’s grip on the region came loose as the South began to lose its capacity to control the racial agenda. The implicit compact that underlay southern enthusiasm for the early New Deal was no longer sufficient, for it became increasingly difficult to secure the section’s accustomed freedom of action. Much as the region’s leaders before the Civil War “seriously exaggerated the strength of Northern abolitionism and curiously underestimated their own political strength in the nation,”
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southern congressional delegations in the late 1930s and early 1940s arguably had amplified their vulnerabilities. But when World War II jolted the South’s economy, accelerated black population movements and economic mobility, emboldened civil rights activists, and produced major union gains, Jim Crow, in fact, was placed under great ideological and practical pressure.

Both the North and the South were dramatically transformed. The war brought about the recruitment of black labor for work in northern factories, most of which were unionized. In 1940, some 77 percent of black Americans lived in the South, only a 2 percent decrease in share from 1930; by 1950, one in three of the country’s fifteen million African-Americans lived outside the region.
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As voters, they were allied with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Although many northern whites were ambivalent, at best, about civil rights, there was an increasing alignment at the mass level of a configuration that included Democratic Party identification, support for New Deal economic policies, and a growing degree of racial liberalism.
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Further, by the mid-1940s, nonsouthern Democratic party activists and officials composed the political force most in favor of civil rights initiatives.
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Party competition could proceed no longer without regard for black rights.

The South also changed during the war.
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One in four farmworkers left the land.
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Very tight labor markets emboldened union forcefulness. When Congress passed the National Industrial Relations Act in 1935 with southern support, the presence of unions in the region had been slight. During the prewar period, the unionization movement had primarily been concentrated in large urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest, where mass-production industries were situated. With the exception of gains on the docks in New Orleans and in the packinghouses and steel mills of Birmingham, the South was largely left out of the union surge of the 1930s. Labor organizing in the South faced high hurdles. The region was less industrialized than the rest of the country, and its factories were widely dispersed in small and middle-size towns where resistance often was relentless. The huge supply of desperately poor persons depressed wages and made union organizing very difficult. The region’s racial order also partitioned workers by race, making divide-and-conquer strategies by employers a ready tool with which to defeat union drives. Many efforts to build southern unions, including a large organizing drive conducted by the AFL in the teeth of the Depression, had come to naught.
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Thus despite some gains, “the union movement of the South in 1939 . . . lagged markedly behind the Northeast, Midwest, and West coast in reacting to the stimulus of the New Deal.”
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During the war, however, both the AFL and the CIO secured dramatic gains. The labor market induced by wartime industrial expansion and fueled by large federal investments facilitated aggressive union efforts. In just two years, from Pearl Harbor to late 1943, industrial employment in the South grew from 1.6 million to 2.3 million workers. Southern trends were brought more in line with national developments. Between 1938 and 1948, the two data points in the leading study of labor trends, the region’s union membership more than doubled, from just under half a million to more than one million.
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Indeed, as World War II drew to a close, H. F. Douty, the chief labor economist at the Department of Labor, observed that “with respect to the South, the existing situation is different from any existing in the past.” Cotton mill unionism had begun to function, and important collective bargaining agreements had been reached with the major tobacco companies (covering some 90 percent of all workers in the industry) and in the cigar industry (covering about 50 percent). Steel unionism became strongly established, and there were important successes in oil, rubber, clothing, and a wide array of war-related industries. Because “the Negro constitutes a relatively large and permanent part of the southern industrial labor force in such industries as tobacco, lumber, and iron and steel,” Douty noted, “. . . successful unionization of such industries require[s] the organization of colored workers.” He added that, based on wartime experiences, including experiments with multiracial union locals, there “is evidence to the effect that workers among both races are beginning to realize that economic cooperation is not only possible, but desirable.”
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Assessing future prospects, he concluded, in 1946, that “union organization in the South is substantial in character and is no longer restricted in its traditional spheres in railroading, printing, and a few other industries.”
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These dramatic achievements obviously threatened the traditional South and prodded the development of an antilabor obsession that connected unions to racial change and unrest.

Wartime’s labor experiences were only part of a larger pattern of profound change.
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The mechanization of southern farming accelerated. Literally millions of nonsouthern Americans were trained in southern military camps, more than a million in Texas alone. Attempts to lure industry to the region finally began to succeed.
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The region’s occupational structure and technological capacity underwent pressured change. A huge investment, one exceeding ten billion dollars, in Department of War facilities and war industries accelerated road construction, helping to overcome the poverty of isolation and the isolation of poverty. War plants manufactured planes, ships, and ordnance, fashioned industrial momentum, and formed a more permanent industrial base. More than a million new civilian jobs were created. Military service emptied many towns and villages at just the moment the new economy fostered urban development. Racial unrest surrounded army camps as black soldiers in the still-segregated army became emboldened to resist Jim Crow restrictions when they left their bases.