Fear Itself (44 page)

II.

I
F THE
South disappointed Germany, it also did not develop a particular voice on global affairs prior to late 1938 or early 1939. Before President Roosevelt began to lead the country toward global engagement, the South’s positions broadly resembled those of other sections. During the first six years of the New Deal, there had been no southern push to move beyond strong neutrality, a modest military, and a defense strategy that protected trade lanes at sea. What demands explanation is not any constant southern internationalism, nor a particular wish to confront dictatorial Germany. Instead, it is how southern politicians came to lead an interventionist coalition at the end of the 1930s, after European efforts to assuage Hitler’s territorial ambitions had collapsed.
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Early in World War II, John Temple Graves, a
Birmingham Age-Herald
columnist, posed just this question. To better understand the sources of “the greater belligerency of the South in the days before Pearl Harbor,” he surveyed other white southern journalists and leading authors and intellectuals.
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Their reasons clustered in three categories: cultural affinities, political calculations, and economic incentives.

Southerners, some noted, celebrated their martial traditions, and, as predominantly evangelical Protestants, resented Nazism’s anti-Christian impulses. Others described the region’s pro-British stance as ethnic solidarity. More than 90 percent of southern whites traced their roots back to England, Scotland, Wales, or Protestant Ireland, reflecting the negligible impact of mass Catholic and Jewish migration from southern and eastern Europe after 1880. Many identified with British values of liberty, recalled British sympathies for the Confederacy, and related to the pain afflicted by military occupation.

Several emphasized partisan calculations. Isolationism united the Republican Party. Democrats, led by President Roosevelt, tilted the other way. This gulf reproduced the division that had separated the parties when Congress debated whether to join the League of Nations after World War I. Then, as fellow Democrats, southerners had sided with Woodrow Wilson. Now, they backed FDR. “The one-party system in the South,” Graves explained, “has been the agency of a total state as in Germany, Italy, and Russia, where the party is continually controlling and the control comes down from above.” “In the South,” he insisted, “the Democratic Party has had within itself divisions as sharp as any that have distinguished Democrats and Republicans elsewhere.” To be sure, “each election time Southerners have had to recognize the party as a thing more important than all their contests within the party.” One result was an “effect like a whole nation’s recognition of itself when war comes,” he argued, adding, “Perhaps that is another reason it was easier for the South to picture the country joined in a war against Hitler.”
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More important still were economic considerations. Cotton and tobacco relied on overseas markets; so, too, did the oil industry in Oklahoma and Texas, the phosphate and sulfur mines of Florida, the steel producers in Alabama. The ports of Jacksonville, Tampa, New Orleans, Savannah, Mobile, Charleston, and Norfolk owed their economic life to these crops and goods. These cities also served as entry points for coffee, cocoa, bananas, manganese, and rubber, and for finished goods and machinery. Not surprisingly, the South had long supported low tariffs and open global trade.

Hitler’s policies and conquests posed a direct threat to southern prosperity. Of the annual twelve billion bales of cotton the South was producing in the late 1930s, five billion were being cultivated for export. But given prewar tension and shipping hazards rising at sea, the South’s warehouses buckled under surpluses. Nazi-dominated markets shut down. Czechoslovakia, as an example, had been an important importer of southern cotton before the Munich pact of September 1938 assigned the Sudetenland, where two-thirds of Czech cotton mills were located, to Germany. Once these southwestern and western parts of the country were incorporated within the Third Reich, cotton imports from the South effectively stopped. The outbreak of war a year later also upset the South’s tobacco commerce. “When Hitler’s army began its march across the plains of Poland,” Marian Irish noted, “the auctions on the 1939 flue cured tobacco were in progress in the southern warehouses when the British buyers were ordered by their government to cease purchasing.” In November, the South’s tobacco markets closed, if temporarily, because there were no Continental European or British customers.
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By contrast, southern military camps and war production after 1939 produced a huge influx of federal government investment, which included a dramatic increase in the generation of hydroelectric power by the TVA, contracts to build ships and planes in or near the main port cities, increases in iron and steel production, and textile mill contracts for uniforms. Clearly, the South had an economic stake in activist policies.

Like policy imperatives in other areas, these reasons operated as causes only to the degree that the anti-isolationist course of action they helped conduce was consistent with the South’s commitment to white supremacy. During World War I, the South had learned that this combination could be crafted, and, with it, the region could benefit from being active in a national patriotic project without compromising its racial system. What that experience had also shown was that economic imperatives, partisan loyalties, and ethnic solidarities would not operate to generate an internationalist orientation without these critical assurances.

With the eruption of war in 1914, it was anti-British sentiment, not anti-German, that first swept the South when the United Kingdom established an embargo to prevent the export of cotton to Austria-Hungary and Germany. Southern economic conditions rapidly declined. Since President Wilson was identified as pro-British, he was denounced widely in the South as a regional traitor, and warned that the Democratic Party’s southern political supremacy might come into question.
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The crisis passed only when Britain agreed to buy the cotton that otherwise would have gone to its enemies. But a second confrontation between Wilson and most southern representatives ensued when the president called for military preparedness after the Germans sank the British liner
Lusitania
in May 1915, with 120 Americans on board. Southern members of Congress worried that much of the bill would be paid by their section’s farmers, and that weapons profits would go to hated northern capitalists. They also feared that expanded federal powers would come to haunt the region and threaten its racial system, especially if Republicans were to return to power. When the House voted to enlarge the army in 1916, fully 123 of the 216 negative votes were cast by southern representatives; they also opposed conscription more than any other part of the country.
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Wilson, in turn, understood that his policies badly needed southern support. He appealed to the region’s patriotism and implied that support for the war would end imputations of southern disloyalty to the union. Writing in August 1918 for the
Jackson Daily News,
John Temple Graves identified World War I as having completed “the triple crown of Southern loyalty that we welded first at Manila Bay and then at Santiago, and now ready for the last service and sacrifice upon the plains of France. Henceforth, the South is at one with the republic.”
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The president also directed massive investment in wartime facilities to the South. Six of fifteen immense army camps, and fully thirteen of the sixteen National Guard camps, were placed in the region. So, too, were navy facilities and war-production factories. Additionally, and critically, southerners were reassured that their support for the war could proceed in a manner that actually reinforced the region’s still-young system of Jim Crow. As Congress conducted hearings on a Selective Service Act in 1917, Secretary of War Newton Baker pledged to strictly enforce racial segregation in the military’s training facilities and fighting units. All the while, the president was demonstrating that it was possible to fight “for democracy and ethnic self-determination abroad without threatening the system of segregation at home. . . . Southerners could embrace his work for democracy abroad without worrying that it would lead to democracy for blacks at home.”
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Later, southern politicians lined up, if unsuccessfully, to secure American membership in the League of Nations and the World Court. We cannot know with confidence how southern representatives would have acted had they not been reassured by a president with Wilson’s high credibility on the issue of race.

The lesson was well learned. With undertakings that the politics of might would not challenge southern racial security, support on the basis of culture, politics, and economics for an active, internationalist response could be activated. In all, the South’s emergent positions reprised the theme that took hold during World War I, to the effect there was no contradiction between being southern and being American. Jim Crow could continue to be defended as a means to keep the social peace, protect black as well as white citizens, and ensure equal status to all white southern citizens without negating the willingness to fight for democracy.
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III.

T
HE FIRST
big international issue Congress confronted was American neutrality.
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By the summer of 1935, with 100,000 Italian troops mobilized and massed on the Ethiopian frontier, and with both Germany and the Soviet Union engaged in heavy rearmament, there was growing fear that the United States risked being drawn once again into a European war. Just as Congress was acting on Social Security, the Wagner Act, and other major pieces of domestic legislation, and on the eve of the September 15 Nuremberg Rally, something of a mass American antiwar movement was emerging. This impulse was supported by a wide array of groups, including the Federal Council of Churches and the National Council for the Prevention of War, to promote legislation that would guarantee strict and impartial American neutrality.
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Much of the populace, perhaps as many as three in four, favored the resolution introduced by Democratic congressman Louis Ludlow of Indiana that called for a constitutional amendment requiring a referendum before Congress could approve any declaration of war.
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The Neutrality Act signed by President Roosevelt on August 31, 1935, sought to remove the contingencies that might bring the United States, perhaps unwillingly, into war. It prohibited the export of arms to belligerent countries and forbade the transport of weapons for their use on American ships. It also required that producers and shippers of armaments be licensed, and it restricted travel by American citizens during war on the vessels of countries at war. These provisions were to be triggered when the president certified that a war had begun. No distinction was made between aggressors and victims.
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Both in Congress and in the country as a whole, the 1935 Neutrality Act was uncontroversial. To be sure, the president did not like the idea of mandatory neutrality, but, after hesitating, he backed the law’s passage.
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Weeks after he signed it, he told the country in a San Diego address that “despite what happens in continents overseas, the United States of America shall and must remain, as long ago the Father of our country prayed that it might remain—untangled and free.”
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Debate in both chambers took place in the midst of extensive hearings conducted by the Senate Munitions Investigating Committee, led by Gerald Nye, a progressive Republican from North Dakota, about armaments, financial capital, and war profits two decades earlier.
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Driven by widespread agreement not to repeat the experience of World War I, which had taken 116,516 American lives and had cost more than thirty billion dollars, legislators passed the new law by a voice vote in the House, and by a margin of 79–2 in the Senate.
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Less than a month before his assassination on September 10, Louisiana Democrat Huey Long reminded the Senate that “it has been 17 years since we ended the war with Europe,” and remonstrated that “we have not done a thing in the world, have we, to keep from being drawn into another one? Seventeen years have gone by, and we are still just where we started.”
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The 1935 Neutrality Act passed with a sunset provision stating that the law would expire on March 1, 1936. This condition kept skeptics on board, especially southerners concerned about potential restrictions on the cotton trade.
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With the act set to expire and with large portions of Ethiopia having been seized by Italy, January and February of that year saw the introduction of three bills to ensure that the United States would not be without neutrality protection. Strikingly, Mussolini’s brutal conquest in East Africa did not call neutrality into question, but quite the reverse. The legislation signed by President Roosevelt on February 28 extended the 1935 law, added a prohibition on the extension of loans, credit, or securities to belligerents, and included a stipulation that required payment in cash for American goods by countries at war. The 1936 act passed the Senate by voice vote, and carried the House by the overwhelming margin of 355–27.

Two features of the debate in both chambers are particularly interesting in light of later developments. First is the strong rhetorical support offered by many southern representatives. Serving his first term in the House at the start of a career, mainly in the Senate, that would last until 1978, Democrat John McClellan of Arkansas insisted, “We cannot underwrite the peace of the world; it would be suicidal folly for us to ever undertake it.”
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Another Democratic first-termer in the House, Georgia’s Benjamin Whelchel, did “not think it fair, neither do I believe it right, for a Christian nation, as America is, to permit the spilling of American blood on foreign soil in furtherance of these conflicts that have raged since the beginning of the world, and, in my opinion, will continue to do so until the end of time.”
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Second is the emergence of an expressive minority—later to become the majority—concerned that neutrality legislation would ensure inaction in dangerous times. What mattered was to identify aggressors and protect the globe’s democracies. This position garnered support primarily from Democrats, both southern and nonsouthern. Thus, in the House, William Colmer of Mississippi called for an “armed neutrality” that would make America “strong enough to demand the respect of those warlike nations who profess a desire for peace and at the same time are, with wanton abandonment, bent upon a policy of economic expansion and aggression,” and he hoped to warn “those who would break that peace with her that there will inevitably and surely be but one result, the annihilation of that aggressor.”
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