Fear Itself (89 page)

CHAPTER 5
JIM CROW CONGRESS

1
The appointment was controversial. Lamar’s nomination was confirmed by a vote of 42–38.

2
John F. Kennedy,
Profiles in Courage
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1956), p. 273. On April 25, 1874, Lamar famously delivered a eulogy in the House of Representatives for Charles Sumner, abolitionist and Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts that called for an end to bitter divisions. Kennedy named Lamar “the most gifted statesman given by the South to the nation from the close of the Civil War to the turn of the century” (p. 188).

3
Twelve Southerners,
I’ll Take My Stand
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1930).

4
This was the assessment of Frank Owsley, one of the group’s main figures. See Richard H. King,
A Southern Renaissance: The Cultural Awakening of the American South, 1930–1955
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 58.

5
Virginius Dabney,
Liberalism in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Cardina Press, 1932), pp. 265, 428; Hans L. Trefousse,
Historical Dictionary of Reconstruction
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 126–27. See also Wirth Armisted Cate,
Lucius Q. C. Lamar: Secession and Reunion
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935); James B. Murphy,
L. C. Q. Lamar: Pragmatic Patriot
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1973).

6
Cited in Elizabeth Sanders, “Ballots and Bounty: Suffrage Expansion and Policy Change in the South” (Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, 1978), p. 217. A useful consideration of the role of economic development, in tandem with segregation, in southern politics and policy is Edward L. Ayers,
The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

7
William N. Parker, “The South in the National Economy, 1865–1870,”
Southern Economic Journal
46 (1980): 1045.

8
Ibid., p. 1032. See also George B. Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South, 1913–1945
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), pp. 111–42.

9
Calvin B. Hoover and B. U. Ratchford,
Economic Resources and Policies of the South
(New York: Macmillan, 1951); Clarence Heer,
Income and Wages in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1930); Richard Sterner,
The Negro’s Share: A Study of Income, Consumption, Housing and Public Assistance
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943); B. B. Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South,” in
The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association, 1935–1963,
ed. George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 90–105. This was Professor Kendricks’s presidential address, delivered in Atlanta on November 7, 1941.

10
Maury Maverick, “The South Is Rising,”
Nation,
June 17, 1936, p. 772. “For all his progressivism, the feisty Texan was slow to abandon his traditionally paternalistic views about blacks. . . . Maverick sometimes went to extremes to keep blacks out of party politics—and thus he presented an embarrassing contradiction as a liberal defender of the Texas white primary until it was ruled unconstitutional in 1944.” See John Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 223.

11
Howard W. Odum,
The Way of the South: Toward the Regional Balance of America
(New York: Macmillan, 1947), pp. 229–30.

12
Southern reticence went hand in hand with “the absence of any effective attack on southern racial practices remotely comparable to the earlier abolitionist or Radical Republican offensives.” See George B. Tindall, “The Central Theme Revisited,” in
The Southerner as American,
ed. Charles Grier Sellers Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960), p. 114.

13
There was one Republican, Oscar DePriest, who was first elected from the South Side of Chicago in 1928. He lost his seat to Arthur Mitchell, a black Democrat, in 1934. For a discussion of race and Chicago politics, see Ira Katznelson,
Black Men, White Cities: Race, Politics, and Migration in the United States, 1900–1930, and Britain, 1948–1968
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1973).

14
See J. B. Shannon, “Presidential Politics in the South,”
Journal of Politics
10 (1948): 464–89.

15
William E. Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), p. 56. Alan Brinkley has astutely observed that “Roosevelt was a coalition-builder,” with an inclination “to conciliate, to broaden his base of support, to win the loyalties of existing leaders. In the South, that meant not only remaining solicitous of political elites in the distribution of patronage and the administration of programs. It meant avoiding issues altogether when those issues seemed likely to create regional antagonisms. Hence the New Deal’s reluctance to challenge segregation in the South, its willingness to tolerate racial discrimination in the administration of its own relief programs, its acceptance of racial wage differentials, its refusal to endorse antilynching legislation, its notable lack of enthusiasm for supporting union-organizing in the South.” See Brinkley, “The New Deal and Southern Politics,” in
The New Deal and the South,
ed. James C. Cobb and Michael Namorato (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1984), pp. 101–2.

16
Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day,
p. 115.

17
David Levering Lewis, “The Appeal of the New Deal,”
Reviews in American History
12 (1984): 554. Lewis notes that “FDR’s administration appears to have been significantly preoccupied with discussing how to avoid civil rights discussions” (p. 556).

18
Walter White,
A Man Called White: The Autobiography of Walter White
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), pp. 168–69. Notwithstanding, White “left the meeting in fine fettle, believing victory was within his grasp,” because he had understood Roosevelt to have “promised White that he would consult with Senator Wagner to spur passage and that he would tell Senate Democrats that he wanted the bill passed.” There is no evidence he ever did so. See Kenneth Robert Janken,
White: The Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP
(New York: New Press, 2003), p. 210. It is not as if Roosevelt had much choice in the matter. “If the president assaulted the barriers of Jim Crow,” Leuchtenburg remarks, “neither southern blacks, few of whom could even go to the polls, nor white liberals, who were in a decided minority on racial issues, could have given him the backing he would have needed.” See Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
p. 59.

19
Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
pp. 56–57. See also Raymond Wolters, “The New Deal and the Negro,” in
The New Deal: The National Level,
ed. John Braeman, Robert H. Bremner, and David Brody (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1975).

20
Frank Freidel,
F.D.R. and the South
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 41. “As for the Southern leadership in Congress, “he notes, “Roosevelt presumably gave it almost complete freedom during these months because he did not want to disturb the unified support he could expect from it” (p. 45).

21
Odum,
The Way of the South,
p. 231.

22
On September 8, 1945, Long was shot by an assassin in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; he died four days later.

23
Carter Glass to Walter Lippmann, August 10, 1933; cited in James T. Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 13.

24
Freidel,
F.D.R. and the South,
p. 46; “Rather forlornly voicing their complaints against the New Deal,” the impact of the southern rejectionists “upon legislation was negligible.” See James T. Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1967), p. 31.

25
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
pp. 57, 58.

26
Richard Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R.
(New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 302.

27
Southern intellectuals often were in the vanguard of efforts to legitimate planning as consistent with liberal democracy, and to urge its application especially to their own destitute region. For an example, see the Vanderbilt economist John V. Van Sickle’s
Planning for the South: An Inquiry into the Economics of Regionalism
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1943). This volume contrasts “liberal planning” with “total planning.”

28
See Ira Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

29
Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 (1933); Bureau of the Census, U.S. Department of Commerce, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940 (1943).

30
African-Americans were confronted with a Hobson’s choice. Unregulated hours and wages for farmworkers meant peonage; regulation to raise wages and limit hours often meant the loss of employment and deep poverty.

31
Travis M. Adams, “The Arkansas Congressional Delegation during the New Deal, 1933–1936” (master’s thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1962), pp. 248–49; cited in Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
p. 65.

32
Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform,
p. 307.

33
Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
p. 2.

34
Broadus Mitchell, “Southern Quackery,”
Southern Economic Journal
3 (1936): p. 143. Mitchell called on the South to support a program that combined ending the worst racial practices, such as lynching, with a recognition that “what we have is the general problem of capitalist exploitation” (p. 145). A denial of that central fact, he believed, constituted southern quackery.

35
There had been earlier legislative proposals by President Benjamin Harrison in 1891 and 1892, after a mob had lynched eleven Italians in New Orleans, producing an international hue and cry. His first proposal protected aliens, but his second would have extended the law to African-Americans. See Will Maslow and Joseph B. Robinson, “Civil Rights Legislation and the Fight for Equality, 1862–1952,”
University of Chicago Law Review
20 (1953): 380.

36
Howard W. Odum, “Lynchings, Fears, and Folkways,”
Nation,
December 30, 1931, pp. 719–20.

37
See http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html.

38
Philip Dray,
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
(New York: Random House, 2002), p. 335.

39
New York Times,
October 28, 1934. Walter White,
The Lynching of Claude Neal
(New York: NAACP, 1934). This pamphlet was widely circulated. For an account of the lynching, see also Robert L. Zangrando, “The NAACP and a Federal Anti-Lynching Bill, 1934–1940,”
Journal of Negro History
50 (1965): 110.

40
The attorney general claimed that Washington had no jurisdiction because federal laws against kidnapping presumed a monetary motive. Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South,
p. 551.

41
Eleanor Roosevelt to Walter White, March 19, 1936, ER Correspondence, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY; cited in Dray,
At the Hands of Persons Unknown,
p. 344.

42
Arthur Krock, the
New York Times
columnist, praised the southern argument for its constitutional soundness. See
New York Times,
May 2, 1935. A learned defense of the southern position can be found in William D. Ford, “Constitutionality of Proposed Federal Anti-Lynching Legislation,”
Virginia Law Review
34 (1948): 944–53.

43
The debate is analyzed in George C. Rable, “The South and the Politics of Antilynching Legislation, 1920–1940,”
Journal of Southern History
51 (May 1985): 201–20. When Black was appointed to the Court in 1938, he was succeeded by Lister Hill, “a liberal for poor whites, but a racist to poor blacks.” See Gary Boulard, “The Failure of the Southern Moderates,”
American Quarterly
40 (1988): 416.