Fear Itself (90 page)

44
New York Times,
April 26, 1935. The paper was quoting Josiah Bailey of North Carolina.

45
Rable, “The South and the Politics of Antilynching Legislation,” p. 212.

46
New York Times,
April 28, 1935.

47
Ibid., April 29, 1935.

48
Congressional Record,
74th Cong., 1st sess., May 1, 1935, p. 6687;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
May 2, 1935.

49
Jeffrey A. Jenkins, Justin Peck, and Vesta M. Weaver, “Between Reconstructions: Congressional Action on Civil Rights, 1891–1940,”
Studies in American Political Development 24
(2010):
81.

50
Rable, “The South and the Politics of Antilynching Legislation,” p. 210.

51
Odum,
The Way of the South,
p. 229.

52
Ella Lonn, “Reconciliation between the North and the South,” in
The Pursuit of Southern History: Presidential Addresses of the Southern Historical Association,
ed. George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), pp. 207, 208. See Carol Bleser’s “Tokens of Affection: The First Three Women Presidents of the Southern Historical Association” in
Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and Women Historians
, ed. Michele Gillespie and Catherine Clinton (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998), pp. 145–57.

53
This was an approach “less concerned with racial justice than with the elevation of the region’s people without regard for race.” See “Introduction: The
Report
in Historical Perspective,” in
Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression: The Report on Economic Conditions of the South with Related Documents
, ed. David L. Carlton and Peter A. Coclanis (Boston: Bedford Books, 1996), p. 26.

54
The central work of the regional studies movement was Howard W. Odum,
Southern Regions of the United States
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1936). Odum was an important national scholarly figure who served as president of the American Sociological Association in 1930.

55
“Request for Report,” June 22, 1938, and “The President’s Letter,” July 5, 1938, in The National Emergency Council, prepared for the president,
Report on Economic Conditions of the South,
p. 1; the report is reprinted in Carlton and Coclanis,
Confronting Southern Poverty in the Great Depression,
pp. 41–82; the original document was published in a pamphlet that was widely distributed, with an initial press run of more than 100,000 copies. A useful discussion can be found in Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
pp. 102–12.

56
B. B. Kendrick, “The Colonial Status of the South,” in Tindall,
The Pursuit of Southern History,
p. 90. For a discussion of colonial imagery in the South, and in studies about the region, see Numan Bartley, “Beyond Southern
Politics
: Some Suggestions for Research,” in
Perspectives on the American South
, Vol. 2, ed. Merle Black and John Shelton Reed (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984), pp. 40–41.

57
For a discussion, see Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White,
pp. 25–52.

58
National Emergency Council,
Report on Economic Conditions of the South,
p. 22.

59
Ibid., 28. In 1930, South Carolina spent $5.20 per black pupil but $52.89 for each white student. The comparable figures for Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, respectively, were $5.94 and $31.33; $6.98 and $31.52; $7.16 and $37.50; and $7.84 and $40.64. See W. T. Couch, “The Negro in the South,” in
Culture in the South,
ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), p. 459.

60
Report on Economic Conditions of the South,
pp. 29–32. “Negro men and women who need to go to a hospital may or may not be permitted to go to a white one; they will not find Negro doctors or surgeons there to treat them. In many instances they are not admitted to white hospitals even though the case may be one of certain death if treatment is not promptly given. Hospitals run exclusively or partly by Negroes are scattered through the South, but only Negroes are treated in them and it happens they are not so well equipped that whites ever tend to break over the well imposed self-restraint that keeps them out.” See Couch, “The Negro in the South,” p. 472.

61
Report on Economic Conditions of the South,
pp. 33–36. For more extended treatments of data about the South in this era, see Richard Sterner,
The Negro’s Share: A Study of Income, Consumption, Housing, and Public Assistance
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943); Rupert B. Vance,
All These People: The Nation’s Human Resources in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945); Maurice R. Davie,
Negroes in American Society
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1949). For a longer-term view, see John C. McKinney and Edgar T. Thompson,
The South in Continuity and Change
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1965). A rich source for qualitative reviews of agriculture, industry, and urbanization that are embedded in a much broader survey of the South at the start of the New Deal is Couch,
Culture in the South.

62
Robert H. Zieger,
The CIO, 1935–1955
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), pp. 32–34.

63
Sidney Fine,
Sit-Down: The General Motors Strike of 1936–1937
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).

64
Edward Levinson,
Labor on the March
(1938; reprint, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 169.

65
Richard B. Freeman, “Spurts in Union Growth: Defining Moments and Social Processes,” in
The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the New American Economy in the Twentieth Century
, ed. Michael D. Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene N. White (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 282.

66
Levinson,
Labor on the March,
p. 236; Michael Goldfield,
The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 10.

67
American Federation of Labor,
Next Steps in Social Insurance
(Washington, DC, 1939); Congress of Industrial Organizations,
Security for the People
(Washington, DC, April 1940). Both plans included comprehensive national health programs.

68
Hofstadter,
The Age of Reform,
p. 308.

69
“Defeat in textiles . . . prefaced a dormant period in southern unionism.” See Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South,
p. 512.

70
J. Wayne Flynt, “The New Deal and Southern Labor,” in
The New Deal and the South,
ed. Cobb and Namorato, p. 71. Milton Derber estimated southern union membership in the eleven ex-Confederate states in 1938 to have been approximately half a million. See Milton Derber, “Growth and Expansion,” in
Labor and the New Deal,
ed. Milton Derber and Edwin Young (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957), p. 28.

71
Herbert R. Northrup,
Organized Labor and the Negro
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), pp. 3–8.

72
Harvard Sitkoff,
A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 169. Similarly, Flynt noted how “the organizing drive launched by labor in the 1930s and supported by New Deal legislation fundamentally challenged southern society at four points. First, industrial unionism posed a serious threat to the major unorganized industries which repeatedly had defeated AFL offensives. Secondly, the CIO challenged the racial shibboleths underlying southern society. Thirdly, congressional and intellectual allies of the CIO attacked repeated and historic denials of civil liberties. And finally, labor in the 1930s broadened its political involvements.” See Flynt, “The New Deal and Southern Labor,” p. 72. “Prior to 1935,” Northrup concluded, “unionism was probably more of a hindrance to than a help to Negroes. The most completely organized industries—railroads, building and printing trades—were those in which union policies are discriminatory and/or the proportion of Negroes small. Since 1936, the pendulum has swung the other way, and thousands of Negro workers have benefited from increased wages, improved working conditions, and job security as a result of collective agreements.” See Northrup,
Organized Labor and the Negro,
p. 255.

73
See Robert K. Carr,
Federal Protection of Civil Rights: Quest for a Sword
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1947); Kevin J. McMahon,
Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chapters 3–5.

74
Glenda Gilmore is too generous, however, in her assessment that after FDR’s “reelection in 1936, he tried to pry Democratic political power out of the hands of southern industrialists who thrived on cheap labor, exploited poor whites and African Americans, and held enormous political power.” See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore,
Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919–1950
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), p. 233.

75
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address at the Dedication of the New Chemistry Building, Howard University, Washington, D.C.,” October 26, 1936, in
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt
, vol. 4 (New York: Random House, 1938), p. 537.

76
Frank R. Kent, “The Swing of the Negroes,”
Baltimore Sun,
November 12, 1936; citied in Nancy J. Weiss,
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln: Black Politics in the Age of FDR
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 208. Whereas Weiss stressed how economic change motivated a shift of black support to the Democratic Party, others have also underscored the limited but real symbolic and practical racial changes ushered in by the administration’s actions. For this view, see Sitkoff,
A New Deal for Blacks,
and John B. Kirby,
Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberals and Race
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980).

77
“Most black people knew that they were getting less economic assistance than whites, and most of them needed more than they were getting. But the point was that they got something, and that kept many families from starving.” Weiss,
Farewell to the Party of Lincoln,
p. 211.

78
Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South,
p. 557. See also Shannon, “Presidential Politics in the South,” p. 469.

79
John A. Salmond,
The Civilian Conservation Corps, 1933–1942: A New Deal Case Study
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967), pp. 91–101.

80
Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
p. 62.

81
See http://www.gwu.edu/~erpapers/teachinger/lesson-plans/notes-er-and-civil-rights.cfm.

82
Freidel,
F.D.R. and the South
, p. 80; Lewis, “The Appeal of the New Deal,” p. 558; Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South
, p. 556.

83
In 1940, as it turned out, “the potential negro vote exceeded Roosevelt’s plurality in each of these states except in Ohio which was carried by Dewey but by a margin considerably smaller than the potential negro vote.” Shannon, “Presidential Politics in the South,” p. 470.

84
See the discussions of southern activism in Egerton,
Speak Now Against the Day;
Patricia Sullivan,
Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Gilmore,
Defying Dixie.

85
For a discussion, see Sean Farhang and Ira Katznelson, “The Southern Imposition: Congress and Labor in the New Deal and Fair Deal,”
Studies in American Political Development
19 (2005): 1–30. See also Michael Goldfield,
The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics
(New York: New Press, 1997), pp. 176–261.

86
Cited in Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
p. 128.

87
“We have been moving deeper and deeper into confusion, as the New Deal became less and less new,” the poet and essayist Donald Davidson, who had helped found the Southern Agrarians and later came to lead Tennessee’s version of a White Citizens Council, wrote in 1938. Donald Davidson, “An Agrarian Looks at the New Deal,”
Free America
2 (1938): 4; reprinted in
The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays after “I’ll Take My Stand,”
ed. Emily S. Bingham and Thomas A. Underwood (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), p. 125.

88
Cited in Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day,
p. 117.

89
For a systematic treatment of the era’s party coalitions and electoral dynamics, see Alan Ware,
The Democratic Party Heads North, 1877–1962
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), especially chaps. 6 and 7.

90
Fayette Chronicle,
September 28, 1937; cited in Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South,
p. 127.

91
The occasion was a consideration of antilynching legislation.
Congressional Record,
76th Cong., 3d sess., January 10, 1940, p. 248.

92
Patterson,
Congressional Conservatism and the New Deal,
pp. 98–99, 111–13. After the Court issued a series of pro–New Deal decisions in late March, April, and May 1937, which included upholding the constitutionality of the National Industrial Relations Act and the Social Security Act, Roosevelt’s plan was rejected by a 70–20 July recommittal vote in the Senate.