Fear Itself (94 page)

76
On this vote, the Democrats achieved a Rice likeness score of 85, one significantly different from the low likeness of 41 marking the relationship of nonsouthern Democrats to Republicans, and the even lower score of 22 characterizing how southern Democratic and Republican voting corresponded.

77
The editorial page thought it to be “a pity that Congress has not been able to disentangle these issues.” See “Votes for Soldiers,”
Washington Post,
August 28, 1942.

78
William M. Brewer, “The Poll Tax and Poll Taxers,”
Journal of Negro History
29 (1944): 260–99.

79
With a Rice score of 80.

80
With a Rice score of 55.

81
Indicated by a Rice score of 33.

82
Washington Post,
August 27, 1942.

83
Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 2, 1942.

84
Washington Post,
September 1, 1942.

85
“By 1944, the African American vote in key northern states could decide a close presidential election.” See Simon Topping, “‘Never Argue with the Gallup Poll: Thomas Dewey, Civil Rights, and the Election of 1948,”
Journal of American Studies
38 (2004): 179. A detailing of voting by African-Americans in the 1944 election is provided by Topping in “The Republicans and Civil Rights, 1928–1948” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hull, 2002), pp. 315–38.

86
An excellent discussion of the poll tax can be found in Key,
Southern Politics in State and Nation,
pp. 578–618.

87
McCloy’s July 2, 1942, memorandum to William Hastie, the African-American civilian aide to the secretary of war who had been appointed in response to organized black pressure, and the October 8, 1940, memo written for the president’s approval, then disseminated to the army on October 16, are cited in Ulysses Lee,
The Employment of Negro Troops
(Washington, DC: U.S. Army, 1994), pp. 158–59, 76. This invaluable book appears as the eighth “Special Study” in the army’s Center of Military History series,
United States Army in World War II.

88
Charles P. Howard Sr., “The Observer,”
Atlanta World,
May 9, 1942.

89
Chicago Daily Tribune,
April 17, 1942.

90
Memorandum, FDR to General Fred Osborn, May 14, 1942, Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers, Official File 1113, box 4, Soldier Vote 1940–1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY. Likewise, a Department of War circular issued a week later, on May 21, counseled soldiers wishing to vote to “write to the Secretary of State of their home state requesting information under the laws of each state.” See “Summary of War Department Actions and Policy,” Franklin D. Roosevelt Papers. The memo was attached to a letter written to the President’s Secretary, M. H. McIntyre, by Robert Patterson, under secretary of war.

91
When, with the administration’s concurrence, Ramsay introduced a bill in July to fashion procedures to distribute and record absentee ballots, a few states—Kentucky, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana—lacked any such provision. One reporter wryly observed that in these locations “not only all colored, but all white soldiers are deprived of a vote in national and state elections and primaries.” See Arthur Shears Henning, “Few Southern States Permit Soldier Votes,”
Chicago Daily Tribune,
April 2, 1942.

92
New York Times,
September 2, 1942.

93
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 2d sess., August 25, 1942, p. 6959.

94
Richard N. Chapman,
Contours of Public Policy, 1939–1945
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), p. 266.

95
Newsweek,
February 14, 1944, p. 39. When the Eastland version passed the Senate in December 1943, Smith declared, “I have one platform on which I shall live and die—my loyalty to the Constitution, my loyalty to states’ rights, and my loyalty to white supremacy.” See
Nation,
December 25, 1943, p. 748.

96
For an analysis along these lines about the importance of absent soldier voters, see “Why Soldiers Votes Are Feared,”
New Republic,
December 13, 1943, pp. 837–38.

97
Barry D. Karl,
The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 181.

98
George Gallup, “Soldiers’ Ballots May Name President in ’44,”
Los Angeles Times,
December 5, 1943.

99
Benson and Wicoff, “Voters Pick Their Party,” pp. 167, 170, 172.

100
Newsweek,
December 13, 1943, pp. 44–45.

101
This was an American Institute of Public Opinion estimate. See “Public Opinion Polls,”
Political Science Quarterly
8 (1944): 439.

102
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” January 6, 1941, in
Nothing to Fear,
ed. Zevin, pp. 258–67.

103
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress, January 6, 1942,
The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt,
vol. 11. (New York: Macmillan, 1943), p. 39. Thus well before the Cold War, worries about how racial discrimination at home would harm the pursuit of American foreign policy goals were already present. For the postwar period, see Mary Dudziak,
Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Thomas Borstelmann,
The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

104
Blum,
V Was for Victory,
p. 208. The campaign was launched by the
Pittsburgh Courier.

105
Lee,
The Employment of Negro Troops,
p. 366.

106
For an overview, see Harvard Sitkoff, “Racial Militancy and Interracial Violence in the Second World War,”
Journal of American History
58 (1971): 661–81. Writing for an
American Mercury
symposium, “The Negro Problem Reaches a Crisis,” that reflected on this violence, Archibald Rutledge, the South Carolina poet and author of fiction about nature and the South, argued that “it is nowhere apparent that the Negro as a race has been especially helped by the laws passed presumably in his behalf, including the law giving him the right to vote,” and he reflected sadly how the “sagacity” and “kindness of heart” that “brought some order out of racial chaos . . . by establishing a caste system” in which “the white man has to govern” was being assaulted “by an intrusive, hostile spirit.” See Archibald Rutledge, “What if the South Should be Right?”
American Mercury
59 (1944): 681, 684. “There has been much foggy talk about democracy,” he concluded, “that we have completely forgotten that this country is a republic; and if a democracy, a very limited one” (p. 686).

107
Myrdal,
An American Dilemma.

108
Berlin,
Washington Despatches, 1941–45,
p. 280.

109
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 1st sess., November 22, 1943, p. 9796; November 29, 1943, p. 10064.

110
Ibid., 2d sess., February 1, 1944, p. 1012.

111
Ibid., p. 1007.

112
Ibid., p. 1008.

113
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 2d sess., March 14, 1944, p. 2567.

114
Remarkably, Democrat Malcolm Tarver of Georgia, who had opposed the 1942 act because it had included such elections, complained how “in my State . . . the election occurs in the primary and any bill which fails to make adequate provision for cooperation on the part of the responsible Federal authorities with State election officials in providing a method by which members of our armed services may vote in their State primaries carries to those men and women from my State as well as those from many other sections of the country no substantial aid in having their votes cast and counted in an effective way.” See ibid., p. 1029.

115
In two of many interventions of this kind, Nebraska Republican Carl Thomas Curtis told the House that “there is something involved here . . . beside the right of a State. It is the right of the soldier, the right of a citizen soldier, to cast a complete ballot on precinct officers, county officers, State officers, Members of the House and of the Senate, and the President”; and North Dakota Republican Gerald Nye complained that “the bill carries only a limited voting privilege to the servicemen . . . only a blank ballot without names of candidates upon it, and it confines soldiers to a chance to vote only for President and Members of Congress.” See
Congressional Record
, 78th Cong., 2d sess., February 8, 1944, p. 1404.

116
“Senator James O. Eastland [D. Miss.] who is serving his first term in the senate, received credit for rallying the forces against the Lucas-Green bill. He and 13 others of the 16 senators from the poll tax states, all Democrats, joined 10 other Democrats and 18 Republicans in voting to toss out the Lucas-Green bill.” See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
December 4, 1943.

117
The act restricted, at first quite severely, access overseas to magazines or books “containing political argument or political propaganda of any kind designed or calculated to affect the result of any election for Federal officers,” an amendment designed by Ohio senator Robert Taft to thwart Franklin Roosevelt’s control, as commander in chief, of the flow of information to overseas voters. For discussions, see John Jamieson, “Censorship and the Soldier,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
11 (1947): 367–84; William M. Leary Jr., “Books, Soldiers, and Censorship during the Second World War,”
American Quarterly
20 (1968): 237–45; Betty Houchin Winfield,
FDR and the News Media
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 182–84. Two months after its enactment, this provision was relaxed by Congress after significant public protest and a press campaign generated by librarians.

118
Republican and southern Democratic likeness scored a remarkable 84 on the Rice scale; by contrast, the score for the two parts of the Democratic Party was just 51, and the degree of likeness between Republicans and non-southern Democrats scored 64.

119
Cohesive at a level of 93.

120
With a Rice cohesion score of 96, all but unanimous.

121
Who were quite divided, with a very low cohesion score of just 11.

122
The Republican–southern Democratic coalition exhibited a likeness score of 98, fully fifty points higher than the intraparty Democratic score of 48.

123
“The vote in the house in favor of the bill to give soldiers and sailors valid ballots next November,” the paper editorialized, “was a victory, and a magnificent victory.” It called on the Senate to show “itself equally zealous in defense of the Constitution.” See
Chicago Daily Tribune,
February 5, 1944. Vigorous editorials supporting an active federal role, while denouncing the southern Democrats, by contrast, ran in the paper on May 4, July 18, August 3, September 16, and October 18, 1942. A representative editorial underscored how “the New Deal party is going to the country in next month’s election with the argument that only its adherents can be trusted to make good the promises of liberty ‘everywhere in the world.’ Yet the southern Democrats who are the mainstay of their party fought to the last ditch against the amendment waiving a poll tax qualification which Sen. Brooks succeeded in writing into the soldiers’ vote law. . . . Dead men in India and boys hanged from a Mississippi bridge have had no comfort from the rhetoric, and the rhetoric will have no meaning to men and women anywhere until there is an end to death at the hands of those whose lips speak meaningless words about justice.” See “The Words and the Music,”
Chicago Daily Tribune,
October 18, 1942.

124
“Soldier Voting Deal,”
Pittsburgh Courier,
January 29, 1944.

125
Chicago Daily Tribune,
February 9, 1944.

126
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 2d sess., April 1, 1946, p. 2914. That very week, Ms. Brazilla Carroll Reece, a long-serving Tennessee member of the House of Representatives, later an admiring biographer of President Andrew Johnson, and the most conservative candidate in the race, succeeded Herbert Brownell Jr., later President Eisenhower’s attorney general, to lead the Republican National Committee. See “GOP Names Southerner as National Chairman,”
Pittsburgh Courier,
April 6, 1946. See also B. Carroll Reece,
The Courageous Commoner: A Biography of Andrew Johnson
(Charleston: West Virginia Education Foundation, 1962).

CHAPTER 7
RADICAL MOMENT

1
Five days before the event, Maj. Gen. Dennis Nolan, who chaired the parade committee, announced “that he had never met with such enthusiasm in a similar undertaking, not excepting even inaugural parades.” See
New York Times,
September 8 and; September 10, 1933.