Penguin History of the United States of America (116 page)

Yet this gloomy appearance was necessarily false. Historical change could not spare even the South. Rescue was at hand; the agents of it, war and capitalism.

The First World War served the South in many ways. First, by stimulating a huge demand for unskilled labour and by at the same time cutting off immigration from Europe, it gave the blacks an alternative to cotton-picking. The factories of the North were clamouring for workers; the South supplied them. The ‘Great Migration’ began: in their thousands the blacks slipped away from the fields to board the trains for Chicago and Detroit. They were seizing the chance to cut the cord which tied them to poverty and the South. Never mind that they would suffer appallingly at the hands of the Northerners; in the end this internal migration would be seen to be the best thing that had happened to their race since the slaves walked away from the plantations. Meanwhile, war necessities poured a flood of wealth and economic stimulus into the South. Her coasts were fringed with shipyards, each building frantically. Soldiers needed cheap, convenient smokes: suddenly the cigarette was big business, and the tobacco farmers were saved. Cotton, needed for explosives, boomed: ‘King Cotton is now restored to his throne,’ an admirer rejoiced, ‘and from fields nodding drowsily in white through the summer he draws royal revenues.’ Oil was so much in demand that the problem of overproduction was solved, for the time being at any rate. Vast new coalfields were opened in Kentucky. Army camps sprang up all over the South, bringing with them a huge stimulus to stores and soda-fountains (smoking was not the soldier’s only relaxation). The Southern textile industry boomed, and began the rapid advance that was to overtake New England in the post-war period. Ordinary wage-earners – even if they were black – found themselves prosperous as never in their lives before. The South was suddenly alive again; hope was real at last.

It might all have been a bubble, but although there was indeed a recession immediately after the war, and although the perennial problems of Southern agriculture got worse and worse during the twenties, the march, once begun, was not halted, even by the 1929 Crash. During the twenties Northern capital, energetically seeking new investment fields, began to enter the South in unheard-of quantities. Wartime success had opened investors’ eyes to the possibilities: they were eager to realize them, and most Southern state governments, mint-new from their Progressive reshaping, were eager to help, especially by advertising the low cost of Southern labour, kept that way by rigid opposition to labour unions and (though they did not say so) by the fomentation of racial rivalry. In the South-West there was an oil boom, characterized by wide-open frontier towns like those of yore, in
which the Wild West had its last fling; Coca-Cola, which was manufactured in Atlanta, began its spectacular rise as the world’s most popular teenage drink; new commodities such as aluminium and rayon came on swiftly; there was a rising demand for lumber; and the Florida building boom. The result soon showed in the statistics: while the number of wage-earners in manufacturing sank nationally by 9 per cent between 1919 and 1927, it went up in the South by the same amount, and the South’s urban population grew more rapidly than that of any other section, though it was still only 32.1 per cent of the area’s total in 1930. Southern boosters acclaimed the new vigour and hopefulness of Dixie. It was all very reminiscent of the West a hundred years previously.

All was not gracious in the garden: the boll weevil completed its devastation of the cotton areas in the early twenties, while the mosaic disease threatened the Louisiana sugar industry, and sharecropping continued to spread. But in retrospect the signs of hope seem more important. Certainly they were more important for the Southern blacks, for the ancient agricultural South would never offer them anything other than more of the same tyranny. That was the most compelling reason for the Great Migration; but however many blacks left the South, the number remaining would still be huge, and growing: 8,912,000 in 1920, 9,905,000 in 1940, 11,312,000 in 1960. Even though the Southern black population was slowly dwindling as a proportion of the US black total, African-Americans would never be free and equal until their position in the South had changed fundamentally.

During the twenties the signs suggesting that such a change was on the way multiplied. Such ancient curses as hookworm, malaria, yellow fever and pellagra were eliminated. The last-named, a deficiency disease caused by the country people’s too-restricted diet of meal, molasses and salt meat, was not diagnosed until 1906 and not generally recognized as a deficiency disease for another twenty years. Yet it was one of the chief causes of Southern lethargy, of that notorious inability of the poor whites and blacks to work either hard or speedily. Its disappearance was a major blessing, if only for what it implied about improved diets and therefore improved incomes.

Inevitably, the South was badly hit by the Depression. The boosters (who in the twenties had brought about substantial investment in new roads, among other things) were stopped in their tracks. Southern farmers probably suffered worse than any others from the general economic collapse. Forced sales of farm lands were on a gigantic scale (on a single day in April 1932, a quarter of the land of the state of Mississippi was auctioned), banks and railroads collapsed, so did the prices of the great Southern staples, cotton, tobacco and sugar; state governments tottered on the brink of bankruptcy. At some point between 1930 and 1935 tenant farming and sharecropping, those twin certain indicators of economic malaise in the South, became more common than ever before or since. Yet the region almost certainly gained more from the New Deal than any other. This was partly because
of the Congressional ascendancy of the South in the newly dominant Democratic party: important partners of FDR like Senator Robinson of Arkansas, the majority leader, or Representative Bankhead of Alabama, Speaker of the House between 1936 and 1940, not to mention Cordell Hull of Tennessee or James Byrnes of South Carolina, were excellently placed to further the interests of their section; and a stream of legislation poured continuously out of Washington to aid the South, the most spectacular item of which, the TVA, rescued from poverty and oblivion the hinterland of five Southern states (Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and North Carolina). Still more important, perhaps, was the fact that the nature of the Depression entailed certain remedies, and both the emergency and its cure were marvellously appropriate stimuli to the Southern economy. The collapse of the world market, for example, at last brought about the dethronement of King Cotton. What a century of agrarian reformers had urged in vain was now compelled by disaster. White and black farmers learned alike, the hard way, that their apathetic reliance on cotton could now only ruin them; and while many abandoned agriculture altogether, many diversified into other crops, particularly livestock, which they found to their surprise were much more profitable; while those who stuck to cotton were bailed out by the federal government on condition that they henceforth regulated production with reference to the national, not the international, market. Subsidy, in short, implied federal planning and control; reluctantly the sturdy individualists of Southern agriculture accepted the lesson (the tobacco farmers made a bolt for freedom in the later thirties, but it ended so rapidly in disaster that they returned to the fold with equal speed) and Southern farming began at last to catch up with farming elsewhere in America. Meanwhile the NRA made itself felt in Southern industry, raising wages in cotton manufacturing (and ending the scandal of child labour in the mills), regulating oil production and making possible the unionization, at long last, of the coalmines. The RFC encouraged the development of a paper industry in the region, exploiting the abundant softwoods of the piny barrens. Chemicals rapidly made their way to a leading position in the Southern economy, partly as a side-effect of the rise of the oil industry. The South recovered more rapidly than any other part of the nation from the Depression; by the Second World War it was poised for a spectacular burst of growth. The emergence of new industrial, financial and commercial classes implied that the entire basis of Southern politics would soon be altered.

Meanwhile, for the Southern blacks, transformation had already begun. Their standard of living and their incomes had been so low that relief payments under FERA and WPA meant that they were actually better off – much better off. The point did not go unnoticed. ‘Ever since federal relief came in you can’t hire a nigger to do anything for you. High wages is ruinin’ ‘em,’ said a North Carolina landlord. ‘I wouldn’t plough nobody’s mule from sunrise to sunset for 50 cents per day when I could get $1.30
for pretending to work on a
DITCH
,’ said a white Georgian farmer. Intense pressure was brought to undo this shocking state of affairs, leading at one moment (in 1937) to the revival of’something like the slave patrol’
¹
which drove blacks to work in the cotton fields. Federal policy accepted the idea that relief payments ought to be lower per capita in the South than elsewhere, just as wages were; but neither this nor any other concession to conservatives could make much difference. The poor of the South, black and white, discovered that higher wages for less work were now available to them, thanks to Uncle Sam; and they were soon ready to think that these good things ought to be available to them on principle. The relief programme reinforced the sturdy patriotism of the Southern poor white. A North Carolina tenant farmer said that whenever he heard the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ he got a lump in his throat: ‘There ain’t no other nation in the world that would have sense enough to think of WPA and all the other As.’ The Southern poor black began to look about him, as his Northern kin had already learned to do.

The experience of segregated service in the profoundly racist army of the First World War, of lynching on the home front and of riots in the war’s aftermath gave Northern blacks a deep awareness of their oppressed status and an equally deep determination to improve it. Sometimes this determination had bizarre results. One such was the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey (1887–1940). Garvey was a Jamaican who found his way to the United States in 1916 and in the post-war years gained a huge following by his insistence on the greatness and glory of being black (an attitude that was to return in greatly increased strength in the 1960s, when it was expressed in the slogan ‘Black is Beautiful!’). He denounced white Americans as hopelessly corrupt and racist, and urged a return to Africa; meanwhile he urged his followers to build up autonomous black social, economic and military institutions, of which the most celebrated was the Black Star Steamship Line. Unfortunately it caused his downfall: it was commercially unsound, and in 1925 Garvey was sent to prison for using the mails to defraud – he had raised money for his Black Star by post. When he was let out two years later Coolidge deported him as an undesirable alien. Garveyism rapidly faded, to the relief of many black leaders, who found its competition all too effective; but it had enunciated many themes that were to re-emerge forty years later. By an irony of history W. E. B. Du Bois, Garvey’s chief opponent, was eventually to adopt one of Garvey’s principles: when Ghana became the first of Britain’s African colonies to regain its independence Du Bois renounced his American citizenship and went to end his days there.

On the whole there was more promise in the activities of the more sedate black organizations, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which had been founded in 1909, by Du
Bois and others, in the wake of a dreadful race riot at Springfield, Illinois, in the previous year. The NAACP, which was the most important and effective of black pressure groups, was a partnership of blacks and whites, like the old abolitionist movement of which it was self-consciously the heir; and it concentrated on securing African-American advancement through the courts. It made some few gains between the wars, notably by securing the destruction of the ‘grandfather clause’, which was outlawed by the US Supreme Court in the case of
Lane
v.
Wilson
(1939) and by scoring a first defeat of the white primary in
Nixon
v.
Herndon
(1927); but these victories were more than offset by the loss of
Grovey
v.
Townsend
(1935), in which the Court unanimously acknowledged the legality of a revised, but equally effective, form of the white primary. This was a heavy blow to the NAACP which had invested a great deal of time and money in the case; furthermore, the Association had difficulty in answering the charge, made in 1940 by Ralph Bunche (a black intellectual, later a leading diplomatist), that it was of very little use to the bulk of poor blacks, who had more pressing concerns than their inability to vote: ‘The escape that the Negro mass seeks is one from economic deprivation, from destitution and imminent starvation. To these people, appealing for livelihood, the NAACP answers: give them educational facilities, let them sit next to whites in street-cars, restaurants, and theaters. They cry for bread and are offered political cake.’

Yet there were some signs that important changes were at hand. In 1925 A. Philip Randolph (1889–1978) organized the first successful black labour union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids, that after years of struggle succeeded in winning both recognition and wage increases from the Pullman Company. The Republican allegiance of black voters (where there were any – that is, in the North) began to crack in the 1928 election, when Herbert Hoover, very injudiciously, courted the racist vote in the South. In the same year Oscar De Priest of Illinois became the first black man since Reconstruction to be elected to Congress.

All the same, the twenties were a miserable period for blacks north as well as south of the Mason-Dixon line, and the coming of the Depression made matters worse. The accelerated impoverishment of the mass of black workers meant that the black lower middle class of small businessmen – shopkeepers, undertakers and the like – who sold them services could no longer find customers, and they too began to succumb to economic disaster. And at first it did not seem that the New Deal could be of much assistance. Roosevelt could not place black rights high on his agenda, if anywhere at all. The NAACP pressed him, as it had pressed so many Presidents before, to support an anti-lynching bill. He told its head, Walter White, ‘I did not choose the tools with which I work… Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress, are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the… committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can’t take that risk.’ But though they accepted this reasoning, black
leaders did not let it discourage them. They took comfort from the fact that FDR had a ‘black cabinet’, an unofficial body of African-Americans whose advice he sought on matters to do with their race, from the knowledge that Eleanor Roosevelt was on their side, and from the President’s words to Mary McLeod Bethune, a member of the black cabinet: ‘People like you and me are fighting… for the day when a man will be regarded as a man regardless of his race. That day will come, but we must pass through perilous times before we realize it.’ They discounted the fact that the TVA accepted Jim Crow restrictions, and that the Federal Housing Authority positively encouraged residential segregation.
²
To them the all-important thing was that the President’s policies had saved them from despair and starvation, and they went over to the Democratic party
en bloc
: for instance, in 1934 a black Democrat, Arthur W. Mitchell, replaced the black Republican, De Priest, as Congressman from the first district of Illinois. At the same time, Republicans did not let the growing black vote go without a struggle, which partly explains the rapidly increasing number of blacks in the state legislatures during the thirties. Black judges began to appear here and there in the North. The Roosevelt administration appointed large numbers of African-Americans to executive posts (though not to any very important ones), while its expenditures went not only on relief for individuals but on building hospitals and college buildings for blacks as well. The emergence of the CIO at last opened a way into unionism for large numbers of black industrial workers, who had previously been blocked by the AFL, more because craft unions disliked unskilled workers than because their members disliked blacks. In 1937 the Supreme Court declared that it was legal to picket firms which refused to employ African-Americans.