Fear Itself (24 page)

Neither Long nor the opposition on the Right spoke for the greater part of the South. With race at bay, they failed to come close to commanding southern majorities in the House and Senate, which eagerly supported the New Deal’s ambitious legislative agenda and “moved White House proposals through Congress . . . to a remarkable degree.”
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The South’s congressional leaders, whose legislative skills and powers he surely understood, were cultivated and flattered by FDR. Offered both patronage and recognition, they enjoyed the prerogatives that came with being in the majority. In all, pressure by the southern rank and file in Congress made the first years of the New Deal more forceful and less circumscribed than they otherwise might have been.

With racial southern autonomy not in question, the region’s representatives were free to pursue their other substantive preferences to great effect. During the early New Deal, they collaborated closely with the White House to achieve their own long-standing desire to regulate and control the market economy. Applying ideas about planning and corporatism, they shaped and endorsed remedies to heal a sick economy that promoted an unprecedented degree of national state intervention. At least as enthusiastically as other Democrats, often more passionately, congressional southerners constrained how business and the stock exchanges could operate. They also joined other Democrats to find a place for labor unions, support massive jobs programs, get behind large-scale public infrastructure projects, restructure American agriculture, open conduits for global trade, and develop a modern welfare state. The milestone laws they helped craft and adopt included the National Industrial Relations Act of 1933, which promoted an economic recovery by moving well beyond laissez-fare; the Banking Act of 1933, which rescued the financial system; the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which regulated Wall Street and other stock exchanges; the Reciprocal Trade Act of 1934, which began to help fashion a more open global economy; the National Industrial Relations Act of 1935, which gave unions a fighting chance to organize; the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, “an astonishing piece of reform legislation” that President Roosevelt called “his greatest legislative victory,”
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which sharply constrained the gas and electric industries; the Revenue Act of 1935, which raised the surtax rate on incomes over $50,000 from 59 to 75 percent; and the Social Security Act of 1935, which not only provided for old-age pensions but created a larger framework to ensure against unemployment and provide assistance to impoverished mothers with children.

Richard Hofstadter’s judgment during the first Eisenhower administration about the far-reaching quality of these legislative accomplishments still rings true. “In the years 1933–8 the New Deal sponsored a series of legislative changes that made the enactments of the Progressive era seem timid by comparison.”
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With the brief exception of World War I, such policies had previously stood outside the scope of imagined possibilities. In embracing features of planning that had been identified mainly with the radical program of the Bolsheviks, in supporting features of corporatism that principally had been associated with Fascist Italy, and in backing the delegation of great power to administrative agencies that regulated the private economy in a manner that had a family resemblance to the active economic project of Nazi Germany, the South helped show that each of these policies could be turned in a democratic, not totalitarian, direction.
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In so doing, the South helped the United States respond to the gibes of the dictatorships that liberal democracies could not restore an effective capitalism or manage class conflict.

Concurrently, southern members of the House and Senate did more than defend the racial status quo by blocking all efforts to advance black rights. As economic legislation advanced, they fortified Jim Crow by making certain that southern employers could continue to draw without hindrance on the still-enormous supply of inexpensive and vulnerable black labor. They did so by ensuring that key New Deal bills on subjects sensitive for the South, such as labor relations, would be adapted to meet the test of not disturbing the region’s racial structure. The main techniques by which this goal was accomplished were a decentralization of responsibility that placed administrative discretion in the hands of state and local officials whenever possible, a recognition in law of regional differentials in wage levels, and the exclusion of maids and farmworkers—fully two-thirds of southern black employees—from key New Deal programs.
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Southern legislators understood that their region’s agrarian interests and racial arrangements were inextricably entwined. Farm labor dominated the economy of the South as in no other region of the country. Of all people engaged in agricultural labor nationwide, 53 percent worked in the South in 1930, and 50 percent in 1940. Of the massive southern agricultural labor force, 40 percent of those classified by the census as “laborers” were black in 1940, and 55 percent of the region’s sharecroppers.
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Only a small proportion of black farmers, about one in ten, owned their own land. Others were sharecroppers, the vast majority, or tenants. By excluding these persons from New Deal legislation, it remained possible to maintain racial inequality in southern labor markets by dictating the terms and conditions for African-American labor.
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What southern members might have done if these provisions had not been adopted is impossible to know. But with these adjustments, southern whites rallied to the New Deal in Congress and beyond. As one commentator put the point in referring to Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas, “So long as they [New Dealers] fought the money power and the big industries—so long as they were pro-farmer and did not stir up the niggers—he was with them.”
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The uncommonly wide repertoire of ideas and techniques that were considered and adopted during this era’s “chaos of experimentation”
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simply would have been impossible without the willing audacity of the segregated South. None of the early New Deal could have happened had the South not been convinced that the Democratic Party would continue to protect its racial order. Once the provisions advanced by the South were made integral parts of New Deal legislation, southern representatives were free to treat their congressional votes primarily as choices about party faithfulness and ideological conviction. Facing no threat in Washington to Jim Crow, southern party loyalty was high, with virtually no gap between the voting behavior of the party’s members who hailed from different parts of the country. As Figure 1 indicates, between 1933 and 1936, fully 96 percent of roll calls fell into the partisan and cross-partisan quadrants in the House of Representatives, and 95 percent in the Senate. In this period, sectional votes were concerned with civil rights in circumstances where it was widely understood that such initiatives stood no chance of passage through the gauntlet of the Senate, and the tiny number of defection votes primarily were related to efforts to protect the region’s distinctive labor market. Otherwise, southern Democrats stood shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow Democrats in a remarkable display of party solidarity.

These decisions to back the New Deal and President Roosevelt were ratified at the polls. FDR, “who frequently thought of himself as a Georgian,”
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had developed credibility in the region as a southerner who had led a great political project in a manner that was consistent with its central preferences. In October 1936, Broadus Mitchell, the Johns Hopkins economist who later ran as the Socialist candidate for governor of Maryland, reflected on this happy experience. “Since Franklin Roosevelt came into office,” he wrote, “the South has been a chief beneficiary of national projects and expenditure. . . . But with all of this cordial, even avid, acceptance of outside money and enterprise,” he hastened to add, “we have continued to insist that our Southern problems are peculiar, that they must not be proved by strangers, that all critical inquiries and negotiations must have the certificate of Southern personnel.” This the New Deal had done.
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Running against Kansas governor Alf Landon in 1936, FDR won a landslide 61 percent of the national popular vote, an achievement that was inflated by his average southern state vote of 75 percent. Even more remarkable was the degree of support he secured across the Deep South. Roosevelt’s reelection was endorsed by 87 percent of voters in Alabama, Georgia, and Texas, 89 percent in Louisiana, and an astonishing 97 percent in Mississippi and 99 percent in South Carolina, where some counties reported not one Republican vote. The lopsidedness of the numbers seemed like something Stalin might have fabricated in the Soviet Union, yet this indeed was an election carried out on American soil. By contrast, when Woodrow Wilson ran successfully for a second term in 1916, he averaged 61 percent in the South, and lost by thin margins to Charles Evans Hughes in Delaware and West Virginia.

FIGURE 1
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Southern Votes in Congress, 1933–1936

This level of approval was an expression of gratitude for more than the New Deal’s economic policies. As the campaign unfolded, the high degree of racial autonomy that southerners had long demanded remained intact, notwithstanding a renewed attention to lynching, its least defensible feature. Later, this issue would serve as a wedge that, hand in hand with other unsettling debates, would begin to divide the Democratic Party along sectional lines. But not yet. With winks and nods, those in both wings of the party understood the gestures and moves the other was required to make, all the while knowing that there was no prospect that antilynching legislation could actually be enacted into law.

When the last congressional attempt to curb vigilante killings had failed in 1922, the South claimed it could handle such extrajudicial murder without federal intervention.
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In the next dozen years, though, 277 instances of lynching were recorded. Of the southern states, only Alabama strengthened its own antilynching laws. Writing in 1931 to explain to nonsouthern Americans why “southern violence and emotional debauch” had not produced a successful countermovement within the region, even though “our conscience is the conscience of a religious people,” Howard Odum explained that “the great body of people who are horrified by lynching . . . are afraid to protest. We are afraid to legislate. We are afraid to enforce law and liberty. . . . Rationalizing amid the fear of fears, we are afraid to do anything. There are practically no exceptions. Teacher, preacher, doctor, lawyer, business man, farmer, laborer, artist and craftsman, writer of poems, dreamer of dreams—we are all afraid. Among the Negroes,” he added, “fear . . . becomes stark terror. The Negroes are afraid to do anything. Why shouldn’t they be afraid?”
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The year 1933 was particularly appalling. The South recorded twenty-six lynchings, the second-highest annual total in a decade.
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By year’s end, “lynching dominated the headlines as at no other time in American history,”
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its prevalence a reflection of how dark economic fears can be expressed through racial malignancy. At the start of 1934, Senators Wagner and Costigan introduced legislation that made it a federal crime for state officials to neglect or collude with lynching. State governments were to be given thirty days to respond; if they did not, the Department of Justice would step in. Any state official allowing a prisoner to be taken by a mob would face five years imprisonment and a five-thousand-dollar fine; any state officer colluding with lynchers could be punished by a sentence of up to twenty-five years; and any county in which the lynching occurred would face a fine of up to ten thousand dollars, with the funds paid to the victim’s family as restitution.

The bill went nowhere, despite the continued resurgence of lynching and the particularly ghastly October 1934 murder of Claude Neal, who had been accused of rape and murder. With a crowd of some four thousand, including many children, bearing witness, Neal was stabbed, burned, and castrated. He was forced to eat his own genitals before being dragged by an automobile to his death; then his body, mutilated and nude, was suspended from a tree in the courthouse square of Marianna, Florida. Photographs were sold for fifty cents. Neal’s toes and fingers were put on display.
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With the Justice Department refusing to intervene during the next half year, despite the fact that Neal had been seized from a jail in Alabama and thus had been transported across state lines,
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Wagner and Costigan moved to have the Senate take up the bill in April 1935. The president remained silent. In March, Eleanor Roosevelt explained to Walter White, “The President feels that that lynching is a question of education in the states, rallying good citizens, and creating public opinion so that the localities themselves will wipe it out. However, if it were done by a Northerner, it will have an antagonistic effect.”
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Southern senators successfully killed the proposed law by preventing the legislation from coming to a vote. They did not, in the main, defend vigilante justice. Rather, they argued that Congress lacked authority to pass such a law; in assaulting states’ rights, it violated the Constitution.
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They also again claimed that their region could control lynching on its own, citing efforts where governors had intervened to stop such violence, and insisted that southern race relations, marked by bonds of affection, were superior to those of the North. James Byrnes contrasted southern paternalism to New York’s gang murders. Hugo Black, another future Supreme Court justice, feared a return to Reconstruction conditions.
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