Fear Itself (29 page)

The ways race and labor had conjoined, these representatives understood, did, in fact, threaten to undermine segregation’s establishment. The legislation, Maybank insisted, “is a pure and simple segregation bill . . . to do away with segregation.” In terms ranging from moderate to intemperate, they joined as a solid South to denounce such interference by defending their customs and the region’s time-honored autonomy. Johnston explained how “long ago the people of the South settled the race question in the only sensible way in which it could be settled, namely, by segregation,” and how “segregation is not discrimination but, instead, it operates for the benefit of both the black and white races.” With this happy record, Maybank cautioned, “the South will not accept any measure which has the undoubted intent of destroying segregation and at the same time permit social equality between the races. We believe that the colored people have their colleges, their elementary schools, and their churches. If they desire communities, they may have them also. Let them remain in them. Let the rest of us leave them alone.”
¹³⁸

With the profound transformations of the war years, “leaving alone” was no longer an option. Tensions between the South’s commitments to an assertive New Deal and to white supremacy progressively sharpened. The fact that the South was able to prevent a vote on the bill by mustering thirty-six votes to sustain cloture (with forty-eight voting to close debate) was not sufficiently reassuring.
¹³⁹
In this unsettled and heated context, even milder and more indirect challenges than the FEPC proposal came to be viewed as acts of war, and every potential law, including the vast bulk of legislative proposals not overtly concerned with race, was assessed for how it might affect the region’s autonomy. It was as if war clouds were looming once again, this time in the South, where an entire way of life seemed threatened.

Southern congressional evaluations of this situation profoundly shaped the content of the era’s achievements as the old formula in which a southern presence within the Democratic Party “would have a check upon extreme violations of its interests” by having the “southern bloc exercise its influence upon the northern wing of its group” no longer was sufficient. As a result, southern power during the 1940s became more pronounced and assertive, so much so that Hofstadter ended his assessment this way, following the successful filibuster of February and March 1949:

It became clear that the southerners still possessed, and were determined to exercise, the balance of power, which they were free to do at any time by bolting and voting with conservative Republicans; and that no legislation could be passed, on either economic affairs or race relations, which they would not accept. . . . The Democratic party thus finds itself in the anomalous position of being a party of “liberalism,” whose achievements are subject to veto by a reactionary faction.
¹⁴⁰

Emerging as the median voter in Congress, the southern bloc became an increasingly independent third force between nonsouthern Democrats and Republicans. Still mostly left of center in ideology, its members preferred to vote with their party when they considered the racial order not to be at stake, and so they still did most of the time. Their fearful apprehension, however, often shading into apocalyptic judgments should the white South lose ground, produced a willingness to join with Republicans or go their own way when they believed that a given substantive issue would jeopardize Jim Crow. Such defections grew increasingly frequent, and the South became the self-conscious arbiter of what could, and what could not, become law.

FIGURE 3
.
Southern Votes in Congress, 1943–1952

Before the Civil War, when the strategy of emplacing a southern presence in each major party seemed insufficient to protect the region’s vital interest in the slave system, John C. Calhoun, fearing that the South might be defeated by sectional interests, formulated the constitutional idea of a concurrent majority that would give a state, or combinations of states, the ability to veto federal legislation that violated its core interests. In the 1940s, as the South lost confidence that it could stand “firm under a combination of the master-race theory and the one-party state” because race relations and the doctrine of white supremacy had become unsteady and vulnerable, it turned to a reprise of Calhoun’s strategy—not, to be sure, as a matter of constitutional federalism, but as a design for southern solidarity and veto rights in Congress, based on shifting alliances depending on the substantive content of a given piece of legislation.
¹⁴¹

During the FEPC debate, Senator Byrd, whose political machine dominated Virginia politics, underscored how “the South is the backbone of the Democratic Party. No one can deny that. Without the support of the South the Democratic Party could not survive as a national party,” and he added that he was “unable to see why our Democratic colleagues from the West and from the North persist time and time again in proposing measures which are without justice and without reason but which are irritating to the South.” Overton of Louisiana wondered “how long will the National Democratic Party continue to bite the hand that feeds it?” There would be consequences, a good many argued. O’Daniel beckoned Republicans to join southern Democrats in a new coalition to restrict the use of federal power. “Then we will let the northern Democrats who believe in this philosophy of government, and who can not be elected without getting the Negro votes, go over to the other side and occupy the empty chairs there.” Bilbo joined in. Pointing to the division between Republican and Democratic desks on the Senate floor, he warned that “if the northern Democrats keep on monkeying with us southern Democrats we are going to draw the line of separation over on this side.”
¹⁴²

And so, selectively, they did. In adopting an increasingly independent role, the South, we will discover, did more than make a last stand against fundamental racial change. With the rest of the country divided between liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, a united Democratic South could defend its interests by determining legislative outcomes. Its strategic voting behavior, and its search for various winning coalitions for different types of public policy, strongly affected the nation’s much wider repertoire of policies. What once had seemed like a domestic policy horizon of far-reaching openness, which included planning and corporatist-interest representation backed by the growing strength of organized labor, gave way to a more restricted vision and less assertive policy instruments, tools that ultimately shaped the procedural face of America’s national state. Concurrently, it was also the South’s representatives in Washington, we will see, who organized the means for the country’s crusading enterprise of might and national security, the state’s second face.

As this history unfolded, the calculated substantive orientation adopted by southern Democrats also had a strong impact on the calculations of the two other voting blocs in Congress. We have already seen how in the second phase of the New Deal, starting in the later 1930s, a new repertoire of considered moves, one that was less simple and less predictable than a stark partisan division, selectively began to appear. It occurred when some southern Democrats, on several matters of particular concern, joined with Republicans to endorse positions at odds with the New Deal. Then, during the war, a different pattern emerged, one that carried into the postwar period. Republicans were confronted with a new, if charged, opportunity to forge voting alliances with the majority of members on the other side of the aisle who were increasingly ready, as a united group, to defect from established Democratic Party positions. Nonsouthern Democrats, in turn, who badly needed southern votes to achieve their aims, had to gauge ever more precisely the outer limits of southern tolerance. Where possible, they tried to adjust the contours of legislation to suit those preferences.

We can see these judgments and processes of this third phase of the New Deal as they emerged during the debates about soldier voting that convulsed Congress in 1942 and again in 1944, the subject to which we now turn.

6
Ballots for Soldiers

R
ECOVERING FROM
what he described as the flu, perhaps still exhausted from grueling travel that had taken him to Cairo in late November to meet with Winston Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek, then to Teheran for a summit with Churchill and Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his January 11, 1944, State of the Union message as a fireside chat.
¹
The Teheran Conference, called to plan the invasion of France, consider the future of Germany, and begin to fashion the postwar division of Eastern and central Europe, had concluded on December 1 with a Declaration of the Three Powers affirming “plans for the destruction of the German forces.” With the Red Army advancing into Poland, having crossed the border on January 6, with a second European front yet to be established, and with costly island-to-island battles under way in the Pacific, the president sought to galvanize support for his wartime policies.

In contrast to his March 1933 “Fear Itself” speech, which called on Americans to discover a moral equivalent to war, FDR was now urgently exhorting the country not to tire of the burdens of the raging global war. He urged a quickening of war production, promoted a plan for compulsory national labor service, and summoned Americans to “subordinate individual or group selfishness for the national good.” Facing labor unrest and growing impatience with the rationing of sugar, coffee, and tires, rising prices, pervasive shortages, overcrowded housing, and long work hours, he appealed for national unity by attacking advantages being taken by “pests who swarm through the lobbies of the Congress and the cocktail bars of Washington . . . to make profits for themselves at the expense of their neighbors,” and, most notably, by pledging a postwar “Second Bill of Rights” to guarantee work and economic security, supply health care, provide decent housing, and enhance public education. He also asked Congress to enact “legislation which would preserve for our soldiers and sailors and marines the fundamental prerogative of citizenship—in other words, the right to vote,” observing how “surely the signers of the Constitution did not intend a document which, even in wartime, would be construed to take away the franchise of any of those who are fighting to preserve the Constitution itself.”
²

By attending to the history and fate of soldier voting during World War II, we can learn much about how the South was decisively shaping public affairs and policy choices at a time when fundamental postwar domestic and international plans were being conceived. Though it was quite impossible for any member of Congress to oppose, in principle, the idea that citizens who were risking their lives in battle should have the chance to cast a ballot, southern representatives were keenly concerned that an effective federal role of the kind the president was proposing threatened to undermine the restrictions on voting that their states had crafted over many decades. As a result of their legislative craftsmanship, the soldier-voting bills that were adopted satisfied southern preferences.

In proposing a strong federal role, Roosevelt must have recalled how, at the end of June 1918, when he was serving as assistant secretary of the navy, the Department of War had issued a statement observing that almost none of the states provided “a practicable method of taking soldiers’ votes under prevailing conditions in Europe,” and thus had failed to live up to Secretary Newton Baker’s announced criteria for voting by the one million men serving overseas in the American Expeditionary Force, requiring that plans for voting not impede military efficiency.
³
The president’s impetus to promote an effective soldier-voting bill surely also took into consideration the feeble results that had been produced by the unwieldy Servicemen’s Voting Act of 1942. That year, final passage did not occur until September 16, only a month and a half before Election Day. That complex statute had ordered each secretary of state to send ballots to soldiers qualified by state law who had declared a wish to vote by returning a postcard provided by the military. Marked ballots were mailed to the secretary’s office in each state capitol, accompanied by an oath of eligibility sworn in front of a commissioned officer. Once received, these ballots were transmitted to election officials in the appropriate constituency. “Time was short; shipping was a problem,”
Newsweek
recalled as Congress began to consider what to do in 1944. “And in the South, Democratic primaries tantamount to election had long since been decided.”
⁴
In all, 78,589 applications were received;
⁵
in a total electorate of 29,448,320, a mere 28,051 war ballots had been cast and counted.
⁶

The issue was more pressing in 1944. Not since the Civil War had such a large proportion of young American men been exposed to the probability of death or injury. The country had entered a raging global war in December 1941 with an army of just under 1.7 million, and a navy, marine corps, and coast guard with a combined force of 486,000. Two years later, as Congress geared up to decide how soldiers might vote, the army had grown to some 7,582,000, and the navy, marine corps, and coast guard to 2,958,000.
⁷
On Christmas Eve of 1943, reporting on Cairo and Teheran and announcing the appointment of Gen. Dwight Eisenhower as the commander who would lead “a gigantic attack on Germany,” Roosevelt had broadcast the warning that “the war is now reaching the stage when we shall all have to look forward to large casualty lists.”
⁸
By the time he was reelected to a fourth term, nearly 140,000 Americans had been killed, and more than 70,000 others, missing in action, were presumed to have died.
⁹

Without a federal soldier-voting framework, President Roosevelt argued in his January State of the Union message, “the men and women in our armed forces” would experience “unjustifiable discrimination” because “the overwhelming majority of them will be deprived of the opportunity to vote if the voting machinery is left exclusively to the States under existing State laws.”
¹⁰
Reporting how the army and navy indicated “that it will be impossible effectively to administer forty-eight different soldier-voting laws” (but implicitly noting that the administration of the franchise was ordinarily a prerogative of the states
¹¹
), he argued it was essential to preserve this fundamental right of citizenship for those fighting in the service of the nation.
¹²

Within weeks, Roosevelt failed to deliver on this goal. Considering it impossible to veto, lest the only system in place be the ineffective arrangements that had been used so feebly in 1942, he let what he himself admitted was a “wholly inadequate” and “defective” bill pass into law at the end of March without his presidential signature.
¹³
“Out of conference between the House and the Senate,” the historian Frank Freidel correctly summarized, “came a bill that bore little more than the semblance of a soldiers’ vote bill,”
¹⁴
if not quite, as Philadelphia Democrat Michael Bradley told the House, “a bill to make it difficult for soldiers to vote.”
¹⁵
Despite powerful practical and ethical impulses favoring direct, simple procedures for soldier voting, the outcome hovered between democracy and its betrayal.

Immediately after Congress heard a message from the president on March 31, in which he explained his very reluctant passive endorsement and requested amendments that would ensure delivery “to men and women in the service . . . a short, uniform Federal ballot,”
¹⁶
Mississippi’s John Rankin, who had led the legislative effort to craft an alternative to the administration bill in the House, “rose to say that he had no intention ‘to quarrel with the President,’ but asserted that ‘we have provided the very best law we could under the circumstances.’”
¹⁷

What were these countervailing circumstances? Why was an assertive president, who was invoking military sacrifice on behalf of a basic right of democratic citizenship, placed in the discomfiting position of waiting until twelve hours before the deadline for a presidential decision to accept, veto, or decline to sign before passively permitting what the
New York Times
called “the ‘States rights’ soldier vote bill” to take effect, not only in contravention to his own wishes but in the face of a national elite and mass consensus that favored expedited soldier voting?

I.

W
ITHOUT EXCEPTION,
members of the House and Senate who discussed the issue in committee or on the floor backed soldier voting. Further, as the
Congressional Digest
observed, “even assuming that a Senator or Representative might feel that the absentee soldiers might not vote for him, sheer political sense would prevent his opposing the soldier vote, actively or passively. It would be political suicide for him to do so.”
¹⁸
“Every one concedes that the men who are fighting to preserve our American form of government should participate in the elections of that government while they are in service,” the once-isolationist
Chicago Tribune
editorialized.
¹⁹
Who could, or would, disagree? In January 1944, the National Opinion Research Center asked respondents whether “you think that men and women over 21 in the armed forces who are stationed outside of this country should be able to vote in the Presidential election next November, or don’t you think they should?” Positive replies were offered by 92 percent.
²⁰

Soldier-voting legislation first passed the House in 1942 by an overwhelming 134–19 margin; final passage in the Senate was achieved on an emphatic 47–5 roll call.
²¹
After the war, in 1946, soldier voting was affirmed unanimously by voice vote in both congressional chambers. No case ever was advanced in Congress, or indeed by any political leader or commentator, to oppose voting rights for soldiers, sailors, and marines. “We all agree that the war has taken the soldier away from the ballot box back in his own State,” Texas Democrat Eugene Worley, who chaired the Committee on Elections, told the House, noting that “no true American can disagree with [the] premise . . . that it is the solemn duty of Congress and the States to do everything within their legal and constitutional power they can do to take the ballot box to the soldier, wherever he may be.”
²²
Largely for this reason, the military-voting initiatives of World War II usually are remembered as efforts to protect and extend voting rights.
²³

This legislation is particularly celebrated for lifting the poll tax, a suspension first enacted in 1942 for soldiers who lived in one of eight former Confederate states (Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia
²⁴
) that still required this payment of between one and two dollars, sometimes cumulatively, in order to vote. Although this was a partial and temporary deferral—only for soldiers, only for the duration of the war, and only for federal posts in the general election
²⁵
—the heat of opposition in the Deep South revealed its significance. There and more widely, it was recognized as a noteworthy advance to black rights in a nation at arms at the site where racism collided with the language and values of republican citizenship. This “limited retreat from the poll tax system”
²⁶
constituted the first enacted congressional civil rights initiative since the wave of procedures that had been introduced to disenfranchise black citizens at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth. A November 29, 1943, political summary, one of a series regularly sent by Oxford’s Isaiah Berlin to the Foreign Office from the Special Survey Section of the British embassy in Washington, reported that the “bill to enable soldiers abroad to vote in presidential election (though it seems not in primaries) has stirred up powerful opposition among Southern Democrats.” They were especially exercised by the “danger to [the] poll tax system since Southern colored soldiers cannot well be prevented from voting with their white comrades, which would establish a powerful new precedent.”
²⁷
Nearly half a century after the fact, the person most responsible for drafting the administration’s preferred bill for 1944, the legal scholar Herbert Wechsler, similarly recalled how “the Southern point of view” was marked by “the fear that this was an opening wedge for congressional intrusion in the electoral process, with its ultimate implications for breaking down the disenfranchisement of blacks. And the Southerners were absolutely right about that.”
²⁸
For African-Americans, long denied meaningful political participation, rescinding the poll tax seemed remarkable, a kind of miracle. Edgar Brown, the president of the Negro Federal Workers Employees Union, who had served as adviser on Negro Affairs for the Civilian Conservation Corps, thus celebrated this “first implementation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution . . . the greatest contribution to democracy since the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln.”
²⁹