Fear Itself (33 page)

Southern Democrats had good reason for concern about the war’s effects on the foundations of white supremacy. Eleven months before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt cast World War II as an “armed defense of democratic existence,” and “a great emergency” that challenged “every realist” who “knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being directly assailed in every part of the world,” and he spoke of “a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men within our gates” as the foundation for the country’s unity and the credibility of its foreign policy “based on a decent respect for the rights and dignity of all nations.”
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With the United States at war a year later, the president spoke even more vigorously about the need to “be particularly vigilant against racial discrimination in any of its ugly forms,” cautioning that Hitler would seek to “breed mistrust and suspicion between . . . one race and another.”
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Taking such talk seriously, a growing number of African-Americans began to mobilize in an unprecedented way for, in the words of a nationwide “Double V” campaign, “victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefields abroad.”
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Racial violence increased, some at and adjacent to segregated military bases in the South in the spring and summer of 1943. By early summer, “serious disorders occurred at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi; Camp Stewart, Georgia; Lake Charles, Louisiana; March Field and Camp San Luis Obispo, California; Camp Bliss, Texas; Camp Phillips, Kansas; Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky; and Camp Shenango, Pennsylvania.”
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One report chronicled 242 incidents in forty-seven cities, the most visible and costly to lives and property being the riots in Detroit and New York during the summer of 1943.
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The threat of a march on Washington had induced President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in June 1941, creating the Fair Employment Practices Committee, which made federal investigation and remediation of discrimination in the workplace a reality for the first time. Lawyers oriented to civil rights staffed the Civil Liberties section of the Department of Justice. Unions, some on a multiracial basis, were making unprecedented advances in the South under tight labor-market conditions. Legislation to curb poll taxes was debated in Congress. Gunnar Myrdal was finishing his massive and unsentimental
An American Dilemma,
which was organized to reveal the full range of contradictions that his subtitle characterized as
The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
.
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The Supreme Court, which had begun to consider the status of the white primary, was about to pronounce it unconstitutional in
Smith v. Allwright.

Soldier voting placed southerners who wished to protect regional racial patterns, or at least ensure that change would come from within rather than be imposed from without, in a difficult position. They did not wish to be portrayed, once again, as opponents of soldier voting, placing racial hierarchy above national obligation. As Isaiah Berlin discerned when the debate over the issue of soldier voting in the 1944 election opened, the opposition to a federal ballot “is in an embarrassing position since it cannot very well afford to be accused of wishing to deprive ‘soldier boys’ of an opportunity to vote in face of all efforts of the President and Administration to give them that right.”
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But southerners feared that a standardized national approach to military balloting would establish a powerful precedent they would be unable to resist when more fundamental challenges regarding voting rights arose.

Shifts to Republican fortunes and prospects presented the welcome possibility of a new set of solutions, simultaneously favoring soldier voting while defending states’ rights. Republican members of the House and Senate who had argued passionately for a strong bill in 1942 now were assessing soldier voting anew, anxiously, lest its terms foreclose opportunity. Concerned their chance to win back the presidency and the House of Representatives might slip away if soldiers were to vote by federal ballot, with the process overseen by the commander in chief and the Departments of War and Navy, they came to advocate a weak federal role, and proposed to limit the flow of information to soldiers serving abroad. To realize these preferences, they required southern votes. The language spoken by the two groups often became interchangeable. Warnings like those of Ohio’s Republican senator Robert Taft to the effect that a federal role would place the country “on very dangerous ground indeed,” and his insistence that the war did not justify superseding what he took to be the “express language of the Constitution,” were not easy to distinguish from Democratic senator Eastland’s admonition that “the proposed legislation is the first step toward Federal control, toward bureaucratic control of the entire election machinery of this country,” and thus a violation of constitutional provisions for state supervision of elections.
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Observing this alliance develop were two representatives who expressed more than a little puzzlement and unease regarding the shift in Republican preferences, Estes Kefauver and John Sparkman. Both men would later become senators, and each ran as vice president with Adlai Stevenson, Sparkman in 1952 and Kefauver in 1956. Kefauver, who favored the federal ballot, wryly observed how “no great cry of States’ rights was raised by many who are going to vote against this measure when we eliminated the requirement for registration and poll tax as a prerequisite of voting for servicemen in September 1942. It is strange that many of those who voted for that measure have become so suddenly converted to the doctrine of States’ rights.”
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Alabama Democrat John Sparkman responded sardonically to Republican talk about constitutional federalism, most recently articulated on the House floor by New York Republican Hamilton Fish (“For years we have seen States rights vanish, one after the other under the New Deal”
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), by noting how members from that party who were lecturing their colleagues about states’ rights had not done so during debates about lynching or the poll tax.
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In turn, Senator James Tunnell, a Delaware Democrat who backed the federal ballot, also took note of the strange bedfellows alliance that had emerged. “The Senator from Mississippi,” he observed, “was perfectly frank when he introduced the bill. His position cannot be criticized. He has his own problem. He said the bill is one to maintain white supremacy.” But how ironic it was, he insisted, that “Senators from the southern part of the country, who are interested in white supremacy,” were now joined at the hip with members from what once had been “the party of Thad Stevens,” the powerful Pennsylvania Republican who, when serving in the House from 1859 to 1868, had sought to use federal power to promote the equality of freedmen.
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However uncomfortable, the alliance of southern Democrats and Republicans found common ground in utilizing a language of democracy to oppose the federal ballot as insufficient, because it would apply only to national offices and general elections. Administratively and politically, liberal Democrats, including the president, understood that they had no chance to create a federal long ballot, since they lacked the means to manage the votes of soldiers for the full range of offices at the local and state level. Listing all candidates from sheriff on up would lead to impossible logistical and shipping problems. This opened the possibility for the opponents of any federal role to contend that what they labeled “the bobtailed ballot” discriminated against military personnel. In the southern version of the argument, the federal ballot was labeled discriminatory because it did not include state-level primaries.
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In the Republican version, it was the failure to offer soldiers means to vote for local and state offices that mattered.
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The first point of inflection changing long-familiar voting coalitions came in the Senate when the Green-Lucas administration bill for a federal ballot and a strong oversight commission with enforcement capacity reached the floor in late November 1943. Into the first days of December, a united Democratic Party had weakened the powers of the elections commission and had included the Merchant Marine, Red Cross, Society of Friends, USO employees, the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, and the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron within the compass of the bill. This marked an effort by its sponsors to find a sufficient number of votes to overcome Republican resistance. Those roll calls, together with votes regulating the distribution of partisan propaganda and political literature to troops, and another that rejected proxy voting by parents or designated relatives, moved along party lines.

The radical shift took place on December 3, when the Eastland substitute, “Requiring That the Method for Absentee Voting Must Be Provided and Regulated by the States Rather Than the Federal Government,” passed on a 42–37 vote, a “startling defeat” for soldier voting by a federal ballot under national jurisdiction.
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The replacement bill eliminated the Federal War Ballot Commission, and simply recommended to the states that they provide means for eligible absentees to vote. The bill also included an amendment offered by Senator Taft to regulate and limit the written materials soldiers could receive.
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Southern members who had supported the weakening amendments to the standardizing federal ballot bill shifted to vote instead for this alternative. Of the forty-two ayes, twenty-four were cast by southern Democrats and eighteen by Republicans; they were opposed by twenty-five Democrats, some from border states, and twelve Republicans. Of the three possible coalitions among Republicans, southern Democrats, and nonsouthern Democrats, the most robust was that of southern Democrats and Republicans.
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In the House, the Rankin version of the Eastland bill passed by the wide margin of 328–69. A nearly unanimous southern bloc
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was joined by an even more united Republican Party,
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together with roughly half the nonsouthern Democrats (who were torn between rejecting this bill or having at least some mechanism for soldier voting),
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to form the majority.
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“Freedom Wins,” the
Chicago Tribune
exulted, having long forgotten its many 1942 editorials excoriating the South for putting states’ rights in the way of effective soldier voting.
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One last effort was made to preserve some federal role in the Senate. Watching the president’s State of the Union appeal for soldier voting get emasculated, an embarrassed Roosevelt administration backed what amounted to a new version of the Green-Lucas bill, one that combined Eastland’s provisions with a weaker version of the federal ballot. “The new measure,” the disappointed
Pittsburgh Courier
commented, “answers the demand for a soldier vote law while guaranteeing that the Negro vote be ‘taken care of’ by election in precincts, counties, and other state units, and therefore is satisfactory to all except Negroes. . . . Our legislators have not yet learned the truth that you cannot have democracy and white supremacy at one and the same time.”
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After much legislative maneuvering, a diluted federal ballot, weakened further by requiring voters to write in the name of their preferred candidates, rather than simply vote by party designation or names already present, was added to the Eastland states’ rights bill.
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This modified legislation, passed by a 47–38 margin, was the version of solider voting that ultimately became law. The federal ballot that it authorized was utilized by only 3 percent of the members of the armed forces who voted.

Two years later, the fight was over. The Democratic soldier-voting bill introduced in early 1946 in the House by Herbert Bonner of North Carolina and in the Senate by Theodore Green of Rhode Island eliminated the federal ballot altogether. It passed both houses in April by unanimous voice votes.
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PART III

EMERGENCY