Fear Itself (4 page)

V.

M
UCH OF
this volume is devoted to examining how this national state got fashioned. This task leads to Congress, the fulcrum of the book. One cannot understand the New Deal without appreciating the activist lawmaking that resulted from many bouts of arguing, bargaining, and voting in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. These policy achievements demonstrably challenged the period’s common claim that national legislatures had become incapable and obsolete.

In the United States, the legislature remained an effective center of political life. As evidenced by the welter of lawmaking this book examines, Congress maintained a pride of place in a system of coequal branches. Its constitutional role was not supplanted. The Senate and House of Representatives continued, when they wished, to say no even to presidents at the peak of their popularity. Working through Congress, the New Deal falsified the idea that legislative politics must ensure democratic failure. To the contrary, Congress crafted policies that changed how capitalism worked, in part by promoting unions that gave the working class a voice both at the workplace and in national politics. It also organized responses to the challenges of global violence and national security. It was, in short, the central operative role of Congress that most distinguished the United States from the forces of brutality and the absence of political competition that characterized the dictatorships.
⁷¹

Yet inside Congress, we hear an obbligato—the deep and mournful sound of southern political power determined to hold on to a distinctive way of life that also was indispensable to the era’s legislative majorities. The region’s representatives were located at the very center of the era’s winning coalitions when the country faced a cascade of grave crises, and when its character as a liberal polity was being fundamentally reshaped.

Students of Congress know that, in addition to personal preferences, members of Congress are most influenced by party and constituency pressures. At a time of widespread racial bias and segregated arrangements hardly confined to the South, the men who represented the Jim Crow South constituted the pivotal bloc in the national legislature. With their local constituencies artificially limited through restrictive voting arrangements, and with such institutional rules as the Senate filibuster at their command, the southern bloc gained a key role within Congress, often playing captain to a diverse crew of other officers. Significantly, their votes tended to count for more than one. Buttressed by virtually all-white electorates in one-party constituencies, and possessing the powers of seniority, they dominated the committee system and the leadership of the House and Senate, thus serving as the legislature’s main gatekeepers.

In all, the enhanced representation of the South in the powerful national legislature with an internal decision-making structure that experienced southern legislators skillfully negotiated and deployed made questions of region and race matter more than we often have appreciated in shaping what the New Deal could, and did, accomplish. Commanding the institution’s lawmaking switchboard, southern members were in a position to determine the shape and content of key legislation. Although they—and the institution in Washington they knew most intimately—did not make the key difference at every turn, the South’s capacity to veto what the region did not want and its ability to promote, as a pivotal actor, the policies it did favor mattered regularly and insistently over the course of the Roosevelt and Truman years. As a result, we live in a different country, different from what might have been without the exercise of power by southern members within America’s uniquely capable national legislature.

To be sure, the southern region did not exist in isolation.
⁷²
The ability of the House and Senate to refashion American liberal democracy depended on harnessing the Jim Crow South to the majority coalition of the Democratic Party. Without the South, there could have been no New Deal. When southern support was withheld, the outcome was different. With southern support, the New Deal could proceed, but there always was a cost, either tacit or explicit.

Much as the Constitution could never have been adopted without cross-sectional backing, and much as Lincoln understood that he could not win the Civil War without the support of Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri, the slave states that stayed loyal to the Union, so Presidents Roosevelt and Truman recognized their own limitations and how much they needed votes cast by their party’s representatives from across the swath of the South to govern effectively. They understood that without the South, the country could not discover policies commanding majorities to steer precariously between the failed or inadequate status quo and nostrums pursued by the world’s dictatorships.

Despite its centrality, southern power has always hovered at the fringe of most New Deal portraits.
⁷³
When present at all, the South is usually slotted into a list of elements in the New Deal coalition—“a unique alliance of big-city bosses, the white South, farmers and workers, Jews and Irish Catholics, ethnic minorities, and African Americans”
⁷⁴
—as if these were equivalent units of political power. The failure to place the special, often determining role of the Jim Crow South front and center, I believe, has had much the same effect as the “willful critical blindness” about race that Toni Morrison has identified so tellingly. “It is possible,” she mournfully noted, “. . . to read Henry James scholarship exhaustively and never arrive at a nodding mention, much less a satisfactory treatment of the black woman who lubricates the turn of the plot and becomes the agency of moral choice and meaning in
What Maisie Knew.
”
⁷⁵
During the New Deal, it was the white South that acted as the key agent in Congress of just such moral choice and meaning. To record the history of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s as if this were not the case would be as much a distortion as writing American history without its African-American sorrow songs.
⁷⁶

The South, then, was America’s “wild card.” Scholarship about the social roots of Fascism in interwar Europe has shown how the fate of democracy frequently hinged on choices made by the leaders and voters from that continent’s least prosperous and most “backward” areas, those who were most afflicted by economic volatility, ethnic conflict, demagogic politics, and a sense of isolation from modern life’s main currents.
⁷⁷
This was also the case in Latin America, where agrarian districts, characterized by repressive labor practices, often rejected democratic governance, preferring various forms of authoritarian government.
⁷⁸

Both liberal and illiberal, progressive and racist, the large bloc of southern states played more than one role in national life, including that of advancing a radically anti-liberal white populism, with a family resemblance to European Fascism that combined “demagogic appeals to lower-income white farmers, bitter denunciations of large corporations and Wall Street, and vitriolic personal abuse of their opponents.”
⁷⁹
This most active form of political racism was perhaps best typified on the national scene by South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond, who ran for president in 1948 and carried four Deep South states, and by Alabama governor George Wallace, who carried five such states in 1968. But such third-party efforts were not the norm. Opting in the main to stay within the Democratic Party, the region empowered most New Deal initiatives in Congress, all the while holding fast to the ideology and institutions of official racism. The result was a Democratic Party—then the party of governance—that internalized the deepest contradictions in American life.

The region’s representatives, who manifested strong preferences and effective strategic means to pursue them, imposed their wishes on each facet of New Deal policymaking. They determined which policies were feasible and which were not. The period’s remarkable burst of invention reconstituted modern liberalism by reorganizing the country’s political rules and public policies, but only within the limits imposed by the most illiberal part of the political order. In yet another ironic turn, these southern politicians helped save liberal democracy so successfully that they ultimately undermined the presuppositions of white supremacy.
⁸⁰

Often placing their supremacist values first, these representatives fought fiercely, if ultimately unsuccessfully, to preserve their region’s racial tyranny. Their main national instrument, the Democratic Party, confederated two radically disparate political systems. One, northern and western, was primarily rooted in cities that featured urban machines, Catholic and Jewish immigrant populations, labor unions, and the working class. The other, southern, was essentially rural, native, Protestant, antilabor, and exclusively white. Writing about “American liberalism today” shortly after the conclusion of the extended New Deal, Denis Brogan sharply observed in 1957 the dynamics of this cross-sectional coalition:

The Liberal conscience is most deeply touched and his political behaviour seems (to the unfriendly outsider) most schizophrenic. The representative Liberal is a Democrat, or an ally of the Democrats, but in the ranks of “the Democracy” are most of the most violent enemies of the integration of the Negro into the American community. This is no doubt accidental; it arises from the localization of the most acute form of the colour problem in the region where the Democratic Party is traditionally strongest. The necessity of holding the national party together makes for strange bedfellows and strange deals.
⁸¹

To properly understand the New Deal, it is just these bedfellows—their deals, successes, and failures—whom we need to place front and center.

But if there is a lesson, it is not one of retrospective judgment, as if the possibility then existed to rescue liberal democracy and pursue racial justice simultaneously. It later turned out that the first would prove to be a condition of the second. But there is no reason not to brood about the confining cage of explicit and willful racism in the Roosevelt and Truman years, or not to weigh its implications.

In a prior book,
When Affirmative Action Was White,
⁸²
I examined how southern power in Congress damaged the prospects of African-Americans. Shaped by the South, national policies in the 1930s and 1940s regarding Social Security, labor law, military race relations, and the treatment of veterans, I argued, reinforced inequality and deepened the racial divide. Missing from that book, however, was a discussion of how housing segregation was encouraged by the Federal Housing Authority, and the failure of the federal government to contravene segregation in its own facilities, whether in Washington, D.C., or even at the atomic bomb research center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. I might even have mentioned how “African American journalists were excluded from both the president’s and Mrs. Roosevelt’s press conferences,” or how the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps were segregated.
⁸³

Though I return to such themes and their implications in terms of racial justice in discussing soldier voting, antilynching measures, and other, mostly abortive, civil rights initiatives, in
Fear Itself
I examine primarily how the South exercised its critical position to affect decisions concerning global power, national security, civil liberty, unions, and the character of capitalism. The southern wing of the Democratic Party, I show, composed the most persistently effective political force that determined the content and boundaries of this momentous “constitutional moment.”
⁸⁴

If history plays tricks, southern congressional power in the last era of Jim Crow was a big one. The ability of the New Deal to confront the era’s most heinous dictatorships by reshaping liberal democracy required accommodating the most violent and illiberal part of the political system, keeping the South inside the game of democracy. While it would be folly to argue that members of the southern wing of the Democratic Party alone determined the choices the New Deal made, their relative cohesion and their assessment of policy choices through the filter of an anxious protection of white supremacy often proved decisive.

The triumph, in short, cannot be severed from the sorrow. Liberal democracy prospered as a result of an accommodation with racial humiliation and its system of lawful exclusion and principled terror. Each constituted the other like “the united double nature of both soul and body” in Goethe’s
Faust.
This combination confers a larger message—a lesson that concerns the persistence of emergency, the inescapability of moral ambiguity, and perhaps the inevitability of a politics of discomfiting allies, abroad as well as at home. It also reminds us that not just whether but also how we find our way truly matters.

PART I

FIGHT AGAINST FEAR