The 40s: The Story of a Decade (35 page)

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At a little after half past eight, it was known that the jury had sounded its buzzer, which meant that they had made up their minds. This certainly meant that the accused persons had been acquitted of all charges. The jurymen had been out only five hours and a quarter, and they would have had to stay out much longer than that before all of them would have consented to a conviction; and they would have had to stay out much longer before they could have announced that they had failed to agree. The press knew what the verdict was and knew there was still an hour till the Judge would return. Yet we knew too that it is not what happens that matters so much as how it happens. Up in the gallery, thirteen Negroes were sitting in attitudes of fatigue and despair. Behind them, three windows looked on a night whitened by the lights of Main Street.

This had been a miserable case for these Negroes. They had not even been able to have the same emotional release that would have been granted them if Willie Earle had been an innocent victim, a sainted martyr. It happened that the only constructive proposal concerning this morass of misery stretching out to infinity round this case that I heard during my stay at Greenville came from a Negro. That, oddly enough, was a plea for the extension of the Jim Crow system. “There is nothing I wish for more,” he said, “than a law that would prohibit Negroes from riding in taxicabs driven by white men. They love to do it. We all love to do it. Can’t you guess why? Because it is the only time we can pay a white man to act as a servant to us. And that does something to me, even though I can check up on myself and see what’s happening. I say to myself, ‘This is fine! I’m hiring this white man! He’s doing a chore for me!’ ” He threw his head back and breathed deeply and patted his chest, to show how he felt. “If riding in a white taxicab does that to me, what do you think it does to Negroes who haven’t been raised right or are full of liquor? Then queer things happen, mighty queer things. Killing is only one of them.”

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At length, the Judge was seen standing at the open door of his chambers, and the defendants were brought into court. They were all very frightened. Mr. Hurd, though he was still confused, seemed to be asking himself if he had not been greatly deceived. Fat Joy was shifting along, wearing sadness as incongruously as fat men do. As they sat down, their wives clasped them in their arms, and they clung together, melting in the weakness of their common fear. The Judge came onto the bench and took some measures for the preservation of order in the court. The jury entered. One juror was smiling; one was looking desperately ashamed; the others looked stolid and secretive, as they had done all through the trial. They handed the slips on which they had recorded their verdicts to the clerk of the court, who handed them to the Judge. He read them through to himself, and a flush spread over his face.

As soon as the clerk had read the verdicts aloud and the Judge had left the bench and the courtroom, which he did without thanking the jury, the courtroom became, in a flash, something else. It might have been a honky-tonk. The Greenville citizens who had come as spectators were filing out quietly and thoughtfully. Whatever their opinions were, they were not to recover their usual spirits for some days. As they went, they
looked over their shoulders at the knot of orgiastic joy that had instantly been formed by the defendants and their supporters. Mr. Hurd and his father did not give such spectacular signs of relief as the others. They gripped each other tightly for a moment, then shook hands stiffly, but in wide, benedictory movements, with the friends who gathered around them with the ardent feeling that among the defendants Mr. Hurd especially was to be congratulated. The father and son were grinning shyly, but in their eyes was a terrible light. They knew again that they were the chosen vessels of the Lord. Later, Mr. Hurd, asked for a statement, was to say, “Justice has been done…both ways.” Meanwhile, the other defendants were kissing and clasping their wives, their wives were laying their heads on their husbands’ chests and nuzzling in an ecstasy of animal affection, while the laughing men stretched out their hands to their friends, who sawed them up and down. They shouted, they whistled, they laughed, they cried; above all, they shone with self-satisfaction. In fact, make no mistake, these people interpreted the verdict as a vote of confidence passed by the community. They interpreted it as a kind of election to authority.

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There could be no more pathetic scene than these taxi-drivers and their wives, the deprived children of difficult history, who were rejoicing at a salvation that was actually a deliverance to danger. They had been saved from the electric chair and from prison by men who had conducted their defense without taking a minute off to state or imply that even if a man is a murderer one must not murder him and that murder is foul. These people had been plunged back into chaos. It is to be remembered that in their statements these men fully inculpated each other. At present they are unified by the trial, but when the tension is over, there will come into their minds that they were not so well treated as they might have been by their friends. Then the propaganda for murder which was so freely dished out to them during their trial may bear its fruit.

It was impossible to watch this scene of delirium, which had been conjured up by a mixture of clownishness, ambition, and sullen malice, without feeling a desire for action. Supposing that one lived in a town, decent but tragic, which had been trodden into the dust and had risen again, and that there were men in that town who threatened every force in that town which raised it up and encouraged every force which dragged it back into the dust; then lynching would be a joy. It would be, indeed,
a very great delight to go through the night to the home of such a man, with a few loyal friends, and walk in so softly that he was surprised and say to him, “You meant to have your secret bands to steal in on your friends and take them out into the darkness, but it is not right that you should murder what we love without paying the price, and the law is not punishing you as it should.” And when we had driven him to some place where we would not be disturbed, we would make him confess his treacheries and the ruses by which he had turned the people’s misfortunes to his profit. It would be only right that he should purge himself of his sins. Then we would kill him, but not quickly, for there would be no reason that a man who had caused such pain should himself be allowed to flee quickly to the shelter of death. The program would have seemed superb had it not been for two decent Greenville people, a man and a woman, who stopped as they went out of the courtroom and spoke to me, because they were so miserable that they had to speak to someone. “This is only the beginning,” the man said. He was right. It was the beginning of a number of odd things. Irrational events breed irrational events. The next day I was to see a Negro porter at the parking place of a resort hotel near Greenville insult white guests as I have never seen a white hotel employee insult guests; there were to be minor assaults all over the state; there was to be the lynching party in North Carolina. “It is like a fever,” said the woman, tears standing in her eyes behind her glasses. “It spreads, it’s an infection, it’s just like a fever.” I was prepared to admit that she, too, was right.

OCTOBER 16, 1948 (ON THE 1948 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN)

C
andidates notoriously promise better than they ever perform, but if Governor Dewey manages the Presidency half as well as he is managing his campaign for it, we are about to have four, eight, twelve, sixteen years of cool, sleek efficiency in government. I venture upon this prophecy after quite a spell of riding aboard the Dewey Victory Special, the train that has been hauling the Republican candidate, his wife, and his entourage of advisers, well-wishers, favor-curriers, and newspapermen up and down the country since mid-September. Before I looked in on the Dewey campaign, I had acquired some seasoning and a basis for comparison by serving a correspondent’s hitch on the train that took President Truman and his similar, but far smaller, group of fellow-passengers over much the same route. As far as the arts and techniques, as distinct from the political content, of the campaigns are concerned, the difference between the Democratic and Republican operation is, I calculate, thirty or forty years. It is the difference between horsehair and foam rubber, between the coal-stove griddle and the pop-up toaster. Dewey is the pop-up toaster.

Everything I’ve seen of the Dewey campaign is slick and snappy. This is in strong contrast to the general dowdiness and good-natured slovenliness of the Truman campaign, at least when and where I observed it. Truman’s mass meetings were all old-style political rallies, brightened up, on occasion, by some droopy bunting and by Department of Sanitation brass bands. In San Francisco, the Democrats contracted a most
unfortunate alliance with a musical branch of the local parent-teacher association, which called itself the Mother Singers of America. The Mother Singers were authentic mothers—and grandmothers—who wrapped themselves in yards of brown monk’s cloth and sang the kind of songs you would expect them to. The Dewey group favors professional musicians, professional decorators, and professionals in everything else. All the way down the line, his effects are more dramatic and more electrifying. At a Truman meeting, the President, as a rule, takes his seat on the platform and sits quietly, a slender and almost pathetic figure surrounded by florid police commissioners and senators of heroic bulk, through all the preliminaries. When his turn finally comes to speak, his advance toward the microphone hardly takes the multitude by storm. Dewey’s entrances are delayed. He remains in the wings until all the invocations and endorsements are over. Sometimes he stays away from the meeting hall until the last moment. Then, with a great whining of motorcycle-escort sirens to hush the crowd and build up suspense, he arrives. The instant his name is spoken, he comes onstage, seemingly from nowhere, arms outstretched to embrace the crowd and gather in the applause that breaks the hush. It is an uncannily effective piece of business. Dewey doesn’t seem to walk; he coasts out like a man who has been mounted on casters and given a tremendous shove from behind. However it is done, he rouses the crowd to a peak of excitement and enthusiasm, and he has to wait an agreeably long while for the racket to die down.

Dewey likes drama, but he has an obvious distaste for the horseplay side of politics. He accepts honorary memberships in sheriffs’ posses and fraternal organizations, but he is uncomfortable during the installation ceremonies. On his first transcontinental tour after his nomination, he collected some fifteen cowpuncher hats, but he refused to try on any of them in public. The only time he got into the spirit of things was at his rally in the Hollywood Bowl. For this gathering, his local managers, mainly movie people, arranged a first-class variety show. In addition to assembling a lot of stars who endorsed the candidate in short, pithy, gag-laden speeches, they hired a marimba band and a chorus line for the preliminary entertainment. For the invocations, they recruited a minister, a priest, and a rabbi all of whom could have played romantic leads themselves. At the end of Dewey’s speech, the marimba band struck up “God Bless America,” as a recessional. Dewey was still standing at the microphone, and Mrs. Dewey, as she always does after he finishes, came
forward to join him. Perhaps the pageantry finally overcame him, for suddenly he breathed deep and took aboard a full load of the fine night air of Hollywood. Then he gave vent to the rich baritone he spent so many years developing. “… land that I love,” he sang, and, slipping an arm around Mrs. Dewey’s waist, looked encouragingly at her. Mrs. Dewey came in on the next line, and together they went all the way through the rest of the Irving Berlin anthem.

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It is one of the paradoxes of 1948 that the man in office is a much less experienced campaigner than the man who is seeking to win the office. Truman was on the public payroll when Dewey was still a college boy in Michigan, but his serious campaigning has been limited to two tries for the United States Senate and one for the Vice-Presidency. It wasn’t bush-league stuff, but it wasn’t big-league, either. Dewey, on the other hand, is entitled to wear service stripes for three major campaigns. In 1940, he sought the Republican nomination as vigorously as he sought the main prize in 1944 and is seeking it now. The effects are apparent in the organization and planning of every phase of his campaign travels. There is far more foresight and far better timing and scheduling than in the President’s tour. Dewey’s staff work is superior, too. For example, correspondents with Truman were forced, while I was aboard his train, to miss deadline after deadline because they had to wait too long for advance copies of the President’s speeches. Presumably his ghost-writers, some of whom were on the train and some of whom were back in Washington, were agonizing up to the zero hour, trying to make their sentences come out right. And then the sentences didn’t come out right anyway. The rhetoric that Truman was given to deliver was coarse, gritty, old-fashioned political stuff, with about as much flow as oatmeal. Dewey’s speeches, which reporters can put on the telegraph wires twelve to twenty-four hours before delivery time, are as smooth and glossy as chromium. It may be that, on analysis, their cliché content would turn out to be neither much lower nor much higher than that of Truman’s speeches, but, as one man on the challenger’s train put it, they are written and spoken in such a manner that they give one the feeling Dewey has not borrowed his clichés from the masters but has minted them all by himself.