Fear Itself (31 page)

Such unconcealed sentiments are scattered throughout these debates. “We of the South are proud, indeed, of the purity of blood which flows through our veins,” Peterson “Pete” Bryant Jarman of Alabama informed the House when soldier voting was first considered, in 1942. Arguing that such a federal measure constitutes “an attack on our southern way of life and on white supremacy in which we have every reason to take much pride,” he concluded that this “entering wedge looking toward the destruction of our State-supervised election systems, our way of life, and possibly white supremacy . . . is really an arrow aimed directly at the heart of the South, which has always been, is now, and ever must be, white supremacy.”
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Ellison DuRant Smith, who had been a leading figure in the Southern Cotton Association (hence his nickname, “Cotton Ed”) before his election to the Senate from South Carolina in 1908, who had led the charge for immigration restriction in 1924 (“I think we have a sufficient population in our country for us to shut the door and to breed up a pure, unadulterated American citizenship”
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), and who famously had walked out of the Democratic National Convention in 1936 when a black minister was about to offer the invocation, took the floor in 1943 to characterize national ballots for soldiers as “but a camouflage to enrage a race that does not understand it.”
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The southern role in the legislative history of soldier voting, however, was both more variegated and more complex than this racist rhetoric might indicate. Three features stand out. First, the year 1942 was notable for how southern congressional moderates, led by Tennessee’s Estes Kefauver in the House and Florida’s Claude Pepper in the Senate, sought to develop an independent voice on behalf of steady, if measured, racial progress, a view they shared with moderate journalists, intellectuals, activists, and politicians who advocated the growth of industry and the acceleration of urbanization as forces that could shape a more modern South.
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Second, soldier voting proved a harbinger of massive resistance and the larger failure of the moderates.
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Because the issue so deeply resonated with fundamental American values—what Gunnar Myrdal at just this moment was labeling “the American Creed”
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—and with the rhetoric of rights announced by the Atlantic Charter and President Roosevelt’s talk of Four Freedoms, the possibility that the federal government might assume an assertive voting-rights role raised hard-core southern anxiety to a pitched level. Eastland’s rhetoric reflected this acute panic for the extreme South. Under these circumstances, the alliance that had brought together such strange bedfellows in the Democratic Party was placed under great stress as southern Democrats and Republicans gingerly discovered how they might join together in alliances of convenience.

Third, alongside wartime lawmaking about organized labor,
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soldier voting provides the most observable setting in which to watch this crucial process of coalition shifting that significantly widened the spectrum of possibilities within national politics. In 1942, nonsouthern Democrats found common cause with moderate southerners to pass a soldier-voting law that protected states’ rights and shielded segregation without overtly endorsing restrictive racial practices. Over the course of the next two years, an alliance of southern Democrats and Republicans came to devise effective means to resist President Roosevelt’s plan for a federal ballot. Southern votes supplied pivotal support for both winning coalitions.

III.

T
HE
R
ULES
Committee of South Carolina’s Democratic State Convention gathered in Columbia on May 21, 1942. By a vote of 40–1, its members resolved to keep the party’s upcoming September primary all-white, despite a petition by a small group of white liberals that called attention to the war and its values, and raised questions about soldier voting. Referring to the exigencies of the time, the decision to maintain the status quo was folded into a motion to suspend action on “all controversial matters.”
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The next month, the two leading candidates for governor—Wyndham Manning, who later, in 1947, was appointed superintendent of South Carolina’s prison system by Governor Strom Thurmond, and the fervent New Dealer Olin Johnston, who had held the gubernatorial office from 1935 to 1939 and went on to defeat Manning in the party primary—debated problems of war and peace at a June 9 mass meeting in Lexington, which had been called to consider the impact of World War II on the state. Near the evening’s conclusion, “A. B. Hogan,” described as a “liberal white,” made reference to the convention’s decision regarding black primary voting, by civilians and soldiers, and asked for the candidates’ views, according to the
Pittsburgh Courier,
the country’s leading black paper. “I’ll be glad to answer that,” said Johnston. “I believe in white voters staying in the Democratic party. If the colored people want a party, let them organize one.” Manning replied, “I’m surprised that such a question should be asked. The Democratic party is a white man’s party and must be so maintained.”
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In a situation marked by an imminent congressional election, and with more than 200,000 African-Americans already serving in the country’s armed forces, the question of black voting did in fact get asked over the course of the next two summer months on Capitol Hill as the House and Senate fashioned the Servicemen’s Ballot Act for the 1942 election. Strikingly, the poll tax issue was placed on the agenda not by Republicans or nonsouthern Democrats but by southern moderates.

Nonsouthern members had taken pains to reassure the South that they had no intention of disturbing existing practices. Raymond Springer, an Indiana Republican, confirmed in the House, “[T]his proposed legislation refers only to those who are “otherwise qualified to vote under the law of the State of his residence. . . . It does not seek to modify or change the qualifications of the voters of any State.”
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After the Rules Committee sent the bill he had sponsored to the floor, the Democratic representative for West Virginia, Robert Ramsay, offered similar guarantees. The law, he declared, would not affect state requirements for voting, “such as payment of a poll tax.”
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Ramsay’s fellow Democrat, Rhode Island’s Theodore Green, the floor manager for the legislation in the Senate, explained that “in view of the need for speedy passage, it was more urgent now to give the service men from the other . . . States their chance to vote than to risk delay by making a stand for the men from the . . . poll tax states.”
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He justified this position, one he had taken alongside other pro–civil rights Democrats, by arguing that the poll tax was controversial and the committee had decided it would omit all such controversial questions.
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By contrast, it was Senator Pepper, a fiery New Dealer, Harvard Law School graduate, and a racial moderate, who insisted that “it is inconsistent with the spirit of American institutions to make a soldier pay a poll tax. . . . That is not democracy,” and Representative Kefauver, a Yale Law School graduate who took to wearing a coonskin cap after he had been likened to a cunning raccoon by his conservative opponents in Tennessee, who resolutely argued that “no poll tax should be required of men in the armed services who wish to exercise their right to vote while they are away from home,” as “one of the principal rights every citizen should have is that of franchise, and this should be without the imposition of financial conditions.”
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In introducing his amendment to suspend the poll tax, Kefauver articulated the tension-charged position of the region’s moderates, noting, “I realize that my position on this bill and to some similar matters is not in conformity with many of my colleagues from the South,” but insisting “that if we feel that these boys are capable of serving on the battlefield to protect us and our country, we ought to feel they are capable of voting in an election without registration and without the payment of a poll tax.”
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When soldier voting was first approved in the House, on July 23, this issue did not elicit much passion. A quite empty and seemingly indifferent House rejected Kefauver’s poll tax amendment by a vote of 33–65.
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With this question out of the way, the bill passed by a 139–19 margin,
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but only after committed opponents, led vocally by John Rankin and Pete Jarman, offered “persistent but futile objections,” forced four roll calls to confirm the existence of a quorum, and challenged the legality of the Rules Committee’s report (“obtained by fraud,” claimed Rankin, “clandestinely held or held without notifying the other members”). Though there is no official record of the individual distribution of votes, as this was a standing vote, the press reported that the nineteen all were southern—the hardest of the hard core from the Deep South, for these were representatives who shared Rankin’s view that the bill was “merely an attempt to get the camel’s nose under the tent and destroy the election laws in every State in the Union,” despite the failure of his colleagues, to that point, to put the poll tax on hold, despite the bill’s affirmation of the right of the states to set qualifications for voting, despite the applicability of this version of the bill exclusively to soldiers stationed inside the United States, and even though the only modification it proposed to state elections laws was that of overriding any requirements that voters must appear in person to register or cast their vote.
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What Rankin and his supporters feared was federal action of any kind in the area of voting rights.
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The difficulty was that once the southern moderates had taken the lead on the poll tax question in the Senate, Green and most other Democrats no longer could refrain from endorsing the suspension. Republicans, in turn, saw an opportunity to divide the Democrats, make them uncomfortable, and appeal to northern black voters.
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They seized the issue as their own. Charles Wayland Brooks of Illinois, who was running for reelection in a tight race, managed to get his Republican anti–poll tax amendment, rather than that of Democrat Pepper, recognized as being in order in the Senate.
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The black press widely praised Brooks; a convention of 3,500 ministers “gave a rising vote of thanks to Sen. Wayland Brooks [R., Ill.] for his successful sponsorship of the anti-poll tax amendment to the soldiers’ vote bill” at the Memphis National Baptist Convention in September 1942; Dr. D. V. Jamison, the president of the National Baptist Convention, citing Brooks, “called upon Negroes to vote for republican candidates for congress as the only way for colored people to secure justice and freedom”; and the African-American vote did exhibit a swing back to Republican voting in the 1942 congressional elections. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, was quick to claim credit for Republican gains, noting in a press statement that “the shift in a number of Congressional districts of Negro voters from Democratic to the Republican side is in large measure due to resentment against the domination of national policy on the Negro by the reactionary South,” a group he described as “Negro hating Southern Democrats.” The sociologist Horace R. Cayton Jr. ascribed the black Republican turn in Chicago that boosted Brooks to “his courage and alertness that eliminated the necessity for payment of poll tax by soldiers and sailors from eight southern states.”
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Approved by a 33–20 margin, the Brooks amendment was one of three liberalizing changes made by the Senate to the House bill. The other liberalizing changes in the Senate authorized soldier voting to include primary elections, the ones that really counted in the South, by an even closer, 28–25 vote; and, by voice vote, extended absentee voting to soldiers and sailors stationed overseas. This broadening of scope to include troops abroad was considered a technical matter, not an issue of principle and, for this election at least, not much more than a gesture; “if it should prove impossible to get the votes back in time,” said Robert Ramsay, summarizing the meaning of the Senate’s action for the House, “it would at least give the boys a chance to vote and enable Congress to say we are going to take the ballot to every man who is a citizen.”
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In light of the bill’s time frame, the issue of whether soldiers should be permitted to vote in primaries likewise was rather abstract, since all the South’s primaries took place before the bill could become law. Nevertheless, the manner in which votes were cast on this amendment, which was proposed by Republican John Danaher of Connecticut, is quite revealing. With fifteen of the twenty-eight positive votes, the core of the winning coalition supporting a more liberal bill was Republican. Not surprisingly, the core of the negative vote was southern. Perhaps less expected was how the fourteen southern nay votes were joined by eleven, a majority, of nonsouthern Democrats, including Green of Rhode Island, who were struggling at just this time with how to maintain cross-regional party unity in the face of an increasingly assertive Republican Party.
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Of the three changes to the House bill introduced by the Senate, the poll tax issue was the most contentious. The “simple issue” of soldier voting, the
Washington Post
observed, “has been virtually lost to sight in the quarrel over Southern poll taxes and the one-party system in the South.”
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The opponents were not just the hard-core rejectionists from the Deep South, such as Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo or South Carolina’s Cotton Ed Smith; they included Kentucky’s Alben Barkley, the Senate’s majority leader, and Missouri’s Harry Truman. Breaking with the southern consensus were five senators from the region’s periphery, who joined Pepper to support the amendment. Coming from West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Delaware, they represented states without a poll tax.
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