Fear Itself (91 page)

93
For a discussion of discharge petitions and civil rights legislation, see Eric Schickler, Kathryn Pearson, and Brian D. Feinstein, “Congressional Parties and Civil Rights Politics from 1933 to 1972,”
Journal of Politics
72 (2010): 672–89. I thank Eric Schickler for sharing their data on discharge petitions.

94
Congressional Record
, 75th Cong., 3d sess., January 27, 1938, p. 1165.

95
These views are reported in Jenkins, Peck, and Weaver, “Between Reconstructions,” p. 85.

96
Michael Perman observes that the strategy the South’s congressmen constructed for the defense of their segregated society seems to have been similar to the formula developed a century earlier when slavery was first attacked during the Missouri Crisis. “On that occasion, it may be recalled, they took an unyielding stand at the margins of the system. . . . Likewise, by defending lynching, which a majority of southerners actually deplored . . . they were taking a stand at the outermost limits of the system of white supremacy.” Michael Perman,
Pursuit of Unity: A Political History of the American South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), p. 244.

97
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 1st sess., April 15, 1937, p. 3550.

98
Ibid., 3d sess., January 26, 1938, pp. 1101–02; January 11, 1938, p. 310.

99
Ibid., January 21, 1938, p. 873.

100
Ibid., January 14, 1938, pp. 506–7; February 2, 1938, pp. 1391–99, 1390; ibid., 1st sess., April 13–14, 1937, pp. 3447–48, April 15, 1937, p. 3524; ibid., 3d sess., January 11, 1938, p. 305. Referring to Walter White and to Majority Leader Alben Barkley, Byrnes is quoted as having complained that “Barkley can’t do anything without talking to that nigger first.” Cited in Rable, “The South and the Politics of Antilynching Legislation,” p. 218.

101
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 1st sess., April 13, 1937, p. 3437.

102
Ibid., p. 3444; April 15, 1937, p. 3547.

103
Ibid., 1st sess., April 15, 1937, p. 3550.

104
Ibid., 3d sess., January 24, 1938, p. 973.

105
For a discussion of these shifting patterns, see John Robert Moore, “The Conservative Coalition in the United States Senate, 1942–1945,”
Journal of Southern History
33 (1967): 370–72.

106
David Brion Davis,
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 77.

107
See http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0056/twps0056.html.

108
Eric Schickler, “Public Opinion, the Congressional Policy Agenda, and the Limits of New Deal Liberalism, 1935–1945,” paper prepared for the Congress and History Conference, University of Virginia, May 2009.

109
Brian D. Feinstein and Eric Schickler, “Platforms and Partners: The Civil Rights Realignment Reconsidered,”
Studies in American Political Development
22 (2008): 1–31.

110
For discussions, see Neil R. McMillan,
Remaking Dixie: The Impact of World War II on the American South
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1997); Pamela Tyler, “The Impact of the New Deal and World War II on the South,” in
A Companion to the American South,
ed. John B. Boles (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Morton Sosna, “More Important Than the Civil War? The Impact of World War II on the South,” in
Perspectives on the American South: An Annual Review of Society, Politics and Culture,
ed. James C. Cobb and Charles Reagan Wilson (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1987).

111
For an overview of demographic and related changes, see Numan Bartley,
The New South: 1945–1980
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), pp. 1–12.

112
There is a good compact discussion in Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South: 1913–1945
, pp. 318–53.

113
Derber, “Growth and Expansion,” p. 28.

114
Frank Traver De Vyver, “The Present Status of Labor Unions in the South,”
Southern Economic Journal
5 (1939): 485–98; Frank T. De Vyver, “The Present Status of Labor Unions in the South—1948,” ibid., 16 (1949): 1–22. Likewise, a survey of union membership in the South between 1939 and 1953 found that “for the entire period . . . union membership increased more rapidly in the South than in the rest of the country,” noting that most of the growth had come in wartime. See Leo Troy, “The Growth of Union Membership in the South, 1939–1953,” ibid., 24 (1958): 407–20. See also Derber, “Growth and Expansion,” p. 34.

115
H. M. Douty, “Development of Trade-Unionism in the South,”
Monthly Labor Review
63 (1946): 581. There is a very large literature debating the character and extent of union multiracialism in the South, but there can be no doubt that measured against then-current practices, the labor movement, and especially the CIO, despite lingering racist practices, constituted the most widespread and effective popular force across racial lines in the 1940s.

116
Ibid., pp. 576–79.

117
For overviews of the southern transformation, see Rupert B. Vance,
All These People: The Nation’s Human Resources in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945); John M. Maclachlin and Joe S. Floyd,
The Changing South
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1956); McKinney and Thompson, eds.,
The South in Continuity and Change.

118
James C. Cobb,
The Selling of the South: The Southern Crusade for Industrial Development, 1936–1980
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982); Bruce J. Schulman,
From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

119
Carl Brent Swisher, “The Supreme Court and the South,”
Journal of Politics
10 (1948): 291–92, 298–99. The state’s 1923 law provided that “in no event shall a negro be eligible to participate in a Democratic primary election held in the State of Texas, and should a negro vote in a Democratic primary election, such ballot shall be void and election officials shall not count the same.” Following a court challenge, the law was repealed in 1927 and replaced by a statute authorizing “every political party in this State through its State Executive Committee . . . to prescribe the qualifications of its own members.” See V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics
in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf), pp. 621–22.

120
Alexander Keyssar,
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 249.

121
Kimberley S. Johnson,
Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age before Brown
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), especially chaps. 3 and 4. For an uncommonly thoughtful consideration of the impact of the New Deal on the South, see Anthony J. Badger,
New Deal/New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), especially chaps. 2 and 3.

122
Maslow and Robison, “Civil Rights Legislation and the Fight for Equality,” p. 394.

123
Lois Ruchames,
Race, Jobs, and Politics: The Story of the FEPC
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); Merl E. Reed,
Seedtime for the Modern Civil Rights Movement: The President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practice, 1941–1946
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Anthony S. Chen,
The Fifth Freedom: Jobs, Politics, and Civil Rights in the United States, 1941–1972
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Kenneth M. Schultz, “The FEPC and the Legacy of the Labor-Based Civil Rights Movement of the 1940s,”
Labor History
49 (2008): 71–92.

124
Richard Hofstadter, “From Calhoun to the Dixiecrats,”
Social Research
16 (1949): 135.

125
Tindall,
The Emergence of the New South,
p. 716; Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day,
p. 201.

126
Howard Odum,
Race and Rumors of Race: Challenge to American Crisis
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943), pp. 3, 6, 7, 9, 13, 11.

127
Egerton,
Speak Now against the Day,
365, 358–63.

128
Charles Wallace Collins,
Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations
(New Orleans: Pelican Publishing Co., 1947), p. 254. Collins plays a central role in Hofstadter’s “Calhoun to the Dixiecrats.” An insightful discussion of Collins can be found in Joseph E. Lowndes,
From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 11–44.

129
Ibid., pp. 264, 256. For a similar view, see also Peter Molyneaux,
The South’s Political Plight
(Dallas: Calhoun Clubs of the South, 1948).

130
Andrew Edmund Kersten,
Race, Jobs, and the War: The FEPC in the Midwest, 1941–1946
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

131
Merl E. Reed, “FEPC and Federal Agencies in the South,”
Journal of Negro History
65 (1980): 43–56.

132
Or even more far-reaching than the provisions concerning employment that came to be embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That landmark law covered employers with fifty or more employees; 1972 amendments extended coverage to employers with fifteen or more employees.

133
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 2d sess., January 23, 1946, p. 251.

134
Ibid., January 22, 1946, p. 179; January 21, 1946, p. 158; January 28, 1946, pp. 455, 457; February 1, 1946, p. 723.

135
Ibid., January 29, 1946, p. 492; January 24, 1946, p. 321; January 31, 1946, p. 655.

136
Ibid., January 23, 1946, p. 253; January 30, 1946, p. 563; January 31, 1946, p. 632.

137
Ibid., January 23, 1946, p. 242.

138
Ibid., January 23, 1946, p. 252; January 30, 1946, p. 565; January 23, 1946, p. 245; February 1, 1946, p. 696; January 30, 1946, p. 565.

139
In 1949 and 1950, Congress returned to the FEPC after President Truman used his 1949 State of the Union address to propose a civil rights agenda that included the repeal of the poll tax and antilynching legislation. Following the Dixiecrat revolt, these proposals produced a particularly acrimonious debate. It was during this successful southern filibuster that the newly elected Texas senator, Lyndon Baines Johnson, offered an eloquent maiden speech, which lasted one and a half hours and was punctuated with the phrase “We of the South.” Johnson defended southern prerogatives and autonomy, arguing that federal civil rights law would “keep alive the old flames of hate and bigotry.” The speech is discussed in Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White,
pp. 8–9.

140
Hofstadter, “Calhoun to Dixiecrats,” p. 150.

141
Ibid., p. 141.

142
Congressional Record
, 79th Cong., 2d sess., February 1, 1946, p. 719; February 4, 1946, p. 813; February 1, 1946, p. 708; January 31, 1946, p. 632.

CHAPTER 6
BALLOTS FOR SOLDIERS

1
Roosevelt, “who considered this one of his most important messages,” had planned to deliver the State of the Union address in person. “He himself labored hard and long on it, a good part of the work was done with us [Samuel Rosenman and Robert Sherwood] sitting around his bed, to which he was confined with a bad cough.” Rosenman commented on how “the Teheran Conference must have been a terrific strain. . . . The President developed some kind of bronchial affliction in Teheran which gave him a racking cough. . . . It took him a long time to shake it off. While Teheran was a high point in the President’s career as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces and as our leader in foreign affairs, it seemed to me to be also the turning point of his physical career. I think his physical decline can be dated from Teheran, although at the time we did not see it.” Samuel I. Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1952), pp. 417–18, 411–12.

2
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 11, 1944, in
Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932–1945,
ed. B. D. Zevin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), pp. 388–97. The call to the right to vote is on p. 395. Cass Sunstein has offered a detailed consideration of this speech in
The Second Bill of Rights: FDR’s Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More Than Ever
(New York: Basic Books, 2006). Soldier voting usually merits only brief mention in histories of Franklin Roosevelt’s third term. Useful descriptive summaries are Boyd A. Martin, “The Service Vote in the Elections of 1944,”
American Political Science Review
39 (1945): 720–32; Michael Anderson, “Politics, Patriotism, and the State: The Fight over the Soldier Vote, 1942–1944,” in
Politics and Progress: American Society and the State Since 1865
, ed. Andrew E. Kersten and Kriste Lindenmeyer (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001), pp. 84–100; Christopher DeRosa, “The Battle for Uniform Votes: The Politics of Soldier Voting in the Elections of 1944,” in
Beyond Combat: Essays in Military History in Honor of Russell F. Weigley,
ed. Edward G. Longacre and Theodore J. Zeman (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007), pp. 129–52.