Master of the Senate (41 page)

This respect was based on the belief that, as
Newsweek’s
longtime chief congressional correspondent, Samuel Shaffer was to state flatly, “Russell was not a racist,” and that he had “an essential reasonableness in this prickly area.” “Russell’s view must be respected,” Shaffer wrote. “He did not say ‘no’ to change but tried to regulate the pace of change to prevent the disorder he believed would follow upon change forced down the throats [of the South].” Harold H. Martin wrote in the
Saturday Evening Post
in 1951 that Russell’s opposition to civil rights legislation, “honest and unshakable,” was based on his conviction that such legislation, “if passed, would lead to rioting and bloodshed in the South.” Journalists clothed his opposition in a romantic view of the South. In an admiring cover story in 1957,
Time
explained that “Dick Russell’s roots lie deeply and inextricably in the long-lost dream of the Old South. He was brought up … amid a smoky Georgia haze of swollen, mud-yellow streams and blowing red dust, of pine-cone fires and fireflies and summer thunder, of white new-blown cotton and wild peach blossoms and slow mules dragging their lazy load.” And Russell epitomized the best of that heritage,
Time
said. “Dick … admired and respected [Negroes] in that special, paternal Southern way.”

The Washington press corps and northern liberals paid Russell, in fact, what for them was their ultimate compliment: they assured their readers that,
no matter what Dick Russell was forced to say for the record, his heart was in the right place. As Martin put it in that 1951 article: “Civil righters who like Russell personally and who note that he bears no resemblance in speech or manner to the classic Northern concept of the Southern demagogue are inclined to think that he is far more liberal in his heart than he is in his votes.” And Martin added, “Russell, indeed, feels none of the demagogue’s hatred toward the Negro, and he despises the Ku Klux Klan mentality which looks upon the Negro as something less than a human being….”

His opposition to proposals to allow black Americans to vote, and to protect them from lynch mobs—his opposition, in fact, to any and all civil rights proposals—was, these journalists said, opposition he was forced to make for political reasons, because otherwise he could not be re-elected. His speeches, they said, were speeches made only for the consumption of his constituents. Dick Russell, they said over and over, year after year—as year after year, decade after decade, Dick Russell fought civil rights bills—Dick Russell didn’t really mean the arguments he was making.

He was such a decent man, they said—he
couldn’t
mean them.

B
UT OF COURSE
the high ground is generally the best ground from which to fight—and never more so than in twentieth-century senatorial battles for the Lost Cause. The South, with its twenty-two votes, was as outnumbered in the Senate as it had been in the Civil War. It needed allies to win. And potential allies—non-southern senators sympathetic to the southern position or at least willing to support it in return for southern support for pet causes of their own—didn’t want to be labeled as racists. If they were to be bound to the Cause, its racial aspects had to be toned down, so that votes against the poll tax or anti-lynching laws could be cloaked in loftier—constitutional—principles, in philosophy rather than prejudice. Richard Russell’s rationalizations made it easier for non-southern senators seeking rationalizations to vote with the South; his approach, so different from that of the Senate’s racist demagogues, was vastly more effective in defending the cause that was so precious to him. And the more perceptive of the southern senators realized this. As Sam Ervin was to put it: “Dick Russell always carried on his combat in such a knightly fashion that he never aroused the antagonism of the people most determined to overcome his efforts. He had an uncanny capacity to do that…. Most southerners possess that capacity more or less to a limited degree, but Dick Russell possessed it to an unsurpassed degree.”

And the South was not only fireflies and peach blossoms and white new-blown cotton, not only gentility and graciousness, not only a sturdy Jeffersonian yeomanry, not only the gallantry of Longstreet and Pickett and of staunch Stonewall on the ridge, not only a place of—in the words Richard Russell spoke on the Senate floor—“peace and harmony between the races.” As
Richard Russell could hardly have avoided knowing, since at least two incidents that somewhat disproved those words occurred not just in Georgia, and not just in Barrow County, but right down the road from his home.

In 1908, when Dick was an eleven-year-old boy in Winder, a young Negro was arrested in Winder and charged with assaulting a “respected white woman.” A judge in nearby Gwinnett acquitted him after a witness testified that the accused had actually been at another location at the time of the alleged crime. Upon his return to Winder, however, the black youth’s train was met at the station by what the
Winder News
called “a reception committee of unknown parties.” Taken to “a secluded spot,” he was given 175 lashes with a buggy whip to “persuade” him to leave town. (“During the persuasion,” the newspaper said, the youth “admitted” his guilt.) No one was prosecuted for the crime. In 1922, when Dick was already in the State Legislature, a black resident of Winder, Jesse Long Reed, was charged with the attempted murder of a twenty-three-year-old white woman (“He … left the black bruises of his hands on her white neck,” the
Winder News
reported). Arrested as he was eating in a local restaurant, Reed was taken to jail, where “people from all directions began gathering” and “there was talk of lynching.” A county judge ordered the sheriff to “get the negro out of Winder.” As he was driving his prisoner to Atlanta, however, the sheriff “found the road completely blocked with five or six automobiles” about three miles outside town. “About 25” masked men armed with pistols dragged Reed from the car, hung him from a pine tree and riddled his body with bullets. “For hours people gathered to view the negro as he hung by the neck,” with some families building fires, spreading blankets, and eating picnic dinners. The sheriff said he could not identify any of the lynchers because they wore masks, and no one was ever prosecuted for the crime.

Russell had arrived in the Legislature to find the Governor, Hugh M. Dorsey, and a group of legislators attempting to pass anti-lynching legislation—since during the past four years alone there had been fifty-eight lynchings in Georgia. Russell did not participate in this attempt. During his ten years in the Legislature—the last five as Speaker of the House—there were other lynchings in Georgia. There is no record of Russell’s views on the subject. There is only the fact that in the House that he headed, no anti-lynching legislation was passed. He “avoided,” in his biographer’s careful term, “inflammatory and emotional issues such as lynching….”

When Russell was elected Governor, he became chief executive of a state whose criminal justice system was considered something special even for the South, in the harshness with which its courts and prisons treated those who came within its purview, the overwhelming majority of whom were black. “Georgia exceeds in size and wealth most of the nearby states, but its prison system must be placed at the bottom of the list,” the National Society of Penal Institutions declared. Russell was very proud of that rigor, and of the role he played in maintaining it—so proud, in fact, that when, in 1969, a reporter interviewing
him about his pre-Senate career neglected to raise the subject, Russell raised it himself.

“I suppose I was the harshest Governor on criminals” in the history of Georgia, he said. “All the statistics the last time I saw [them] showed I pardoned and paroled fewer people than any Governor they ever had.” Even as harsh a governor as his successor Eugene Talmadge (known as “Whippin’ Gene” because he said that while he had never actually been a member of the Ku Klux Klan, “I used to do a little whippin’ myself) had, Russell said, pardoned three times as many criminals as he had. Georgia’s criminal justice system as a whole, Russell said, was exceptional in the fairness with which it dispensed justice. Pointing out that he had been a criminal lawyer in his early career, he said, “I had never seen a man I knew was innocent, convicted.”

The incident during his governorship that brought him, for a brief time, into the national spotlight revolved around the harshest aspect of that system. In 1932, America was stunned by the publication of
I Am a Fugitive from a Georgia Chain Gang.
*
Its author, Robert E. Burns, a young white New York accountant, successful before the First World War, had emerged from the war shell-shocked and unable to hold a job, wandered south to Georgia where, “so hungry I was seeing things,” he was partly persuaded and partly intimidated by two men into joining them in robbing a grocery store of four dollars and eighty cents. Arrested in 1922, he was sentenced to six to ten years in the Georgia chain gangs, where men wore a heavy iron shackle on each ankle and were manacled together at work all day, and in their bunks at night—those of them lucky enough to be in bunks and not in the notorious “cage wagons.” Burns saw men tortured in medieval stocks, beaten with heavy leather straps, and worked to death until, within a year, he escaped.

During the next several years, he became a reporter and then the editor of
Chicago
magazine, before Georgia detectives showed up in his office in 1929. Georgia prison officials promised him a release or a parole within ninety days if he returned voluntarily. As soon as he returned, however, the promise was broken; he was remanded to the same chain gang to complete his full sentence. Escaping within a year again and making his way to New Jersey, he wrote his book, which received respectful reviews. The “real importance” of this “breathtaking and heart-wrenching book … lies in the baring of Georgia’s incredible penal system … which manages to defeat essential justice and outrage humanity,” said the
New York Times.
“The conditions he describes there, the filth, the starvation rations, the inhuman shackles and chains, the body-breaking labor, the vicious cruelty, would be almost unbelievable if it were not that… investigators … substantiate what he says.” And the
New York Herald Tribune
said, “One would like to hear the answer of Georgia authorities to this burning book.”

The answer came from Georgia’s Governor. Demanding that Burns be extradited to serve the remaining years of his full term, he dispatched a team of state prosecutors, armed with somewhat unconvincing affidavits from convicts defending conditions in the chain gangs, to bring him back. When New Jersey’s Governor, Arthur H. Moore, refused to allow him to be extradited, the Georgia Governor reacted to the refusal with rage. The New Jersey decision, he said, was “a slander on the State of Georgia and its institutions.” And, he said, it was unconstitutional, a violation of the rights of a “sovereign state.” “The Governor of New Jersey, nor anyone else has any right to wantonly and deliberately insult the state of Georgia and her people by declining to honor an extradition for a convict on the ground that our State is uncivilized and backward, inhumane to prisoners and barbarous in their punishments.” As for “charges that our penal system is barbarous and inhumane,” the Georgia Governor said, they must “be denounced for what they are: absolutely false and unfounded…. Prisoners are well fed and treated humanely, but are not coddled nor maintained in luxury.”

The Governor, of course, was Richard Russell, and the response of northern newspapers to Russell’s statements was summarized by one editorial which said, “The State of New Jersey … is telling the world that something is rotten in the State of Georgia,” but “The State of Georgia, far from bowing its head in guilty shame, is taking the offensive and lashing out at New Jersey and its Governor with both fists. We can see how Georgia feels about it all in the statements of its Governor….” But when, a decade later, articles about now-Senator Russell began appearing in national magazines, they contained no reference to his defense of a system that defeated essential justice and outraged humanity. The flattering cover stories in
Time
and
Newsweek
, the long profiles in the
Saturday Evening Post
, that celebrated the progressive reforms of Russell’s governorship, never even mentioned the Georgia Chain Gang incident; in fact, if there was a single mention of the incident in even one of the scores of profiles of Russell that appeared in newspapers and magazines during the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s, the author has been unable to find it.

Nor did any of the articles mention that the southerner who said that anti-lynching legislation was “unnecessary and uncalled for,” who said that the South was a place of “peace and harmony between the races,” had had, very close to his home, at least two lynchings for which no one was ever convicted or even prosecuted. None mentioned that the southerner who asserted so passionately that the South could take care of the lynching problem itself had done nothing to take care of it as Speaker or Governor. None mentioned that he had, in at least one respect, been the harshest Governor in the history of a very harsh state—none mentioned any of the aspects of his career that might have hinted at the existence of feelings other than the “love” for black Americans of which he talked, and the “fairness” and “moderation” for which he was so widely praised.

•    •    •

A
ND IF
R
ICHARD
R
USSELL’S SENTIMENTS
were kept on a lofty plane so long as he, and the South he loved, were winning, and winning easily, when winning became more difficult there did indeed begin to surface hints of feelings that might have surprised those who were sure that Richard Russell was “not a racist,” that he had “an essential reasonableness” about race, that he was not trying to prevent change but merely to “regulate” its pace, that “he is far more liberal in his heart than he is in his votes,” that he “admired and respected [Negroes] in that special, paternal Southern way.”

Winning became harder because of the Second World War. Turning back civil rights measures in the Senate had been easy in 1935 and 1938, but the great buildup for the oncoming war brought huge defense plants to the South (ironically, to Georgia more than any other state, thanks to the influence of Russell and his House counterpart, Carl Vinson, on congressional Armed Services Committees; more than twenty-five thousand workers would be employed on the assembly lines at the great bomber plant at Marietta alone), and in 1941 President Roosevelt established by executive order a Fair Employment Practices Commission and empowered it to move legally against defense and war contractors who discriminated on the basis of race, color, or religion.