Why White Liberals Fail

Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump

Anthony J. Badger

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674276093
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique du Nord

It's not the economy, stupid: How liberal politicians' faith in the healing powers of economic growth—and refusal to address racial divisions—fueled reactionary politics across the South. From FDR to Clinton, charismatic Democratic leaders have promised a New South—a model of social equality and economic opportunity that is always just around the corner. So how did the region become the stronghold of conservative Republicans in thrall to Donald Trump? After a lifetime studying Southern politics, Anthony Badger has come to a provocative conclusion: white liberals failed because they put their faith in policy solutions as an engine for social change and were reluctant to confront directly the explosive racial politics dividing their constituents.After World War II, many Americans believed that if the edifice of racial segregation, white supremacy, and voter disfranchisement could be dismantled across the South, the forces of liberalism would prevail. Hopeful that economic modernization and education would bring about gradual racial change, Southern moderates were rattled when civil rights protest and federal intervention forced their hand. Most were fatalistic in the face of massive resistance. When the end of segregation became inevitable, it was largely driven by activists and mediated by Republican businessmen.Badger follows the senators who refused to sign the Southern Manifesto and rejected Nixon's Southern Strategy. He considers the dilemmas liberals faced across the South, arguing that their failure cannot be blamed simply on entrenched racism. Conservative triumph was not inevitable, he argues, before pointing to specific false steps and missed opportunities.Could the biracial coalition of low-income voters that liberal politicians keep counting on finally materialize? Badger sees hope but urges Democrats not to be too complacent.

Part I A SOUTHERN NEW DEAL, 1933–1945

CHAPTER ONE The New Deal

Southern Enthusiasm

ON THE FIFTH OF DECEMBER IN 1938, President Franklin D. Roosevelt went to Chapel Hill to receive an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina. Smarting from midterm elections in which the Republicans had made significant gains, with unemployment still high after the “Roosevelt Recession” of 1937–1938, the president nonetheless remained defiant. Citing the late Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo, he gave a ringing endorsement of liberal principles. “There’s change whether we will it or not,” he said. Wrapping himself in the activist reforming mantle of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, he assured his audience that he was not a “consorter with communists, a destroyer of the rich, a breaker of our ancient traditions” who breakfasted each morning on a dish of “grilled millionaires.”

Roosevelt recounted a recent conversation with his elderly neighbor in Warm Springs, Georgia. The neighbor, “an old-fashioned conservative,” said he didn’t understand all the newfangled goings-on in Washington, but what he did know was “this section of the country, and I want to tell you that there is a new spirit abroad in the land. I am not talking about the fact that there is more buying power, that houses are painted that were never painted before, that our banks are safe, that our roads and schools are better. What I am talking about is that all of our young people in my section of the country think that we are going places.”¹

Roosevelt’s speech came at the end of nine months in which the creation of a liberal South had loomed large in his thinking. In the spring, he had commissioned a report on the South from the Temporary National Economic Council. Pulled together by southerners who were second-rank officials in key New Deal agencies, the Report on Economic Conditions of the South painted a picture of a region rich in natural resources yet chronically poor and undeveloped. The South was, in FDR’s estimation, the nation’s number one economic problem.

To implement the report’s agenda would require sympathetic members of Congress. The president used this goal of revitalizing the South to justify his attempt, in the summer of 1938, to see liberals elected in Democratic primaries. Two of the most high-profile campaigns were in the South, where he tried to unseat veteran senators Walter F. George of Georgia and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina. The failure of this attempted “purge,” as it came to be known, highlighted the need for a pro–New Deal organization in the South. The report became the foundation document for the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an organization of progressive southerners, white and Black, launched in November in Birmingham, Alabama.²

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was a congenial location for New Deal liberals. FDR told his audience he was happy to become an honorary alumnus of the university, “typifying as it does American liberal thought through American action.” He remembered visiting a quarter of a century earlier at the behest of Josephus Daniels, his boss in the Wilson administration, who had wanted him to see a university “which was thinking and acting in terms of today and tomorrow and not in the tradition of yesterday.”³

In the 1920s, under Harry Woodburn Chase, the University of North Carolina became the first southern school to be recognized as a leading research university. Its Institute for Research in Social Science, led by Howard Odum, produced unsparing analyses of the region’s poverty. The Georgia-born Odum had pioneered the study of Black folk songs and southern religion, and he had been recruited to Chapel Hill to found one of the earliest Schools of Public Welfare. The Institute for Research in Social Science, which he founded in 1924, laid bare the racial dimensions of poverty and examined the problems of labor relations in North Carolina’s textile industry. In its early years, the labor relations studies were controversial. As one researcher noted, it was “the conservative industrial faction” that reacted more angrily than the “conservative race faction” to the institute’s activities. From 1933 onward, many of the institute’s staff went to Washington to work for the New Deal’s relief and rural poverty agencies. Their work delivered the empirical underpinning of the Temporary National Economic Council Report.⁴

The university’s New Deal liberalism was embodied by its president, Frank Porter Graham, who had been an immensely popular dean of students and professor of history at his alma mater before he was drafted to run the university in 1930. Supported by an army of devoted alumni in the state legislature, he had successfully guided the university through the cost-cutting imperatives of the Depression and had fought off the constant efforts of David Clark, publisher of the Southern Textile Bulletin, to eliminate radicalism among the students and faculty at Chapel Hill. Graham fiercely defended the civil liberties of labor organizers at the time of the violent textile strikes of 1934, personally standing bail for one of his former students, socialist Alton Lawrence. He fought for freedom of speech on campus, just as he and others had warded off the efforts of religious conservatives to ban the teaching of evolution in the 1920s. He defended the rights of Marxist professors to express their views as private citizens, provided they were doing their jobs properly, and protected one who had dined with the African American vice presidential candidate for the Communist Party in 1936 in neighboring Durham.⁵

Graham’s Presbyterian faith had instilled in him a concern for the plight of African Americans, and in 1913, as secretary of the YMCA, he had initiated surveys of housing and sanitation conditions for Chapel Hill’s Black population. In 1932, he had invited Langston Hughes to speak on campus. Later he allowed the Soviet ambassador to speak, as well as the general secretary of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder. In 1938, Graham was elected chair of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. In his address to the November conference, he proclaimed, “The black man is the primary test of American democracy and Christianity.”⁶

Left-leaning politicians in Washington who wanted to bolster support in the South for potentially controversial New Deal programs turned to Graham. As a result, he was appointed vice-chair of the consumers’ board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933. The following year, FDR asked him to chair the Advisory Council on Economic Security, which proposed the passage of what became the Social Security Act in 1935. In 1938, FDR prevailed upon him to chair the Advisory Committee on Economic Conditions in the South, which would publicly launch the TNEC Report.⁷

No one could challenge Frank Graham’s liberal credentials on economic issues. He was a quintessential New Dealer. But his position on race highlighted the limitations of white southern liberals in the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1938, a young African American woman, Pauli Murray, had applied to the University of North Carolina hoping to do graduate work in sociology. Brought up in the Durham public school system, Murray had a bachelor’s degree from Hunter College in New York and she was working for the Works Progress Administration’s Workers Education Service. Roosevelt’s speech extolling Chapel Hill as a bastion of liberal thought provoked her to challenge him the next day.

Murray wrote to FDR on behalf of 12,000,000 of his citizens who “have to endure insults, injustices, and such degradation of spirit that you would believe impossible as a human being and a Christian.” She spelled out the realities of segregation and disenfranchisement. “We have to live in ghettoes everywhere,” she wrote, “not only in Warm Springs, Ga., but also in the city of Washington, the very heart of our democracy.” No wonder she and other young Negroes had to move to northern cities. The president had praised the University of North Carolina “as an institution of liberal thought” and spoken of the necessity of a change “in a body of law to meet the problems of an accelerated era of civilization.” She challenged him to use his prestige to ensure that the university opened its doors to Negro students. If not, she prodded, did it mean “that everything you said has no meaning for us as Negroes?”⁸

Murray knew that the southerners on FDR’s White House staff would be unlikely to show him her letter. To attract his attention, she sent a copy to Eleanor Roosevelt. (Murray had met the First Lady in 1934, when Mrs. Roosevelt had visited Camp TERA, a residential school for unemployed women in upstate New York in which she’d been enrolled.) Eleanor Roosevelt wrote back that she understood Murray’s point “perfectly,” but “great changes come slowly.” She said she shared her husband’s faith in young people. “The South is changing,” she asserted, but then she cautioned, “don’t push too fast.” Nevertheless the First Lady paraphrased some of Murray’s concerns in her newspaper column, “My Day,” two days later.⁹

On December 12, 1938, the Supreme Court handed down the Gaines decision, finding that in the absence of a law school in the state of Missouri for African Americans, the state could not deny a Black resident admission to the University of Missouri Law School. Nor could it satisfy its constitutional obligations to provide “separate but equal” opportunities to its white and Black students by providing tuition for Black students to attend law school in another state. A segregated state would face a stark choice: it could either integrate its flagship universities or build new institutions that would provide a “substantially equal” education for African Americans.

In light of the Gaines decision, Pauli Murray wrote in January 1939 to Frank Graham asking him to provide the leadership that FDR had asked for. Would it not be a “victory for liberal thought in the South” if the university admitted her, rather than forcing her to carry the issue to the courts? How could African Americans in the South be expected to fight the threat of fascism if they were treated the same as the Jews in Germany?¹⁰

Murray was certainly writing to a sympathetic recipient. After the war, Graham had been active in the interracial movement, serving on the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Local branches of the CIC brought middle-class white people into contact, often for the first time, with middle-class Black community leaders. Whites were alerted to the daily humiliations suffered by their Black counterparts and the lack of public services for their community. The Interracial Commission worked to soften the edges of segregation and to end its more egregious excesses. It sought to defuse the possibility of racial conflict in the immediate postwar years and to eliminate lynching and miscarriages of justice. It aimed to secure legislative and executive support for desperately needed improvements in health, education, and civic services for Black communities. But whites like Graham involved in the interracial movement rarely envisaged the end of segregation. They tended to assume that “the Negro problem,” as it was euphemistically called, could only be solved by gradual change, mediated by well-meaning whites.

Black journalist George Streator captured the dynamics of this paternalism in 1933, when he proclaimed that it was high time “The Colored South Speaks for Itself.” “Having formed the habit of dictating the program of Negro Education and welfare,” he argued, “these men … are reluctant to listen to the very people to whose training they have contributed.” Younger whites at Chapel Hill also chafed at the worthy futility this represented, denouncing meetings suffused with “the patronizing approach on the part of the whites and the ingratiating appeal from the Negroes” and showcasing the “confessional value … [of] Negroes … bursting with a smoldering sense of injustice and the erase of conscience … which the whites get from their benevolent gestures.”¹¹

By this time, Graham almost certainly regarded segregation as wrong. In 1936, he had told Walter White privately that it would please him greatly if the NAACP’s campaign against the inequities of segregation succeeded. (He declined White’s invitation to join the NAACP’s National Board.) He was already being criticized for his support for increasing the resources allocated to Black educational institutions in the state. When he received Pauli Murray’s letter, he was sympathetic to her appeal but concluded that, as a state official, he could not admit her until the state changed its laws. Where Murray feared that continued segregation would make Negroes less likely to support the war against fascists, Graham feared that precipitate action would drive whites into the hands of the fascists and set back the cause of racial progress. In the long run, he believed change would have to be evolutionary: religion and education would have to bring about gradual change. The races, he told Murray “go up or down together.”¹²

To Murray, Graham’s stance was a frustrating evasion. Two years later, the young African American historian John Hope Franklin was invited to dinner by Graham, who saw himself as trapped in the middle between extremists on both sides. Like Murray, Franklin did not doubt Graham’s sincerity. He could see that Graham was trying to be helpful, understanding, and reasonable. The problem was that “all the reasonableness, as sweet as it was, was on one side. On his side.”¹³

Graham was one of the most advanced liberals in the South when it came to race relations. While he thought that segregation in the long run might be indefensible, he found it difficult to contemplate a desegregated university and feared a white backlash against any attempt to impose dramatic racial change. He understood the grievances of the middle-class Black leaders and educators he knew, with whom he enjoyed easy relations. But his faith in gradualism ultimately prevailed.

To read Graham’s correspondence with James Shepard, president of the North Carolina College for Negroes (later North Carolina Central University) is to read unremitting obsequiousness on the part of Shepard and pervasive condescension on the part of Graham. There was seemingly no level of flattery from Black leaders that could embarrass him. He accepted it as his due. As Charles Holden has shown in his work on academic freedom at Chapel Hill between the wars, Graham was courageous (and effective) in his defense of academic freedom, but his concern was mainly to fight o...