A Stone of Hope

Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow

David L. Chappell

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780807895573
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Derechos civiles en política

The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition.
Chappell reconsiders the intellectual roots of civil rights reform, showing how northern liberals' faith in the power of human reason to overcome prejudice was at odds with the movement's goal of immediate change. Even when liberals sincerely wanted change, they recognized that they could not necessarily inspire others to unite and fight for it. But the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament--sometimes translated into secular language--drove African American activists to unprecedented solidarity and self-sacrifice. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson, Modjeska Simkins, and other black leaders believed, as the Hebrew prophets believed, that they had to stand apart from society and instigate dramatic changes to force an unwilling world to abandon its sinful ways. Their impassioned campaign to stamp out "the sin of segregation" brought the vitality of a religious revival to their cause. Meanwhile, segregationists found little support within their white southern religious denominations. Although segregationists outvoted and outgunned black integrationists, the segregationists lost, Chappell concludes, largely because they did not have a religious commitment to their cause.

1

Hungry Liberals

THEIR SENSE THAT SOMETHING WAS MISSING

The destruction of Jim Crow was one of the crowning achievements of the period when liberals dominated American politics, from 1933 to 1969. Yet the overall liberal commitment to Jim Crow’s destruction is easy to exaggerate when looking backward through the lens of the 1960s. There were no significant gains in civil rights in the first part of the period, the 1930s, when liberals’ power was greater and more secure than ever before or since. A few New Deal liberals believed that it was morally necessary—and that it was politically possible—to do something about racial prejudice in the 1930s. To say that such antiracist liberals were few is not to denigrate their integrity or courage. Rather the opposite. The few included First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, abetted by New Deal supporters and officials like Will Alexander, Mary McLeod Bethune, Virginia and Clifford Durr, Clark Foreman, George Mitchell, Rexford Tugwell, Senator Robert Wagner, Palmer Weber, and Aubrey Williams. ¹ Black leaders often considered the minor but unprecedented gestures of these few to be heroic. Their gestures probably had something to do with black voters’ swing from overwhelmingly Republican before 1932 to overwhelmingly Democratic since 1934.² Still, liberals could not—at least they did not—alleviate discrimination for most African Americans during the New Deal.

Secretary Ickes—former head of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—sketched out the position of Negro sympathizers in the New Deal in his diary.³ When Senator Josiah Bailey of North Carolina accused Ickes of “trying to break down the segregation laws” in a speech in 1937, Ickes wrote to Bailey that opposition to segregation “had never been my position.” He explained, “As a matter of fact, I think it is up to the states to work out their own social problems if possible, and while I have always been interested in seeing that the Negro has a square deal, I have never dissipated my strength against the particular stone wall of segregation.” Like most liberals, Ickes had more faith in the gradual processes of education and economic development than in political action. He believed that the stone wall of segregation would “crumble when the Negro has brought himself to a higher educational and economic status. After all, we can’t force people on each other who do not like each other, even when no question of color is involved.” Like Bailey, Ickes took it for granted that public association of New Deal officials with desegregationism would be “prejudicial”—would injure Roosevelt’s standing with his key constituency, the enfranchised white South. Ickes also assumed the futility of any attack on segregation. ⁴

The few liberals who joined Ickes in taking up the cause of “seeing that the Negro has a square deal” in the 1930s strove to connect that cause with the general liberal program—an abstractly plausible connection, in the sense that freedom and equality were liberal goals.⁵ More important to liberals with a practical eye, including Mrs. Roosevelt, the connection had some political plausibility: abolishing the poll tax, she believed, would create a massive pro-New Deal constituency. Millions of poor white as well as black southerners would get the vote. The new voters’ presumable loyalty to FDR might be enough to compensate the Democrats for the inevitable reaction: retaliation from the white supremacist oligarchs of the South, who were so strong in the Democratic Party—and often so supportive of the New Deal—that the president had to be very careful not to offend them .⁶

Unfortunately, however, the antiracist link with liberalism did not have enough political plausibility: for the time being, the oligarchs had the poll tax and were strong enough to prevent its abolition in most states. Nor could New Dealers be certain, even if they could abolish the poll tax, that the new voters would be loyal to them: the black break with the Party of Lincoln was too recent to look reliable, and poor white southerners were, rightly or wrongly, assumed to be more devoted to racial restrictions than rich ones. As journalist Marquis Childs wrote in 1942, “The issue of the poll tax, which keeps from one third to one half of all the eligible white voters away from the polls in the South, has been talked about by the younger New Dealers, but no direct attack has ever been made on it.” ⁷ Those who did attack the poll tax, including the NAACP and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, got little support from New Dealers in Washington.

Despite most New Dealers’ failure to support anti-poll tax legislation, or even (for northerners) apple-pie proposals like federal antilynching legislation, NAACP leaders sought to connect black hopes to liberalism. Thus NAACP leaders did their bit to redefine liberalism in the 1930s, or at least to increase liberals’ emphasis on substantive equality.⁸ Liberals, especially Democratic ones, were slow to respond, though they responded more than those who were known as conservatives, and they were more politically viable than the communists, socialists, and Christian radicals who embraced the antiracist cause with greater abandon. In their prime, New Deal liberals had more urgent and realistic things to strive for than racial equality.

It is hard to sort out whether liberals cared a great deal about racism, but lacked the power to challenge it, or simply cared too little about racism, until black voters and protesters forced their hand three decades later, in the 1960s. It is clear, however, that to do something about Jim Crow, liberals needed something more forceful—either stronger conviction or greater power—than they had in the 1930s. A sense of needing more, of lacking what they needed to realize their own goals, pervaded liberal thought. Liberals expressed that sense frequently in the 1930s and 1940s. Though not always connected in their minds with racial equality, this sense of incompleteness provides a window into liberalism’s fundamental limitations. Through it, one can begin to see the path to the civil rights movement’s eventual success in overcoming those limitations.

Liberal insiders at the 1948 Democratic National Convention remembered the post-New Deal shift in favor of civil rights as a dramatic break with the past. According to Chester Bowles:

The national strength of the Democratic party had for a century and a half been based on a coalition between Northern liberals and city organization leaders on the one hand and Southern Populists on the other. . . . It was leaders such as James Byrnes of South Carolina and Sam Rayburn of Texas who had guided through Congress Roosevelt’s proposals for Social Security, subsidized agriculture, TVA and work relief for the unemployed.

The political price that Roosevelt and the Northern liberals had been forced to pay for Southern support for the New Deal was a heavy one: a political moratorium on the issue of civil rights.⁹

Yet in some ways New Dealers appeared less useful to devotees of civil rights after the war than before. We now know that, twenty years after the end of World War II, liberals finally won enough votes in Congress to pass serious civil rights laws. But over most of those twenty years, liberals in the Democratic Party still depended on the support of southern members of Congress, who in turn depended on racist laws. As black people migrated to northern cities, where they could vote, many northern liberals grew bold in speaking out against southern politicians. But at the same time, liberals felt a new sense of powerlessness in domestic affairs.

Congress drove home liberals’ sense of powerlessness by overriding President Harry Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Northern Democrats depended on unions the way southern Democrats depended on the poll tax. But enough reactionaries had been elected in 1946 to reverse the pro-labor trend of the New Deal. Senator Robert Wagner, who epitomized the new liberalism of the New Deal days, viewed the reversal from the hospital: the override of the Taft-Hartley veto was “one of the bitterest disappointments I have ever experienced. For I was forced to see the work of a lifetime destroyed, while I lay on my back in bed.” ¹⁰ Though liberalism after World War II was more strongly identified with black civil rights than before the war, liberals lacked the popular mandate they had had, or believed they had had, in the age of Roosevelt. To judge them by their own words, liberals were in deep trouble after World War II. One of their most vigorous minds, historian Richard Hofstadter, observed in 1948 that liberals were in a “rudderless and demoralized state.” They were anxious and defensive, filled with self-doubt, and fighting among themselves.¹¹

Postwar liberals feared that Franklin Roosevelt’s personality, rather than their own ideology, was what had attracted vast majorities to the New Deal. This fear was reinforced by their great loss in popularity after FDR’s death. For this and other reasons, liberals trimmed their sails.¹² The depression was one of the many great things the war killed, but in doing so it killed a lot of liberal hope. Absence of economic crisis made serious reform hard to sell, and FDR’s successor, Harry Truman, was at once less committed to reform and a lousier salesman than FDR. The depression did not return, as so many experts believed it would. Instead, liberals had to convince voters of the urgency of reform through the greatest boom ever in American history, which was rather like urging medicine upon a healthy and increasingly spoiled child. Liberals on the whole abandoned the large-scale planning by which they had tried to alter the basic structural inequities of capitalism in the 1930s. Instead, they tried to ensure greater individual rights ¹³ and the continuation of economic growth.¹⁴ Their domestic concerns were often set aside in foreign policy disputes.

THE QUEST FOR SECULAR FAITH

To understand postwar liberals’ lack of confidence, one must look at the historical roots of their sense of alienation from the masses. They feared that they could not communicate with the public they so earnestly wanted to help. Liberals had long suspected that their program would have a troubled relationship with democracy. The roots of this suspicion were visible in liberals’ frequent exasperation with the popularity—the democratic power—of irrational, that is to say illiberal, appeals. Liberals’ enemies always felt free to whip up popular nostalgia for tradition, respect for authority, and religious enthusiasm. Liberals thought that their enemies fought unfairly, but they could not deny the advantages of illiberal appeals in a democracy.

Even in their confident days, the most sensitive and articulate liberals sensed that something was missing from their method and program. They always understood their method and program to be based on faith that human reason could solve the “problems” of human society.¹⁵ Yet the deepest believers in reason perceived that reason was not enough. The pragmatist philosopher who gave American liberalism its distinctive cast in the Progressive Era, William James, memorably expressed the need for an irrational crusade to inspire the sacrifices that reason could not inspire in his famous essay “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910). James hated war and hoped that it could be abolished, but he wrote that those who campaigned against “war’s irrationality and horror” missed the point. Modern man still had “all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors.” War was thrilling in a way that meeting human needs was not. That was why people loved it. Armies bred pride in collective effort. Groups that pursued such nonmilitary goals as “pacific cosmopolitan industrialism,” on the other hand, bred only “shame at the idea of belonging to such a collectivity.” James supported efforts to outlaw war, and he believed in “the gradual advent of some sort of socialistic equilibrium.” But he worried about inspiring people to get there. In a utopian program of good wages and short hours, “Where is the sharpness and precipitousness, the contempt for life, whether one’s own, or another’s? Where is the savage ‘yes’ and ‘no,’ the unconditional duty? Where is the conscription? Where is the blood-tax? Where is anything that one feels honored by belonging to?” ¹⁶

James, the scientific thinker who had suffered a nervous breakdown, was echoing the patron saint of modern English-speaking liberalism, John Stuart Mill, who had suffered a similar breakdown in the early nineteenth century. Mill’s famous breakdown came with the revelation that, if all his desires for social reform came true, he would still be unhappy. Reforms could satisfy the calculations of his father’s great utilitarian system, but the human soul craved something deeper. Thus began Mill’s search into the irrational urges and unscientific flights of Romanticism for the missing elements of liberalism.¹⁷ Liberals have not always had time to continue that search, but they have never satisfied the hunger that led to it.¹⁸

John Dewey, who played the role of patron philosopher of American liberals more often than anybody after James’s death in 1910, was more cautious and more persistent than James or Mill in exploring what liberalism lacked. At the beginning of American liberals’ political ascendancy in 1929, Dewey noted that “liberals are notoriously hard to organize.” Reason was just not as good a basis for solidarity as the conservatives’ basis, tradition. Liberals “must depend upon ideas rather than upon established habits of belief; and when persons begin to think upon social matters they begin to vary.” Conservatives, by contrast, had “a natural bond of cohesion. . . . They hold together not so much by ideas as by habit, tradition, fear of the unknown and a desire to hold on to what they already have.” Though Dewey eschewed dogmatic systems that claimed to have all the answers, he recognized the pragmatic necessity to develop a coherent set of goals around which liberals—and, he hoped, new converts—might rally. “The history of liberal political movements in this country is one of temporary enthusiasms and then steady decline. If liberals are ‘tired,’ it is chiefly because they have not had the support and invigoration that comes from working shoulder to shoulder in a unified movement.”¹⁹ The injustices of the 1920s (especially the Sacco-Vanzetti case) and the stock market crash finally convinced Dewey that neither of the major parties could be trusted to come up with any attractive course. But the vacuum was not easily filled. “It would be difficult,” he wrote in 1930, “to find in history an epoch as lacking in solid and assured objects of belief and approved ends of action as is the present. . . . The lack of secure objects of allegiance, without which individuals are lost, is especially striking in the case of the liberal.” ²⁰

Some observers—notably H. Richard Niebuhr and Robert and Helen Lynd—saw Christianity as equally factious and demoralized,²¹ but Dewey became possessed by a sense that religion had what liberalism lacked. He came to believe that liberals could appropriate the inspiration they needed from religion, if only they changed their way of thinking about religion. Toward the end of his 1929 book, The Quest for Certainty, Dewey tried to dissociate “religious” belief, which might be beneficial to liberals, from existing “religion,” which was the most damaging excrescence of civilization’s misguided “quest for certainty.” He developed this effort to rescue useful “religious” qualities from “the historic religions” more fully in 1934 in A Common Faith. He admired what he called the “truly religious” habits in human experience. But unfortunately mankind, in its prescientific ignorance, had allowed these admirable, socially indispensable habits to get tied up with “religion,” with irrational superstitions, enforced by intimidation and propaganda. The “religious” impulses of generosity and self-sacrifice, of humility and communal solidarity, he insisted, could be severed from the corruptions of every known religion—from closed-minded bigotry and dogma, from the tendency to persecute outsiders.²²

Dewe...