Delaying the Dream

Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938-1965

Keith M. Finley

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9780807145067
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Few historical events lend themselves to such a sharp delineation between right and wrong as does the civil rights struggle. Consequently, many historical accounts of white resistance to civil rights legislation emphasize the ferocity of the opposition, from the Ole Miss riots to the depredations of Eugene "Bull" Conner's Birmingham police force to George Wallace's stand on the schoolhouse steps. While such hostile episodes frequently occurred in the Jim Crow South, civil rights adversaries also employed other, less confrontational but remarkably successful, tactics to deny equal rights to black Americans.
In Delaying the Dream, Keith M. Finley explores gradations in the opposition by examining how the region's principal national spokesmen -- its United States senators -- addressed themselves to the civil rights question and developed a concerted plan of action to thwart legislation: the use of strategic delay.
Prior to World War II, Finley explains, southern senators recognized the fall of segregation as inevitable and consciously changed their tactics to delay, rather than prevent, defeat, enabling them to frustrate civil rights advances for decades. As public support for civil rights grew, southern senators transformed their arguments to limit the use of overt racism and appeal to northerners. They granted minor concessions on bills only tangentially related to civil rights while emasculating those with more substantive provisions. They garnered support by nationalizing their defense of sectional interests and linked their defense of segregation with constitutional principles to curry favor with non-southern politicians. While the senators achieved success at the federal level, Finley shows, they failed to challenge local racial agitators in the South, allowing extremism to flourish. The escalation of white assaults on peaceful protesters in the 1950s and 1960s finally prompted northerners to question southern claims of tranquility under Jim Crow. When they did, segregation came under direct attack, and the principles that had informed strategic delay became obsolete.
Finley's analysis goes beyond traditional images of the quest for racial equality--the heroic struggle, the southern extremism, the filibusters--to reveal another side to the conflict. By focusing on strategic delay and the senators' foresight in recognizing the need for this tactic, Delaying the Dream adds a fresh perspective to the canon on the civil rights era in modern American history.

1. Opening Pandora’s Box

ON 13 APRIL 1937, African American defendants “Bootjack” McDaniels and Roosevelt Townes entered a not guilty plea for the murder of white grocer, George Windham. Following the arraignment of the two detainees at the Winona County, Mississippi, courthouse that afternoon, a mob abducted them in plain view of their police escort and drove them to the nearby town of Duck Hill. In a wooded lot, nearly five hundred spectators watched as the abductors fastened McDaniels and Townes to adjacent trees. One member of the mob, burnishing a lit blow torch, demanded a confession from McDaniels. After repeated applications of the flame to his legs and torso, McDaniels admitted his role in the crime and fingered Townes as his accomplice. Satisfied with the confession, members of the mob shot McDaniels before turning their attention to the other captive. Townes too initially denied his involvement, only to announce his guilt after suffering repeated burns from the blow torch. An even worse fate met Townes as the lynchers kindled a fire at his feet, burning him alive. The gruesome murder witnessed by hundreds of Mississippians, none of whom made an effort to stop the carnage, received national media attention. Despite witnessing the initial abduction in broad day light, the police officers charged with guarding the black defendants claimed not to have recognized a single member of the mob. Without a suspect, the lynching at Duck Hill went unsolved and unpunished. For many, the miscarriage of justice in Mississippi underscored the necessity of federal legislation aimed at curtailing this heinous crime. Duck Hill became a powerful propaganda tool in the decades-long fight for antilynching legislation.¹

Following World War I, the number of lynchings rose significantly after two decades of steady decline. According to Tuskegee Institute statistics, eighty-three lynchings occurred in 1919, up from sixty-four in 1918 and the record low of thirty-eight in 1917. In 1922, Republican congressman Leonidas C. Dyer of Missouri responded to the increase by introducing legislation that would make lynching a federal crime. His bill contained punishment clauses that covered both the participants in the murder and the local law enforcement officials responsible for protecting the victims. A final section of the measure made counties in which a lynching took place culpable for indemnity payments of up to ten thousand dollars to a victim’s family. Partisan divisions marked legislative action on the Dyer bill. With President Warren G. Harding endorsing the legislation, Republican members of the House of Representatives rallied behind it. By comparison, the Democratic response proved cool. A near-straight party-line vote led to the 231 to 119 passage of the Dyer proposal, an event that witnessed only eight Democrats supporting the antilynching measure. Stiff southern opposition to the bill in the U.S. Senate led to its abandonment after twenty-one days of debate.²

Awakened to the politicization of lynching that accompanied the Dyer bill, southern states increased their efforts to prevent the crime. Immediate results met this offensive. Whereas fifty-one lynchings occurred in 1922, only seven took place in 1929. During the Great Depression, the number of lynchings again rose, reaching a peak of twenty-four in 1933. Renewed pressure in the 1930s for a federal antilynching law resulted, prompting Democratic senators Robert F. Wagner of New York and Edward P. Costigan of Colorado to introduce new legislation. Their proposal reduced the Dyer bill’s definition of a lynch mob from five individuals to three but maintained the punishment clause for law enforcement officials and the indemnity clause for counties in which the crime occurred. Costigan and Wagner further narrowed the scope of their bill by not providing for punitive action against the actual participants in a lynching. In 1935, debate on the Costigan-Wagner bill began and ended in the U.S. Senate. As in 1922, a handful of southern senators brought legislative action to a halt through a series of lengthy speeches that hinted at a much larger filibuster to come. After a week of debate, the chamber abandoned the measure. Despite the southern success, an important political development emerged from the 1935 fight. Unlike the straight party-line battle over the Dyer bill, the Costigan-Wagner proposal enjoyed greater bipartisan support. For many southerners, the fact that two prominent Democrats led the crusade for a federal antilynching law meant a substantive change had occurred in the civil rights fight. Long the bastion of white supremacy, the national Democratic Party appeared on the verge of abandoning the interests of its southern wing.³

Certain northern politicians gravitated toward the antilynching campaign in response to demands from segments of the coalition of groups that formed the foundation of the New Deal consensus. Farmers, urban workers, and ethnic minorities, sometimes neglected by the Republican administrations of the 1920s, found their interests supported by Franklin D. Roosevelt and the overwhelming Democratic majority in both houses of Congress. Attempting to capitalize on the changing allegiance of the electorate, many northern statesmen sought to keep interest groups that benefitted from New Deal programs in the Democratic column. African Americans were one segment of the population that gained an increased voice in the 1930s, albeit more at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt than the president. Eleanor often served as the administration’s moral compass, urging the president and his advisors to equitably handle the dispensation of New Deal programming so that black communities were not overlooked. She invited African Americans to the White House just as she championed their causes, like antilynching, at a time when her husband opted for expediency and the nation for indifference. For Franklin Roosevelt, politics remained the art of the possible. Pushing civil rights programs would precipitate the withdrawal of southern support for his other programs. Without that support, legislation that would benefit all Americans regardless of race would remain unpassed. Furthermore, beginning during World War I, thousands of black Americans began leaving the South in search of greater opportunity. Although many communities did not welcome the migrants, participants in the black diaspora enjoyed greater freedom in the North than afforded to them in the land of Jim Crow. Looser suffrage requirements beyond Dixie’s borders also granted many blacks a political voice they had not possessed below the Mason-Dixon line. Since the majority of the migrants settled in urban centers, they magnified their political clout by forming powerful voting blocs. Northern politicians recognized that in part their continued electoral success required winning the confidence of these newly established black communities. Championing civil rights legislation became the principal mechanism for capturing the allegiance of black voters—or at least that was how some southern politicians began perceiving the situation thanks in part to the propaganda of a particular civil rights pressure group.⁴

A major catalyst for this shift in southern thinking was the NAACP, established in 1909. The organization placed itself in direct opposition to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine, which focused on black economic advancement, while following a cooperationist stance toward segregationists. From the outset, the NAACP made full black equality its stated goal, although securing the franchise remained its foremost long-term objective. The organization in the short-term put its support behind the drive to make lynching a federal crime. Many activists, especially in the 1910s, 1920s, and early 1930s, doubted an antilynching bill would ever pass or even could bring tangible improvements in the daily life of black southerners if it did. Nonetheless, the NAACP viewed the publicity surrounding Capitol Hill fights on civil rights as valuable publicity, as a means of getting its message of equality on the national agenda and before as many Americans—especially those who would ordinarily not consider the plight of African Americans—as possible. When need be, the NAACP flexed its political muscle by inflating both its hold over northern blacks and the actual numbers of blacks casting ballots in any given election. These scare tactics were meant to pressure northern politicians from states with sizable black constituencies to vote “right” on civil rights proposals. Careful examination of the NAACP’s statistics reveal their exaggerated nature, prompting serious doubts regarding the group’s dubious claims that the black population held the balance of power in many northern states. Regardless of the actual strength behind the NAACP, southern senators took seriously the organization’s threats. Southern critiques of civil rights legislation now included condemnation of a group dominated by black voters that compelled northern politicians to do its bidding. Repeated failure met the NAACP’s antilynching campaign, yet the organization never ceased its agitation, a fact that made southerners even more defensive. For the NAACP, all efforts, even unsuccessful ones, meant that the harsh light of public scrutiny would fall on the South, and when that happened the organization’s leaders knew their cause would gain strength. Pressure, constant and searching, was to be applied until political equality was attained. It was a long-term vision, one that would unfold slowly, but it was one the NAACP believed worthy of pursuing. Justice would one day prevail. As subsequent Senate debates would illustrate, southerners imbued the antilynching fight with incredible significance. They had good reason for their concern.⁵

Despite the defeat of the Costigan-Wagner bill in 1935, interest in a federal antilynching law remained. With local southern officials seemingly unwilling or unable to thwart the crime, some national legislators renewed their drive for a federal antilynching statute to end law enforcement lapses such as occurred at Duck Hill. At the very moment of the Duck Hill murders, discussion in Washington focused on a federal antilynching law authored by Joseph A. Gavagan, a Democrat from the overwhelmingly black New York district of Harlem. After the Mississippi slayings, enthusiasm for the then-stalled Gavagan bill increased, culminating in its passage in the House of Representatives, 277 to 119. Victory in the House represented a small but significant hurdle for antilynching advocates. Final success hinged on pushing the measure through the U.S. Senate. Upon this last and most difficult barrier rested the fate of antilynching legislation.⁶

Senate rules held the potential of preventing passage of Gavagan’s proposal. In theory the U.S. Senate permitted almost unlimited debate, a fact that enabled a senator to address himself on a particular subject for as long and as often as his physical capabilities permitted. In practice, Senate Rule 22 established guidelines for cloture, or what southerners called the “gag rule.” Adopted in 1917 in response to a controversial filibuster against President Woodrow Wilson’s plan to arm American merchant vessels for protection against German U-boat assaults, the rule stipulated that the curtailment of debate, or cloture, could occur only if two-thirds of those senators present and voting agreed to the action. With such stringent guidelines, successful cloture votes proved rare. Despite the rule, therefore, the Senate maintained its reputation as the “worlds greatest deliberative body.” When several senators similarly inclined worked together, they could bring legislative action in the chamber to a halt. By engaging in a filibuster, southerners defended the interests of their region by talking in relays until they forced the removal of an objectionable bill from consideration. Filibusters occurred infrequently, and in the twentieth century southerners most often employed the technique when faced with what they considered grave threats to the region’s racial system. As V. O. Key demonstrated in Southern Politics, the South’s congressional and senatorial delegations exhibited little uniformity in their voting behavior. Only regarding civil rights did legislators from the region act in concert. Race-related legislation unified southern statesmen and race-based initiatives served as the catalyst for their filibusters. Southerners met the Dyer and Costigan-Wagner bills with filibusters that forced antilynching advocates to remove their legislation.⁷

Successful filibusters often relied on more than just the cloture guidelines established by Senate Rule 22. In the 1922 fight over the Dyer bill, for example, southerners utilized Senate Rule 3, which made the reading and correcting of the previous day’s Senate Journal, or minutes, privileged business. Under usual circumstances, the chamber customarily approved the Journal without debate by unanimous consent. By voicing their objection, southerners made the correction of the Journal the body’s pending business, thereby creating a parliamentary situation that thwarted any other legislative action. Until the Senate approved the Journal, no other business could be transacted. More important for southern interests, debate on the Journal fell beyond the jurisdiction of Rule 22 and thus beyond the guidelines governing cloture. Antilynching advocates soon relented, recognizing the impossibility of shutting off debate on the Journal discussion that undermined consideration of the Dyer bill.

Along with Senate Rules 3 and 22, southern dominance of the committee system would in later years serve as a valuable weapon in the fight against civil rights. In 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee that held jurisdiction over antilynching legislation contained few southern members, none of whom had a realistic chance of ascending to the chairman’s post in the foreseeable future. With civil rights growing in importance, southern senators focused their attention on stacking the committee with reliable members, an effort that eventually culminated in one of their own serving as chairman. But like all things in the Senate, that would take time. Indeed, not until James Eastland of Mississippi attained the chairman’s seat in 1956 would a southerner control the Judiciary Committee. To meet the threat in the 1930s, southerners employed other delaying tools. For example, Indiana Democrat Frederick Van Nuys followed the defeat of the Costigan-Wagner bill in 1936 with a request for funding to conduct an investigation of southern lynching. The decision to fund such an investigation rested with the Audit and Control Committee chaired by James Byrnes of South Carolina. Throughout 1936, Byrnes refused to convene his committee, an action that killed Van Nuys’s request. Southern senators oversaw other committees of vital interest to their colleagues. By tradition, Senate committee chairmanships fell to members of the majority party who had accrued the most seniority on a particular committee. Time in office determined committee assignments. Representing one-party states, southerners frequently faced only limited opposition on election day. As a result, most of them experienced lengthy tenures in office that enabled them to accumulate considerable seniority privileges. A disproportionate number of the Senate’s standing committees thus fell under the direction of southern chairmen. During the Seventy-fifth Congress in 1937, southerners chaired the Finance, Appropriations, Agriculture, and Post Office Committees, all of which held jurisdiction over bills that affected the entire Senate membership. Even committees not run by southerners had chairs sympathetic to the region’s interests. Using the leverage these committees granted them, southerners could subtly pressure their colleagues throughout the voting process. A Wyoming senator, for example, would find funding for a rural post office infinitely more important than a civil rights bill. As a result, he would likely curry favor with southern leaders by voting against cloture on an antilynching bill in exchange for an expeditious hearing on a measure critical in his bailiwick. When the Gavagan antilynching proposal reached the Senate, southern legislative leaders planned their defense with considerable power in their hands. They would need all of the parliamentary devices at their disposal when they faced the first civil rights proposal in the twentieth century with widespread bipartisan support.⁸

Prior to the late 1930s, the legislative situation did not warrant a significant organization of the Senate’s southern ranks. In both 1922 and 1935, fewer than ten senators from states of the former Confederacy actively engaged in the filibusters that blocked antilynching legislation. Although most of the region’s senators opposed these measures, the majority of them recognized that the bills stood little chance of success and thus they left the task of defeating the proposals to the region’s more demagogic statesmen, who made race a centerpiece of their election campaigns. Despite its defeat in 1935, the Costigan-Wagner bill concerned southern senators because of its bipartisan appeal. The boost given the antilynching crusade by the Duck Hill incident heightened that concern and pointed to the need for greater cohesion in the southern ranks to meet the threat posed by civil rights legislation. The freedom to remain on the sidelines during civil rights battles increasingly became a luxury that southern senators could ill afford to indulge.

Concurrent with the development of greater southern unity in the Senate emerged the need for a command structure to organize the region’s statesmen. Texas senator Thomas Connally’s southern peers selected him to lead the fight against any proposal that “was a sectional bill aimed against the South.” Born on 19 August 1877, Connally spent his boyhood on the plains of central Texas as the son of a Confederate veteran turned farmer. Although his youth encompassed two distinct historical worlds, one associated with the Old South and the other with the Wild West, his fidelity to southern interests brooked no compromises. He won election to the U.S. Senate in 1928 and quickly gained recognition for his knowledge of foreign affairs, a skill he honed during his tenure in the House of Representatives from 1917 to March 1929, when he took his seat in the upper chamber. To many observers, Connally seemed a caricature from another generation. Throughout his career, he wore an anachronistic black string tie and long black coat in a manner reminiscent of a nineteenth-century statesman. Tall and lean with a gray mane that curled over his collar, the Texan, according to North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey, was “the only man in the United States Senate who could wear a Roman Toga and not look like a fat man in a nightgown.” In addition to his imposing physical presence, Connally proved an effective orator. Delighting spectators and senators alike, a Connally speech came “complete with facial expressions, gestures, and even pantomime,” as the Texan paced the row of seats adjacent to his desk. Despite his senatorial appearance, he possessed an acid tongue that he often turned on opponents without regard for chamber protocol governing verbal exchanges. Journalist William S. White, who wrote fondly of the Senate’s southern members, considered Connally as “unpredictable as an undischarged Roman candle,” a fact that caused other senators to walk “warily but still fondly about him.”⁹

More than his dynamic personal traits raised Connally to the leadership of the southern Senate group at the time of its greatest twentieth-century crisis. Compared to many of the region’s senators, he possessed the least political baggage in so much as he was not noted for demagoguery and remained a solid supporter of the New Deal. As a result he remained popular with nonsoutherners for his apparent moderation, at least in comparison to the excesses of many of his regional cohorts. Extreme southern racists such as South Carolina’s “Cotton Ed” Smith and Mississippi’s Theodore Bilbo proved too controversial to hold the leadership post. Others, such as Josiah Bailey, Harry Byrd of Virginia, and later Walter George of Georgia, developed reputations as fierce opponents of the New Deal, making them something less than favorites of the Senate’s overwhelming Democratic majority. Throughout the 1930s, Tom Connally had remained loyal to the New Deal. Not until the 1937 effort to pack the Supreme Court with more liberal justices did Connally finally abandon his support for the Roosevelt administration, making him the one southerner with a voting record consistent with that of nonsouthern Democrats. If a northern senator needed a reason not to vote for cloture, Connally was the man best suited to do the convincing. His physical presence, oratorical skills, and moderate policy preferences, along with his desire for the post, made him a formidable commander of the southern opposition. The Texan would soon need all of his personal and political attributes as Senate debate on the 1937 Gavagan antilynching bill neared.¹⁰

Following House action, the Senate Judiciary Committee received the Gavagan bill. In the committee, Democrats Robert Wagner of New York and Frederick Van Nuys of Indiana championed their own antilynching bill that closely followed the 1935 Costigan-Wagner proposal. The measure provided for a maximum penalty of a five-year jail term and a five-thousand-dollar fine for any state official who failed to protect a prisoner from a mob, defined by the bill as two or more persons. Under the legislation, counties where a lynching occurred would be held liable to the victims’ families for as much as ten thousand dollars. In a decision that would later haunt civil rights advocates, they permitted Illinois Democrat William Dieterich to insert a rider to their bill that exempted mob and labor related murders from the prop...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Opening Pandora’s Box
• 2. The Origins of Strategic Delay
• 3. The Battle Broadens
• 4. Division in the Ranks
• 5. Victory through Compromise
• 6. This Is Where the Battle Will Be Won or Lost
• 7. Inevitable Defeat
• Conclusion
• Note on Sources
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Footnote