ANOTHER WAR OF YANKEE AGGRESSION
Though secession did not survive the Confederate War, peaceful secession is by no means inconceivable at some future date.—News and Courier
A featured part of the white South Carolina defense of the racial status quo is the allegation that the entire integration drive constitutes a gigantic conspiracy of jealous Yankees against Dixie. “South-baiting is currently a fad north of the Mason-Dixon line,” said the embittered News and Courier. Along with other pro-South spokesmen, the Charleston paper considers the integration crusade a continuation of the spirit of abolitionism and the “waving of the bloody shirt.” The South Carolina segregationist state of mind includes the assumption that a “cold war” exists between the “beleaguered” South and the rest of the nation. But the struggle of the 1950’8, as contrasted with that of the 1860’s, is basically one of ideas. Hence the success of Southern efforts depends upon effective presentation of the pro-segregation story to the nation. But alas, in this respect, segregationists face insurmountable handicaps. The South has to stand alone in the fight to save segregation and such related principles as “constitutional government, states rights, geographical spread of governmental powers, unlimited debate in the U. S. Senate, harmonious relations between the races, (and) separate and excellent school systems.” Because of the importance of these principles, the News and Courier would have its readers remember that “a little integration” is like “a little adultery.”[454] Southern opposition must be total.
In defending South Carolina against outside criticism, the press of the state, led by the News and Courier, has sought to point out the absolute superiority of the “Southern way of life.” Referring to the South in Jeffersonian terms the Morning News said: “An agrarian society helps encourage fundamental decency and proper thinking. People cannot be closely associated with nature and God’s bounty without absorbing some appreciation for the proper order of things and the love of God.”[455] The News and Courier decried the fact that “movies, popular novels, the Northern press, Northern colleges—and not a few teachers in Southern educational institutions” hammered at the theme that the South was “hopelessly out-of-date” and “ignorant and backward.” To combat this point of view, parents of college students were advised to “help their youngsters understand their traditions. Traditions have to be taught. They aren’t automatically implanted in the brains of 18 and 19 year-olds.”[456]
On another occasion the News and Courier, after “reluctantly” concluding that “the organized campaign of vilification of the Southern way-of-life and traditions has been partially inspired by malice,” declared, not inaccurately, that the Southern resistance was the result of “a unique and imperishable nationalism in the South.” This nationalism was not aggressive, it asserted. “It was cradled in the intense desire to be left alone.” It was rooted in the pride that Southerners had in their unique way of life.[457]
The South as the defender of traditional American values was the theme of a speech by Representative William Jennings Bryan Dorn. Employing terminology reminiscent of his famous namesake, he referred to his region as “the last frontier of Americanism.” It was the duty and challenge of the South to sell its “political, industrial and educational philosophy” to the rest of the country. “I’m proud I represent people who live in the Bible Belt,” said Dorn. “I had much rather represent the Bible Belt than some of the slums and confusion that exist in many of our larger cities.”[458]
Just as the South’s efforts to preserve segregation are warmly applauded, so are the North’s essays at integration roundly condemned. Here, again, the News and Courier is the leading though by no means the only spokesman. Comparing the segregated South with the integrated North, it stated:
Segregation in the South at least has prevented terrorism in cities. Crime exists, of course, but nothing like these reports from Northern cities. Undisciplined packs roam their streets. In the South we have no packs of savages. Though Negroes are more numerous, they are better behaved. Yes, and more CIVILIZED! They stay to themselves. They recognize and accept the limits set up for themselves and for white people.
Released from social restrictions of the segregation code, Negroes are running wild in the North. That is what the North would inflict on a far greater scale on the people of the South.[459]
On another occasion, the same paper indicated that its ideas on racial superiority extended not only to Negroes but to many whites as well: “Are these so-called Northern spokesmen actually Northern Americans? Are they from good old New England Yankee stock? Are they solid inland families, descended from pioneers who crossed the plains? Or are they first-generation mal-contents, full of alien notions? Are they recent immigrants from who knows where—Russia, perhaps?” Then in a not too subtle type of innuendo the News and Courier wondered “what kind of schism are they trying to drive through the Federal Union of States? Why, other than for Communist reasons, would they wish to split that union?”[460]
Many white South Carolinians accuse the North of hypocrisy. Governor Timmerman, for example, declared that “Northern propagandists are as loud, obnoxious and untruthful today as the Abolitionists were a century ago.” Integrationists, like the abolitionists, he asserted, are hypocrites. Editor Waring of the News and Courier stated that while the South had always been “open and above-board” in its treatment of Negroes, the North had been “sly and underhanded.”[461] Since the North had preserved segregation practically intact despite absence of legal sanction and non-discrimination laws, several spokesmen, including James F. Byrnes, urged the Gressette School Segregation Committee to go above the Mason-Dixon line to study Northern methods.
White South Carolinians are especially critical of Northern news media—newspapers, periodicals, radio and television. Blithely ignoring the pressure for conformity within the South, the News and Courier criticized Northern leaders who allegedly parroted words which they thought the public wanted to hear. The courage to tell the truth outside the South, complained the lowcountry newspaper, was at one of its lowest points in history.[462]
Alleged reluctance of national news media to present sympathetically the pro-segregation cause has given rise to such terms as the “Paper Curtain” and the “Integration Curtain” and the charge that the South is being “brainwashed” into acceptance of the alien notion of integration. In no other aspect of the desegregation controversy is the cornered and minority status of the South more apparent. With ever increasing frequency, complaints have arisen against pro-integration statements and incidents appearing on national television and radio networks, in national periodicals and in the Northern metropolitan press. Newspapers such as the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and the Washington Post and Times-Herald are subjected to constant attack. Mass circulation periodicals such as Saturday Evening Post, Look, Time and Life likewise receive special criticism. Among nationally circulated periodicals only the U. S. News and World Report, whose editor David Lawrence appeals to the most reactionary elements in the South, has won South Carolina approval. The Columbia State, for example, had the following to say of Time:
Through stupidity or malice Time has repeatedly followed, with the rest of the blackguard Northern press, this tone of false witness, either directly or by innuendo, against the South. Time has consistently paraded the idea that it is too stupid or malicious to recognize the fact that the South is a part of the United States. Refusing to accept the sword of Robert Lee tendered at Appomattox, it continues by snide inference, malicious innuendo and biased implication to fight the Confederate War against this section, blind to the fact that Time and the rest of the inflammatory press is following the same line of wild-eyed chatter that led to Secession in 1860—with grim determination arraying section against section, gracelessly exaggerating the faults of one, while cravenly covering up those of the other.
Time has double-crossed the American people on so many important issues, through stupidity or malice, that a better name for the weekly would be “Two-Time.”[463]
Instances of racial violence and incidents of discrimination against Negroes in the North and West quite naturally, and rightly, afford grist for the mill to editorial writers on South Carolina newspapers. Statements such as “clean up the mess in your own back yard before criticizing us” and “in the South there is frankness; in the North hypocrisy” are interspersed with “you don’t see any race riots in the South” or “the Northern states are finding that Southerners are not the only ones concerned with maintaining racial barriers.” The racial disturbances at Calumet Park in Chicago and the bigotry displayed by some of the residents of Levittown, Pennsylvania in the summer of 1957 were eagerly seized upon by counter-attacking South Carolina editors. That the great majority of people in the North deplored such incidents—as was true of most Southerners in the Little Rock affair—was carefully masked by editorial legerdemain and the views of the rabidly intolerant minority presented as typical. News of racial tension outside the South and in it—insofar as opposition to any and all forms of integration was concerned—is featured by blazing front page headlines that can only further incite South Carolina extremists. Some South Carolina editors, like Thomas Waring of the News and Courier, deplore the fact that similar editorial tactics are not utilized in the Northern press. In a particularly biting editorial Waring declared:
It is too bad no seismograph records the range of press hypocrisy in the North. The handling of the Chicago race riots would have registered severe shocks in some big cities.
Editions of the New York Herald-Tribune for Monday and Tuesday ... contained not a line about a serious racial clash in the country’s second largest city.
The New York Times on Monday printed an Associated Press dispatch seven inches long on page 10. The Times, with unrivaled facilities of its own for gathering news all over the world, did not see fit to print the full AP account. Tuesday’s issue ... contained no story on all further disorders occurring in Chicago on Monday.
The handling of the local story by the Chicago Daily News is also interesting. It was printed on page 3 under a headline saying “Man Fined $50 in Race Flareup.” The Daily News devoted its entire back page to pictures of the earthquake damage in Mexico City. No pictures showed the race riots in the city where the Daily News is published. The riots were called “racial disturbances” throughout.
Does any reader wonder how these newspapers would have displayed “racial disturbances” had they occurred in South Carolina, Mississippi, or elsewhere this side of the Paper Curtain? Race riots aren’t news in the North.[464]
Of all the Northern newspapers, the New York Times is the chief bête noire of the South Carolina press in general and the News and Courier in particular. The Charleston paper’s plaint is that the Times is a “liberal” paper which writes its own views into news stories. As to the Times’ liberalism the News and Courier summed it up by saying that the New York paper “places its faith in government and laws for rapid improvement of mankind. It is a concept much like the totalitarian ideology.” The News and Courier, which professes admiration for Cuba’s Batista and the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, proceeded to develop this idea further: “The history of the world does not indicate that laws improve the breed. The best that can be hoped from laws, as we see it, is to maintain law and order so that people can live out their lives in some degree of safety and comfort. By tampering with the laws and customs about race in the United States, the ‘liberals’ have created disorder and discomfort both in the South and in the North.... Today, as it has been doing for years, the Times is pamphleteering for its cause—the intermingling of the races.”[465]
The summer of 1957 was a particularly fecund one for attacks on conditions in the North by South Carolina newspapers. Revelations in the Syracuse, New York press of filthy and abominable conditions in migrant labor camps in the Empire State coupled with NAACP charges of peonage and the ordering by Governor Averill Harriman of a sweeping investigation by state authorities occasioned the State to send staff writer Bob Pierce northward on a “muckraking” expedition. Pierce, who received full co-operation from the Syracuse Post-Standard which threw open its files to him, sent back to Columbia a series of stories that were picked up by other papers of the state. They were like heady wine for the embattled defenders of the Southern way of life. Enjoying for the moment the luxury of having still another tangible social abuse in the North to attack, the State combined in several editorials a mixture of Southern chauvinism, eloquence, and what it evidently considered to be irony. Said editor Latimer on one occasion: “Now we read a complaint that New York migrant camps are a twentieth century slave racket. Well, the people up North should know how to operate such a place. Their forbears were primarily responsible for the introduction of slavery in this country.... Conditions up North must be getting bad for the NAACP to admit that anything but racial harmony and fair treatment to Negroes is to be found above Mr. Mason and Mr. Dixon’s line.”[466]
That the national news media have been at least partially effective in shaping public opinion in the segregation controversy is evidenced by the repeated criticisms of their policies. The News and Courier declared that freedom of the press as it related to “truth about race matters” had already vanished “from a large segment of American daily newspapers.” Race news was rarely reported outside the South without a pro-NAACP bias. Also radio and television and Hollywood film producers were “under the black curtain of race censorship.” “The other day, in a Charleston theater, we saw a movie short in which John C. Calhoun was pictured as a scheming, treasonous troublemaker,” the News and Courier indignantly exclaimed. In a letter to the same paper Fred Grossman noted “a palpable spirit of antipathy” between the North and South, a feeling which he blamed on the NAACP “and affiliated organizations of equally dubious allegiance.” Southerners on national television shows, he asserted, were “inevitably browbeaten, ridiculed, outwitted by well-rehearsed MC’s.” In the movies, Southerners were always villains. As a result of this slyly conducted campaign of propaganda and insinuation, the mere mention of the word South automatically brought to mind such “evil connotations as bigot, demagogue, Simon Legree and the like.”[467]
The News and Courier, insisting that it does “not especially admire a policy of pandering to popular views to please the subscribers,” and summarizing its presentation of the race controversy as “the truth as we see it,” proclaims itself as far more objective than its Northern counterparts. In presenting “the truth as we see it,” the News and Courier commented in the following fashion on the segregation riots of Clinton, Tennessee:
Truly, this is a tragic time in American history.... Who would have thought that tyranny would come so quickly to America, or that the federal government would seek to restore all the brutality and oppression of Reconstruction days? And yet the day of infamy has arrived....
Today the North approves the methods of Hitler in attempting to force racial mixing upon a people who will not mix. If Nazi techniques are upheld by the higher courts and by public opinion in the North, one day the people of the North themselves will feel the sting of tyranny.[468]
The newspaper chose to overlook the fact that “the brutality and oppression” in Tennessee was being enforced by the National Guard of the state, called out by the governor and not the federal government. Ignored too was the parallel of “racial superiority” both in Nazi Germany and in Tennessee.
That some white South Carolinians accept the Charleston paper at face value as the fountainhead of truth is indicated by a letter to the editor by C. H. Ruppert of Charleston. Ruppert wrote: “Each time I pick up an issue of your paper, I thank God I live in a state where the truth is printed regardless of personal views and I also know that both sides are presented in any issue that may arise. If the truth could be presented in the Northern papers, maybe the honest and worth while people who live there could understand Southern people for what they really are.”[469]
Frequently blame for the whole integration fight is placed on “Negro politics.” “Afro-Americans,” said the News and Courier, “brought in chains to the New World, are about to seek their revenge. They are forging now the handcuffs whereby 10 percent of the population would dominate 90 percent through the fluke of concentration.” This observation concluded: “More than ever the Southern States seem destined to play a role in eventual redemption of the rest of the Republic from Negro politics.”[470]
South Carolina newspapers throughout the entire segregation-integration controversy of the past four years have shown a peculiar insensitivity in regard to the effort of the United States to win the support of the nations of Asia and Africa. They have refused to see any connection with the propaganda efforts of the nation’s diplomacy in behalf of the democratic ideology and their espousal of racial supremacy doctrines at home. A naked statement demonstrating lack of concern with this particular problem came not surprisingly from the News and Courier which entertains no special regard for the democratic credo: “We are tired of manufactured nonsense about ‘propaganda’ overseas. The suggestion that American laws and customs are subject to foreign veto makes us sick. Our government should not look over its shoulder to see whether it wins applause or boos from the peanut galleries of the world.”[471]
Such an internationally myopic viewpoint could be expected from the embattled News and Courier but one could hardly anticipate it being broadcast in a more sophisticated form by Donald S. Russell who when he expressed it was president of the University of South Carolina, a position which he resigned a few weeks later. Addressing the Bamberg Lions Club, Russell lashed out against “the ill-advised efforts of many heedless busybodies to inject the issue of school integration in the South into American foreign policy.”[472] Conceivably Russell was speaking strictly for home consumption as he was in the process of preparing the ground for his announcement as a gubernatorial candidate. Yet this outlook was hardly befitting a man who fancies himself to be well informed in the realm of international diplomacy and who has served as Assistant Secretary of State.
In recognition of the influence of mass communication, various proposals have been advanced to overcome the absence in the South of a single pro-segregation newspaper or periodical of nationwide standing. The South, lamented the News and Courier, had lost its voice in an age of miraculous means of communication. Consequently the Southern arguments were not heard in the North. The “primary need” of the South, then, was “a non-profit and non-political organization to present the Southern viewpoint.” Financed by voluntary contributions by Southerners, such an organization would employ lawyers to argue segregation cases before the courts, issue press releases on the position of segregationists, and furnish speakers to present the Southern argument to the nation.[473] Ironically, it is largely on these very grounds that South Carolinians have condemned the NAACP!
The News and Courier has taken other steps to bolster the Southern ramparts against the integrationists. It plugs W. E. Debnam’s “handbooks for Southerners,” Then My Old Kentucky Home Good Night and Weep No More My Lady. These would intellectually fortify those Southerners who were “being brain-washed by experts” from the North. Southerners who bought the books, furthermore, could send them to Northern acquaintances. On another occasion the News and Courier presented itself as covering the race controversy “more than any other newspaper in the country.” In one of its own advertisements it suggested three ways to pierce the “Paper Curtain”: (1) Southerners could correspond with relatives, friends and business acquaintances in the North and “tell the truth as they know it;” (2) better yet they could “send pamphlets, clippings and other printed arguments through the mail;” (3) “most effective of all would be to send The News and Courier.” A gift subscription was at their command. In 1956 the paper issued a twenty-five cent pamphlet, entitled “We Take Our Stand,” containing thirty-two of its editorials on the race issue. Such methods as these caused the Independent to comment sourly: “The Charleston News and Courier ... constantly stirs the [race] issue with one hand while reaching out with the other to cash in on the agitation by advertising itself as a ‘Southern spokesman’ without peer, urging ‘buy me, buy me.’ The theory seems to be: more strife, more profit.”[474]
W. D. Workman Jr. suggested establishment of a “Southern Foundation” to foster “recognition of Southern achievements (and attitudes) in the fields of industry, agriculture, politics and government, education and sociology.” The foundation could “aid in breaking down the obvious and discriminatory refusal of Northern publishers to print anything out of the South which does not conform with their preconceived ideas of ‘liberality in the New South.’” Finally it “could offset some of the mealy-mouthed preachments of ‘dogooder’ organizations within and without the South which seek to develop a guilt complex among Southerners for simply being Southerners.”[475]
The “Bookworm,” writing in the News and Courier, suggested a boycott against publications attacking segregation. He proposed that (1) all Southern organizations “secede from their national affiliations,” thereby taking large numbers of members and dues from national groups which were attempting to “influence Southern thought and action”; (2) Southerners discontinue subscriptions to national publications unfriendly to the South; and (3) Southerners notify advertisers in these publications that their products are no longer being used.[476]
Scion of an old Charleston family, Arthur Ravenel, Jr., a member of the state House of Representatives, proposed to the Columbia Rotary Club the creation of a fund to be used for the purpose of buying up Northern newspapers and magazines and other media of information. The fund would be financed by non-interest paying bonds subscribed to by loyal South Carolinians. Through these captive magazines “the Southern and conservative story” could be told to America. “You cannot win a defensive battle or a defensive war,” said Ravenel. “South Carolina, as we know her and love her, cannot survive another decade unless we take the offensive quickly and maintain it vigorously. We alone among the forty-eight states can do it. We have the wherewithal. Our assets include a singleness of purpose among our people; geographical unity; an illustrious history; a social system free of racial strife; two societies complete and separate, living in mutual respect for one another; and a community of real Americans.” South Carolina, continued this young legislator, had “no ‘pinks,’ no reds, no ‘isms.’ We have the type of people who form the backbone of the nation. We have a story that can be told.” The battle to win men’s minds could be won, Ravenel maintained. “That real American, David Lawrence, had proven with the U. S. News and World Report that America avidly seeks the truth.”[477]
Suggestions of this nature also reached into the state legislature. In the 1957 session, Representative F. Mitchell Ott of Orangeburg County introduced a resolution calling for the creation of a nine-member commission which would interest other Southern states in sending delegations to visit Northern and Western state legislatures. The purpose of such visits would be to arouse these states to the threat of “continuing and accelerating invasion of states rights by the federal government.”[478]
The successfully waged battle for passage of a federal civil rights act revealed the extent of the South’s isolation from the rest of the country. It was looked upon in South Carolina and the other deep South states as but another campaign in the insidious war of Yankee aggression. The first skirmishes occurred in the spring of 1956 when the Eisenhower administration asked Congress to enact a civil rights law which would include creation of a bipartisan commission to investigate individual grievances and creation of a new civil rights division in the Department of Justice. The proposals also provided that any citizen who felt that his constitutional rights had been infringed might go directly to a federal court with his complaint, bypassing the state courts.[479]
Reaction to these proposals ranged from indignation to outright defiance. Senator Olin D. Johnston considered them “a brazen attempt to abolish all states rights and to establish a form of dictatorship government.” Never before had the nation come “as close to creating a Hitler or Stalin type dictatorship.” The Independent compared them to the “‘force bills’ Black Republicans put into effect” during Reconstruction. Their purpose was to “create more strife” and to “capitalize on such strife to create more Negro votes for the Republican Party.” The News and Courier also considered the proposals “force bills aimed at the South.” The purpose was “political reconstruction, in an all-out attempt to capture the Negro vote.” They meant “invasion of liberties guaranteed under the Constitution.”[480]
The 1956 Civil Rights Bill died in the Senate; consequently, in 1957 a new and stronger bill was introduced into Congress. Again state leaders bellowed their opposition. Representative L. Mendel Rivers charged that the 1957 proposals were based on “a contemptible, malicious, dastardly lie” about conditions in the South. Such a law “is not only not needed but violates every guarantee the Constitution gives us.” Passage of the bill would drench the nation with more “blood than ever a mutinied ship.” All Americans, not only Southerners, would lose their rights with passage of the bill. Senator Thurmond warned the House Judiciary Committee that adoption of the “so-called civil rights” proposals would “turn neighbor against neighbor,” deprive citizens of their rights to trial by jury and “keep our people in a constant state of apprehension and harassment.”[481]
An organized campaign of resistance developed in the state to the 1957 civil rights proposals. Appearing for South Carolina before the Judiciary Committee of the national House of Representatives were Senator Thurmond; Representative Dorn; state Representative Robert E. McNair of Allendale, chairman of the South Carolina House Judiciary Committee; Thomas A. Pope of Newberry, former state House Speaker, currently chairman of the South Carolina Bar Association Executive Committee; state Representative James A. Spruill from Cheraw, member of the House Education Committee; and Columbia attorney Clint T. Graydon. Each in turn made impassioned pleas that the bill not be passed and that the South be left alone to deal with the race problem as it saw fit. Their arguments were generally based on legalistic and constitutional grounds.[482] They gave increased significance to a statement by Morning News editor O’Dowd that in the South democracy and states rights had come to mean that all men were equal but some less equal than others.
Commenting on the testimony of the state’s representatives the News and Courier said that South Carolina could “be proud” of its legislators and private citizens who spoke before the committee. “Clarity, honesty, dignity and understanding” characterized their addresses. “South-haters picture Southerners as Stone Age men, roughnecks and demagogues. They must have been bitterly disappointed when our spokesmen, in cool, intelligent tones, warned of perils threatening freedom in all 48 states.”[483]
South Carolina’s delegation in Congress opposed the civil rights bill in toto but they were unhappily aware they could not prevent passage of an act in 1957. Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, it is rumored, had told Southern Senators in January that a bill was going to be enacted and that they had better forget about their usual “corn and pot liquor” arguments and consider the legislation on its own merits.[484] Under such circumstances the strategy of Southerners in Congress was to take a last ditch stand against the most vulnerable of the bill’s provisions, namely that violators of Federal court orders be subject to punishment by a judge of the court without benefit of jury trial. By insisting on a jury trial amendment to the bill, the Southerners could present themselves as the real defenders of civil rights.
Yet the spectacle of the Southerners in Congress presenting themselves as champions of jury trials was ironic in light of the fact that jury trials were not guaranteed those similarly accused in state courts. South Carolina law, for example, provided that disobedience of a court order “may be punished by a judge as for a contempt.” Also, circuit courts might punish “by fine or imprisonment, at the discretion of the court, all contempts of authority in any cause or hearing before the same.”[485]
Both in the House of Representatives and the Senate South Carolina’s delegation fought a last ditch battle for total rejection of the civil rights bill. Speaking for his fellow House members from South Carolina, Representative Dorn argued that the bill was not needed and that it would further centralize power in Washington and pave the way for a “federal dictatorship.” Nor would South Carolina representatives accept any part of the jury trial compromise, said Dorn. An identical opinion came from Senator Thurmond who believed it “entirely wrong to make any concession on the jury trial amendment or any part of the bill.” The Constitution, he said, “specifically provides for jury trials in all criminal cases and the Constitution cannot be compromised.” Senator Johnston was equally adamant. He complained of not having been consulted on the compromise measure and accused the leadership in both the House and the Senate of high-handed and illegal procedures. In the closing debate on the bill Johnston declared: “The cornerstone of human liberty is being shattered.... This is the most backward looking, retrogressive compromise that has ever issued from any self-appointed committee within my knowledge, memory, or understanding.”[486]
Both South Carolina representatives and other Southern members of the Congress were engaged in a fruitless struggle. The civil rights bill, largely rewritten by Democratic senators and their advisers, was accepted by the House of Representatives which previously had approved a more stringent Administration measure. With this hurdle surmounted, only Senate approval remained. Since Reconstruction days, however, the Senate had been the graveyard for civil rights bills.
South Carolina political leaders continued to hope that the Senate would perform its traditional role and that Southern senators in general and their own in particular would resort to the filibuster, the ultimate weapon of beleaguered minorities. They clung to this hope in face of the fact that the Democratic leadership in the Senate had exacted an agreement from a caucus of Southern senators against use of such a tactic. Yet South Carolinians knew that a filibuster at best would merely delay passage of the bill and at worst invoke a move for cloture and result in the adoption of a more drastic act.[487]
True to form, Governor Timmerman called on “American citizens ... to demand that their representatives stand up and fight for what is right or step aside and let there be elected men with political courage who will.” The bill, he charged, was a “sell-out of principle for the evil of political expediency.” Should Southern senators “at this late hour falter or fail to filibuster,” they would be held accountable for “compromising the inalienable rights of the American people.” Similarly, Representative Mendel Rivers of Charleston stated that “if I were a senator, I’d talk until hell freezes over before I’d accept this bill.... I’d filibuster whether Lyndon B. Johnson is elected President or not.” Representative Robert Hemphill hoped that the Senate would “filibuster til Christmas if necessary.” Other South Carolina representatives expressed like sentiments.[488]
Senator Johnston did not heed the pleas of those urging resort to the filibuster; he had left Washington temporarily to attend the marriage of his daughter in Columbia. But the state’s junior senator responded nobly. Obtaining the floor of the Senate at 8:45 p.m. on August 28th, J. Strom Thurmond began a record-breaking filibuster that finally terminated twenty-four hours and eighteen minutes later. It was a prodigious effort and brought congratulations from Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, the previous record holder.[489] But it only delayed passage of the compromise civil rights bill; more important, it brought an avalanche of adverse criticism on Thurmond’s balding head, particularly from infuriated fellow Southern senators who charged him not only with violating the caucus agreement, but also of making a grandstand play for personal political advantage.[490]
Back home, reaction to Thurmond’s filibuster was on the whole favorable though hardly enthusiastic. Many persons privately acknowledged that he had made a complete fool of himself. Particularly was this true in Columbia where local leaders were making a strenuous effort to retain Fort Jackson. It was feared that Thurmond’s action might ultimately hurt the city’s cause. Governor Timmerman, fighting mad, was the Senator’s principal defender. He was “shocked” to learn that Thurmond had received no help in his heroic battle. “When the going got rough,” he growled to a press conference, the Southern senators had “fallen down on the job.” He resented for Thurmond “the effort to belittle what he did.” The Senator, he said, “hasn’t broken faith with anyone; he’s the only one who didn’t break faith.... I’m commending, not condemning, what Strom Thurmond did.” Timmerman was sure that the people of the Palmetto State “didn’t send Senator Thurmond to Washington to be a political flunky for Johnson, Knowland or Eisenhower.” In what could be interpreted only as a rebuke to Senator Johnston, the irate Governor asserted that when the next election time came, he “would take a second look at the man who turned his back on his constituents” before he would support him. Finally, lashing out in another direction, Timmerman called President Eisenhower “a disgrace to the office he holds.”[491]
Timmerman’s remarks were resounded in News and Courier editorials which observed that while Thurmond had made himself unpopular with many Americans and his fellow Senators, he spoke for the overwhelming majority of South Carolinians. “An occasional sneer that Senator Thurmond was putting on a personal play to the grandstands merits no attention,” said the Charleston paper. “When personal conviction tallies with the demands of the people, why shouldn’t a senator stand up and say so even though he stands alone?” The News and Courier, like the Morning News, hesitated to say that the other Southern senators had compromised with principle, as had Governor Timmerman. But it did not believe that “others should blame Thurmond for acting alone.” The State’s editor, Samuel Latimer, seemingly caught with his editorial directive down, could muster only a brief nine line comment on Thurmond’s filibuster, the gist of which was that it was a futile but creditable performance.[492]
From Anderson, however, came a bitter blast against Thurmond from the Independent: “The very junior senator from South Carolina, Mr. ‘Stand-On-Head’ Thurmond was all steamed up this week in opposition to the Ike, Nixon, Brownell civil rights bill. All his ‘oratory’ in the Senate will not erase the fact that Thurmond helped put the present anti-South Republican Party in power. He can change his colors—and his speeches—but the folks back home will always remember that he is one of the forces that have plunged a dagger into the heart of the South. South Carolina voters will be waiting—and ready—when ‘Stand-On-Head’ comes up for reelection. Any good Democrat can trim him and he knows it. That’s why all the smoke at the moment. Something is urgently needed by the little man to divert attention from his support of the Republicans....”[493]
Passage of the civil rights bill did not mean its acceptance in any way, manner or means by South Carolina leaders. Governor Timmerman immediately let it be known that he would not co-operate with any civil rights investigation commission that might come to South Carolina.[494]
The worst crisis in the current “war of Yankee aggression” on the South came, of course, in the early autumn of 1957 with the Little Rock affair. South Carolina resounded with praise for Governor Orval Faubus and condemnation of President Eisenhower. As in all of the deep South states, white South Carolinians were aghast at the President’s use of troops to enforce the integration decree of the “northern judge,” Justice Ronald N. Davies. The state’s press, its politicians, and its self-appointed spokesmen joined in a crescendo of verbal abuse on President Eisenhower, Attorney-General Herbert Brownell, Mayor Woodrow Wilson Mann of Little Rock, Vice-President Richard Nixon, Presidential aide Sherman Adams, and Adlai Stevenson—the last named for supporting the President.[495] Governor Timmerman made the state’s outstanding gesture of protest by resigning his commission as an officer in the United States Naval Reserve, a gesture which apparently did not disturb the Navy in the least.[496] Someone scrawled “Ike is a nigger-lover” on the door of the children’s entrance to the Richland County library in Columbia. In university classrooms, students who only a year before had “liked Ike” were asking professors how they “could get rid of him.” If Little Rock had been in South Carolina, white South Carolinians could hardly have been more concerned.
In placing the hero’s laurels upon the brow of Governor Faubus, his admirers rarely if ever were willing to face up to the fact that the Arkansas chief executive, by calling out the state’s national guard to prevent Negro children from enrolling at Central High School, was preventing the execution of the law of the United States. Nor was it acknowledged that his utterly reckless statements had anything to do with creating the atmosphere of tension that nourished the violence which engulfed Central High School on the first day of the new term. South Carolina post-mortem editorial comment criticized resort to violence but, with a curious twist of logic, those guilty of violence were less condemned than those who allegedly had created it. The thugs who kicked and beat Negroes and newsmen and the sideburned adolescents whose faces reflected their hatred as they jeered or struck at the Negro students were never really denounced outright. Instead the villains of the piece were declared to be the leaders of the NAACP and the “Northern agitators” who were accused of inciting the violence. South Carolina editorialists in deploring use of violence, as they invariably did, always left an escape door for those who resorted to it. Illustrative are the following editorial comments:
The News and Courier deplores terror tactics in any cause. Yet men have used them to promote all kinds of efforts both worthy and unworthy—including religion. People of good will do not want violence and bloodshed over integrating the schools of the South. Yet many of those people would rather be dead than integrated. Shall white people be exterminated to make room for colored? They outnumber the colored and they will not give up easily. (Sept. 19, 1957, p. 8-A.)
Efforts to enforce the court’s integration edict already are resulting in violent acts by hoodlums, bedsheet gangsterism and vandalism. This is deplored by the vast majority of Southerners as injurious to the cause of the South.... Yet it does not seem to have gotten through the thick heads in Washington and elsewhere in the North and West that Southerners will not quail in the face of bloodshed, if bayonets are directed against them by hogwild racist South-baiters. (Anderson Independent, Sept. 21, 1957, p. 4).
Decent citizens everywhere abhor violence; [the] South is not lawless.... The South has a right to try to maintain its way of life by any and all lawful means. It has done so for a hundred years despite the outcome of the war that prevented them [sic] from seceding from the Union, when that seemed to many of them the only way to uphold it. (Florence Morning News, Sept. 19, 1957, p. 4).
The State cannot condone violence. It never has, and never will. Neither can it condone the actions of agitators and others who bring about violence.... There was no disorder until the judge caused the Arkansas Guard to be removed. The disorder came after the judge and Mayor Mann of Little Rock took charge.... We want to keep the record straight as to under whose auspices the rioting occurred. (Sept. 26, 1957, p. 4-A).
No thinking citizen of the South will condone the violence that erupted in Little Rock when federal, city, and school authorities and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People disregarded Governor Faubus’ advice to allow for a cooling-off period before attempting the integration of nine Negroes into Little Rock’s Central High School. Mob violence is not the answer to anything anywhere, except as an instrument of revolution. It solves nothing. (Record, Sept. 25, 1957, p. 4-A).
In none of the above editorial excerpts was a word of sympathy extended to the victims of violence or an express denunciation made against those engaged in the particular acts. One is reminded of the old condemnations of lynching. No one “approved” the practice in principle, but.... On the other hand, when an Arkansas segregationist, C. E. Blake, was struck on the head with the butt of a rifle which he was trying to wrest away from a federal soldier standing guard, there was more admiration for than censure of his action. Senator Johnston suggested to Governor Faubus that “warrants be issued for the arrest of federal soldiers responsible for unnecessary bludgeoning of Arkansas citizens and unlawful invasion of their homes.”[497]
In fact, the state’s senior senator had considerable gratuitous advice for Governor Faubus. “If I were governor of Arkansas,” said Johnston, “I would ignore the President and call out the National Guard in the name of the State of Arkansas to defend life and property and to defend the state against all alien influences and forces especially the NAACP and troublemakers who wish to force a division upon the country.” From his Washington office the Senator told the press that it was “a known fact that subversive elements in this country support the NAACP in inflaming the issue of integration and their ultimate goal is to conquer us through division. If the President were tolerant of the tolerant South’s position and less tolerant of the intolerant NAACP the grave situation at Little Rock would never have occurred.”[498]
Other South Carolina political leaders expressed themselves with varying degrees of vigor on the Arkansas situation. In a prepared speech at Bennettsville, elder South Carolina politician James F. Byrnes voiced complete confidence in the President’s integrity but maintained that he was being “misled” by Attorney General Brownell. He believed that Governor Faubus had been vindicated by events and called the assignment of Judge Davies to the case highly “unwise.” Byrnes declared that the Arkansas affair was staged purely for political reasons as a means of outbidding the Democrats for the Negro vote. That South Carolina had avoided such difficulties resulted from the high quality of Negro schools in the state—better than those provided for whites—and the sensible attitude of the “real” Negro leaders. The former governor called on the Southern states to desert their allegiance to the Democratic Party and to unite for southern independent action.[499]
Byrnes’s call for southern political independence echoed the plea made earlier by Farley Smith, leader of the South Carolina Independent Democrats. By sending troops into Arkansas, said Smith, the President had “succumbed to integration extremists” and “silenced the voice of moderation and understanding.” Smith declared further: “We are now fair game for every Negro baiter and South hater and wild-eyed fanatic on both sides of this momentous question. God only knows where this will all end. But one thing should be crystal clear by now—the South has had enough.” With this last statement James P. Richards, former South Carolina Congressman and Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, agreed. “It’s about time they realize that an issue like this can’t be handled by the federal government,” he asserted. Richards, whose job it then was as President Eisenhower’s roving ambassador to make friends for the United States amongst the dark-skinned peoples of the Middle East, observed that “the Russian provinces ... have a form of segregation between the Russians and the others. When you ask why, they say because the people prefer it that way.”[500]
Governor Timmerman, who had sent a telegram of encouragement to Governor Faubus, pointed out that the Little Rock incident could never have occurred in South Carolina because of the state’s educational segregation laws.[501] The same position was taken by State Senator Marion Gressette who heads the state committee entrusted with the preservation of racial segregation in the schools. The law of South Carolina, Gressette pointed out, would automatically shut off state funds to any school ordered by a court to accept a Negro and also the school from which the latter came. “Our law ... would permit a cooling off period in South Carolina,” Gressette observed. “Where we would go from there would depend upon the circumstances and no one can predict what the circumstances would be.” He divulged that his committee had a plan for such a contingency but refused to reveal its contents. He did give notice, though, that the federal government “would be absolutely helpless in trying to force a person or persons into South Carolina schools. The federal government has no power to compel the General Assembly of South Carolina to appropriate funds for the operation of schools.”[502]
Not all of Senator Gressette’s colleagues shared his opinion that Little Rock couldn’t happen in South Carolina. On October 6th, Senator John D. Long announced that the legislative delegation of Union County had arranged the purchase of nine new Browning sub-machine guns with 1000 rounds of ammunition to beat back “any invasion of federal troops” such as took place at Little Rock. “Anyone violating our laws,” said Long, “will be arrested, jailed and treated the same as any other accused persons.” Senator Long was confident that Union County Sheriff J. Harold Lamb and his eight deputies could handle any situation that might arise.[503]
Of the many causes for which South Carolinians blamed the renewal and intensification of the integration efforts of the 1950’s, few have been more prominent than the economic. The integration drive of the post-World War II period coincided, of course, with the unprecedented industrial growth of the South. At the same time, national labor organizations, which previously had made discouragingly little progress in South Carolina, began increased “agitation” to unionize the labor force of the state. Since essentially the same forces are opposed to both integration and unionization, it is natural that these two aspects of the new Yankee aggression should be presented to the public as different phases of the same thing.
South Carolina’s principal industry is cotton textiles. Only a small percentage of textile workers in the state are unionized and nowhere does there exist equality of employment opportunities for Negroes in South Carolina textiles. In fact state law on labor and employment contains the following provisions:
It shall be unlawful for any person engaged in the business of cotton textile manufacturing in this state to allow or permit operatives, help and labor of different races
(a) to labor and work together within the same room,
(b) to use the same doors of entrance and exit at the same time,
(c) to use and occupy the same pay ticket windows or doors for paying off its operatives and laborers at the same time,
(d) to use the same stairway and windows at the same time, or,
(e) to use at any time the same lavatories, toilets, drinking water buckets, pails, cups, dippers or glasses.[504]
In blaming integration and unionization efforts on Northern jealousy and resentment of Southern economic progress, the Anderson Independent has been the leading voice in the state. The paper presents itself as the friend and champion of the working man and, in truth, is prepared to go much further than most South Carolinians in supporting minimum wage laws, social security benefits, and other benefits for the working classes. However, labor unions have no more implacable an enemy. In stating its position on the connection between Republican politics, organized labor and integration, the upcountry newspaper declared:
We said then [1952], and repeat the opinion now, that the forces behind the integration campaign are the true lineal descendants of Black Republicanism that forced the South into secession and war in the 1860’s and for the same reasons—money and industry.
In the 1850’s there were the Abolitionists. In the 1950’s there is the NAACP. In the 1850’s the South’s economy was becoming too strong to suit New England interests. In the 1950’s the migration of industry poses the same challenge to the North and East.
The Republican party was founded upon Abolitionist agitation and the same party today is staking its hopes of retaining power on the modern-day Abolitionists who also are in unholy alliance with the big labor unions.[505]
Shortly after making this statement, which exhibited lack of concern for historical accuracy, the same newspaper further spelled out its stand on organized labor:
This time the issue is not the abolition of slavery. Rather, it is the demand that industrial slavery in the form of labor unions be allowed to dictate the allocation of industry and jobs.
The South’s position today in relation to the rest of the U. S. in its constitutional resistance to integration may be strengthened by placing heavier emphasis upon the fact that, unlike the 1850’s the South is on the side of liberty in a battle against a peculiarly insidious type of slavery.[506]
The Independent is by no means alone in speaking of the “conspiracy” between the integrationists and organized labor. Lieutenant Governor E. F. Hollings warned against the combined efforts of CIO labor unions and New England politicians in collusion with the NAACP to “cut the flow of industry” into South Carolina and the South. Likewise, Attorney General T. C. Callison hinted at “some unholy alliance between the NAACP and enemies of ours who would be rejoiced to bring about the condition of confusion, which would interfere with the migration of industry to our state.”[507] Shortly after Congress’ passage of the Civil Rights Act the News and Courier ran the following editorial note under the title of “Know Your Enemy”: “Every South Carolinian who is employed in a textile mill should know that William Pollock, president of the Textile Workers Union of America, AFL-CIO, has petitioned President Eisenhower to appoint immediately civil rights commissioners for the South. The man who wants to collect the dues of textile workers in South Carolina can’t wait for the New Reconstruction to begin.”[508]
National labor unions have been, of course, among the most consistent and militant supporters of full civil rights for Negroes. This fact, together with such actions by the national unions as condemning the activities of the Citizens Councils, have been used against the cause of organized labor. The News and Courier commented with much validity that the “traditional viewpoint” of Southerners on separation of the races accounted for the resistance to labor organization in the state. South Carolina’s industrial workers, it maintained, would have to choose between heeding “the orders of union officials who are brainwashed with the popular creed of mixing the races” and declaring “their independence as free citizens.” Noting that the South was traditionally “pro-segregation and anti-union,” it declared that to the “union member who has already parted with one tradition the question is whether he can part with the second, and still be accepted in the community.” In a not very subtle attempt to alienate the South Carolina worker from the labor union, the News and Courier declared that “the white man who wishes to preserve his culture, his civilization, as he and his fathers knew it, is in the minority as the national union labor leaders count noses.”[509]
Anti-union elements have been not unsuccessful in using for their own ends the pro-integration stand of national labor unions and their leaders. In some areas union members support Citizens Councils or other white supremacy groups. And the implication of statements by a number of labor leaders in the state, notably among those of the Textile Workers Union of America, is that these members put loyalty to the Citizens Councils above that of their labor unions. Oversimplifying the case, Representative John Calhoun Hart of Union, one of the leaders of a weak and unsuccessful effort to repeal the state’s right-to-work law, told George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO: “Organized labor will never make any substantial progress in the South until national labor leaders stop uttering such rot and drivel on racial matters in the South. Any Southerner who would go along with you on such things is not worth his salt and could not be elected dogcatcher.”[510]
One of the most curious developments in the integration controversy has been the creation of the United Southern Employes Association, a pro-segregation labor organization imported from North Carolina. Leaders of the new labor group acknowledged that they were reacting against the pro-integration tendencies of the old unions and against “the trend toward concentration of too much power in the hands of ‘a few big-shots.’” Applicants for membership were required to sign a promise to attempt “in a legal manner, to maintain and support the Southern tradition of segregation in education and society of the white and Negro races without discriminating against or violating the civil rights of any other person or persons.” The movement also aimed at the establishment of a member-controlled labor movement and the bringing about of “good friendship” and good relations between workers and industries. The United Southern Employes Association supported amendments to the state’s right-to-work law which would require the approval by secret ballot of union members before any strike could be called by a local union, thus preventing “wildcat strikes by unions without the approval of their members”; prohibit national or international unions from levying more than a seventy cents per month tax on members without membership approval by secret ballot; ban a national or international union from controlling local funds or property; require membership approval, by secret ballot, of all contracts and work agreements before such become binding; allow any union member to withdraw his membership upon ten days notice to the local union; and require that union members be notified ten days in advance of any union elections; investigate labor disputes; and in general serve as a state labor board. Though the dedication of such an organization to the real welfare of the working class might be questioned, the United Southern Employes Association presented itself as labor’s hope in the South. By early 1957 the group had only one office in the state, at Rock Hill, but it had grandiose plans for establishment of others.[511]
The close association of the United Southern Employes Association with conservative elements in the state came to light in January, 1957, when W. A. Somersett, one of its organizers, was asked to address the meeting in Columbia of the South Carolina Independent political movement. Somersett presented the Association as being dedicated to the preservation of racial segregation. He condemned the national Democratic party as being “socialist” and listening overmuch “to persons such as Walter Reuther.”[512]
Somersett descended a few steps down the South Carolina social ladder when he addressed a meeting of the Fort Mill Klan Klavern. According to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union, he asserted that any klansman was automatically considered a member of the USEA and could be sent across an AFL-CIO picket line. This statement, it is said, was greeted by a chorus of boos and a walkout of most of the klansmen who were themselves textile operators.[513]
Thus the segregationist elements of the state reacted to the diverse phases of the renewed war of Yankee aggression. It is a war in which the South appears doomed to lose again, although at a much slower pace than the struggle of the 1860’s. The growing disagreements between North and South spotlight the ever increasing isolation of the latter, not only in the nation but in the free world. It is evident, by 1958, that the time has come for Southerners to undergo an “agonizing reappraisal” of their traditional concepts of the relationships between the races. It is also evident, however, that South Carolina’s white spokesmen are not yet prepared to do this. On the face of things it appears that white South Carolinians would settle down to a long and slow process of chopping off the dog’s tail a bit at a time: The end result will not change but the process will be much more painful.