THE LOST CAUSE RELOST
The racially pure ... Teuton on the American Continent has arisen to be its master; he will remain master so long as he too does not succumb to blood defilement.—Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
In 1954 historian Francis B. Simkins told the Southern Historical Association: “There is a reality about the South which historians with egalitarian standards find hard to understand or appreciate.” The South, said this native South Carolinian, should be judged by its own standards, not those of a liberal, equalitarian, democratic America.[547] Professor Simkins’ advice has not been followed in this study.
In contemplating the arguments advanced by white South Carolinians against integrating the races on any level, one is struck by the prominence given to expressions of fear that integration will inevitably lead to wholesale “amalgamation” and/or “miscegenation” which will result in turn in the destruction of Southern civilization. An excellent example of this reasoning is contained in the late Herbert Ravenel Sass’s article “Mixed Schools and Mixed Blood,” which appeared in the November 1956 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. “It is the deep conviction of nearly all white Southerners,” Sass wrote, “that the mingling or integration of white and Negro children in the South’s primary schools would open the gates to miscegenation and widespread racial amalgamation.” To guard against this “danger,” he declared, Southerners would maintain segregation in public schools at all costs. “The South must do this because, although it is a nearly universal instinct, race preference is not active in the very young. Race preference (which the propagandists miscall race prejudice or hate) is one of those instincts which develop gradually as the mind develops and which, if taken in hand early enough, can be prevented from developing at all.” If the South allowed its small children to attend integrated schools in which white and colored would be “brought together intimately and constantly” there would be many “in whom race preference would not develop.” This would be the ultimate tragedy for the South and for civilization. For “a very few years of thoroughly integrated schools would produce large numbers of indoctrinated young Southerners free from all ‘prejudice’ against mixed matings.” Negro leaders, he concluded, desired racial amalgamation; “they not only want the right to amalgamate through legal intermarriage but they want that right to be exercised widely and frequently.”[548]
The concern of South Carolinians with the “threat” of intermarriage is evidenced by the frequency with which this subject is mentioned in letters to newspapers in the state. Though the logic and factual accuracy of many of these letters leave something to be desired, they none the less are illustrative of a state of mind. For example, W. A. Morris of Charleston, referring to the mulattoes in the NAACP, said: “In the animal kingdom the mongrel is despised and outlawed, the good farmer uses only purebred stock and dog and cat fanciers insist on pedigreed pets. Should we expect less of man, made in the image of God, or attempt to improve on God’s work?”[549] Mr. Morris did not make it exactly clear how both whites and blacks but not mulattoes could be made in God’s image. Nor did he concern himself with how mulattoes got to be what they are.
Sentiments similar to those of Morris were expressed by Mrs. S. L. Blackman of Darlington: “Cross-bred animals lose the higher qualities of the parent stock,” she asserted, “and the low qualities always come to the fore. That’s a law of nature you can’t get away from.... If segregation is broken down everywhere, this world will be peopled by a mongrel race, eventually fit for nothing, not worth the air they would breathe, just scum of the earth.”[550] Mrs. Blackman’s dogmatic assertions are in direct contrast to the findings of the late Professor Franz Boaz, America’s greatest cultural anthropologist. Concerning attitudes such as those expressed by Mrs. Blackman, Boas wrote: “The claim has been made ... that mixed races ... are inferior in physical and mental qualities, that they inherit all the unfavorable traits of the parental races. So far as I can see, this bold proposition is not based on adequate evidence.” Going even further, he declared, “The few cases in which it has been possible to gather strictly scientific data on the physical characteristics of the half-bloods have rather shown that there may be a certain amount of physical improvement in the mixed race.”[551]
Stanley F. Morse, a chronic letter-to-the-editor writer and prominent in white supremacy circles, told the News and Courier that the progeny of “uncontrolled [interracial] crossings are mongrels which are more apt to be inferior than superior.” “The fall of the Egyptian, Roman and other great civilizations,” he continued, “was largely due to the development of a mongrel race caused by interbreeding with slaves and ‘barbarians.’” Furthermore, “planned mongrelization of a race in 740 B.C. produced the despised Samaritans.” Those who would condone such mongrelization were “breaking the Divine Laws.” Other writers also considered intermarriage a violation of the will of God. Mrs. E. R. Mansfield of Mt. Pleasant, for example, wrote the News and Courier editor that “naturally this process of maintaining racial purity and integrity at the same time that we make possible equality of opportunity, is going to impose a hardship and some personal tragedies, on some individuals. But this will not be the first hard thing that God in His infinite goodness has demanded for us.”[552]
Three principal conclusions result from this study: (1) South Carolina has not yet embraced democracy as the term is generally defined by Americans outside the South. (2) Many white South Carolinians still accept a racism which in its most extreme forms approaches that of Hitler and the Nazis. (3) Not a few of the arguments and defenses advanced by segregationists against the Court decision are so illogical and so riddled with inconsistencies that sometimes one is obliged to question not only the sincerity but also the intelligence of the spokesmen. These conclusions have been illustrated in the body of the study but a short summary is in order.
The denial of equality of access or opportunity in any public area, function or facility by a “superior” group to an “inferior” group constitutes the antithesis of democracy. In this respect South Carolina, like all of the Southern states, is undemocratic, a condition which persons concerned with promoting integration have not failed to note. Clarence Mitchell, the Washington NAACP official, referred to South Carolina as “the frontier of democracy,” a place where “the real meaning of America” had not penetrated.[553]
The attitude of leading segregation spokesmen regarding democracy is more revealing than that of critics of the South. The News and Courier is the state’s most articulate expert on the “phony spiels about democracy.” The American people had gone “hog-wild in worshipping ‘democracy,’” complained this paper. Democracy with its “unrestricted franchise” did not guarantee good government. Indeed there was “ample precedent for requiring that those who vote on public issues be able to understand” what they were doing. Property, too, was a relevant qualification. George Washington himself had warned against the “‘dangerous multitudes without property and without principle.’” “Some persons” would object to the use of property as a qualification for voting but property was “still a gauge of competence.... Paupers are and should be excluded from deciding how other people’s money is to be spent.” Editor Thomas R. Waring’s editorials also argued that majority rule might be the essence of democracy but the United States was not a democracy. It was a republic. A mob might be a majority at certain times. “The condemnation of Jesus Christ had the approval of a majority. Throughout the history of the church there have been martyrs of majorities.”[554]
A democracy, according to the News and Courier, did not guarantee protection of sectional or local interests. But the United States—“a federal republic”—was especially designed for this end. Under the American constitutional system the parts were supposed to be equal to the whole. In this sense then it was not “the democratic way to force the majority of the people of a REGION to live in a manner that is repugnant to them. The democratic way should take into consideration the local as well as the national feelings of citizens.”[555] John C. Calhoun never better expressed these sentiments.
The Record, too, abhorred “absolute democracy.” The United States was never intended to be such. It was “a limited representative democracy.” The Record deplored constitutional flexibility. It maintained that the presumption on which the Supreme Court based its decision outlawing school segregation, namely, that the Constitution was “a growing document,” eliminated, “for all practical purposes,” the Constitution as “a safeguard of the people’s purposes,” as “a safeguard of the people’s rights and as a limitation upon government.” The Record maintained that the integration problem arose from the fact that “so many of the minority groups, who have been urging the abolition of segregation and other such ‘reforms’” were “not inheritors of the British tradition out of which the American Constitution grew.” These groups saw nothing to be feared in constitutional amendments by the Supreme Court. It was all “democracy” to them and by democracy they meant what the United States Constitution did not mean—absolute democracy.[556]
On this subject the State was equally vociferous. Referring to the term human rights as “meaningless,” the Columbia newspaper in 1957 declared: “The only right with which man is endowed at birth is the right to survive if he can. The right to vote, think freely and speak freely” and the right of representative government “are created by government and society.” Social Darwinism in its rawest form is not yet dead in South Carolina.
Not only do the segregationists deny the validity of many of the basic concepts of democracy but they also dispute the authority of the federal government to assure equal treatment under the laws of the United States to all Americans. They uphold what they consider to be the constitutional rights of the states above human rights as applied to the Negro. Democracy is denied to Negroes in the name of democratic government. Harking back to the conservative nature of the Constitution as originally written, the News and Courier thought it “ridiculous that a document which recognized slavery” was now being “brandished as a guarantee of all sorts of supposed rights. Did the framers of the Constitution, who approved of slavery, sit down and write a document guaranteeing to Negroes the right to send their children to mixed schools?” The question of the Charleston paper reveals more of its fetish for constitutionalism than does the answer: “The framers didn’t guarantee Negroes anything—not even protection from the whip!” The Record, at least recognizing that the Court based its decision on the Fourteenth Amendment and not the original Constitution, declared that “every student of the Constitution” knew that the amendment “was never constitutionally submitted to the states or constitutionally ratified” and was therefore “not today constitutionally a part of the Constitution.”[557] The Record’s arguments concerning the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment contain, of course, an element of historical truth, but only a warped approach to the problem of constitutionalism can hold that the Amendment is not part of the fundamental law of the land.
Not only is there a considerable body of anti-democratic opinion in the state but it is also safe to say that most white South Carolinians consider the Negro a member of an inferior race. Dr. E. Ryan Crow, chairman of the South Carolina education finance commission, observed, for example, that “the white man feels he belongs to a superior race.” To support this belief in racial superiority segregationists often resort to science or pseudo-science. The News and Courier thought it “curious” that many Americans had “abandoned the scientific approach to study of the human species.” “Leaders of public opinion,” it complained, had thrown overboard “the scientists’ cold appraisal” and had fallen back on “sentiment, on propaganda, on political catchwords.” Anything that tended to confirm “inherent differences among races,” was “frowned on as ‘racism.’ Yet a large body of scientific evidence indicates that important differences DO exist” between the races.[558]
These comments by the News and Courier brought a letter of agreement from Francis Fielding-Reid, M.D., of Charleston who warned South Carolinians against accepting “a certain type of pseudo-scientific balderdash.” Said the doctor:
Some years ago a so-called “prominent scientist” made a statement to the effect that the brains of people of various races had been examined anatomically and found essentially identical, and that this indicated that there were no essential intellectual nor emotional racial characteristics other than those caused by environment. Such statements are puerile or are made with intent to deceive....
This writer has heard pseudo-scientific sophistry to the effect that, since most deservedly prominent colored people have some white ancestry, mixing the races is desirable in order to produce more of these individuals. Such statements, too, are puerile and fraudulent.[559]
Other South Carolinians expressed similar opinions. Flora Bell Surles of Mt. Pleasant reported that ethnologists, whom she failed to name, had “shown” that the Negro race was “as yet ‘a childlike race.’” Gilbert Wilkes, also of Mt. Pleasant, described Negroes as belonging to a race which had “no history, or culture, or background of training in either social behavior or custom.” They were “only four generations removed from the trackless jungle” where they had lived “for countless thousands of years, without any development and in many cases without even having devised a language.”[560] Harold A. Petit of Charleston, vice-president and regional manager for the South Carolina Electric and Gas Company and past national president of Exchange Clubs, declared: “The Negro is irresponsible in every degree. I think it is a basic trait, although other conditions—environment, economics and education—contribute to his so-called lethargy.”[561]
A “Dirt Farmer” from “Rural South Carolina” expressed in the News and Courier the sentiments of the state’s most extreme racists. Conceding that segregation could not be “theoretically defended upon the basis of any code of ethics,” he nonetheless favored it because “like Hitler,” he believed “that the Aryan people are superior to any other who have yet trod the face of this earth during the period of recorded history, that they have the inherent ability to contribute more to the future well-being of mankind than any other.” What were the Aryan’s points of superiority, according to the “Dirt Farmer?” Their “curiosity: the desire to know for the sake of knowledge itself;” their “urge to reshape the world more to their own liking;” and their “seeking and finding newer and truer answers” to the problems of civilization. In the interest of impartiality he searched for points of superiority in the Negro. He could find only one—“a more highly developed sense of rhythm.” If the attributes of the Aryans were ever merged “with those of their inferiors, that fatal error can never be redeemed,” he concluded. Mankind’s slow progress would end “and the wave of the future” would push him “inexorably back into darkness and oblivion.”[562]
Logical inconsistency is the most striking characteristic of the many statements made in defense of racial segregation. The aforegoing pages have made this manifestly clear. But then who is logical when it comes to the question of racial superiority? Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and their like were living proof that logic really didn’t matter.