
          Tilling the Ground for Change
          Reviewed by Lassiter, MatthewMatthew Lassiter
          Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996
          
          Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New_Deal
Era, by Patricia Sullivan (University of North_Carolina Press, 1996, 335 pages).
          The travails of Southern liberals and radicals during the 1930s and
1940s have recently moved to the center of pre-Brown era Southern and civil_rights history as scholars continue to probe beneath the surface of white_supremacy in the so-called Solid South. Following closely on the heels of Speak Now Against the Day, John Egerton's extensive chronicle of dissenting Southerners, Patricia Sullivan's welcome new book examines the changes brought to the South by the New_Deal and World_War_II. Through the perspectives of Southern-born New_Deal policymakers, indigenous voting_rights activists, and especially the labor-liberals in the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW), Sullivan portrays the rise and fall of a progressive alternative to the white supremacist South: "days of hope" during which a New_Deal-inspired biracial movement for economic and social justice emerged as a challenge to the region's reactionary politicians. The repercussions of this effort shaped national as well as regional politics; in the decade between 1938 and 1948, Sullivan argues, the fate of the labor organization drives and voting_rights campaigns of the South largely determined the future of New_Deal liberalism and the Democratic_Party, and the commitment of Democratic policymakers in Washington substantially influenced the fate of Southern progressivism.
          The harsh realities of the Great Depression weakened the South's
traditional political opposition to federal intervention, and the
events of 1938 in particular "opened the way for a new political realignment in the South" (p.5), ushering in a pivotal decade of extraordinary fluidity in Southern politics. Southern New_Dealers drew up the Report on the Economic Conditions of the South, which labeled the region the "nation's number one economic problem"; Roosevelt traveled to the deep South to campaign against recalcitrant New_Deal opponents from his own party; the NACCP won its first significant legal victory against educational segregation in the Gaines v. Missouri law school case; the CIO escalated its push to organize black and white Southern workers; and an eclectic group of Southerners organized the SCHW, with repeal of the poll tax at the top of the new organization's agenda.
          Sullivan disagrees with many scholars who have focused on how
political constraints and policy compromises resulted in an
essentially conservative thrust for the New_Deal. Despite a caveat
that many New_Deal policies reinforced racial discrimination, she
paints the era as a time when, across the country, "there was a deep,
abiding awareness that a sea change in American politics was under
way" (p.24). It would have been helpful if this thesis were better
qualified; Days of Hope leaves the impression
that racial egalitarians and labor sympathizers had more power in
formulating New_Deal policies than they actually exercised, and it
glosses over the clearly significant influence enjoyed by
industrialists, bankers, and other conservative interests. This is
partly because for Sullivan, the truly radical potential of the New
Deal lay in its ability to raise consciousness and engender protest,
as the federal_government's aggressive new stance brought an unprecedented opportunity for biracial challengers to the South's manifestly undemocratic political structure. Even the New_Deal's limitations had an indirectly progressive impact: it was precisely the disjuncture between the optimism it inspired and the realities of everyday life under segregation and economic hardship which motivated a diverse array of Southerners to mobilize in demand of equal rights and economic justice. 
          Throughout the narrative, Sullivan combines the broader sweep of national-regional political developments with a narrow focus on individual Southern activists. Although at times extensive biographical sketches disrupt the narrative flow of the book, we are treated to evocative portraits of Southern New_Dealers such as Clark Foreman, Virginia Durr, Palmer
Weber, and Robert Weaver. Days of Hope is in large part a tribute to the Southern progressives who demanded large-scale federal action in the South, integrated race and class analyses through campaigns for labor and voting_rights, and envisioned an interracial democracy in place of segregation and white_supremacy. Coalescing in the SCHW, they forged a popular front with labor leaders such as Sidney Hilman at the CIO-PAC, civil_rights activists such as Charles Houston of the NACCP, and Washington allies such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Agricultural Secretary and eventual Vice-President Henry Wallace. The book is a "study of a generation"--a more
radical generation than the prominent academics and journalists who led the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and its successor, the Southern_Regional_Council. To Sullivan, white SRC moderates were "apologists for the segregation system" (p.166) because they believed that social change would have to come gradually and be led by elites such as themselves, not the federal_government and certainly not ordinary black Southerners.
          Sullivan is much more sympathetic toward the pragmatic compromises of her heroes in the SCHW than those of the moderate progressives of the SRC, but the latter also supported the New_Deal and opposed voting discrimination, and the two organizations were not as far apart as she implies. The white activists in SCHW rejected segregation more forcefully but, like the SRC, often phrased their protests in economic rather than explicitly racial terms. Fighting for Southerners such as the sharecroppers who formed the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the black citizens who protested the all 
white primary which rendered the Fifteenth Amendment irrelevant, SCHW
progressives advocated federal action against anti-democratic voting
laws and campaigned against conservative politicians who red-baited
and race-baited them in response. The transformations wrought during
the war years provided an even wider opening for the South's
progressive vanguard, especially after the 1944 Supreme_Court decision
in Smith v. Allwright signaled the demise of the white primary, the linchpin of efforts to deny the right of African_Americans to vote.
          Sullivan's passages about black efforts to gain entry into the
Democratic primary are among the most compelling in the book. These
middle chapters are a significant contribution to scholarly discourse,
demonstrating that during the 1940s the voting arena witnessed many of
the same conflicts which would rock the South during the desegregation
struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. For the Southern black
reformers who mobilized under the "Double V" campaign, Smith v. Allwright was as inspirational as the
Brown decision would prove to their successors. In South_Carolina, for
example, a statewide movement for black voter_registration led by John
McCray and Osceola McKaine resulted in increased political power and a
firmly established NAACP network which would provide the basis for
the legal civil_rights protests of the following decades. In response
to black challenges to the white primary, conservative politicians through legal machinations and the Ku Klux Klan through intimidation pursued the same strategies which would later be known as massive resistance. The foreshadowing took place at the national level as well, as the South_Carolina Progressive Democratic_Party organized by McCray and McKaine challenged the state's all-white delegation at the 1944 Democratic national convention but met the same fate as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic_Party would twenty years later in Atlantic City.
          The 1944 convention also provided a bitter battle over
Vice-President Henry Wallace's renomination, an event Sullivan
presents as a symbolic struggle over the fate of New_Deal
liberalism. The NACCP, the SCHW, labor unions, and other New_Dealers
rallied around Wallace, who denounced Southern conservatives and
stirringly advanced a progressive vision sympathetic to organized
labor and hostile to racial discrimination. Although party leaders,
with Roosevelt's knowledge, defied
the will of convention delegates by replacing Wallace with Harry Truman, progressives felt that momentum was on their side. Wallace and his allies believed that changing the South was critical to the survival of New_Deal liberalism, and after Roosevelt's reelection Wallace remarked that "a spirit of liberalism is abroad in the South." According to Sullivan, the changes wrought by the New_Deal and World_War_II comprised "the seedbed of a genuinely liberal and progressive movement," "an opening for racial tolerance and political democracy in a society steeped in segregation and white_supremacy" (p.188, 194).
          Could interracial democracy have transformed the South and, by extension, the nation? The key to this progressive hope was a class-based alliance which reached across racial boundaries, and in 1945-46 voter_registration drives constituted a political challenge which "revived the democratic promise of Reconstruction and moved beyond the tentative interracialism of the Populist movement. "(p.220) But despite substantial increases in black voter_registration and a number of electoral victories, the labor-liberal movement to shore up the national Democratic party by transforming its Southern base was ultimately unsuccessful. Southern politicians successfully exploited anti-union and pro-white_supremacy sentiments, but in Sullivan's analysis it was not the Dixiecrats but rather the national Democratic party which slammed shut the progressive window in the South by failing to enforce constitutional guarantees. In the new arena of Cold War politics, liberal anticommunists attacked labor unions and groups such as the SCHW for supposed Communist ties, fragmenting what was left of the Popular Front. Truman, who "lacked any basic commitment to the social democratic thrust of New_Deal reform" (p.223), cracked down on organized labor and abandoned the South to conservative Democrats. Under fire, the CIO distanced itself from the SCHW and purged the radicals and Communists in its ranks. Branded a Communist-front organization by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the SCHW descended into internal bloodletting and disbanded after Henry Wallace's campaign as the 1948 presidential candidate of the Progressive Party.
          The epilogue of Days of Hope is a beautifully written account of Wallace's Southern campaign swing in 1948. Wallace questioned the Cold War foreign policy consensus, adamantly supported the rights of laborers and unions, and told white Southerners to their faces that segregation was a sin. He was greeted by determined supporters but also jeered and assaulted by amazingly hostile mobs, at times even afraid for his life.
          On one hand, Wallace's defeat symbolized the end of the New_Deal era and the failure of interracial democracy in the South. During the 1950s the southern black freedom struggle operated in relative isolation, and only after 1960 did the federal_government through the Democratic party join forces with progressive Southerners once again. On the other hand, the "activists of the earlier decades tilled the ground for future change" (p.275), fighting to establish the legal precedents and political power which would be crucial to civil_rights activists of the next generation.
          Sullivan's book embodies the contradictions of hoping against hope
that things might have been different in the South. The window of opportunity approach is a mainstay of progressive Southern historians but is always problematic because it dwells on what might have been and by definition must downplay the often overwhelming evidence of why history turned out the way it did. In Days of Hope, the depth of interracial democracy in the South during the 1940s seems exaggerated; Sullivan does not provide evidence that a popular interracial movement existed, as opposed to a more limited cooperation among political activists and New_Deal supporters. White farmers and industrial laborers rarely were willing to work on equal terms with their black counterparts; one of the fundamental dilemmas facing progressives was that white working class Southerners overwhelmingly supported Roosevelt and simultaneously resisted other components of what Sullivan calls interracial democracy. The CIO's 1946 Operation Dixie drive to unionize the Southern textile industry was only the latest example of how many obstacles lay in the path of biracial class-based politics.
          In its attention to the fluidity, radical potential, and reservoir
of dissent which existed beneath a rigged political system, Sullivan's
book is a compelling challenge to easy generalizations about the Solid
South. Its greatest contribution is the chronicling of Southerners who
knew that their region had to change from within and knew that federal
intervention was also a prerequisite, a lesson which still resonates
today. The book opens with an official of the Hoover administration
telling Congress that "federal aid would be a disservice to the
unemployed," and its main villains are the Southern politicians who
opposed New_Deal liberalism and the national Democrats who abandoned
it. Days of Hope is an eulogy for an earlier
time when the pragmatic and freewheeling New_Deal offered hope and
provided inspiration to millions of Southerners and Americans caught
in desperate circumstances, but it is also a reminder of the
possibilities of social change and the necessity of aggressive action
in these less hopeful days, when the legacies of the New_Deal are
again under assault from traditional enemies and only half-heartedly
defended by many traditional
supporters.
          
            Matthew Lassiter is a graduate student at the University of Virginia.
          
        
