A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow

By David L. Chappell

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

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2009
• ISBN: 9780807895573

David L. Chappell

David L. Chappell is Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.

Book preview

001

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

Praise

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Hungry Liberals

THE QUEST FOR SECULAR FAITH

PULPIT ENVY: THE VARIETIES OF A SECULAR WILL TO BELIEVE

THE POSTWAR POLITICS OF CULTURE

Chapter 2 - Recovering Optimists

LIBERALS AND THE RISE OF THE RACIAL ISSUE

MYRDALERIE OR MASTERY? ON THE IDOLATROUS FAITH IN INSTITUTIONS

Chapter 3 - The Prophetic Ideas That Made Civil Rights Move

MARTIN LUTHER KING’S ANTHROPOLOGY

AN AMERICAN DILEMMA OR A THEISTIC DILEMMA?

BEYOND KING

FORCE, NOT MERELY SUASION

NONVIOLENCE IS NOT NECESSARILY THE HEART OF THE MATTER: MODJESKA SIMKINS

Chapter 4 - Prophetic Christian Realism and the 1960s Generation

JAMES LAWSON

IMMEDIATISM AND THE PRACTICALITY OF RENOUNCING THIS WORLD: FANNIE LOU HAMER

THE OLDER GENERATION’S LESSONS ARE NOT LOST

ON THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PROPHETIC THOUGHT

Chapter 5 - The Civil Rights Movement as a Religious Revival

THE WAYS AND MEANS OF A REVIVALIST

MAKING RELIGION REAL IN THE LIVES OF MEN

WHAT RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM ACCOMPLISHED AND COULD NOT ACCOMPLISH

Chapter 6 - Broken Churches, Broken Race

DEGREES OF SEGREGATIONISM

CONSERVATIVES CANNOT LIVE BY SEGREGATION ALONE

ON THE DEFENSIVE: NO POSITIVE GOOD ARGUMENT FOR SEGREGATION

THE WAGES OF NEUTRALITY

SEGREGATIONIST ANTICLERICALISM

Chapter 7 - Pulpit versus Pew

PURGING THE SUSPECTED INTEGRATIONISTS

OTHER SEGREGATIONIST EFFORTS TO ORGANIZE DISSENT

BIGGER THAN ELVIS PRESLEY

NOT ONLY UNEQUAL, BUT ALSO UNSEPARATE: THE LARGER SOCIAL TRUTH BEHIND BILLY GRAHAM

MISSIONARY MOTIVATIONS

THE WORLDLY SOURCES OF BLACK SOUTHERN CONFIDENCE

Chapter 8 - Segregationist Thought in Crisis

HOW TO CLAIM THE HIGH GROUND WITHOUT ABANDONING THE GRASSROOTS

AVOIDING THE TAINT OF LAWLESSNESS AND MOB RULE

CONSTITUTIONALISM AND THE CULT OF RESPECTABILITY

A GENTEEL EFFORT AT A REBEL YELL: INTERPOSITION

TOO LITTLE FORCE TO WIN OR TOO MUCH TO CONTROL?

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONTRADICTION OF SEGREGATIONISM

RACISM AS A SOCIAL BOND AND SOUTHERN LUCK WITH LEADERS

Conclusions

Appendix - A PHILOSOPHICAL NOTE ON HISTORICAL EXPLANATION

Notes

Archival and Manuscript Sources

Bibliographical Essay

Acknowledgements

001002

© 2004 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Set in Janson by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Portions of Chapters 1, 5, 6, and 8 appeared in articles or essays in the following publications, respectively: The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South, ed. Ted Ownby (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002); African American Review, Winter 2002; Journal of American Studies 32 (August 1998); and Georgia Historical Quarterly 82 (Spring 1998). Those materials are used here by permission of the publishers.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Frontispiece: Detail of photograph of Fred Shuttlesworth

(© Danny Lyon/Magnum Photos)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chappell, David L.

A stone of hope: prophetic religion and the death of

Jim Crow / David L. Chappell. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2819-X (cloth: alk. paper)

eISBN : 97-8-080-78955-7

1. African Americans—Civil rights—History—20th century. 2. African Americans—Segregation—History—20th century. 3. Civil rights movements—United States—History—20th century. 4. Civil rights workers—Religious life—United States—History—20th century. 5. Civil rights—United States—Religious aspects—Christianity—History—20th century. 6. Christianity and politics—United States—History—20th century. 7. Church and social problems—United States—History—20th century. 8. United States—Race relations. 9. United States—Church history—20th century. I. Title.

E185.61 .C5435 2003

323.1196’073—dc22 2003017334

08 07 06 05 04 5 4 3 2 1

To my father,

Vere Claiborne Chappell

003

History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.

—SEAMUS HEANEY,

The Cure at Troy

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, no matter how it turns out.

—VACLAV HAVEL,

Disturbing the Peace

Introduction

004

In his famous I Have a Dream speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said that he was going back to the South with faith that his people could hew a stone of hope from a mountain of despair. That image captures the philosophy of the civil rights movement. The faith that drove black southern protesters to their extraordinary victories in the mid-1960s, this book argues, grew out of a realistic understanding of the typically dim prospects for social justice in this world. Despair was the mountain. Hope was by comparison small, hard to come by. Freedom isn’t free, one of the movement’s songs observed: You gotta pay a price, you gotta sacrifice, for your liberty. In another one of his 1963 speeches King said that the jailed black children of Birmingham were carving a tunnel of hope through the mountain of despair.

King’s public career had begun in 1955, in a period defined by Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Stalin; by the homogeneity of Levittown and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; by a popular president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who opposed federal action to promote equality; and by equally popular racial demagogues in the southern states. The Democratic Party, in its 1948 platform, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, appeared to repudiate their long-standing support of white supremacy. But neither could do much to change the discriminatory laws and customs in the South. The Democrats retreated from their bold statement, and the Court seemed to consign victims of discrimination to an endless, costly series of individual lawsuits. Many black southerners—including King, for a time—concluded that the rosy promises of change were as false as innumerable promises in the past. Hopes of racial justice seemed as distant as ever.

Yet over the twelve-odd years of King’s career, a mass movement rose up in the South and brought city governments, bus companies, and chambers of commerce to their knees. The movement created disorder so severe as to force a reluctant federal government to intervene—on the side of black southerners, which was more surprising then than it seems in hindsight today. The civil rights movement—aided by Democratic-Republican competition for the votes of recent black migrants to the North and by U.S.-Soviet competition for allies among newly independent African and Asian nations—destroyed Jim Crow, the vast system of legal segregation and disfranchisement named after a nineteenth-century minstrel character. In addition to provoking Congress to turn against its powerful southern bloc in the sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the movement forced a change in the Constitution. The Twenty-fourth Amendment and new interpretations of the Fifteenth guaranteed black Americans the vote. The movement shut down a political culture of racist demagoguery and one-party rule in the southern states, a culture long underwritten by the threat of mob violence.

The movement did all this with remarkably few casualties. Ugly as white southern resistance was, Maya Lin’s memorial to martyrs of the civil rights movement has only 40 names engraved on it. The apartheid regime in South Africa beat that figure in a single day, at Sharpeville in 1960, when it killed 67 people and wounded 200 more. In a freedom struggle closer to our own time, Chinese authorities killed some 2,600 in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square. America’s own war to destroy slavery, with 600,000 deaths, makes the destruction of segregation a century later appear astonishingly nonviolent. Its destruction appears a feat of moral and political alchemy, well represented by King’s stone of hope from a mountain of despair.

How did it happen? The civil rights struggle did not consist entirely of politics and grassroots organizing, as books and documentaries on the subject have so far implied. It also involved a change in American culture, a change in what Americans thought and felt when they talked about things like freedom, equality, race, and rights. It involved a change in Americans’ expectations about these things, what they considered realistic as opposed to idealistic.

This book tries to account—and claims only to begin the accounting—for the cultural changes behind the civil rights movement by answering four questions: Why did the dominant voice in American political culture, liberalism, fail to achieve anything substantial for black rights at the height of liberal power in the 1930s? Where did black southerners find a philosophical inspiration to rebel, given the failure of liberalism as they knew it? How did black southerners sustain the confidence, solidarity, and discipline of their rebellion through years of drudgery, setbacks, and risk? Finally, why were the enemies of the civil rights movement, for one fleeting but decisive moment, so weak?

Chapters 1 through 4 reconsider the intellectual roots of the civil rights movement. The black southern movement’s political successes depended on an alliance with northern liberals. Yet the liberals’ animating faith was radically different from that of the southern movement. Liberals believed in the power of human reason to overcome prejudice and other vestiges of a superstitious, unenlightened past. Liberals believed, with Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose famous 1944 report on American racism they embraced, that progress was under way: further education, along with economic development, would lead white southerners to abandon their irrational traditions. Therefore liberals, though sincere in their devotion to black rights, did not see any reason to do anything drastic to promote them. Indeed, they thought that pushing too hard for black rights would provoke a violent reaction in the backward white South.

Liberals’ most sensitive and articulate spokesmen, such as John Dewey and Lionel Trilling, were acutely aware of the cultural weakness of their faith in reason. Especially after seeing how difficult it was for the West’s liberal democracies to fight the Nazis, liberals envied and feared conservatives’ power to draw on irrational wellsprings of myth and tradition. Yet in the South of the 1950s, it was liberals’ new black allies, rather than their white supremacist enemies, who drew most effectively on such irrational wellsprings.

The black movement’s nonviolent soldiers were driven not by modern liberal faith in human reason, but by older, seemingly more durable prejudices and superstitions that were rooted in Christian and Jewish myth. Specifically, they drew from a prophetic tradition that runs from David and Isaiah in the Old Testament through Augustine and Martin Luther to Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century. (That tradition also traveled down a different path, via the seventh-century prophet Muhammad, to the mind of the mature Malcolm X and some of his followers, though that path is not examined in this book. The prophetic tradition was not confined to Christianity or even to religion: strictly Christian thinkers like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr were quick to admit that an atheist might take a prophetic stance more readily and faithfully than a typical twentieth-century Christian.) The thinkers who were active in the black movement—at least the ones for whom I was able to track down an extensive intellectual record—believed that the natural tendency of this world and of human institutions (including churches) is toward corruption. Like the Hebrew Prophets, these thinkers believed that they could not expect that world and those institutions to improve. Nor could they be passive bystanders. They had to stand apart from society and insult it with skepticism about its pretensions to justice and truth. They had to instigate catastrophic changes in the minds of whoever would listen, and they accepted that only a few outcasts might listen. They had to try to force an unwilling world to abandon sin—in this case, the sin of segregation. The world to them would never know automatic or natural progress. It would use education only to rationalize its iniquity.

Like all nonmythical figures, the thinkers of the civil rights movement were inconsistent. They understandably strayed from the Prophets’ lonely, undiplomatic, often downright antisocial path. At times they spoke the language of liberal Christianity and secular liberalism, which had in common a very unprophetic faith in human autonomy and self-improvement. They were political strategists, who recognized that the human hopes they needed to cultivate were entwined with consumerist striving for a piece of American prosperity, which was spreading like mad in the post-World War II boom. They were also human: they could forgive consumerist striving in the poor sinners around them and in themselves. The paper trail of more serious moral failings than consumerism on the part of Martin Luther King is now too conspicuous to be ignored. American law dictates a presumption of innocence for the less famous leaders whose trails have not been uncovered. But common sense, not to mention their own prophetic view of human nature, dictates the opposite. The thinkers in the civil rights movement could not live up to their own austere moral vision, could not entirely separate themselves from the world or from the world-view they condemned. That said, they departed from modern liberal faith in the future—from the Humanism that had been rising in Western culture, with occasional setbacks, since the Renaissance—far more than historians have recognized. They strayed far more than the allegedly chastened liberals of the post-World War II generation, who read Reinhold Niebuhr and claimed to embrace his pessimism about human nature. (In Chapter 1 I argue that liberals only applied that newfound pessimism to foreign affairs, leaving their optimism about life inside the United States, even for the poor and for racial minorities, intact.) The alliance between black Christian civil rights groups and American liberals was more an alliance of convenience than one of deep ideological affinity. Viewed in this light, the alliance’s unraveling after the 1960s may not seem as baffling and bewildering as it ordinarily does.

The movement’s few prophetic spokesmen and spokeswomen aside, how can we account for the masses of poor, disfranchised protesters? How did they have the guts and the discipline to stand against the dogs and firehoses when there was no reason to think they would win on this earth? Chapter 5 considers these questions. There is much testimony about conversion experiences during the mass meetings and demonstrations, which no historian or social scientist has put at the center of the story before.

The conviction that God was on their side comes through in many statements by black movement participants during the 1950s and 1960s. This conviction often came to participants in ritualistic expressions of religious ecstasy. Experiencing and witnessing such expressions gave participants confidence, not simply in the righteousness of their protest, but also in the effectiveness of that protest in this world. Historians have not scrupulously separated the two kinds of confidence, perhaps because they have not entirely forgone their own liberal faith in human progress. To know that one is morally right is easy and common; to believe one is going to defeat one’s enemies requires rather extraordinary faith. Being right about the latter matter requires something even more extraordinary than faith.

Perhaps the hardest and greatest hope of the civil rights protesters was hewn from that impassible, snow-capped range of bigotry, hypocrisy, and social conservatism, the southern white church. That is the subject of Chapters 6 and 7. Though the white churches of the South drew indignant criticism from black and northern white ministers for their failure to fall into line behind the black protesters—criticism that historians have echoed—what was surprising was that those churches did not lend much support to the other side. White southern churches, though they were then celebrating the centennial of the Civil War, did not follow the example of their antebellum ancestors. A hundred years earlier, ministers and theologians had led the pro-slavery cause with brilliance and vigor. (It is hard to account for the suicidal devotion of nonslaveowning white southern families—three-fourths of the South’s white population—to the slave system without the faith they learned to have in the moral superiority of slavery. Their ministers and theologians taught them to see slavery as a benevolent bulwark against the North’s anarchical and irresponsible freedom, which let workers go homeless and starve.)¹ More recently, southern white churches had worked aggressively and creatively to instill industrial discipline (sobriety, obedience to authority, and individualist disdain for labor unions) during the great social struggle over industrialization of the Carolina Piedmont.² And, not so long after the civil rights battles, southern churches mobilized masses in the antiabortion movement and other political feuds over family values.

But unlike white southern social conservatives before and after them, the segregationists in the 1950s-60s tended to identify their own white southern churches as their enemy. Most readers today are surprised to learn that the southern Baptists and southern Presbyterians went on record in favor of desegregation in the mid-1950s by a majority vote of representatives of their member churches. In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the vote was roughly 9,000 to 50 in favor of desegregation; in the General Assembly of the southern Presbyterians, it was 239 to 169.³ These figures are more striking in light of the near-unanimity of elected officials against desegregation.

It is important to remember that the southern Baptists and southern Presbyterians in the 1950s-60s were still maintaining the separate denominations their forebears had created when they broke from their northern counterparts over slavery: segregationists could not blame the desegregationism of their denominational assemblies on Yankee control. White churches at the local level were less unified than the regionwide denominational bodies. The vocal opposition of lay segregationists and, in rare instances, politicized clergy, made the issue so controversial that most ministers seem to have tried to avoid it. The most important consequence of this was that segregationist propaganda often condemned the southern white clergy en bloc for its failure to stand up for the white South’s cause. Segregationists condemned their churches, that is, for exactly the same sin as Martin Luther King condemned them in his 1963 Letter from the Birmingham Jail: for neutrality in a moral crisis.

Scholars who notice the apolitical stance of the southern churches generally see it as de facto support of segregation. So it was for many years. But by the mid-1950s, segregationists needed more than de facto support. They needed somebody with more cultural authority than an opportunistic politician to embrace their cause. They needed legitimacy. They needed the cultural depth and tradition their church represented. They thought that the church had the ability to instill discipline and to demand sacrifice. They wanted that discipline and sacrifice to galvanize the white South for an honorable show of force worthy of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. But they did not get what they wanted. Instead, they enviously watched as prominent black southern protesters got political support from their churches—which was almost as rare and surprising as their getting support from the federal government.

White supremacists in the South failed to get their churches to give their cause active support. That was their Achilles’ heel. Again, this was more significant at the time—at the height of the Billy Graham revival, in the heart of the Bible Belt—than it appears in hindsight today. Compared to the thorough, confident support that slaveowners received from their leading theologians and other cultural authorities a century earlier, the segregationists look disorganized and superficial.

The segregationists had other cultural strengths—ones that historians have not taken seriously. They had brilliant rhetoricians and constitutional scholars on their side who defended the southern way of life with much more confidence and coherence than their religious leaders. Most scholars have dismissed the segregationists as simpleminded racists and opportunistic demagogues. There were plenty of both in the white South. But as I argue in Chapter 8, serious intellectuals—particularly editors and lawyers —also attempted, with sophistication and moral sincerity, to dignify and reinforce segregation. Their failure to persuade their enemies (presumably most people who read this book) should not distract attention from a concern that plagued them more than their enemies: how to control their allies. How they dealt with that concern is a key to understanding how black protesters beat them. Segregationists outspent, outvoted, and outgunned the black protesters. But the black protesters found the segregationists’ weak points.

The irrational prejudice, economic exploitation, and political opportunism that most historians see at the root of the system do not explain the problem that absorbed most white southern propagandists’ energy: how to maintain respectability while drumming up sufficient popular militancy. The white South’s most influential editors supported segregation, but they were as serious as northern liberals were about repudiating bigotry, backwardness, and ignorance. They believed that segregation was the best way to maintain peace—to avoid an irrational emotional backlash. Yet they needed to stir their followers to face the alarming new threat of mass organization in the black South—and to face what they saw as northern politicians’ growing temptation to appease that mass organization. They needed to inspire sacrifice and risk. They fretted over the difficulty of inspiring the white southern masses, whom they saw as complacent and apathetic. How could they motivate those masses to put up a good fight without going the demagogic route of relying on impractical and uncontrollable emotions like racism? The segregationist intellectuals were racists themselves, to the extent that the record can reveal such things. But they had little confidence in racism’s power to hold the white South together through a long battle.

Segregationist intellectuals put most of their hopes in constitutional arguments about state rights. Most historians refuse to admit that these arguments were constitutionally sound, however unsavory their political effects may have been. Fortunately for the civil rights movement, legal arguments did not decide the political dispute. Segregationist intellectuals tried to keep the white South under control. They were haunted by a sense of their own ineffectiveness. They saw the franker racists of the white South coming up with more exciting, more inspiring battle cries. The trouble was that the effective battle cries pushed white southerners away from what even the poorest ones seemed to want: respectability. Those battle cries would thus fail to unify and sustain the population throughout the struggle.

The segregationists’ tone was often defeatist: segregationism had the wry honor of sounding like a lost cause before the battle even began. Segregationist violence in this light appears to have been more an expression of desperation than determination. The forty martyrs of the movement should be seen in that perspective, as well as in the perspective of moral outrage. The outrage is—thankfully—still fresh; it is a salutary outrage, which may be all this nation has to counter the still-powerful temptations of racial profiling. But a ray of hope should illuminate the outrage, or a stone of hope should balance the outrage: The peculiar racial institution of the twentieth-century South was destroyed by means considerably short of civil war. That makes its destruction in many ways a more rather than a less impressive achievement than the destruction of slavery.

The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black southern activists got strength from old-time religion, and white supremacists failed, at the same moment, to muster the cultural strength that conservatives traditionally get from religion. Who succeeded in the great cultural battle over race and rights in the 1950s and early 1960s? Those who could use religion to inspire solidarity and self-sacrificial devotion to their cause. Who did not have such religious power? Two groups: those who failed—the segregationists—and those who succeeded only by attaching themselves to the religious protesters—the liberals.

Black southern activists did not win all of their goals, especially in the economic realm: they did not achieve equality. But, grounded as they were in a long tradition of disappointed prophecy, they could not have expected to gain anything like heaven on earth. Measured by historical standards of realism, their achievement was extraordinary—arguably the most successful social movement in American history, one that has been an inspiration from Soweto to Prague to Tiananmen Square. The cultural and religious perspectives that follow do not provide the whole story of this extraordinary movement, but they outline the extent and depth of its imprint on the national psyche. They tell us not only what happened during the civil rights struggle, but also what the struggle meant to its participants on both sides.

1

Hungry Liberals

THEIR SENSE THAT SOMETHING WAS MISSING

005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE QUEST FOR SECULAR FAITH

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

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

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

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

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

Dewey was generally deaf to and suspicious of religious feeling as it actually existed (this is the starkest contrast between Dewey and James), yet he thought that some kind of piety might be philosophically justifiable.²³ Some postreligious faith might foster a socially useful sense of dependence and ward off pride. Such faith might nourish a sense of common participation in the inevitable uncertainties of existence . . . coeval with a sense of common effort and shared destiny. ²⁴ In this Dewey echoed, among others, Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim, who strained to find some way to replace religion—which, Durkheim observed, was losing its credibility whether we liked it or not—as a tool for the moral instruction of children.²⁵

Dewey was more concerned than Durkheim with the specific problem of political morality. He felt an urgent need to transform public institutions (schools and other instruments of a potentially democratic state). These institutions often inculcated a salutary moral sense in children, but they could be reformed to do more: to express the people’s moral sense and enforce it against the competing sense of the privileged few. Dewey believed that the people’s moral sense was being drowned out by those with undemocratic privileges, particularly industrial corporations, which he thought were the principal cause of a crisis in democracy in the late 1920s and 1930s.²⁶ As the crisis deepened, Dewey expanded his quest for a viable public morality by criticizing the all-encompassing faiths that sustained communism and fascism. He also criticized the faith that bolstered capitalism, a faith that was just as dogmatic as communism and fascism, but worse in a way: it opened the way for the extremist alternatives because it was so unsatisfying.²⁷ The mid-twentieth-century rise of new nationalist movements, which pretend to represent the order, discipline, and spiritual authority that will counteract social disintegration, was, to Dewey, a tragic comment upon the unpreparedness of the older liberalism to deal with the new problem which [liberalism’s] very success precipitated. Liberals needed to compete with the modern secular faiths that inspired the murderous and suicidal devotion of the masses in Europe and Russia.²⁸

Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action (1935), which his disciple Sidney Hook hoped would be to the twentieth century what the Communist Manifesto had been to the nineteenth, expanded on Dewey’s diagnosis of liberals’ great failing. Liberals, with their spirit of open debate and reasoned compromise, with their watered down dialectic, failed to command the enthusiasm of the public. They could not dispel the dishonest propaganda with which the state and corporations maintained an unjust order.²⁹ This preoccupied Dewey because he was a democrat as much as he was a liberal. He wanted majority rule, that is, as much as he wanted liberty. He acknowledged and wrestled with the tension between those two commitments better than his fellow liberals. But reconciling majority rule with liberty was not easy, and Dewey may have failed to inspire the faithful following that Marx and Engels had because he was more honest than they in acknowledging how difficult it was to reconcile the basic elements of his faith. Where they blithely claimed to reconcile French Romantic dreams of socialist bliss with the skeptical economic theory of British Utilitarianism, he saw that devotion to human freedom and reason was sometimes incompatible with mass popularity.

John Dewey, patron philosopher of independent liberals, believed solidarity and sacrifice were necessary to achieve freedom and equality. But liberals’ devotion to reason left them incapable of inspiring such solidarity and sacrifice. To inspire what reason could not inspire, Dewey tried to prove that modern man could invent a new faith—even a God—compatible with materialistic science. (Special Collections Research Center, Morris Library, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale)

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Dewey’s task, then, was to establish a new social organization with some new central spiritual authority that could nurture and direct the inner as well as the outer life of individuals. This new authority had to be created in a scientific spirit, not a dogmatic or nationalistic one. Liberal education would have to renew the springs of purpose and desire. To do this, education would have to be transformed—an admittedly difficult thing to accomplish before the economic and political institutions that