III
Traditionally orthodoxy on the race issue has transcended all other considerations in South Carolina politics. Consequently the state has had more than its fair share of zealots willing to play the race issue for the last ounce of its political worth. Even those most outspoken on the issue have not been free of charges of racial heresy. In the 1938 senatorial election Olin D. Johnston, attempting unsuccessfully to unseat “Cotton Ed” Smith, charged that the Senator had not always been anti-Negro. “Why, Ed Smith voted for a bill that would permit a big buck nigger to sit by your wife or sister on a railroad train,” he cried. But Smith was able to use the attack on him by Roosevelt and Northern liberals with telling effect. He boasted that he had walked out of the 1936 Democratic National Convention when a Negro minister was asked to pray. The purpose of that prayer, he declared, was “not to ask divine assistance but to invoke colored votes.” “White supremacy, that time honored tradition,” bellowed the Senator in a campaign speech, could “no more be blotted out of the hearts of South Carolinians” than could the “scars which Sherman’s artillery left on the State House at Columbia.”29
During the 1930’s and 1940’s under encouragement given their aspirations by the New and Fair Deals, South Carolina Negroes became Democrats in theory and in fact. Their most ambitious political undertaking was the formation in 1944 of the Progressive Democratic Party under the leadership of John McCray, a newspaperman, and James M. Hinton, a minister and insurance saleman. The Progressive Democrats supported the national Democratic Party but opposed that of the state.30 The Progressive Democrats had little success. David Duncan Wallace, the historian of South Carolina, estimated that only about 3,500 Negroes voted in the presidential election of 1944 and about 5,000 in 1948. In the latter year the Progressive Democrats sent a slate of delegates to the national party convention and unsuccessfully challenged the regular state Democrats.31 A similar attempt in 1956 also failed.
The increasing role of the Negro in South Carolina politics has had the effect of spotlighting such issues as civil rights, FEPC, and states rights. The white majority remains as determined as ever to maintain “the Southern way of life” and every inch of ground is yielded grudgingly. The race question is applied to nearly every political issue, either openly or covertly, and all-out attempts have been—and to be sure, still are—made to discredit any proposal or policy that would alter the status quo. The most popular method has been that of equating unpopular measures with communism, atheism, racial “mongrelization,” etc. Sometimes the results have been ludicrous. In his unsuccessful 1950 campaign for the United States Senate, Governor J. Strom Thurmond asserted that had President Truman “not been so busy playing Negro politics,” the nation would not have been involved in the Korean situation.32 Favorite targets in the 1940’s were President Truman’s civil rights bill and his FEPC proposals. Thomas R. Waring, editor of the News and Courier and not to be confused with his cousin the judge, said the opposition to President Truman’s proposals was based on the belief that they “would be an invasion of states and individual rights” and would result in “an intermingling of races in hotels, restaurants, theaters, buses, and places of employment.” Governor Thurmond termed the FEPC proposals the closest this country had yet come to communism. They would turn the United States into “nothing more than a police state,” he warned. The proposals would force employers “to hire even Hindus.” The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, a few hours after addressing the state legislature where he was warmly received, told a Klan rally that if the civil rights proposals passed, it would “be legal for a Negro to come up on your porch and ask for your daughter’s hand in marriage.”33
Particularly dismaying to the state’s political leaders has been the growing realization that neither of the national political parties can be relied upon to protect what South Carolina Democrats consider to be the best interests of the state and the South. At the 1936 Democratic National Convention the South lost an effective weapon when the party abolished the ⅔ rule for party nominations. Though President Roosevelt had been able to hold the state party leaders in line, major revolts have developed in South Carolina against the national Democratic Party in every presidential election since 1944. Shortly before the 1952 presidential campaign was underway James F. Byrnes declared that the South had become a “stepchild” in national politics while both national parties were becoming slaves to the demands of minorities which held the balance of power in key Northern cities. He labeled the 1948 Democratic platform “more socialistic than democratic,” and the result of pressures brought by “organized minorities of northern states” on the leaders of the Democratic Party. These pressures had forced those leaders “to abandon the cardinal principle of states rights.”34
This alleged “renunciation by the Democratic Party of the principles upon which the Republic was founded” led in 1948 to the most successful of the political revolts, if measured in terms of election results. In the presidential election of that year the “Dixiecrat” movement, with Governor Thurmond as its candidate, carried four Southern states. Though this movement was generally justified in terms of states rights and constitutional government, the race issue undoubtedly was of paramount importance in inspiring it.35 Thurmond publicly and piously objected to the “white supremacy” theme of many of his followers. He professed to be “not interested one whit in the question of white supremacy” and referred to himself as “a progressive Southerner” who was interested in bettering the conditions of the Negro. He said he would conduct his campaign solely in support of “the sovereignty of the states as against federal government interference.” In October he reiterated that he was not running “on a platform of racial discrimination.” That was “for each state to decide.”36
Despite such pronouncements the race question ran prominently throughout Thurmond’s campaign speeches. Few did not contain a long attack on President Truman’s various civil rights proposals, especially FEPC. In August he said that if the “segregation program” of President Truman were enforced, “the results in civil strife” might be “horrible beyond imagination.” Lawlessness would be rampant. Chaos would prevail. Streets would be unsafe. The President’s “so called civil rights program” was written by Joseph Stalin in 1920. It was “made to order for Communist use in their designs upon national security.”37
In the 1952 election widespread support developed for General Eisenhower in the state because it was believed generally that the Republican Party and its candidate were more in harmony with Southern conservatism and consequently represented less of a “threat” to the South on racial and economic issues.38 However, slightly more than a majority of the state’s voters remained loyal to the national Democratic Party; Negroes voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic candidate.