It goes without saying that the park and the lake and the golf course were for whites only, and that the women that Vanity Fair employed in the 1930s were all white. From the plant’s establishment until the 1960s, when federal civil rights laws forced the company to open jobs for black workers for the first time, the economic disparity along racial lines in Monroe County, which had already been significant before industrialization, became even more stark. Racial tensions increased in ways that would have been hard to recognize at the time. As the war came, the younger and more ambitious of Monroe County’s black community moved to cities, or left the South altogether. Whites in town complained that the rising generation of blacks did not have the same manners as their elders. Commonplace, everyday frictions increased, such as incidents of aggressive driving by local blacks on county roads, a development that in Watchman Jean Louise observes upon her return home from New York.
A. C. Lee’s souring relationship with the New Deal tracked closely with the emerging fault line in southern politics. White southerners as a whole were largely supportive of the New Deal through 1937 or so, yet political divisions in the region were sharpening. On one side were liberals who wanted to push forward with further New Deal reforms that would truly modernize the southern economy. They took heart from President Roosevelt’s much publicized Report on Economic Conditions of the South, released in August 1938, in which the president famously described the region as “the nation’s No. 1 economic problem.” A few months later, a coalition of New Dealers and labor and civil rights reformers met in Birmingham to establish the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, which would be the main voice of progressive reform in the region over the next decade, and the target of countless reactionary attacks.
On the other side were conservatives who felt that the economic emergency was over, that relief efforts should be pulled back, and that government should ease up on business and let the free market do its work. The principal expression of this view was the 1937 Conservative Manifesto, signed by a bipartisan group of senators, but driven mostly by southern Democrats, particularly North Carolina senator Josiah Bailey. It has been called “a kind of founding charter for modern American conservatism… among the first systematic expressions of an antigovernment political philosophy that had deep roots in American political culture but only an inchoate existence before the New Deal.”
A. C. Lee had always tended toward the conservative side of things. As a state legislator he mostly voted with the Black Belt, the swath of counties in south-central Alabama. This was the area with the richest farmland, the largest planters, and the largest black population; it had been the stronghold of slave owners in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, the political leaders of the Black Belt aligned with the “Big Mules” of Birmingham, and the smaller “Mules” of Mobile—the heads of the steel, ironworks, and shipbuilding plants, along with the utility executives who had helped bring them to the state. They comprised the conservative faction in Alabama politics. They joined together to fight labor unions, and they opposed the counties of northern Alabama and the southwestern wiregrass counties, where the black population was much smaller, which meant that politicians there felt a freer hand in backing populist, progressive measures that had the potential of dividing the white community along class lines.
Yet A. C. Lee’s conservatism was rooted as much in his religion as in any economic or political philosophy. He strived to live a Christian life, as taught by the Methodist church in which he had been born, baptized, and reared to manhood, and which he served faithfully in adulthood. His idea of a good and moral life was informed, too, by the relationships he made and the responsibilities he assumed as a conscientious member of his community. Being conservative meant that you didn’t spend money that you didn’t have, you didn’t wear flashy clothes or buy expensive cars, you didn’t show off, or brag, or gossip, you weren’t lazy, you didn’t say one thing in town and something else at home, and you were polite, particularly to those less fortunate than you.
These were values essential to a moral life and, Lee was always quick to point out, essential to democracy as well. Free government required elected representatives to be honest, responsible, and trustworthy. For A. C. Lee, a good political representative didn’t have to be a self-professed political conservative, but he should be conservative in temperament and habit. In a June 1930 editorial that anticipated an upcoming gubernatorial primary, for example, Lee defined conservatism as “the idea of moderation as distinguished from extremism.” The conservative candidate was the person who didn’t traffic in negative campaigning, who didn’t court votes with extravagant promises. An editorial two months later titled “The Present Need for Conservatism” warned readers against “the glittering appeal of the demagogue.”
The Depression tested the small town conservative values of Lee and millions of other Americans in novel ways. It was not just that opportunistic demagogues exploited the fears of desperate, downtrodden people—though that was a concern. Equally ominous was the reality that values of thrift, personal responsibility, and individual initiative, along with traditions of private charity, all seemed like weak medicine for so monumental an emergency. In 1933, when A. C. Lee wrote about God raising up Franklin Roosevelt to meet the present crisis, it wasn’t just talk. For him, as for millions of Americans, the New Deal really did seem heaven-sent.
By the late 1930s, however, Lee had slid into the camp of those who felt that the New Deal had done enough. The wages and hours bill was the turning point, but his reaction to it fit with his broader assessment of relief policy. The New Deal had begun to “actually promote the idea of dependence… on the part of our citizenship,” he wrote in 1938. He lamented the “rapidly growing idea among our people that the government owes them a living.” Government debt was growing out of control, he feared. It was time that Americans started “Living within Our Income” once again. As his objections to the New Deal increased, his conservatism became less about personal morality and more of a clearly defined political position. This, it should be noted, was part of a broader change in the New Deal itself. By the late 1930s, the New Deal, which had begun as a grab bag of old reform ideas that had come out of the Populist and Progressive movements, became more of a unified, coherent liberal program.
Lee’s commentary on two high-profile political races in 1938 is revealing in this regard. In both Lee supported the conservative, anti–New Deal candidate. The first involved the campaign for the US Senate seat in Alabama that opened up when President Roosevelt appointed Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937. The White House backed Lister Hill, the congressman from Alabama’s second district and a reliable New Dealer. Conservatives in Alabama supported “Cotton Tom” Heflin, who until George Wallace came along was perhaps the most notorious bigot in Alabama politics—no small distinction. Heflin had helped draft the 1901 state constitution that secured black disfranchisement, and had served ten years in the US Senate in the 1920s. He failed to win renomination as the Democratic candidate in 1930 after refusing to support the Catholic Al Smith, the Democratic nominee, in the 1928 presidential race.
In 1930, A. C. Lee, who had only recently taken over as Monroe Journal editor, had been an outspoken critic of Heflin. This was of a piece with his conservative, Black Belt inclinations. In the 1920s, Heflin had been a member of the Klan, which at the time had been a favorite organization of Alabama’s white workingmen (the future US senator Hugo Black had joined the organization in order to win the loyalties of white laborers). Lee denounced the Klan groups from outside Alabama lobbying on Heflin’s behalf. He also criticized efforts by Heflin and his supporters to turn the race into a referendum on Catholic influence on the Democratic party. In a speech in Monroeville, Heflin called out Lee as one of the “Hickory Nut Heads” leading Alabamans astray, a designation Lee proudly publicized on the Journal’s editorial page. Seven years later, however, all of that was ancient history. Lee still had no great enthusiasm for Cotton Tom, yet, as h
e wrote in December 1937, a vote for Heflin was “[t]he only way the people of Alabama can effectively voice their opposition to the pending wages and hours legislation.” Lister Hill was too much of a New Deal yes-man, Lee argued. The majority of Alabama voters saw it differently. They sent Hill to the Senate in an easy victory.
The other campaign of interest was in Georgia, where US senator Walter George was up for reelection. In a June fireside chat, President Roosevelt announced that, in his role as leader of the Democratic Party, he would be taking part in a number of legislative races that affected his administration’s priorities. Southern liberals had been urging him to leverage his popularity in the region to help unseat conservatives who had opposed the New Deal. Chief among them were George and South Carolina senator “Cotton Ed” Smith, who was also up for reelection that year. In a late summer visit to Warm Springs, Roosevelt traveled to the nearby town of Barnesville for an awkward face-to-face encounter with George. Appearing on the same platform as George and his rival, a young attorney named Lawrence Camp, Roosevelt stunned the crowd by bluntly endorsing Camp. “[O]n most public questions [Senator George] and I do not speak the same language,” Roosevelt explained.
In an editorial, A. C. Lee coolly noted the president’s flair for the dramatic. Senator George voted with the president 85 percent of the time, Lee pointed out. No president should expect members of his party to rubber stamp every measure. Roosevelt’s friends in Georgia would be doing the president a favor, Lee wrote, by sending George back to the Senate: “[W]hen [the president] allows his judgment to lead him astray, his friends should take the situation in hand and set him right again, not leaving this chore to his enemies.” The greater fear for Lee was that in trying to turn the Democratic Party into the party of liberalism, Roosevelt was “inviting a storm that may easily sink the ship.”
Lee would never go all the way with Black Belt–Big Mule conservatives in actually opposing Roosevelt’s third term, yet by the 1940s, his editorial page was filled with anti–New Deal sentiment. Some of the editorials Lee wrote, but some were editorials that he republished that had been circulated by national business organizations mobilizing in new ways to oppose the New Deal. Lee had resisted earlier efforts of this kind, such as the Liberty League, which he denounced in a 1934 editorial. Yet, during the war, business groups were inundating newspaper editors throughout the country with pro-business pamphlets, publications, and ready-made editorials, and A. C. Lee lapped them up. His favorite was the Industrial News Review, based out of Portland, Oregon, and funded primarily by the utility industry. It sent out for free roughly a dozen editorials each week that editors could use without attribution, although Lee always ran his with the credit line. For much of the 1930s, if Lee ran editorials from other publications, they tended to be from Alabama newspapers, most commonly either the Mobile or the Montgomery papers, and the topics concerned state matters. By the 1940s, however, the Industrial News Review was by far the most frequent source of guest editorials, offering pieces with titles such as “What Is Capitalism?,” “Free Enterprise Medicine,” and “Planned State Leads to Despotism.”
Lee’s own writings on domestic politics during the war years took on a decidedly more ideological cast, reflecting the influence of such groups. Labor unions replaced Huey Long as his bête noire. He denounced as selfish and unpatriotic striking workers in the nation’s defense industries, such as the dockyard workers in Mobile. Criticism of striking workers was perhaps his most frequent complaint in the early years of the war. In the latter years, denunciations of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which had broken with the American Federation of Labor in 1938 and represented the more liberal wing of the American labor movement, would take its place. Yet he also wrote on broader economic issues, emphasizing the needs of private industry in the fight against labor and government regulators. A sample of editorial titles during these years gives the flavor of such writings: “Private Enterprise Must Be Saved,” “The Great Internal Problem” (which was labor unions), “What We Can Expect of Labor” (Lee’s answer: more headaches), “Private Industry at Crossroads,” and “Are We Headed for Statism?”
Lee’s ideological turn coincided with a broader hardening of attacks on labor and liberal groups in Alabama. Charges of communism or fellow-traveling flew hard and fast in Alabama newspapers, particularly those connected to Alabama industrialists. “Around here,” John Dos Passos reported an Alabama farmer telling him in the early 1940s, “communism’s anything we don’t like. Isn’t it that way everywhere else?” Little of that thinking showed up in the Monroe Journal. Adamant though he was in his opposition to labor groups, Lee was no red-baiter. He stuck to the dry economic facts to make his case.
Yet the most fundamental threat signaled by the labor agitation, for A. C. Lee and for all Alabama conservatives, was the threat to white rule. Labor politics in Alabama had always been inseparable from racial politics, and because wartime mobilization had opened up new opportunities for employment and military service for black and poor white Alabamans alike, white rule was more tenuous than it had been in decades. In 1941, in response to a nationally organized civil rights campaign, President Roosevelt established the Fair Employment Practices Committee, giving African Americans a toehold to advocate for equality in the workplace. For the first time in Roosevelt’s long tenure, he placed the White House clearly on the side of the black community. Three years later the Supreme Court outlawed the white primary, the scheme that denied blacks participation in Democratic primary elections on the grounds that the party was a private organization that could determine its own membership. It had been a pillar of Jim Crow rule, and the decision sparked an increase in black voting in the upper South and in some cities across the region. In the Deep South, though it had little immediate impact, it still provoked tremors.
In the 1930s, it was easy for A. C. Lee to write off racial agitation as the meddling of political radicals from outside the state. That had been his stance during the Scottsboro controversies. But in the 1940s, calls for change were coming from unexpected places. In particular, the assaults on the poll tax, the annual fee required of all registered voters, concerned Lee. Alabama had the stiffest poll tax in the country: $1.50 annually, required regardless of whether it was an election year. The tax was cumulative, meaning that it was due for every year missed dating back to when a person turned twenty-one, the age of eligibility. A. C. Lee defended it as part of a venerable tradition in American politics that could be traced to the nation’s founding. Voting was a right of citizenship, but it was also a responsibility not to be taken lightly. He believed that the law helped ensure that vital matters of public concern would be decided by a serious, deliberate, responsible citizenry. Of course, that was how its authors had promoted the poll tax back in 1901 when they passed it as part of a new state constitution, one that effectively disfranchised almost every black Alabaman and a large number of poor whites who had supported Populist candidates in the preceding years.
During World War II, however, when thousands of poor Alabamans were risking their lives to defend democracy abroad, it hardly seemed right that they be taxed in order to exercise the most basic right of citizenship. Labor and civil rights groups, including the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, had been lobbying against the tax for years, but in the 1940s a significant number of white southerners were warming to the idea. Veterans’ groups were pushing anti–poll tax measures, and a number of southern states had already dispensed with it. In 1942, Congress passed a law that exempted all veterans from the tax through the end of the war. Later that year, liberals in Congress managed to put forward a national anti–poll tax bill. Lee lauded the southern senators who successfully filibustered it, yet even among the normally unified southern delegation were poll tax opponents, most notably Florida senator Claude Pepper, an Alabama native.
When he wrote about race, A. C. Lee talked about defending the rights of states relative to the federal government. This was the conservative, dignifie
d way to speak about white supremacy. Lee was convinced that the rights of states were among the most fundamental, long-established principles in American governance. Whatever his private racial views might have been, Lee never published any screeds trumpeting white racial superiority or railing against race mixers, as was common in Alabama newspapers. That kind of talk clashed with his paternalistic sensibilities. He saw no profit in inflaming racial passions on either side of the color line. Perhaps he was mindful of people he would have referred to as his Negro friends in Monroe County, people who he knew read his editorials each week, men like Horace James Lamar, the principal of the Bethlehem Industrial Academy, a black school, who wrote letters to the Journal requesting assistance from the white community in fundraising efforts.
In the 1940s, as membership in the NAACP grew exponentially and the drive for African American rights took on greater urgency and openness, A. C. Lee valorized an older, more accommodating generation of African American leaders. In an October 1942 editorial, for example, Lee applauded the navy’s decision to name a battleship for the late Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Institute. “No other colored man has yet appeared,” Lee wrote of Washington, “who possesses the ability and the broad understanding of humanity and the relationships between the races.” In a similar vein, Lee memorialized George Washington Carver, also of Tuskegee, as “the most eminent negro living” who “occupied a unique place in the scientific world, and in the minds and hearts of the people of America.”
Yet the pressures for change were never ending, and they wore on Lee. The energy and optimism of his editorials during Roosevelt’s first term had been replaced by gloom and bitterness by the mid-1940s. Fights in Congress like the effort to make permanent the Fair Employment Practices Committee were evidence of “the lengths to which we have gone in recent years toward socializing this fair country of ours.” The “political complex” had changed in fundamental ways, he believed, ceding power to those who controlled “a large bloc of the people.” Surveying the conditions in the country in November 1945, Lee wondered “if the American people are losing their art of properly appraising values in life.” The ideals of America’s forefathers had long been abandoned. Selfishness and greed prevailed, Lee believed. “We are traveling the downward road to ultimate destruction.”
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