Authors: Ira Katznelson
Faced with insecure support from the left side of his party and with complex divisions among Republicans, Truman and his administration came to rely heavily on southern legislators, especially in congressional committees and, where needed, on the floor of each chamber, to lead coalitions that would advance their preferred policies. The policy steadiness, seniority, and party leadership of southern representatives placed them in a pivotal role when the content of national security bills was crafted, when the amending process had to be controlled, and when votes had to be won when there were divisions on the floor. As the war was ending, sixteen Democrats served on the Military Affairs Committee in the House. The six with the most seniority were from Kentucky, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and Tennessee. Of the others, three more were southern. On the Committee on Naval Affairs, six of the most-senior nine Democrats were from the South, including the chair. The eight longest-serving Democrats on the Committee on Foreign Affairs included six southern members. Four of the six Democrats on the Committee on Un-American Activities were southern, including the three who were most senior. Much the same pattern prevailed in the Senate, where seven of the eleven Democrats on Naval Affairs were southern, and half the fourteen on Foreign Relations, including the two most senior. Even more striking was the role southern representatives assumed in the Republican Eightieth Congress, the one that adopted the National Security Act. Each of the six Democrats on the thirteen-person Senate Armed Services Committee was from the South; half of those on Foreign Affairs were southern, but these included the two longest-serving members. In the House, only two of the fourteen Democrats serving on Armed Services were not southern, and every Democrat on the Committee on Un-American Activities came from a southern district.
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This pattern of overrepresentation, which continued to prevail through all the Congresses that shaped the national security state in the Truman administration, placed southern Democrats in the most pivotal position. Though the South Dakota Republican John Chandler “Chan” Gurney, who chaired the Armed Services Committee during the Republican Eightieth Congress, introduced the National Security Act of 1947 and shepherded its passage, the three Democrats he brought to the House-Senate conference were influential southerners: Harry Byrd of Virginia, Millard Tydings of Maryland, and Richard Russell of Georgia. When the Defense Reorganization Act of 1949 went to conference, Tydings, then chair of Armed Services, again negotiated with Russell and Byrd by his side, along with the addition of Virgil Chapman of Kentucky. All the House conferees also were southern: Carl Vinson of Georgia, Overton Brooks of Louisiana, Paul Kilday of Texas, and Carl Durham of North Carolina.
The South’s concerns about economic development and race, moreover, gave its representatives added reasons to lead in this way. The buildup of American military strength that had begun just before the war was most concentrated in this region, marking the start of a geopolitical propensity that has endured. “Defense Boom in Dixie” was how
Time
titled its report on the impressive increase in the construction of shipyards, military-base camps, plants for airplanes and ordnance, and oil refineries that led to accelerated economic development and urban growth.
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Over the course of World War II, the South accounted for more than 60 percent of the country’s new army bases, including the largest training camp at Fort Benning, Georgia. The region also benefited from some 40 percent of all spending on new military installations, and, despite its backward industrial structure, from 20 percent of the country’s defense-industry expenditures.
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During the second half of the decade, decisions to continue with such investments were critical to the South’s efforts to close the large economic gap that existed between this region and the rest of the nation. An equation that correlated economic growth with military spending had taken hold in the South, and defense spending came to supplant in many ways the region’s prior agricultural dependency.
We have also seen how the war and its aftermath accelerated racial conflict. Many scholars have emphasized how both the war against Nazism and the postwar confrontation with the Soviet Union advanced the emerging movement for civil rights because the United States could not credibly fight for liberty abroad while practicing Jim Crow at home.
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But the relationship between white racial preferences and foreign affairs had another dimension, something of a countercurrent. With the American Communist Party “raising the red flag in the South” against segregation, southern legislators were sure that an affinity existed between their wish to resist black political advancement and their preference for a robust national security state.
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Writing in 1947, a leading student of civil liberty observed how John Rankin of Mississippi, the ranking Democrat and “the guiding spirit” on the House Committee on Un-American Activities, had established a standard by which “anyone who favors the Fair Employment Practice Committee or who wishes to see the poll tax abolished in the South is a communist.”
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V.
A
S LEGISLATORS
turned to national security, the deep anxiety occasioned by the bomb marked every debate. The language frequently was tinged with alarm, often more of a tocsin than a logical argument. When the House deliberated about military organization in 1947, Mississippi’s John Bell Williams, a World War II pilot who had been wounded in action, solemnly spoke about “the atomic bomb—the most devastating and powerful instrument of man.”
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Alabama’s Lister Hill, his fellow southern Democrat, warned the Senate that “pilotless aircraft, homing rockets, supersonic planes, and atomic explosives will finish the demonstration that the Japanese Zero of 1941 so dramatically began” at Pearl Harbor. Republican senator John Chandler Chan Gurney likewise pointed out how, “with the development of supersonic planes and guided missiles with atomic warheads, the cushion of distance provided by the Atlantic, Arctic, and Pacific Oceans will no longer provide a corresponding cushion of time in which we may react to attack and mobilize our forces. It is not being an alarmist to point out that in the event of another global war hostilities will be initiated without prior warning, and by an attack as complete and devastating as lies within the capabilities of the nation which launches it.”
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With “another world war” conducted in these circumstances, Texas Democrat John Emmett Lyle Jr. warned the House, “it is highly probable that life on this star, as we know it, will be at an end.”
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From the start of the atomic age, Washington was pressed to find legal, organizational, and strategic frameworks within which to superintend the revolutionary weapons that had devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Adding to the widespread sense of fear was the absence of any precedence.
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Starting with the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, and culminating in the decision in 1950 to pursue the greatly more powerful H-bomb (which was first tested in the South Pacific with the explosion of “Mike” at the start of November 1952
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), the Truman administration sought to discover the means not only to create the bomb but also to manage this source of perpetual fear.
William Laurence ended his best-selling book on the birth of the atomic age with the urgent realization that as “mankind must now face the reality that atomic energy is here to stay . . . we must find means to control it.”
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It was just this goal that President Truman announced when he asked Congress on October 3, 1945, to create an Atomic Energy Commission in this “new era in the history of civilization” to grapple with the “potential danger” as well as the “full promise” of nuclear fission. With two months having “passed since the atomic bomb was used against Japan,” it had become vital to adopt “drastic and far reaching” legislation beyond “any of our usual concepts” to regulate “the control, use and development of atomic energy within the United States.”
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The stakes were immense. One of the country’s top journalists, William S. White, published a report ten days later entitled “Bill for Atomic Control Is Expedited in Congress.” His disquieting lead paragraph recorded how “Congress set out this week with anxiety and even foreboding on a task unique in the parliamentary history of the world, an attempt to control the well-nigh uncontrollable, atomic energy and the atomic bomb,” and how the federal government would soon assume “powers unprecedented in the life of the country.” Congress, he projected, was about to offer the executive branch a “grant of administrative power, vast and beyond anything in the history of this Government . . . to direct this fearsome force,” a grant that would include the capacity to “nationalize atomic energy as nothing had ever been nationalized here before.”
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As White was writing, Congress was taking up an atomic energy bill that was prepared inside the Department of War and offered by Kentucky’s Andrew Jackson May, the Democrat who chaired the Military Affairs Committee in the House, and by Colorado Democrat Edwin “Big Ed” Johnson in the Senate. “Its aim,” President Truman’s memoirs recalled, “was to set up a kind of permanent ‘Manhattan District’ under military control.”
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Doing “what the armed forces wanted,”
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as Congressman May put things, the May-Johnson bill proposed a part-time commission, to be composed by active military officers and atomic scientists who would oversee the work of a strong administrator and deputy administrator, each of whom could be a military officer. These commissioners would specify rules for the ownership of fissionable materials, the production of atomic bombs, the regulation of patents, the degree of secrecy that would be required, as well as decide how to police the loyalty of those with access to confidential information.
Despite endorsements by some leading physicists, including Oppenheimer, and despite vigorous support by Secretary of War Robert Patterson and Leslie Groves, for whom the administrator position seemed designed, key leaders quickly jettisoned this approach. Its Manhattan Project model could not overcome the resistance of administration figures in the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion and the Bureau of the Budget who wanted civilians to be in control. Nor could it prevail over the active lobbying by “scores of atomic scientists [who] descended upon Washington to buttonhole congressmen, lobby within the administration, and educate the public.” These scholars and experts worried that the degree of rigidity and secrecy that “a military dictatorship over atomic energy” might impose would restrict effective scientific research.
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This was not, shall we say, a polite struggle.
Fortune
took note of how “the scientists of the country, backed by democratic forces, rose in fury and smashed the May-Johnson bill.”
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It was clear, the executive secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Howard Meyerhoff, conceded, that “so powerful a weapon as atomic energy calls for restriction of use, and restriction of use in turn demands certain restrictions upon freedom of research and freedom of publication,” but military control seemed a step too far.
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Leading Manhattan Project scientists denounced the May-Johnson bill. Some were appalled that even minor security violations might lead to long prison terms.
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Harold Urey, the Manhattan Project physical chemist at Columbia University, told a group of one hundred scientists meeting on that campus on October 30, 1945, that this was the “first totalitarian bill ever written by Congress. . . . You can call it either a Communist bill or a Nazi bill, which ever you think is worse.”
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With this opposition signaling that key physicists might refuse to collaborate in the future development of atomic weapons, the May-Johnson bill was buried in the House Rules Committee. Initiative shifted to the Senate, which voted to form a Special Committee on Atomic Energy. That committee began a first round of hearings in November 1945. Chaired by Connecticut Democrat Brien McMahon, who observed that “military control of atomic energy, though necessary and useful during war, is a form of direction to which scientists in peacetime will not willingly submit,”
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the Atomic Energy Committee (AEC) soon began to craft a new version of atomic control legislation that was consistent with an early December statement by President Truman directing “that the entire program and operation should be under civilian control and that the government should have a monopoly of materials, facilities, and processes.”
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In addition to McMahon and Michigan Republican Arthur Vandenberg, it was the committee’s four southern Democrats—Senators Harry Byrd of Virginia, Tom Connally of Texas, Richard Russell of Georgia, and Millard Tydings of Maryland—who most shaped the Atomic Energy Act clause by clause. They understood that a framework had to be fashioned to facilitate advances in atomic weapons and assist the growth and security of the country’s stockpile. The law they designed included a full-time civilian commission, advised by a military liaison committee (a compromise that satisfied the scientists and the armed forces) with nearly unrestricted authority to plan and organize all aspects of both peaceful and military applications of atomic energy.
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The bill conferred to the commission the possession of all fissionable substances and all facilities required to produce atomic weapons. It was designated as the sole manufacturer of these bombs, subject to the ultimate assent of the president, who could authorize exceptions that would allow the armed forces to make atomic weapons in the public interest. The AEC was granted authority to investigate the loyalty of its employees in order to preserve atomic secrets, and alone determine which scientific and technical information should classified as secret, a restriction that it would define solely on the basis of how such a release would affect national security. Private patents that dealt with atomic energy were banned. Instead, the AEC was made the exclusive custodian of “all patents, plants, contracts and information related to atomic energy.” In so doing, the law reflected the view articulated on the editorial page of the
New York Times,
which argued that “we cannot have free enterprise in a field which includes not only uranium but anything associated with it in utilizing atomic energy for peace. It is the price we have to pay if we want to avoid another catastrophic global war.”
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