Authors: Ira Katznelson
33
Alexander Keyssar,
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States
(New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 246.
34
A Proquest Historical Newspapers search yielded ninety-four instances of “soldier voting” or “soldier vote” described as “controversial” or as a matter of “controversy” between the start of 1942 and the end of 1944.
John W. Malsberger,
From Obstruction to Moderation: The Transformation of Southern Conservatism, 1838–1952
(Selingsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2000), p. 107; Martin, “The Service Vote in the Elections of 1944,” p. 727;
Newsweek,
December 6, 1943, p. 59; Allen Drury,
A Senate Journal, 1943–1945
(New York: McGraw Hill, 1963), pp. 11–12; Rosenman,
Working with Roosevelt,
p. 28;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 24, 1942; Arthur Brody, “Soldiers’ Votes and 1944,”
Nation,
February 19, 1944, p. 207;
New York Times,
January 30, 1944;
New York Times,
February 22, 1944. Drury’s diary, written when he covered the Senate for the United Press, was published in 1963 to take advantage of his fame as the author of
Advise and Consent
(1959) and
A Shade of Difference
(1962), both best-selling novels. A retrospective treatment of the era’s “Congressional Blues” that also devotes attention to the war’s rancorous debates about soldier voting is David Brinkley,
Washington Goes to War: The Extraordinary Story of the Transformation of a City
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), pp. 220–23.
35
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress,” January 6, 1941, in National Archives and Records Administration,
Our Documents: 100 Milestone Documents from the National Archives
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 170–71.
36
Chicago Daily Tribune,
April 17, 1942.
37
Steven F. Lawson,
Black Ballots: Voting Rights in the South, 1944–1969
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 74.
38
The statement, drafted by Samuel Rosenman, also predicted that the Eastland bill “would not enable any soldier to vote with any greater facility than was provided by Public Law 712 (the 1942 act) under which only a negligible number of soldiers’ votes were cast.” See Memorandum, Samuel I. Rosenman to President Roosevelt, January 21, 1944, Samuel I. Rosenman Papers, box 25, Soldier Vote Folder, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, NY;
New York Times,
January 27, 1944.
39
Anderson, “Politics, Patriotism, and the State,” p. 94.
40
Boynton, “A Study of the Elective Franchise of the United States,” p. 301.
41
The voting tally is reported in APSA, “Findings and Recommendations,” p. 513; the estimate is by Edward G. Benson and Evelyn Wicoff, “Voters Pick Their Party,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
8 (1944): 172.
42
Harry S. Truman, “Special Message to the Congress on Absentee Voting by Members of the Armed Forces,” March 28, 1952, in
Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1952–53
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1966), 217–20.
43
Cited in “Findings and Recommendations of the Special Committee on Service Voting,” pp. 512–13.
44
Ibid., pp. 513–14. This pattern was consistent with broader southern turnout rates. In 1940, when “no state above the Mason-Dixon Line had a less than 65 per-cent turnout of voters,” the percentage of citizens over twenty-one who voted in Mississippi and South Carolina was under 15 percent, under 25 percent in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Virginia, under 35 percent in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Texas, under 45 percent in Florida and North Carolina, and under 65 percent in Kentucky, Maryland, and Oklahoma. Of the southern states, only Missouri, Delaware, and West Virginia performed above the 65 percent rate. See Gordon M. Connelly and Harry H. Field, “The Non-Voter—Who He Is, What He Thinks,”
Public Opinion Quarterly
8 (1944): 176.
45
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 2d sess., March 15, 1944, p. 2619. LeCompte, a supporter of the bill, immediately noted that the two sections of the 1942 act that “are very definitely the sections that provide for the suspension of the poll tax” still stood, and thus “if the Federal Government has not suspended the poll tax and the registration features, it is because the Federal Government is not able to do so. That is my frank and honest opinion” (p. 2619).
46
Lucas served as majority leader in the 81st Congress.
47
For a discussion of Rankin’s role and the impact of southern congressional power on the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, see Ira Katznelson,
When Affirmative Action Was White: Am Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), pp. 113–41.
48
These citations are drawn from the useful overview by Kenneth W. Vickers, “John Rankin: Democrat and Demagogue” (M.A. thesis, Mississippi State University, 1993). In regard to his authoring the administration’s bill, Herbert Wechsler remembered, “My principal opponent was one of the most miserable characters I think I have ever experienced in this life, a congressman from Mississippi by the name of John Rankin. John Rankin was certainly one of the most totally racist, prejudiced people to come to Congress, even in those days, from anywhere in the country.” When Wechsler was nominated to the Department of Justice post in February 1944, Rankin denounced the appointment. “He said I was that fellow ‘Wechsler, who calls himself Wechsler.’ . . . There was a family in Washington, Adam Wechsler, which was not a Jewish family, and the implication was that I had changed my name from a Jewish-sounding name to a non-Jewish sounding name.” See Silber and Miller, “Toward ‘Neutral-Principles’ in the Law,” pp. 881, 882. Rankin also stressed the similarity of the name with that of “James Wechsler, author of an article in today’s PM, attacking yesterday’s House vote.”
See New York Times,
February 3, 1944. For documentation of Rankin’s anti-Semitism, see Russell Whelan, “Rankin of Mississippi,”
American Mercury
49 (1944): 31–37.
49
Washington Post,
September 4, 1942.
50
Congressional Record
, 78th Cong., 1st sess., November 17, 1943, p. 9629.
51
Ibid., 2d sess., March 15, 1944, p. 2620. Rankin’s one departure from his uncommonly cool talk came during his summary statement just before final passage of the conference version of soldier voting in 1944. Attacking “Sidney Hillman, the foreign-born, communistic crackpot” for his support of a federal ballot, he recalled, “I have been here through the long lean years when the southern Democrats held the party together. We went down the line and fought the battles during all those years, and all the Frankfurters and all the Hillmans and all the Winchells and all the radicals of the C.I.O. cannot run us out of the Democratic Party now.” New York’s Charles Buckley interrupted to ask, “Is the gentleman from Mississippi insinuating that the Democratic Party is made up entirely of the Jewish race?” Rankin replied, “Nobody intimated such a thing but the gentleman from New York” (pp. 2638–39.
52
Congressional Record,
78th Cong., 2d sess., January 31, 1944, pp. 908, 911. Eastland had previously served for eighty-eight days in 1941, having been appointed to fill out the term left vacant by the death of Senator Pat Harrison. Eastland declined to run in the special election, which was won by Wall Doxey, the member of Congress from the state’s Second District. Defeating Doxey (who had the support of President Roosevelt and Senator Theodore Bilbo) in the Democratic Party primary of 1942, and winning an unopposed general election, Eastland began his service in the Senate in January 1943. For an illuminating discussion of Mississippi’s politics “as a battle between the delta planters and the rednecks” of the hill country, see V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 229–53. In the 1950s, Eastland endorsed massive resistance to desegregation, counseling his constituents that they were free not to obey the Supreme Court’s
Brown
decision because it was based on political imperatives and sociological evidence, rather than on constitutionally sanctioned jurisprudence.
53
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 2d sess., September 9, 1942, pp. 7073–74.
54
Ibid.,
68th Cong.
, 1st sess., April 9, 1924, pp. 5961–62.
55
Ibid., 78th Cong., 1st sess., November 29, 1943, p. 10067.
56
Key,
Southern Politics in State and Nation,
pp. 311, 664–75.
57
For an acute analysis of the character and limitations of southern moderation, see Anthony J. Badger,
New Deal/New South
(Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007), pp. 102–26.
58
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944).
59
For a discussion, see chapter 12.
60
Atlanta Daily World,
May 27, 1942.
61
The Pittsburgh Courier,
June 13, 1942. In 1938, Governor Johnston had justified the white primary as a means to keep racial demagoguery out of Democratic Party campaigns. “Inasmuch as these changes in our rules have definitely eliminated even the possibility of Negroes’ voting in the primary elections of South Carolina, any further mention of the Negro question by any candidate only serves to show that he is endeavoring to evade the real issues of the campaign, and appeal to the ignorance, the prejudices, and the emotions, rather than to the intelligence of the people of South Carolina.” See
Pittsburgh Courier,
August 13, 1938. Later, when he served in the Senate, “Senator Olin Johnston of South Carolina announced that he would filibuster any FEPC bill for three weeks—talking about the South’s ‘Negro problem’ from the reconstruction period down, so that the Nation could understand what it is all about.” See
Pittsburgh Courier
, May 26, 1945.
62
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 2d sess., July 23, 1942, p. 6552.
63
New York Times,
July 23, 1942.
64
Washington Post,
August 15, 1942.
65
Congressional Record,
77th Cong., 2d sess., August 17, 1942, p. 6859.
66
Ibid., August 20, 1942, p. 6901; September 9, 1942, p. 7074.
67
Ibid., July 13, 1942, p. 6553.
68
For discussions, see Lawson,
Black Ballots,
p. 66;
New York Times,
July 24, 1942. There was no roll call. Kefauver demanded a division on the vote. Following the vote, a Republican, John Martin Vorys of Ohio, demanded tellers, but the chairman, after counting, stated that “nine members have arisen—not a sufficient number. Tellers are refused.” See
Congressional Record
, 77th Cong., 2d sess., July 13, 1942, p. 6561.
69
This was a standing vote, with the individual ayes and nays not recorded by name in the
Congressional Record,
but counted by tellers as members literally stood to record their positive or negative preference.
70
Congressional Record
, 77th Cong., 2d sess., July 23, 1942, p. 6451;
Washington Post,
July 24, 1942;
New York Times,
August 18, 1942.
71
Rankin and other opponents of the poll tax suspension argued that the Constitution vested the power to determine suffrage qualifications in the states, that the poll tax constituted a reasonable exercise of state power over voting, and that any suspension or repeal would require a constitutional amendment. The advocates of wartime suspension argued that the poll tax was not a suffrage qualification, that the Supreme Court had regularly found that the right of citizens to vote in congressional elections derived from the Constitution, not the states, and that the poll tax both restricted the franchise unduly and had been established to counteract the Fifteenth Amendment.
72
A thoughtful contemporary discussion of competition for black votes in the North is Louis Martin, “The Negro in the Political Picture,”
Opportunity: Journal of Negro Life,
July 1943, pp. 104–7, 137–42. This issue of the Urban League journal was devoted to “The Negro and His Government.”
73
There was a comical aspect to this: “Brooks beat Senator Pepper (Democrat), of Florida, to the gun in offering the amendment. Pepper charged the Illinois Republican had ‘unfairly’ used the substance of an antipoll tax amendment he had previously sponsored, but Brooks refused to withdraw in favor of Pepper’s.” See
Washington Post,
August 23, 1942. “Mr. Brooks submitted an amendment which was in almost the same language as Mr. Pepper’s, and the two Senators engaged in a heated interchange over their prerogatives before Senator Herring, who was presiding, ruled that the Brooks amendment was in order.” See
New York Times,
August 25, 1942.
74
Chicago Daily Tribune,
September 12, 1942;
Chicago Daily Tribune,
October 25, 1942;
Atlanta Daily World,
November 10, 1942; Horace R. Cayton, “Negro Vote: New Deal Conservatism Delivered the Race Vote to Reactionary GOP,”
Pittsburgh Courier,
November 21, 1942. McKeough, it might be noted, was a Chicago machine Democrat who defeated Paul Douglas in the Democratic primary.
75
“Doubt was widespread at the Capitol, however, that the Senate’s expanding of the absentee balloting program to service men abroad as well as to the Continental United States would be much more than a gesture.” See
New York Times,
September 2, 1942;
Congressional Record, 77th
Cong., 2d sess., September 9, 1942, p. 7075.