Striving for Equilibrium

“The four or five years right after World War II,” writes John Egerton, an independent journalist and long-time contributor to Southern Exposure, “appear to have been the last and best time — perhaps the only time — when the South might have moved boldly and decisively to heal itself, to fix its own social wagon voluntarily. But it didn’t act, and the moment passed.”

What happened? And why didn’t the press provide a stronger voice for change ? In this article adapted from Speak Now Against the Day, his new history of the generation before the civil rights movement published by Alfred A. Knopf, Egerton examines how newspapers searched for the middle ground in race relations — ignoring the warnings of the black press and failing to “seize the time and do the right thing.”

 

I like to look at newspapers as diaries or ledger books, vast repositories for the daily accumulation of raw material from which history is shaped and made permanent. From that perspective, the ratio of waste to essence is very high — about like gold mining or pearl harvesting. All those pages, all that ink, all that effort, and so much of it expendable, come and gone and forgotten in a matter of hours. But pause and look carefully at everything — the news and editorials, the photos, the display ads, the classifieds — and a pattern begins to emerge. You learn what people said and did, what they ate, what they wore, what they drove; deeper still, you learn what they thought, what they believed, what they valued.

Reading Southern newspapers from the postwar ’40s now, you can get an acute sense of a region and a people striving for equilibrium in a time of great uncertainty. After the exhilaration of victory in the summer of 1945, consensus quickly eroded and then evaporated into the magnolia-scented atmosphere. The South was still confused, ambivalent, defensive, still a place divided — against outsiders and against itself.

For two and a half years, the newspapers were full of signs. They told of decorated combat veterans like PFC Jack Thomas of Albany, Georgia — an orphaned black youngster raised by his grandmother — who had risked their lives for liberties they weren’t allowed at home. They described each new addition to the lengthening file of civil rights decisions by the federal courts, which were chipping away at the elaborate legal framework of racial segregation and discrimination. They cast a critical eye on the woefully inadequate schools, hospitals, housing projects, and other public facilities to which black citizens were confined under the “separate but equal” doctrine. They reported on the deliberations of biracial community groups in widely scattered cities that were working openly and actively for tolerance and fairness in race relations. And they recorded and amplified the voices of individual advocates of social reform — as well as the strident voices of political demagogues, Klan terrorists, and a host of other reactionary extremists. Clearly, there had to be some sorting out of feelings, attitudes, and beliefs.

“When I went to North Carolina to become editorial page editor of the Charlotte News in September 1945,” said Harry Ashmore, remembering back almost 50 years, “there was a little hint of change in the wind. Nothing powerful — just a feeling, really, that it might be a good time for some fresh thinking. North Carolina wasn’t the most backward Southern state by any means; it had abolished the poll tax years before, and it had one of the best state universities in the country. The News was a fairly progressive paper — W. J. Cash was on the editorial staff there before the war. I felt I could get establishment support on any plea for fair treatment of blacks — if it stopped short of what they called the social question. In other words, equal was negotiable, or at least open for discussion — but separate was not.”

Two years later, when Ashmore moved out to Little Rock to edit the Arkansas Gazette, that faint stirring of liberalism was already beginning to die down. The report of President Truman’s civil rights committee came out that fall, and a few months later, the Dixiecrats bolted out of the Democratic Party over the civil rights issue. The Cold War had started, too, and Communism was getting the blame for almost every deviation from the political or social status quo. From then on, social reform of any kind was a hard sell. The time for quietly making little changes was past — if there ever really was such a time.

 

Young Turks

The experiences of war had given Harry Ashmore a new perspective on his country and his native region, and in that he was not unlike thousands of others returning to take up their lives “down home.” But most Southerners — young ex-G.I.s in particular — weren’t temperamentally inclined toward passive introspection and soul-searching. They didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about the South’s readiness and capacity for social or economic or spiritual renewal; the region’s problems didn’t yield to such reflective analysis.

Instead, a 29-year-old journalist like Ashmore, having a daily page to fill and an audience waiting, was much more likely to focus on the issues of the moment from a middle-ground perspective. In the postwar South, that meant moderate progressivism: not harking back to the romantic myths of the Old Confederacy, but also studiously avoiding, as much as possible, the sacrosanct totems of segregation and white supremacy.

To anyone then active in the field of daily journalism, it must have felt like a great time to be living and working in the South. Newspapers had a virtual lock on the communications business, and local papers enjoyed an influence that far exceeded their size. The chains had not yet penetrated to all corners of the region; except for a few Hearst and Scripps-Howard papers, almost every operation was locally owned. The television networks were just then forming in New York, and they wouldn’t break into the Southern city markets until the end of the decade. Radio was doing a little news and information programming, but not much. Some papers, like the Courier-Journal in Louisville and the Arkansas Gazette, to which Ashmore gravitated, blanketed their states with both news coverage and circulation; they were indispensable to anyone who tried to keep up with what was going on.

Personalities dominated the papers. Owners, publishers, editors, and even some lower-echelon writers were widely recognized as influential and important people. Readers all over Georgia and even beyond the state knew who Ralph McGill was and what he was saying in the Atlanta Constitution; likewise, Virginians followed Virginius Dabney in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, and North Carolinians knew Jonathan Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer. Birmingham columnist John Temple Graves had a following that extended well beyond the circulation area of his paper. And, quiet little man that he was, even publisher J.N. Heiskell of the Gazette was no stranger to his Arkansas subscribers.

When conservative and liberal owners locked horns, as did Jimmy Stahlman of the Nashville Banner and Silliman Evans of the Tennessean, readers in their area followed the fight avidly. When reactionary rivals competed daily, as Thomas Hederman of the Clarion-Ledger and Frederick Sullens of the Daily News did in Jackson, Mississippi (even though Hederman owned both papers), an entire state could be affected. Against that dominating influence, Hodding Carter and his smaller, more isolated Delta Democrat-Times in Greenville gave Mississippians an offsetting moderate voice, magnified by Carter’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize and by the regional and national recognition his magazine articles and books received.

Young turks like Harry Ashmore represented at once a continuation of certain Southern traditions and a departure from them. The papers he worked for in both Charlotte and Little Rock were family-owned companies that regarded racial issues with a certain benevolent inattention. Theirs was not a philosophy of dehumanization; they were intellectually but passively accepting of the basic rights undeniably due to black citizens. They wanted to be tolerant, enlightened, and fair on the subject — but not crusading. They were not fight-to-the-death defenders of a rigid and inflexible segregationist orthodoxy, but they weren’t destroyers of it either; more accurately, they were resigned to it as a reality that they felt would not soon change.

“You couldn’t have stayed at home and had any influence at all if you openly opposed segregation,” Ashmore observed. Looking around at his contemporaries back then, he concluded that a majority of editors in the region tended to see things in more or less that way. There was a broad mainstream of acceptable opinion — moderate, reasonable, informed, but carefully circumscribed — and he fit comfortably within it.

Beyond the seasoned old hands of Southern newspapering — dominant figures like McGill, Dabney, Carter, and Daniels — Ashmore could look up to experienced and talented editors at the Louisville Courier-Journal, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, the Nashville Tennessean, and the Chattanooga Times. At a number of the smaller dailies throughout the region, there were also editors and publishers whose moderation and tolerance were an inseparable part of their sense of duty as public servants.

There were weekly editors with a nontraditional perspective, too. Neil Davis, a Nieman Fellow with Harry Ashmore and Thomas Sancton at Harvard in 1941, returned from the service to edit the Lee County Bulletin in Alabama, and throughout his long career there, his paper was a model of professional responsibility. J.W. Norwood, publisher-editor of the Lowndes County News in Georgia, fought fearlessly when he got mad — as he did when he condemned the state Democratic Party leadership in a scorching editorial in 1947: “Given a choice between crooked, scheming politicians and voting with the Negroes, I choose the latter, and to paraphrase those famous words of Patrick Henry, ‘If that be treason then make the most of it.’”

 

“First and Right”

These, collectively, were representative echoes of the majority voice of the Southern press in the first two or three years after World War II. Though they weren’t exactly editorializing in close harmony, they did tend to follow the middle path of pragmatic progressivism on which there was a high degree of consensus. They were Southerners bonded by choice to a region with which they closely identified; they were editors who seemed ready to face realistically the South’s problems and needs; they were white men (and a very few women) who thought they were as well qualified as anyone, and better than most, to offer enlightened leadership in the eternal Southern challenge of race. Time magazine, writing in 1947 about the “realistic and readable” Harry Ashmore (“neither a Yankee-lover nor a deep-dyed Southerner”), described him as an editor who “tempers his enthusiasm for reform with consideration of the facts of Southern life.” No one had to be told that foremost among those facts was segregation.

The editors were no anvil chorus of Jim Crow-busting reformers; no one in daily journalism in the South was on that mission in the ’40s — and, for that matter, neither were very many Northerners. Only the black papers and a handful of regional writers outside the mainstream press dared to confront segregation in print from within the region. Lillian Smith’s articles exhorting the South to reform its racist ways were widely published in other journals, but her own South Today, which she and Paula Snelling had edited in north Georgia, was discontinued in 1945. Alabamians Aubrey Williams and Gould Beech enjoyed a period of success in Montgomery with the Southern Farmer, their populist and racially inclusive monthly tabloid for families who worked the land, and they got in some good licks against segregation — but again, it was not daily journalism, and it lasted for barely a decade.

The black papers, all weeklies except the Atlanta Daily World, often published news and commentary on racial issues that couldn’t be found in any white publication, but few outside the black neighborhoods paid much attention. Black publishers and editors in the South got little except grief from a mixed bag of critics — liberal and conservative, black and white, North and South. (They were spurned by the white press, too; in 1946, the association of newspaper correspondents in Washington voted to exclude the Daily World’s representative from the congressional press galleries.) If the papers were at all conciliatory on social issues, they were viewed as timid and Uncle Tomish; if they were combative, they were called recklessly radical; if they tried to entertain or amuse or titillate as well as to inform, they were dismissed as sensationalist rags. But in their denunciation of segregation and its crippling effects on Southerners black and white, the black papers were not only first and right but prophetic; the problem was not with them but with the whites who ignored their warnings.

It was also in the 1940s that the New York Times and Time magazine sent reporters to open bureaus in the region. Meanwhile, transplanted Southerners were making their mark at publications in the North, writing critical and hard-hitting stories about the South and its problems in the New York Herald-Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New Republic. Kentuckian Ted Poston was a pioneering black reporter for the New York Post beginning in the late 1930s, and George Streator, a Nashvillian and a Fisk alumnus, was the New York Times’s first black general assignment reporter, beginning in 1945.

There were, to be sure, some urban papers in the South, and numerous smaller dailies too, that controlled public opinion on the conservative flank of the mainstream journals. The Nashville Banner, the Hederman papers in Jackson, and the Charleston News & Courier were usually in a reactionary class by themselves. Also staunchly conservative on most economic, political, and social issues were the Dallas Morning News, New Orleans Times-Picayune, the Houston Post and Chronicle, and the papers in Memphis, Knoxville, and Chattanooga.

D. Tennant Bryan, who owned the Richmond papers and the Tampa Tribune, moved them ever closer to the camp of the conservative resistance. Virginius Dabney, in his long tenure as editor of the Times-Dispatch for the Bryan family, had endorsed FDR four times — “with diminishing enthusiasm,” he later explained, adding: “I held my nose and stayed with Truman in 1948.” But the tide was turning fast; soon after that, Bryan named 29-year-old conservative reporter and editor James J. Kilpatrick to replace the retiring Douglas Southall Freeman as editor of the News-Leader, and in the next five years Kilpatrick would pull both his paper and Dabney’s Times-Dispatch sharply to the right.

 

Party Loyalty

Nevertheless, what was most surprising about the postwar positioning of Southern publishers, editors, and writers on the liberal-to-conservative spectrum was that the balance continued to weigh in favor of the more moderate and progressive papers all the way to the end of the 1940s. Thus, a curious and inexplicable anomaly continued: a press more forward-looking, more open-minded and liberal, than its political representatives, its pillar institutions, or the generality of its readers. It bears repeating that they were not integrationists, not left-wing radicals, not revolutionary reformers. But except for a few, they were not rightwing reactionaries either.

“We were saying that the South should live up to the promise of the ‘separate but equal’ doctrine,” said Harry Ashmore. “That was as far as we felt we could push. But at the same time, I think most of us knew that there was no way to make separate equal — and so in a sense, we were really forcing the integration issue.”

Newspaper publishers and editors and reporters — the principal dispensers of adult education in the pre-television South — might well have led the region to a quicker, more direct, and more equitable resolution of its racial conflicts, had the choice been left to them. But when the Dixiecrats forced the issue, the dividing line became an unbridgeable canyon.

“We had to stick with the Democratic Party or take up with the Dixiecrats,” said Ashmore. “The other third party — the Progressives, with Henry Wallace — was not a realistic alternative in the South. They were as far out on the left wing as Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats were out on the right. The way we saw it, the traditional Democratic Party occupied the middle ground. The only real choice the Southern liberals had at that point was to stand and fight as yellow-dog Democrats. Party loyalty was all that saved us.”

As the forces of reform and resistance came ever closer to open conflict, the narrow demilitarized zone between them was diminishing rapidly, its occupants crossing over to one side or the other, or abandoning the field altogether. Among them were some troubled men and women who believed in fairness and justice, but whose deference to Southern traditions restrained them from advocating the sudden demise of Jim Crow.

Even the most prominent Southern journalists — McGill, Dabney, Carter, Daniels — reacted negatively to the report of President Truman’s civil rights committee, which outlined a number of specific proposals to end racial segregation. Their consternation underscored the deep and conflicting feelings that divided the South’s progressives and liberals and moderates almost as much from one another as from the majority on the right.

Of them all, McGill seemed the most troubled — not so much by the contents of the committee’s report as by its broader implications and its probable long-term consequences. The committee, he wrote, had “tried to cut the cloth to fit many patterns.” The result was “a report with Christian aims . . . but it can’t be enforced, even with troops. It still has to be accomplished by improving the human heart.” This coercive effort, he said, would only “harden resistance and widen the gulf.”

The Atlanta Constitution editor was still several years away from joining the fight against segregation and discrimination, but he was beginning to see the unavoidable struggle that lay ahead. “I cannot be a good crusader,” he wrote in that portentous fall of 1947, “because I have been cursed all my life with the ability to see both sides of things.” For a long time, he had seen and felt the white South’s troubles most acutely; now, with each passing month and year, the black side of the case for simple justice was weighing ever more heavily in his troubled mind. Seeing both sides in the South’s undeclared civil war as 1948 was dawning, Ralph McGill surrendered to the melancholy muse within him and waited in fatalistic resignation for the lines to be drawn and the battle to begin. “Some day,” he added in an apocalyptic closing line, “the Lord’s going to set this world on fire.”