White citizens of the U. S. South expect a Republican President, for political reasons, to treat Negroes as near-equals. That is a prime reason why they have almost always voted solidly Democratic since Reconstruction.* On the other hand, Southern voters expect a Democratic President to cooperate in keeping Negroes firmly in their social place.
Last summer President Roosevelt, a Northern Democrat, received a delegation of Negro Elks in his office, allowed himself to be photographed with them (TIME, Aug. 12). Still more shocking to Southern sensibilities was it when Mrs. Roosevelt addressed the Women's Faculty Club of Washington's Howard University (Negro), let herself be photographed between two young Negro officers of the University R.O.T.C. By count of Chicago's Negro Representative Arthur Mitchell last August, President Roosevelt had given more jobs to blackamoors than had all three preceding Republican Presidents put together. To a North Carolina Negro businessman the President wrote that, in proportion to their numbers, Negro citizens had been given more Relief than whites. Negro journals like the Baltimore Afro-American, and the Pittsburgh Courier commented happily on these and other instances of the Roosevelt consideration for their race.
Political opponents of Franklin Roosevelt were not long in seeing that this kind of political dynamite could blow larger holes in the Solid South than any other single campaign issue. Throughout the South began to appear cheap pamphlets containing blurred photographs of the Roosevelts consorting with Negroes, blatant text proclaiming them ardent Negrophiles. First public notice of this stirring of the black pot of race feeling was taken when copies of the Georgia Woman's World were placed on the chair of every delegate to the convention of anti-Roosevelt "Goober Democrats," called by Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge and the Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution in Macon last winter (TIME, Feb. 10). Embellished with most extant photographs of Roosevelts & Negroes, this shoddy sheet shrilled:
"Notwithstanding the fact that he was elected by the Democratic Party, PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT HAS . . . PERMITTED NEGROES TO COME TO THE WHITE HOUSE BANQUET TABLE AND SLEEP IN THE WHITE HOUSE BEDS. . . THE LITTLE DOLE WHICH HE GAVE TO THE SOUTH WILL NEVER PERMIT HIM AND MRS. ROOSEVELT TO PUT SOCIAL EQUALITY IN THE SOUTH AS THEY HAVE DONE IN THE NORTH AND IN PENNSYLVANIA."
Last week Senator Hugo Lafayette Black chose to give this whole delicate question a public airing in his Senate Lobby Investigating Committee.* Up for investigation was John Henry Kirby's Southern Committee to Uphold the Constitution. First witness was fat, freckled old John Henry Kirby, Texas oil and lumber man, who quickly revealed that the right-hand man who really knew the inner workings of his organization was one Vance Muse. A big, muscular, loose-jointed Texan with thick brown hair and a scar on his cheek, Mr. Muse swung up to the witness chair. Senator Black told him to sit down.
"I think," boomed Vance Muse, "that I should stand in the presence of the Senate of the United States, in which I have implicit faith."