DEMOCRATIC HARMONY, REPUBLICAN VICTORY
NOT LONG AFTER HOWARD JACKSON began his fourth term as Baltimore’s mayor, Franklin Roosevelt was nominated for a third term as president. Mayor Jackson was not one of his adherents. At the state Democratic convention, Jackson had urged Maryland’s delegation to the national convention to support, instead, US Senator Millard Tydings of Maryland, one of the anti–New Deal Democrats targeted in FDR’s ill-fated “purge” of 1937. In a concession to political reality, the state convention decided that if Roosevelt appeared to be succeeding in winning his third nomination, the Maryland delegates should vote as they pleased.1
Roosevelt’s nomination was clearly a setback for Jackson, and he seemed unwilling to accept it in silence. Little more than a month after the national convention, he gave a speech condemning the fiscal policies of “this Government,” expressing concern about “the erosion of citizenship, the erosion of local governments, State, city, and county, by virtue of their dependence upon the national Government, the erosion of the moral fiber of the American people by their dependence upon government rather than their own independence.” Jackson proceeded to raise questions about foreign policy: “I am not afraid of Hitler. I haven’t got the jitters as a lot of people have. What I am concerned about is our local and domestic affairs. What I am worried about is that this government is spending $2 and taking in $1.”2
Speculation and criticism followed the mayor’s speech. Speculation centered on the possibility that he might desert Roosevelt for Republican Wendell Willkie. The mayor’s mail was mixed. Three letters complimented him on his remarks; all came from out of town. The backlash was local, and much of it came from Jackson’s supporters. A local book publisher wrote that as one of Jackson’s “most ardent supporters [I am] all the more grieved at your untimely speech. I might almost say tirade . . . Even if you are opposed to the New Deal administration, you should be politician enough to know that this is no time to show it.”3
At a labor rally a week before the election, the Baltimore Sun reported that Jackson was “heckled persistently as he attempted to recount the achievements of his administration in the labor and welfare fields.” Finally, someone shouted from the back of the hall, “Are you for Roosevelt?” When the mayor hesitated, the roar of the audience grew louder, until Jackson finally responded that he had voted for Roosevelt as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention and pledged his support for the Democratic ticket.4 Coming as it did, so soon before the general election, the endorsement seemed belated and half-hearted.
At Democratic campaign headquarters on the night of the election, many of the celebrants were Mayor Jackson’s longtime political associates and allies. But Jackson was conspicuously absent. The Sun reported that there was considerable criticism of Jackson, “forced to declare for Roosevelt at the labor meeting.”5
During the following year, Jackson sent several telegrams to FDR in support of his foreign policy.6 Jackson saw to it that his telegrams received wide publicity, along with a letter of thanks that he received from the president. The mayor was attempting to mend his fences with local advocates of the New Deal.7
He was mending fences even with his political archrival. Jackson and William Curran cited the war as reason for their truce. A month after Pearl Harbor, the two men agreed on a candidate to fill the vacant chairmanship of Baltimore’s Democratic Central Committee and engineered his unanimous election. Not long afterward, a local reporter noticed that Curran and Jackson greeted one another with a hug at a public banquet. Jackson explained: “Willie and I have always been good friends, personally.” They were becoming good political friends too. Curran endorsed Jackson’s reelection as mayor, and the two leaders agreed on a common slate of candidates for the state legislature. “People are not interested in ordinary politics at this time,” said Curran. “Those who have boys in the armed forces scattered over the world don’t want to talk politics.” Even Governor O’Conor reached out to Jackson. The Herbert O’Conor Democratic Club cancelled its Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner so that the governor and his friends could attend the banquet held at the mayor’s Concord Democratic Club. All of the speakers emphasized the need for political unity. A “harmony conference” met in July 1942, at which Curran, Jackson, and O’Conor were able to agree on a partial slate of candidates for the General Assembly from Baltimore City. The participants expressed a hope that further conferences would extend the list of “harmony” candidates.8
World War II increased municipal responsibilities. Even before Pearl Harbor, the city had to expand its public services to accommodate thousands of new workers in local defense plants and shipyards. The public schools had to provide for their children. Mayor Jackson became director of civil defense for the Baltimore metropolitan area, but wanted some assurance that his new office did not make him subordinate to the state’s director of civil defense, Governor O’Conor. It took a ruling from Fiorello La Guardia, the national director of civil defense, to put the mayor in his place.9
Harmony had its limits. While Curran and Jackson made peace with one another, they revealed how little control they exercised among their supposed followers. The Democratic primary of 1942 brought out not only “harmony” candidates for the legislature but also recalcitrant Jackson candidates and Curran candidates, along with some who supported both Jackson and Curran but not O’Conor, and still others who ran under the banners of district leaders such as Jack Pollack. In one Baltimore legislative district, 17 candidates ran for three seats in the house of delegates. The election produced a motley collection of Democratic legislators and only a narrow victory for Governor O’Conor over Republican Theodore R. McKeldin. Pollack crowed that the results disclosed the “dead leadership” of William Curran.10
Curran and Jackson, however, continued to cooperate. Curran reiterated his support for Jackson’s reelection as mayor in 1943, and Jackson endorsed Curran allies for the offices of comptroller and city council president. Harmony, however, did not extend beyond these three citywide offices. Neither Curran nor Jackson endorsed any candidates for the city council, perhaps because they recognized just how little influence they exercised in district-level politics. Jackson won the Democratic primary with a 6,000 vote margin over all four of his opponents combined. Curran’s candidates for comptroller and city council president were also successful. But in the general election, Jackson lost his bid for a fifth term as mayor to Theodore McKeldin by more than 20,000 votes, while every other Democratic candidate was victorious.11
The mayor’s defeat was generally attributed to “long continuance in office,” though McKeldin’s final campaign attacks on Jackson suggested a variety of other reasons for retiring him—his use of the mayor’s office to enhance his insurance business, for example. But the new alliance between Jackson and Curran may have given McKeldin his most effective ammunition. He pointed out that Jackson had waged his last campaign “to keep Mr. William Curran out of the City Hall. This time he takes the same William Curran to his heart and into City Hall despite the past smears he has put upon him.”12 When the city’s two most powerful Democratic bosses joined forces, Baltimoreans may have had reason for apprehension. Rapprochement between the two also deprived Democratic district bosses of the opportunity to win patronage and perquisites by shifting from Curran to Jackson and back again.
MINORITY OF ONE AND THE RACIAL MINORITY
Mayor McKeldin commanded no machine. A lone Republican in an otherwise Democratic government, his influence depended almost entirely on his personal political skills. The unanimously Democratic city council went its own way. Curran and Jackson had agreed that the council’s patronage should be divided evenly between their two camps. Instead, the supposed partisans of Howard Jackson deserted their fallen leader and joined three council members controlled by Fourth District boss Jack Pollack to deny the Curran faction any share of the spoils.13
At first, McKeldin dispensed mayoral patronage among council members and their retainers without much regard to faction, a strategy designed to maintain good will with the council as a whole, but one that infuriated the mayor’s fellow Republicans—who gained almost nothing tangible from his victory. When McKeldin made appointments outside the council’s Democratic factions and their backers, the jobs usually went to Jews, African Americans, women, or independent liberals, thus creating an intensely loyal personal constituency for the mayor among people usually denied access to leadership positions in city government.14 To his fellow Republicans, the mayor offered only a plea to rise above partisanship. In a speech to the Alexander Hamilton Club of Maryland, he urged his party to “forget its special party interest and support first and foremost the interests of the nation, the State, and the city.” Some Republicans, at least, believed that the mayor had betrayed his party “by selling out to the Jackson wing of the Democratic party.”15
An alliance with the council’s Jackson faction made sense for the mayor. Pollack, in one of his politically exquisite acts of betrayal, had shifted his district’s three stalwarts from the Jackson to the Curran side of the council, thus creating a new council majority and securing the tangible gratitude of the Curranites. For Mayor McKeldin, an alliance with the pro-Jackson minority was an exercise in balance-of-power politics designed to offset the influence of the Curran-Pollack majority.16
War may have inspired Baltimore’s rival Democratic bosses to strive for unity and to compose “harmony” tickets, but it seems to have heightened tension between the city’s black and white residents. Mayor McKeldin was apprehensive that Baltimore might have a race riot like the one that exploded in Detroit in 1943.17 The first stirrings of interracial violence emerged in Baltimore barely two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when a police officer killed a black soldier, Private Thomas Broadus. Patrolman Edward Bender shot him in self-defense, according to the Baltimore Police Department, when attacked by Broadus and two other black men, one of whom seized the officer’s nightstick and used it to beat Bender over the head. Initial reports said that Bender had suffered a broken arm and a possible skull fracture, but neither the police department nor hospital officials offered further confirmation of his injuries. He was released from the hospital after just over a week, and a grand jury declined to indict him on a charge of homicide. Not long afterward, a judge acquitted Private Broadus’s alleged accomplices of assaulting Bender or interfering with a police officer. Neither of the defendants testified; the judge dismissed the charges on the basis of the patrolman’s testimony that Broadus was the person who had beaten him with his nightstick.18
The Baltimore branch of the NAACP initiated its own investigation of Broadus’s death; so did the state’s attorney, the medical examiner, and military authorities. Eyewitnesses reported that Broadus had been running away from his fight with the police officer when he was felled. The soldier was killed by two shots in the back.19
Broadus was the second black man killed by Officer Bender in his five years on the force. His death and the exoneration of the police officer responsible for it triggered a mass protest in the city’s black community. Led by the Afro’s Carl Murphy, 2,000 African Americans joined a caravan of cars and buses to confront Governor O’Conor. (The Baltimore Police Department still operated under the governor’s authority.) The protesters demanded not just an end of police brutality but the hiring of more black officers (there were only three) and appointment of black police magistrates. O’Conor listened, and a month later appointed the Commission on Problems Affecting the Negro Population.20
The commission’s subcommittee on the police submitted a preliminary report demanding that Officer Bender’s case be resubmitted to the grand jury on the grounds that Bender had killed Broadus while he was fleeing and the patrolman was no longer in danger. The report criticized the handling of the case by the state’s attorney. He had allowed the grand jury to dismiss charges against Bender before it had heard from all witnesses to the shooting. The report was even more critical of the police commissioner, Robert F. Stanton, who had not taken any disciplinary action against Officer Bender. Since his appointment as commissioner, Stanton had hired no black police officers. During the preceding 12 years, police officers had killed 14 black men—9 of them since Stanton had become commissioner less than three years earlier. None of the nine officers had been brought to trial or disciplined.21
The 18-member commission continued to work on its final report for almost a year. It recommended the hiring of black police officers and appointment of blacks to government bodies such as school boards. It did not, however, challenge the regime of segregation. It urged greater financial support for teacher training at black colleges. The commission paid particular attention to housing for African Americans, perhaps because it was the black problem most likely to disturb whites. Black neighborhoods were already overcrowded, and wartime migration to Baltimore aggravated the housing shortage for blacks, much of which was substandard. Overcrowding in black neighborhoods threatened to push blacks into white neighborhoods. As the commission pointed out, housing was “at the root of many of the stresses that arise between the white and colored races.” It called for additional black housing, with the proviso that it be “contiguous to existing Negro neighborhoods.”22
The commission had little to say on the issue of black employment. Its members had split on the question of initiating a fair employment practices investigation of Baltimore industry. The mere proposal drove some members to resign in protest.23 An investigation would have shown that barriers to black employment persisted even in the face of wartime manpower shortages. The Afro celebrated the employment of 13,600 blacks in Baltimore-area defense plants “as job barriers fall.” But by the end of 1942, African Americans accounted for less than 7 percent of the city’s war workers, though they made up more than 20 percent of Baltimore’s labor force. In many cases, even employment did not lead to desegregation. The Glenn L. Martin plant and the Koppers Company confined black workers to separate facilities. Attempts to create integrated workplaces at Western Electric and Maryland Drydock triggered strikes by white workers.24
The migrations set in motion by World War II changed Baltimore’s ethnic composition. The percentage of the population born abroad was shrinking. Ethnic political and social organizations were in decline. Baltimore’s new immigrants were from Appalachia and the South. About 89 percent of the new arrivals—150,000 to 200,000—were white; their arrival reduced the demand for black workers. Employers refused to hire African Americans or assigned them to the least desirable jobs. When pressed, writes Kenneth Durr, they explained that they were deferring to the wishes of their white workers. They were mostly right. The massive influx of southern whites, says Durr, reinforced racist sentiments among native Baltimoreans.25
Mayor McKeldin escaped responsibility for police misconduct, but he stood directly in the line of fire when it came to the deficiencies in black housing cited in the final report of the governor’s Commission on Problems Affecting the Negro Population. The Committee on Post-War Planning, originally appointed by Mayor Jackson, released its report on the same day that the commission announced its findings and called attention to the same conditions. Both reports took care to propose that any new housing for black Baltimoreans should be adjacent to existing black neighborhoods.26
The federal government’s wartime need for defense workers intensified the problem of housing black Baltimoreans. Months before McKeldin’s election, the federal War Manpower Commission had directed the Federal Public Housing Administration (PHA) to build as many as 2,000 temporary housing units in Baltimore for African American workers in defense plants and shipyards. The Baltimore City Plan Commission immediately objected to the construction of temporary housing. Baltimore already faced a shortage of decent, affordable housing. A survey of low-rent units conducted in 1941 found that even in housing rated as “standard,” over 30 percent of the renters had no inside toilets or baths, and the percentage of households unable to afford decent housing was growing, especially among African Americans. City officials wanted wartime housing that would continue to serve after the war was over.27
More controversial than the durability of black housing was its location. The federal housing agency selected a site for the project in industrial East Baltimore, convenient to many of the city’s mills and factories. The announcement provoked immediate protests from white residents nearby and from the Baltimore Association of Commerce, which complained that the area was a prime location for railyards and manufacturing and too valuable for residential development.28 The Baltimore Housing Authority then suggested a different site on the same side of the city, just east of Herring Run Park. The authority’s chairman emphasized that his agency was not recommending the site, only calling attention to it, because “the selection of the site or sites, the determination of all questions of policy and the planning and actual construction” were matters to be decided by the federal housing agency. Another eruption of protest meetings followed the mention of the Herring Run site. The chairman of the city’s housing authority stood before one gathering of angry protesters and denied that his agency had any authority to decide where to put the federal government’s housing project for black defense workers. For his part, Mayor Jackson claimed that “it has not yet been demonstrated, in my opinion, that there is a need . . . that would warrant the building of temporary Negro war workers’ housing.”29
Candidate McKeldin had criticized Mayor Jackson for failing to “take any part in the discussion of the Negro housing project.” Mayor McKeldin appointed the Inter-racial Commission on Negro Housing to consider the matter and to resolve the impasse between local and federal officials. The mayor took care to emphasize, however, that he had “no authority to determine where these houses shall be built.”30
The mayor’s Inter-racial Commission met with officials of the PHA to consider Mt. Winans, a predominantly black neighborhood in a remote corner of Southwest Baltimore, as a location for black housing. Mayor McKeldin declared it “an ideal place for the project.” A week later, the chairman of the Inter-racial Commission mentioned, hopefully, that he had heard no protests about the site. Two days later, however, residents of adjoining neighborhoods announced that they would oppose the use of Mt. Winans for black housing. Two hundred of them gathered the next evening and voted to send a delegation to Washington to protest use of the site. But there was no need for protest. In a meeting with city officials, the regional director of the PHA had already eliminated the Mt. Winans site because of its isolation.31
Attention reverted to the Herring Run location. The City Plan Commission favored the site. The city’s housing authority, which had earlier suggested but not recommended it, now announced its disapproval of the location.32 Mayor McKeldin, whose sideline was paid, professional oratory, delivered a masterful performance before 750 white opponents of the Herring Run site at the War Memorial auditorium. When he rose to speak, he was greeted with boos. He quieted the crowd and pointed out that housing black defense workers had been a problem before he assumed office, and again emphasized that the federal government had the responsibility for selecting a site for housing those workers. On the proposed location near Herring Run Park, he declared, “If I had selected this site I would have had the courage to stand up here and say so.” He won loud applause when he said that he “had been unalterably opposed to bringing Negroes here from the South and building housing for them to the exclusion of long-time residents.” At the close of the meeting, members of the once hostile audience surrounded the mayor to get his autograph.33
A week later, Mayor McKeldin distanced himself even further from the racial uproar by announcing that the city solicitor, a mayoral appointee, had ruled that city agencies had no authority to select public housing sites. That initiative, he said, belonged to the city council. The mayor called a special session of the all-Democratic council and gave them 15 days to designate locations for African American housing. If they failed to do so, he said, he would present the federal authorities with the disparate site recommendations of the Baltimore Housing Authority, the City Plan Commission, and his Inter-racial Commission. The council made no decision. Instead, it enacted a legally absurd but politically expedient ordinance prohibiting the federal government from “constructing any war housing in Baltimore without the approval of the Mayor, City Council, and Board of Estimates.”34
The mayor thus failed to saddle the city council with an onerous decision that was almost sure to anger white voters, or black voters, or both. But he may have succeeded in moving one or more members of the council to mobilize Maryland’s entirely Democratic congressional delegation to intercede with the PHA. Maryland’s two senators and two of its congressmen met with federal housing officials to express their opposition to the Herring Run location. Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., from Baltimore’s Third District in Southeast Baltimore, suggested that federal officials’ “seizure” of the site against the protests of city officials might prompt a congressional investigation. Congressman Streett Baldwin of Baltimore County added that “if Congress knew the money . . . would be used for this kind of project, you would not have gotten it, and you would not get any more.”35
Herbert Emmerich, commissioner of the PHA, next attempted to burden Mayor McKeldin with the responsibility for deciding where to put housing for black defense workers. He may have reasoned that the mayor would be vulnerable to pressure because, as a solitary Republican, McKeldin could not count on Baltimore’s Democratic politicians or its congressional delegation to rise to his defense.
Emmerich’s stern letter to the mayor noted that the Inter-racial Commission and City Plan Commission had both recommended use of the Herring Run site for permanent African American housing. The mayor had forwarded these recommendations to the PHA. Though McKeldin told the PHA’s regional director that the city council had to decide on the location of housing for black workers, Emmerich was determined to compel the mayor to assume responsibility for it: “I find it necessary to request that you advise us definitively and promptly whether the recommendations which you transmitted to us actually represent the recommendation of the City.” He gave McKeldin a deadline of August 25, 1943.36 If McKeldin rejected the Herring Run site, or failed to take a position, Emmerich added, “only one course remains open to us: that of building temporary housing to meet the war need on sites selected by us. As a matter of law, war housing projects may be constructed without regard to municipal laws, rules, ordinances or regulations.” The mayor was not cowed. He bridled at the “curt bureaucratic attitude” evident in Emmerich’s “lengthy letter of ungrounded assumptions, patent omissions and mandatory requirements.” It was, wrote McKeldin, a “panicky letter seeking to escape responsibility . . . on Negro housing . . . by shifting the same to me.” Federal officials had repeatedly claimed authority to decide where to build housing for black defense workers. As for the mayor, he “had not indicated a preference for a site. I have never expressed and do not now express a preference, as that is my prerogative.”37 The mayor then informed Emmerich that the Herring Run site was unacceptable, not because he was personally opposed to it, but because the city council would never approve it. Choosing a location, he repeated, was not his job. Instead, it became the business of the federal district court: the federal housing agency initiated condemnation proceedings to acquire the Herring Run land by eminent domain.38
McKeldin went on vacation when the case went to court. The acting mayor criticized the federal officials for acting in a “most autocratic and dictatorial manner” and instructed the city solicitor to contest the condemnation suit.39 For Baltimore’s political class, however, settling the issue in the courts may have been preferable to selecting a site themselves. But the politically astute Thomas D’Alesandro, Jr., took advantage of a lull in the court proceedings to arrange a conference between Baltimore officials and the head of the PHA. The city’s representatives resurrected one of their early proposals—a plan that distributed housing for black workers among four small sites located close to defense plants. Two of them were outside the city limits.40
The newly proposed sites did not escape criticism. The Baltimore Urban League, supported by the local branch of the NAACP, objected to three of the four locations, primarily because they were in isolated industrial areas remote from community facilities such as schools and stores.41 But the remoteness that made some of these sites objectionable to African Americans was precisely what made them acceptable to white residents and politicians. Other cities decided to locate housing for African Americans at isolated or undesirable sites or confined them to preexisting black ghettoes.42 Baltimore politicians tried to sidestep the decision altogether.
FEATS OF FOOTWORK
Local Republican leaders had feared that the mayor would be “jockeyed into an unfavorable position on the matter” of black housing and were uneasy about “subtle attempts . . . to create the impression that the city administration is responsible for the efforts to locate the development in the city.” But Mayor McKeldin had proven capable of the political footwork needed to dance his way around a politically treacherous issue. Democrats, however, persisted in their attempts to maneuver him into hazardous positions or prevent him from building a record of accomplishments. Democratic state legislators torpedoed his proposal for a crosstown expressway.43 With the help of the city’s Democratic delegation in Annapolis, Baltimore’s police commissioner, bypassing the mayor, proposed police pay increases directly to the state legislature. But the mayor would have to fund these increases from the city budget, along with increases for other city employees whose compensation was pegged to police pay scales.44 The Democratic city council refused to back the mayor in a tax dispute with the private company that held the franchise for public transportation in the city because the council wanted to deny the McKeldin administration an opportunity to pose as “the champions of the people against the great vested interests.”45
In the face of Democratic obstructionism, McKeldin nevertheless managed to ready the city for postwar renewal. He gave Baltimore an up-to-date airport that could handle a new generation of large passenger aircraft too big for the municipal airfield begun under Mayor Broening.46 McKeldin launched a school construction program and initiated planning for a civic center to accommodate conventions and sporting events. He started a new reservoir to secure the city’s water supply, and a tunnel to carry water to the city. He appointed a commission to revise the city charter, which produced the first major overhaul of the document since 1898. The mayor got authorization from the state legislature to create the Baltimore Redevelopment Commission.47 Its assignment was to shrink the city’s slums. McKeldin also introduced another innovation in city government. He appointed the first African American to the city’s board of school commissioners: George W. F. McMechen, a local attorney. Thirty-four years earlier, his rental of a house on McCulloh Street had provoked the wave of white protest that led Baltimore to enact its residential segregation ordinance. His appointment to the school board incited no public protest, and Mayor McKeldin was named to the 1944 honor roll of the Afro-American.48
McKeldin might have expected difficulties with Democrats, but factional divisions in his own party deprived him of solid support in meeting the Democratic challenges. By 1944, the battle lines were clear. On one side were Mayor McKeldin and his executive assistant, Galen L. Tait, who was also chairman of the Republican State Central Committee. In opposition were the followers of Paul Robertson, chairman of the Baltimore City Republican Committee and candidate for his party’s nomination to the US Senate. One of Robertson’s backers demanded that Tait be dismissed as the mayor’s deputy because he was using city time to manage the campaign of Robertson’s chief opponent in the Republican senatorial primary. McKeldin’s camp responded by demanding the resignation of a pro-Robertson member of the city’s election board who allegedly pressured Republican election judges to support his candidate.49
The intraparty feud grew more intense when McKeldin became a candidate for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1946. Fellow Republicans charged that he had failed to report many of the campaign contributions received when he was running for mayor in 1943. They attacked him for failing to appoint Republicans to city offices and for his “political mismanagement” thereafter. Even after three years as mayor, McKeldin was still just “an amiable youngster,” according to one Republican critic, “totally lacking in business or executive experience, as is exemplified by the various muddles of his administration.” Another questioned McKeldin’s eligibility for the Republican primary “on the grounds that he is not even a Republican.”50
McKeldin lost the governorship by a wide margin. Other Republican losers blamed him for dragging them down to defeat. The fact that his most energetic Republican critics were concentrated in Baltimore may have affected McKeldin’s decision not to run for reelection as mayor in 1947. Even more important, perhaps, was that he failed to carry the city as a gubernatorial candidate.51