An exercise in courage or militance for a worthy cause is, I believe, never wasted, even though its tangible result is impossible to measure. The tragedy of the Southern liberals and the Southern Communists is that a potential for great achievement was squandered.
—Robert F. Hall
Most, if not all, Southern liberals of the 1930s would have found these words scandalous—at best, wishful thinking; at worst, a vicious distortion of history. But Rob Hall's ruminations on the Democratic Front, based on firsthand experience and four decades of reflection, contain enough grains of truth to fill a silo. If democratizing the state of Alabama can be considered a “great achievement,” then Communists were indeed one of many groups on the threshold of ushering in a new era of reform. The CIO in Birmingham, for example, had become more than a federation of labor unions. It evolved into a unique force for social change, particularly for blacks—an evolution that can be traced in part to the vocal presence of Communist labor organizers. Communists spurred a handful of liberals into action as well; Joseph Gelders's beating and his persistent campaign against vigilante violence, in particular, rattled more than a few progressive Southern circles. By the close of the New Deal decade, Southern liberals had emerged from the closet as if in unison, assuming a stronger stance against poverty, racism, and civil liberties violations. And, of course, black middle-class organizations such as the NAACP, whose ranks now included reluctant radicals and black trade unionists, embraced a somewhat more activist civil rights agenda.
Yet during this same period, the Party had begun to lose organizational contact with its black rural supporters following the SCU's liquidation; its black urban membership shrank once the CIO began to take off; and the Party in general remained isolated and ostracized from Southern liberals and the black middle class. The latter was particularly damaging to the Popular Front. By late 1937, as Birmingham became the only sustained center of Party activity in the state, Communist leaders redoubled their efforts to attract progressive urban elites, especially white liberals. Its organizers were predominantly white native Southerners, its journal spoke directly to Southern liberals, and its loosely organized branches consciously absorbed regional cultural influences. Even the language of class struggle was southernized. Party publications drew the battle lines between the “common people, Negro and white” and the “Bourbons” who represented post-Reconstruction reaction as well as “the Wall Street bankers and monopoly capitalism.” But after two trying years, Southern Communists failed to achieve their primary goal—to attain a legal, respectable standing in regional and local politics. Moreover, despite all the internal reforms, Party membership was less stable than it had ever been. To illustrate, although the Alabama Party reported only thirty-four dues-paying members in December 1937, in response to a friendly recruitment contest instigated by Texas Communists, Birmingham organizers managed to sign up 366 new members in January 1938 alone. Such a remarkable increase can be attributed to the period's relaxed standards for enlistment: one needed only to sign a card to be a Communist.1
The Party's inability to overcome its insular existence was not just an Alabama problem; it was a national dilemma. By the close of 1937, national and international CP leaders had realized that the type of broad-based Popular Front led by Communists in Spain or France could not succeed in the U.S., at least not in the near future. It was decided, then, to refashion the U.S. Popular Front into a more realistic, politically accommodating policy. The Democratic Front, as it was called, retained the pro-Roosevelt rhetoric but departed from the Popular Front by accepting a furtive role in coalition politics. As one leading Party theorist explained, “We should support the progressive movement, not demanding the admittance of our Party, not making this a condition for our support of the democratic forces, but showing by our activity . . . that our Party is a constructive force entitled to entrance in the progressive movement, thereby paving the way for entrance at a future time.”2
Before 1938, Alabama had few liberal organizations or institutions in which Communists could work effectively. Aside from creating movements that would attract sympathetic political figures, Southern Communists believed a progressive agenda could be realized through the Democratic party. Exuding a sense of optimism prefiguring Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns fifty years later, Southern Central Committee representative John Ballam best expressed the view that blacks, farmers, workers, and the struggling middle class could seize control of the Democratic party: “It is entirely within the field of practical politics for the workers, farmers and the city middle class—the common people of the South—to take possession of the machinery of the Democratic Party, in the South, and turn it into an agency for democracy and progress.”3
Alabama Party leaders took Ballam's words to heart, even to the point of focusing more attention on Democratic candidates than Communist candidates. In the 1938 primary Rob Hall challenged James Simpson for a Senate spot, and Joe Gelders, running as an independent Democrat, made a bid for state legislator. Though both were beaten handily, Communists exhibited no remorse and instead celebrated the victories of Congressman Luther Patrick and Senator Lister Hill. Hall even applauded the election of Joe Starnes over Tom Heflin as a victory for the New Deal slate. (Within a matter of months, Starnes would serve on the Dies Committee and accuse virtually every liberal, radical, or prolabor organization of Communist domination.) The election of Alabama New Dealers in the House and Senate, noted one optimistic Birmingham correspondent for the Daily Worker, was proof that Southerners clamored for a progressive agenda.4
No matter what Southern working people wanted, the Democratic Front offered Communists the only doorway into the world of Southern liberals, largely because the extent of their political isolation was more severe in the South compared with most of the U.S. The Communist label still frightened Birmingham's most progressive citizens, some of whom identified with the Party only in the privacy of voting booths. Joseph Gelders, the Communists’ sole entree into Alabama's liberal circles, was well aware of the present impasse and moved swiftly to strengthen his influence among Southern New Deal Democrats. Realizing that a Southern chapter of the NCDPP, an organization widely considered a “Communist front,” was more of a liability than an asset, Gelders decided late in 1937 to replace it with something more Southern and less threatening. Instead of creating another civil liberties organization from scratch, Gelders sought to merge the Birmingham NCDPP with an established but dying organization based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, then called the Southern Committee for People's Rights.
Founded in Atlanta in 1933 by a small group of Left-liberal intellectuals drawn to the Herndon case, the Southern League for People's Rights (as it was originally called) was created as a non-Communist alternative to the ILD. Its founding members included journalist Bruce Crawford, a history graduate student named C. Vann Woodward, and Olive Stone, a sometime patron of the SCU and central figure among Montgomery's independent Marxists. Stone was the organization's driving force, serving as its secretary and editing its newsletter singlehandedly. When she moved to Chapel Hill in 1935 to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology, so went the organization, whose name by then had been changed from League to Committee. At its height in 1935, the SCPR had grown to fifteen hundred dues-paying members based mainly in Virginia and North Carolina, but its membership began to dwindle after it fought efforts to dismiss University of North Carolina professor E. E. Erickson for dining with black Communist James Ford. By 1937 all that remained were a few dedicated liberals and a handful of Communists active at the university. When Gelders met with SCPR members late in 1937 and proposed merging the two organizations into a national committee for people's rights, few dissented. (Those opposed to the idea either personally disliked Gelders or believed—correctly so—that he was a Communist.) Less than a month after the negotiations had been finalized, Gelders opened the NCPR's national headquarters in Birmingham.5
Gelders staffed the NCPR with educated, Southern-born Communists whose political affiliations were not widely known. To direct the Birmingham office, he hired Laurent Frantz, an energetic young lawyer from Tennessee who would eventually become his son-in-law. Brought up in a reform-minded household—his father had actively promoted a single-tax colony in Tennessee—Frantz became interested in Marxism during the 1930s while studying at the University of Tennessee. Searching for a vehicle to practice his politics as he pursued a degree in law, Frantz joined the Socialist party but soon became disillusioned with the timidity of Socialist leaders, including Norman Thomas whom he considered a “pacifist intellectual.” Thus, when Communists proposed a united front with Southern Socialists late in 1934, Frantz not only responded to the call but switched his allegiance to the CP. Shortly thereafter, he received clearance to join the CP and was appointed assistant editor of the Southern Worker in January 1937, for which he wrote numerous articles under the pen name “Larry French.” After six months with the Southern Worker, he joined the staff of the NCDPP and worked on the campaign to free Bessemer Communist Bart Logan.6
One of the NCPR's first tasks was to reopen a four-year-old case involving Birmingham labor organizer John Catchings. Catchings had been convicted for allegedly dynamiting company property during the 1934 Republic Steel strike. The Party and the NCPR tried to build popular support for the case (Catchings was deemed “Birmingham's Tom Mooney”), but their efforts to free the Mine Mill organizer bore little fruit. Yet the campaign did produce “The Ballad of John Catchings,” a catchy little tune written by Joe and Esther Gelders, and in the process created a new folk hero for the Southern Left:
In ’33 the Eagle came
And brought the NRA
John Catchings said: “Our time has come
We'll organize this very day.”
Those rich men's hearts are harder still
Than steel made in their mill
Republic would not be content
To obey the laws of government. . . .
Come gather round me Brothers all
Together let us shout
If we must take that jail house down
We're going to get John Catchings out.7
Musical contributions notwithstanding, on the surface the NCPR differed little from the old NCDPP; even its board of directors remained largely unchanged. But the organization's focus shifted sharply away from political prisoners to civil rights. In January 1938, Gelders and Birmingham NAACP secretary W. E. Shortridge jointly dispatched a circular letter endorsing the Wagner-Van Nuys antilynching bill that, if passed, would have allowed federal authorities to prosecute police officers or state officials who, through negligence or inaction, indirectly conspired in a lynching. Two months later, the NCPR joined the NAACP and three hundred black pastors to protest the appointment of an all-white staff to manage a newly created black housing project in Smithfield, an industrial suburb of Birmingham.8
The NCPR was not meant to replace the Communist Party. On the contrary, the CP continued to work openly, recruit members, and maintain a separate identity. Although the burden of work continued to fall on the shoulders of a few veterans, the Party's paid membership had increased steadily, reaching 850 by May. In preparation for the CPUSA's tenth national convention, Birmingham Communists hosted their first open regional conference, drawing eighty-five delegates from as far away as Oxford, Mississippi, to Atlanta, Georgia. Held in the Odd Fellows Hall a few days after May Day, the conference began and ended in a festive mood, complete with song, food, and brief tours of Jane Speed's bookstore. Leading the discussion with a report on the recent Alabama primaries, Rob Hall suggested that progressives approach Democratic politics through “people's legislative conferences” and other forms of lobbying rather than run independent candidates. Consequently, most delegates agreed that any successful political strategy required empowerment through voter registration. By the end of the conference full enfranchisement irrespective of race and the abolition of the poll tax were issues foremost on the Party's agenda. As if to emphasize the revolutionary implications of winning the franchise, a group of Birmingham Communists inserted the new slogan into “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” closing the conference in jubilant chorus:
Black and white together we'll
win the vote,
win the vote,
win the vote,
Black and white together we'll
win the vote
Going to build our promised land.9
The Tenth National Convention, which opened in New York on May 26, not only affirmed the decisions of the Birmingham conference but placed particular emphasis on the role of the black middle class in building a Democratic South. The Alabama delegation, which included veterans Jane Speed, Rob Hall, Henry O. Mayfield, Hosea Hudson, and Hosea Hart, listened as black Party spokesman James Ford proclaimed the South the center of “Negro work.” The NNC, noted Ford and several other speakers, exemplified the trend toward a progressive alliance of black middle-class and religious organizations, trade unions, farmers’ organizations, student groups, and other mass movements. The Negro Commission asked Communists to join the church, the “main mass organization” in the black community, and encouraged black Party members to become even more active in the NAACP.10
The speeches and resolutions of the Tenth National Convention still placed great faith in a Southern liberal-labor alliance, but the focus on returning to the black community added another dimension to Party work. While black rank-and-file Communists had never left their communities, the Party had, until recently, subordinated black issue-oriented activity so as not to jeopardize relations with Southern liberals. But black Alabama Communists did not have an organization devoted primarily to black issues that they could call their own, especially after the ILD had been dismantled. Furthermore, neither the NNC nor the SNYC—a federation of black youth groups founded by young Communists in 1937—had established chapters in Alabama by mid-1938, and the NCPR, whose letterhead continued to list white radical intellectuals such as John Howard Lawson and Rockwell Kent, was still little more than a paper organization.
Influencing established black organizations was not a viable option either. Most black Communists who had joined the NAACP as instructed were growing increasingly disenchanted with its leadership. Black Communists and former ILD organizers (who usually attended meetings dressed in overalls) were rarely taken seriously by their middle-class co-members. And when they did succeed in persuading branch officers to investigate incidents of police brutality, NAACP leaders proceeded timidly. One such case occurred in May 1938, after fifteen-year-old John Smith had been falsely convicted of raping an eight-year-old white girl. Immediately following the trial, as Smith was being escorted to jail, the girl's father H. E. Colburn, appeared in the corridor outside the courtroom and fatally shot the black youth while police passively looked on. When word of the killing reached Hosea Hudson, he asked the NAACP to pressure the district attorney into charging Colburn for murder. Under Hudson's leadership, a committee within the NAACP raised money and retained black Birmingham attorney Arthur Shores, but the charges against Colburn were dismissed nonetheless. As with several other local cases, NAACP leaders opted not to pursue the matter further. Consequently, many individual Communists left the NAACP disappointed: “The NAACP didn't change much, not much. They didn't do anything. They still didn't want to rock the boat, make they good friends mad. The leadership was still trying to make deals.”11
By late spring 1938, it became apparent that neither the NAACP nor the NCPR would be the vehicle for establishing the Democratic Front in Birmingham's black community. Joe Gelders had realized this months before both the regional and national conventions. As early as February, Gelders proposed a new organization that would focus all of its energies on what local Communists had agreed was the linchpin of the Democratic Front in the South—the right to vote. Rob Hall strongly concurred and both men called upon seasoned radical Hosea Hudson to organize such a broad-based movement in Birmingham. Within a matter of days, two black ministers and several local black Communists, including Henry O. May-field, Hazel Stanley, Cornelia Foreman, Mack Coad, and Jimmie Hooper, met in the Negro Masonic Temple and founded the Right to Vote Club.12
The right to vote without financial requirements and irrespective of race was by no means new to the Communists’ program, but never before had the Party launched a campaign that had as its primary goal the enfranchisement of black and poor white voters. Even during the Popular Front, when the Party shifted to electoral politics, black organizers were either asked to distribute literature in support of Democratic candidates or leaflets explaining progressive legislation, but no effort was made before 1938 to systematically challenge the Board of Registrars. Indeed, before the Tenth National Convention one Southern Communist leader not only questioned the importance of winning the vote for blacks but argued that most blacks in Southern cities already exercised the franchise.13
The Right to Vote Club prepared black adults for the rigors of voter registration by making procedural and legal information easily accessible to the community. Laurent Frantz taught classes on the state and federal constitutions, and club leaders held workshops on voter registration procedures. In these free community workshops participants were made aware of the various legal methods used by the state to limit the franchise. First, a two-year residency was required for participation in state elections, a one-year residency for county elections. Second, the applicant had to be able to read and write any passage of the Constitution, providing the applicant had been working most of the preceding twelve months, but if the applicant owned property worth at least $300, the literacy requirement could be waived. Finally, the applicant was required to pay back poll taxes.14
In addition to these requirements, African-Americans faced an added assortment of legal and extralegal hurdles. Most county boards required that black applicants have two white male sponsors vouch for them in a court of law before processing their application. More commonly, blacks were turned away for failing to answer irrelevant questions, such as who served on the president's cabinet or how many drops of water there were in the ocean. The intimidation one confronted at the registrar was overwhelming, even for a seasoned Communist like Hosea Hudson: “You'd be surprised how people felt. I know how I felt, and that's the way I know how them people felt. You just get nervous. . . . Telling people to come out to meetings and to register to vote is one thing. But going down to the horse's mouth to register to vote is another.”15
Although the Right to Vote Club opened its doors to blacks and whites of all classes, it was predominantly a black working-class organization. A few prominent black businessmen and professionals in Birmingham in 1938 exercised, and jealously guarded, the franchise. Indeed, for some the vote was more of a status symbol than a democratic right. While collecting data for Gunnar Myrdal's study of black life during the late 1930s, Ralph Bunche found that in Birmingham “it is not unusual for ‘upper class’ Negroes—business and professional men—to take the attitude that the great mass of Negroes, being uneducated and illiterate, are not yet ready to exercise the franchise.” And one of his research assistants listened to a black Birmingham miner describe, with less erudition but greater poignancy, the role “big niggers” play in keeping the vote out of the hands of poor blacks: “They go down and register and tell the white folks that they can control the rest of the niggers in town. They get a light handout and that is all there is to it. Now, they have been trying to get all the niggers in the mines to vote. If they do it will be a different story.”16
Thus Communist leaders of the Right to Vote Club were not surprised when some of their most vocal opponents turned out to be black middle-class voters. Leading the charge was the Birmingham Negro Democratic Council led by black conservative M. D. L. White. Formed in 1933 by blacks who had split from the Alabama Federation of Civic Leagues, the council had the backing of several white politicians who had intended to control the black vote by allowing select individuals to register. In a private meeting with Hudson, White invited the Right to Vote Club to join the council if Hudson reduced the club's membership to a select few. White told him, “‘We only going to qualify those that you all will recommend, send down or bring down. Your friends, we'll qualify them. But don't send everybody down. Don't bring common nigras, and don't bring over fifty a year.’ ”17
Scoffing at White's offer, club members continued holding seminars, disseminating pamphlets, and discussing voting rights with ordinary citizens in the black community. After several months of preparation, Hudson and several other club members approached the Jefferson County Board of Registrars in the spring of 1939 and attempted to register. After all of the applicants were turned down, the group retained black attorney Arthur D. Shores to file a petition on their behalf with the federal circuit court. Choosing the strongest applications in the group, Shores petitioned on behalf of Hudson and five black school teachers (the latter risking immediate dismissal from the Board of Education for their involvement in the suit), but the presiding judge refused to issue a writ of mandamus requiring the Board of Registrars to explain why the six petitioners were turned down. Nevertheless, the Jefferson County Board of Registrars subsequently decided to register the petitioners anyway so as to avoid a legal precedent.18
As a result of publicity surrounding the case, the Right to Vote Club began to attract several prominent blacks in 1939, including Birmingham World editor Emory O. Jackson and UMWA organizer Hartford Knight. More significantly, the Board of Registrars’ practice of registering petitioners in order to avoid a court battle eventually led to an increase in black registered voters. In 1938, Jefferson County had only 712 registered black voters; two years later this figure had ballooned to approximately 3,000. But registration was only half the battle since most blacks still could not pay the required back poll tax, which could total thirty-six dollars or two months’ wages for many unskilled or domestic workers. In the end the Right to Vote Club fell short of becoming a mass organization, and without the complete support of the NAACP and organized labor, it lacked the strength needed to bring about a full-scale suffrage and anti-poll-tax campaign. Weakened by internal squabbles and petty jealousies, the club finally collapsed under its own weight in 1940.19
In an address praising President Roosevelt's 1938 report of the NEC on economic conditions in the South, Earl Browder contended that the “participation of an awakening Southern intellectual group” was essential to solving the region's pressing problems. Browder's words set the tone for the Democratic Front: the hope for a New South lay, not exclusively with the working class or even the black masses, but with the emerging group of Southern liberals. By 1938 this interpretation was not entirely empty rhetoric, for New Dealers and civil liberties advocates had begun to rise from Southern intellectual circles, perhaps more vocal and more determined than ever. The work of the SPC, a think tank composed of prominent intellectuals, had come into its own during the 1930s. Established mainly to tackle the South's economic dilemmas, the SPC encouraged the NEC's study of the region's political economy. The activity of the Chapel Hill-based SCPR not only attracted several eminent names but belied the notion that Southern liberals habitually backed away from direct confrontation. Of course, the region's liberal activist/intellectuals were still miles to the right of Southern Communists, but the gap was narrowing ever-so-slightly in the late 1930s.20
The idea for a conference of Southern liberals and labor leaders had been brewing in Joe Gelders's mind for some time, even before the appearance of the NEC report. Early in 1938, following extended preliminary discussions with state CP secretary Rob Hall, Gelders asked Lucy Randolph Mason, the CIO's Southern regional public relations representative, to help organize a civil liberties conference in the South. Meanwhile, Gelders discussed his plans with Eleanor Roosevelt, whom he had met through two International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union organizers from Tupelo, Mississippi, and in June he was granted a private hearing by Franklin Roosevelt. The president liked the idea but asked Gelders to broaden the scope of the conference to include other matters, especially voting rights issues such as the poll tax and other exclusionary practices.
Returning to Birmingham, Gelders organized two meetings in July to discuss the region's political and economic problems. At the second meeting on July 21, the group drafted a statement of purpose, proposed a broad conference on the economic conditions in the South, and invited the SPC and other liberal groups who had been working independently toward the same goal. On September 6, enthused by the recent release of the NEC report on the South, one hundred representatives from seven Southern states returned to Birmingham to discuss the report, finalize plans for a conference in November, and give themselves a name. This unique gathering of Southern intellectuals, activists, and labor leaders called themselves the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW).21
The SCHW's debut was a rousing success. Over twelve hundred delegates filled Birmingham's municipal auditorium on November 20 for the four-day meeting. Some of the South's most distinguished liberals assumed permanent offices within the SCHW, including UNC president Frank Graham, Herman C. Nixon, Clark Foreman, and Judge Louise O. Charlton. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black was also in attendance to receive the conference's first Thomas Jefferson Award for distinguished service. In the course of four full days of debates, speeches, and panel discussions, delegates addressed, among other things, issues raised by the NEC report, passed resolutions opposing regional wage and freight differentials, endorsed the FSA, and strongly supported Senator Robert La Follette's investigations into civil liberties violations. The conference even advocated appropriating federal funds for housing, slum clearance, and parks and recreation—a demand that had been on the Birmingham Communist Party's agenda for several years. When a resolution on Scottsboro declared in no uncertain terms that the case had been an outgrowth of social conditions in the South, it must have brought a smile to the faces of Communists in attendance.22
Conference organizers tried to translate the SCHW's message of justice and equality into action by holding nonsegregated meetings. The first day of mixed sessions alarmed quite a few delegates, but the meetings were held without incident. When proceedings resumed the next day, city commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor and a small contingent of police officers showed up to enforce Birmingham's segregation ordinance. Rather than defy the order and use their collective strength and eminence to challenge one facet of Jim Crow, delegates complied, choosing instead to pass a resolution condemning the city's segregation laws. As the more radically inclined reluctantly abided by the law, a disgusted Eleanor Roosevelt defiantly placed her chair in the aisle dividing black from white.23
In public the Party praised the SCHW. Paul Crouch, then editor of the New South, described the four-day affair as “the beginning of a road to a better, happier, more prosperous South—a NEW SOUTH.” But before their own close-knit circles, Southern Communists offered less adulation and more critical commentary. Though otherwise enthusiastic about the SCHW's future, Rob Hall felt the delegates offered too few effective solutions for dealing with rural poverty and, in line with the Democratic Front, expressed displeasure with the conference's focus on labor to the detriment of the Southern middle class. Furthermore, Hall admonished the white delegates for their paternalism toward blacks, pointing out that Southern progressives who offered to “do for the Negro” failed to see “the Negro people as a force which could contribute greatly, in its own right, to the solution of these joint problems.” Such an attitude was not only inexcusable, Hall argued, but the SCHW's success depended upon the complete inclusion of blacks as active participants and leaders. In a review of James Ford's The Negro and the Democratic Front published in the New South, Hall used Ford's life to show Southern liberals that blacks have more to offer than entertainment and muscle: “As a native Southerner, reared in circumstances very similar to your own, I know with what doubts you approach this question. ... It is difficult for you, perhaps, to conceive of learning the solution of a great historic problem from the words of a former Negro steel worker of Pratt City.”24
The Communists’ strongest criticisms of the conference were reserved for closed meetings and were never made public. Most prominent on their private list of grievances was the delegates’ unwillingness to challenge Birmingham's segregation laws. Hours after the SCHW's first run-in with police, local Communists held a special meeting to discuss the day's events. Nearly everyone agreed that the circumstances offered a unique opportunity to mount a successful challenge to segregation. With utmost caution, Gelders set out to persuade influential delegates to defy the laws, but few were willing to even entertain the idea, let alone join the fight.25
As could be expected, the SCHW faced charges of Communist domination from the outset. Its detractors probably would have cried Communism no matter when the conference came into being, but such charges carried considerable weight late in 1938, the year Congressman Martin Dies launched the special committee on un-American activities. It marked the beginning of an era sometimes called the “little Red Scare.” That the SCHW had been created in the midst of premature McCarthyism was bad timing at best, for practically all opponents appropriated anti-Communist rhetoric to articulate a variety of grievances. During the Dies Committee hearings, for example, committee member J. Parnell Thomas, a New Jersey Democrat, linked a number of alleged radical government officials to the SCHW in an effort to prove that “the New Deal is working along hand in glove with the Communist Party.” His co-committee members also claimed that the CPUSA funneled cash to the SCHW by way of Rob Hall and Joe Gelders.26
Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham city commissioner, late 1930s (courtesy Birmingham Public Library)
Anti-New Dealers were not the only ones playing political football with the SCHW's reputation. Some of the strongest accusations came from inside the Southern Conference, from the other end of the ideological spectrum. STFU activists Howard Kester and H. L. Mitchell made sweeping claims that Communists controlled the conference, and Socialist Frank McAllister called for the expulsion of CP members from the SCHW ranks. “We were trying to do things that were absolutely fundamental,” SCHW activist Virginia Durr recalled, “right on the lowest level of political and economic democracy. And these socialists and Trotskyites did nothing in the world but red-bait.”27
Most Southern opponents, however, were much more concerned with black than red. Unlike the Socialists, racist critics cared little for naming names or proving direct political connections, choosing instead to base their accusations of Communist subterfuge solely on an individual's stand vis-à-vis the color line. Indeed, most letters of protest from Birmingham residents judged the SCHW on the basis of a single event: its resolution condemning the city's segregation ordinance. Shortly after the conference closed, city commissioner Jimmie Jones received dozens of letters praising him and “Bull” Connor for their principled stand against the Reds as well as numerous requests for a thorough inquiry into Communist activity. Though Jones was himself a conference participant, he nonetheless requested a Dies Committee investigation of the SCHW.28
Alabama industrialists launched the most sustained attack against the Southern Conference. “I am one of the greatest believers of White Supremacy,” explained Birmingham mining magnate Charles DeBardeleben in a letter to SCHW chairman Frank Graham, and as such he would never tolerate an organization whose members “mingle and associate with negroes.” Like most other Birmingham capitalists engaged in a bitter struggle with the CIO, DeBardeleben had hoped Southern liberals would come to their senses and abandon the Southern Conference once and for all. Their most influential and sophisticated mouthpiece was Alabama: The News Magazine of the Deep South, a slick, weekly publication sponsored by the Association of Southern Industries. Ostensibly a popular magazine of conservative opinion, Alabama was founded as a foil against the CIO and Southern New Dealers, the SCHW representing the worst of both tendencies. “Joe Gelders’ ‘Southern Conference’ on how to abolish white supremacy in the South” was just a Communist front, the editors announced, replete with “carpetbaggers” and “self-appointed social uplifters of the left wing . . . with social equality as their No. 1 objective.”29
Conservative opposition to the SCHW, combined with the activities of the Dies Committee, facilitated a resurgence of white supremacist organizations in Alabama. Patterned largely after the White Legion, most of these organizations were preoccupied with Communism and promoted their cause in highly charged patriotic language. Early in 1939 a group of Montgomery businessmen and attorneys formed the Alabama Council of Accepted Americans to fight Communism and other foreign ideologies. Though white supremacy was one of its cardinal principles, the council gave assurances that “no fight would be made on the Negroes.” At about the same time, the AWDC, founded by Mabel Jones West in 1928, was revitalized by the new political climate. Describing the Southern Conference as an “affront” to white womanhood and an insidious attempt “to destroy White Supremacy,” West and the AWDC organized an “America for Americans” counterrally in Birmingham shortly after the SCHW's first meeting.30
While upholding the Communists’ right to participate, Frank Graham defended the SCHW from charges of Red control, identifying only six Party members among the gathering of twelve hundred. But Graham's findings eased few minds: several prominent figures, including Alabama politicians Lister Hill, John Bankhead, and Luther Patrick, bolted the Southern Conference for fear of being associated with Communists. Those who remained in the organization, while trying to be good civil libertarians, grew increasingly hostile to known Communists active in the Southern Conference. When Rob Hall offered to purchase two hundred copies of the SCHW proceedings early in 1939, Judge Louise Charlton refused at first to fill the order, arguing that Communists should not have access to SCHW material. But because the proceedings were available to the general public, Judge Charlton could not justifiably turn down Hall's request.31
The conservative political climate was especially damaging to Alabama's nascent industrial labor movement. By mid-1939 CIO leaders found themselves in a position not unlike that of the SCHW, caught in the bramble of accusations planted by Martin Dies and friends. The Dies investigation marked the beginning of a full-scale assault on organized labor: between 1939 and 1941 alone, nearly fifty antiunion bills were introduced into Congress. Leading the charge in Birmingham was Alabama congressman and Dies Committee member Joe Starnes, who had made sweeping claims that Communists controlled the state CIO industrial council. Outraged by Starnes's indictment, Alabama (CIO) News Digest editor E. T. O'Connell dismissed the charges as “a smokescreen behind which to fight honest, God-fearing people who have cast their lot with labor organizations.” He agreed with Starnes, however, that Communists have no place in the labor movement and pointed to several clauses and resolutions denying membership to CP members. If Communists were active in CIO unions, O'Connell declared, the blame must be placed on management, not labor: “There is nothing in the code of employers, so far as we know, denying employment to Communists, such as there is in the constitutions of CIO affiliates. So, if there are employers here or elsewhere who know of Communist members of the CIO, it is their duty first to discharge them as employees. . . . If they have any proof that will hold water, they can be assured the CIO affiliates will boot out the Communists.”32
Most Birmingham labor leaders joined O'Connell in supporting the anti-Communist tenets of the Dies Committee, so long as the CIO did not fall victim to scapegoating. This posture was not new; the same argument had been used in opposition to the state antisedition bill in 1935. State CIO president William Mitch, no doubt cognizant of Communist organizers in Mine Mill and SWOC, claimed repeatedly that the CIO was free of CP members. In defense of his own union, the UMWA, Mitch proudly pointed to article 14, section 2 of its 1938 constitution, excluding Communist Party, KKK, and IWW members. Birmingham CIO director Noel R. Beddow, who had hired known Communists as SWOC organizers, was especially vehement in his response to the Dies Committee's allegations. The Communists, he explained in an “open letter” to Joe Starnes, were “well educated, smooth talkers, well fed and well clothed who have been sent into a district where the field is fertile for the growth and development of the poisonous seeds of their un-American, un-democratic theories.” The CIO had no people like that, Beddow claimed, only poor, semiliterate black and white workers incapable of grasping the principles of Bolshevism. In a letter to the Birmingham Post, Beddow not only denied Communist influence in both the CIO and the SCHW but went to great extremes to prove labor's undying support for Southern traditions: “Certainly labor is not in favor of Communism. . . . The only equality labor is seeking in the South is the equality of wages and working conditions. The Negro worker certainly is not seeking any social [e]quality.”33
The little Red Scare had taken its toll by the middle of 1939, forcing liberals and labor into temporary retreat and ruining the Party's hopes for a Southern Democratic Front. As CIO and SCHW leaders geared up for their own internal investigations and expulsions, an unexpected event in Europe hastened their actions. In August 1939, the Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact with fascist Germany that cleared the way for the Nazi invasion of Poland and simultaneously enabled Russia to invade Finland. After an initial period of disbelief, two confusing months passed before the Comintern announced a substantive change in the Party line. The old antifascist slogans were dropped as the Central Committee launched a new campaign to keep America out of the “imperialist war.” The era of the Democratic Front came to an inauspicious end.34
The widespread disillusionment within national Communist circles following the Nazi-Soviet Pact is a familiar story and need not be retold here. In Alabama, however, the events after August 1939 followed a somewhat unique pattern. The pact just did not have much effect on a cadre primarily black and poor. Most Birmingham Communists were more concerned with CIO work than foreign policy issues, and in the midst of growing sentiment to expel radicals from the labor movement, Party members simply had more pressing problems to contend with. Even the black middle class refrained from criticizing local Communists for their support of the pact. On the other hand, the Nazi-Soviet Pact was acid to the already deteriorating relations between Communists and liberals, especially within the SCHW, where heightened suspicions gave way to bitter conflicts. For his rather mild defense of the Soviet Union's actions, Joe Gelders was accused of being a Communist, prompting several SCHW members to call for his immediate expulsion. Gelders denied the allegations, claiming only a perfunctory knowledge of Marxism and a soft spot in his heart for any defender of civil liberties. So adamant were his denials that during the 1940 campaign for city commission, Gelders threatened to sue candidate W. B. Houseal for calling him a Communist. Lying about his Party affiliation was undoubtedly a painful experience for a man who had desired to be an open Communist from the moment he joined. But Gelders's vilification within the Southern Conference—the movement he had helped bring into existence—was far more devastating, particularly since the attacks had more to do with foreign policy than with the SCHW's immediate goals.35
Despite efforts to keep the controversy a private matter, conflict over Soviet actions threatened to split the SCHW in half during its second meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1940. For a brief but significant moment, the conference's theme of “Democracy in the South” took a backseat to events in Russia and northern Europe. When a group of interventionists led by journalist William T. Couch proposed a resolution condemning the Soviet Union's invasion of Finland, Gelders and a number of other Communists and liberal isolationists opposed it, setting in motion an unwanted debate on the floor. But Gelders's protestations were to no avail; the resolution was adopted. Though the resolution made no impact on American or European politics and the SCHW as a whole still opposed U.S. intervention, the controversy resulted in a few more resignations, increased suspicions, and an unavoidable political split within the Southern Conference.36
From a national and international perspective, the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Russia's invasion of Finland represented the Democratic Front's final epitaph. U.S. Communists abandoned most of their hard-earned liberal alliances, prepared new literature assailing Wall Street warmongers, and made plans for the “re-Bolshevization” of the Party. In Alabama, on the other hand, there were no liberal alliances to drop since a potent, racist strain of anti-Communism precluded any open relations between Southern liberals and Communists. In Alabama Joe Gelders was the Democratic Front, and he went no further than defending Soviet foreign policy. He did not give up on the Southern Conference, despite the animosity and name calling, nor did he or his comrades abandon the Party's Southern program of expanding the franchise, fighting for black civil rights, and supporting the CIO. The SCHW did not give up on Gelders either; in 1939 he was elected executive secretary of its civil rights committee, through which he spearheaded a mass anti-poll-tax campaign. While developing the anti-poll-tax bill (H.R. 7534), arranging for its introduction by Congressman Lee Geyer, and building a case to challenge the tax's constitutionality, Gelders proceeded with unusual dedication, sometimes without pay. (In 1941 the SCHW owed Gelders $1,470 in back salary!) Moreover, throughout the 1940s Communists held several important posts in the Alabama chapter of the SCHW—their presence not so much influencing Alabama liberal opinion as constituting a critical section of it.37
The potential for great achievement was squandered, as Rob Hall had said, but the squandering had taken place long before Comintern directives invaded local politics. Although the South had made tremendous progress toward reducing outright antilabor and antiradical repression, the power of anti-Communism in its uniquely Southern form—and the residual racism accompanying it—created an invisible barrier between many like-minded individuals. When the Nazi-Soviet Pact entered Southern liberal politics, the somewhat awkward defense thrown up by Joe Gelders and friends just made the barrier more formidable. By 1940 the Central Committee announced a change. Hoping to recapture the Third Period spirit without completely falling back into sectarianism, Communist leaders looked to “re-Bolshevize” the Party from top to bottom. A return to the old radicalism, anchored by a strong antiwar platform, was intended to rebuild the Party's tottering base of support. Alabama CP leadership tried to follow suit: in 1940 Rob Hall criticized the SCHW for not adopting an antiwar stance, placed labor at the center of the radical movement once again, and credited the black industrial proletariat for the “heightened militancy” of Southern civil rights struggles.38
But the experiment in Popular Front politics did not die so easily. Beginning about 1939–40, a new wave of radicals entered the Alabama CP, resumed the coalition-style politics of their predecessors, and constructed an interracial movement of young people who shared the subversive belief that freedom, equality, and opportunity are the inherent rights of all Americans, irrespective of race, class, or sex.