
          Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race,
1920-1944 by John T. Kneebone. Chapel_Hill: The University of
North_Carolina Press, 1985.
          Reviewed by Sullivan, PatriciaPatricia Sullivan
          Vol. 8, No. 1, 1986, pp. 22-24
          
          The term "liberal" often obscures more than it explains. The
adjective "southern" is certain to add to the confusion.
          There is an implicit assumption that "southern liberal" means white
southern liberal. The image of a southern liberal between the two
world wars, the period John Kneebone addresses, evokes an ambivalent
figure. The system o~ legalized white_supremacy was firmly intact, and
many "liberals" endorsed Mark Ethridge's 1942 statement that "there is
no power in the world-not even all the mechanized armies of the earth,
Allied and Axis-which could now force the Southern white_people to the
abandonment of the principle of social segregation."
          Thus, John Kneebone feels compelled to qualify his definition from
the start. "Southern liberalism," he explains, "must emphasize the
adjective. Downplaying the southernness of these people tends to
identify them with national racial liberalism that takes its traction
from a history emphasizing the ideals of Jefferson's declaration, the
abolition movement, the Radical Republicans during Reconstruction, the
abolition movement, and Negro protest in the twentieth century." The
liberalism Kneebone writes about has limitations which time brings to
the fore. His is a provocative study of a particular style of
"southern" liberalism which came of age in the 1920s and 1930s and was
moribund by the end of World_War_II-a victim of its own inner
contradictions, underscored the emerging black protest movement.
          Southern Liberal Journalists and the Issue of Race,
1920-1944 is organized around the lives and careers of five
men: Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980) of the Baltimore Evening
Sun, George Fort Milton (1894-1955) of the Chattanooga
News, Virginius Dabney (1901-) of the Richmond
Times-Dispatch, Ralph McGill (1899-1969) of the Atlanta
Constitution, and Hodding Carter (1907-1972) of the
Greenville (MS) Delta Democrat-Times. Hardly two
generations removed from the period of the Civil_War and
Reconstruction, the past was very much present in the minds of these
journalists. They maintained that the slavery system bore the seeds of
its own demise, and, therefore, the Civil_War was an unnecessary
war. The journalists focused their attention on Reconstruction as the
event which traumatized the process of change in the South, and caused
the political and social unrest that disrupted the region through the
turn of the century. The Progressive era brought back a semblance of
order through the enactment of segregation and disenfranchisement law
in the South. A delicate balance had been restored, and the subjects
of Kneebone's study dedicated themselves to maintaining social harmony
while nurturing the progress promised by increasing urbanization and
industrializtion.
          These men came of age professionally during the post World War I
period. Southern journalists of the 1920s won national acclaim as the
voices of reason and tolerance in a region that seemed woefully
lacking in both. They applied a critical eye to the southern social
scene and challenged the excesses of fundamentalism, the Klan,
lynching and prohibition. By the end of the decade, Kneebone explains,
an identifiable southern journalism existed. The journalists had
assumed their "class" responsibility as social reformers with a
twofold mission: to educate the southern white masses, and to explain
the South to northerners in order to discourage "outside" interference
in southern affairs. They further refined their position during the
Agrarian debate of 

the early 1930s when they held forth as proponents
of progress through "regulated industrialization."
          Race relations remained largely on the periphery of the
journalists' concerns during the 1920s. In 1930 the number of
lynchings, which had been on the decline during the previous decade,
increased dramatically. The Commission on Interracial Cooperation
(CIC) responded with an investigation which reinforced the belief that
these evils were uniquely lower class in origin. The key to
establishing and maintaining good race_relations, then, was to modify
and cultivate the behavior of the white southern masses. The
Scottsboro case also failed to raise any serious questions about the
base injustice of legalized white_supremacy. While striving to curb
its excesses, the journalists worked to insure that the segregation
system worked. They were confident that urbanization would contribute
to better race_relations, and adopted Robert Parks' model of vertical
segregation as their goal in realizing a more equitable society. Black
folk remained an invisible people whose patience, endurance and
submission were taken for granted as white reformers promoted gradual
change within the limits of Jim Crow.
          Events during the 1930s tested the position that the journalists
had secured for themselves. They enthusiastically endorsed Franklin
D. Roosevelt during his first term as the embodiment of Rational
Leadership, a true statesman who stood above partisan squabbles. His
aggressive legisla. tive program met the crisis of the depression and
implemented programs to provide for the larger social good. By 1937,
however, their view of the President had begun to sour. Roosevelt's
second term victory was based on a coalition of labor, black and urban
voters, suggesting a class appeal which countered the journalists'
ideal of social harmony. The President's court-packing plan and his
attempt to purge conservatives from the Democratic_Party in the South
completed the disillusionment. Outside interference in regional
affairs could never be justified, even if it intended to mobilize
political support for New_Deal programs the journalists favored. By
1938 their opposition to FDR and the New_Deal paralleled that of the
South's most conservative representatives in Congress.
          The Depression and the New_Deal had released forces for change in
the South which challenged the moderating influence of Kneebone's
subjects. Just as they retreated from Roosevelt, another group of
Southerners rallied to demonstrate their support of the President in
founding the Southern Conference for Human Welfare (SCHW). As Arthur
Raper, a founding member of SCHW, explained to me a few years ago, the
events of the 1930s had shaken the foundation of southern society. "A
lot of folks were up on their feet and talking and expecting things
that they had never expected before .... Here was ... a very basic
ferment, and people needed to respond to it in some way." The SCHW
went beyond the CIC (which addressed itself to the "better" elements
of the community as agents of gradual change), and made a mass,
interracial appeal. Organized by southern New_Dealers and labor
activists, the SCHW hoped to build a broad-based constituency for
progressive political action in the South. The organization
concentrated on eliminating voter restrictions which kept the great
majority of southerners from the ballot box, and later joined the CIO
and NAACP in promoting voter_registration and education drives
throughout the South. The SCHW acted on the assumption that an
expanded electorate, which included working class and black_voters,
was essential to liberalizing the South. This approach contradicted
the basic premises shared by the southern journalists. They believed
in cooperative endeavors led by the elite class, and they strongly
opposed any type of racial or class activism. These men lacked a basic
faith in the "democratic" process, and did not promote enfranchisement
of the masses as part of their reform program. They eschewed politics
in favor of Howard Odum's ideal of social planning by "nonpartisan"
leaders as the means for advancing the general welfare.
          By the end of the 1930s, the journalists were on the
defensive. Events overseas, however, seemed to provide a reprieve from
pressing social concerns. "Dr. Win the War" had replaced "Dr. New
Deal" and the journalists enthusiastically endorsed the war against
fascism. World War 11 caused them to abandon the anti-war doctrines
which had served as the intellectual foundation of the southern
liberal program for gradual reform. Their support for the war undercut
an earlier notion that the Civil_War had demonstrated the futility of
war for principle. Hitler had changed 

all of that. There were moral
issue worth fighting for. Gerald W. Johnson acknowledged that "the
principle of freedom is a unit to the extent that when any man's
freedom is attacked every man's freedom is threatened." George Fort
Milton proclaimed, "the world cannot endure half slave and half free."
The war became their cause-and their undoing. For when black Americans
internalized wartime rhetoric, and publicly endorsed the
indivisibility of freedom and democracy, the journalists were forced
to confront the color line. When they did, they qualified those very
principles which justified the war against Hitler. By the end of the
war, the journalists had become apologists for the segregation system
and relinquished whatever leadership role they might have played in
the emerging civil_rights movement.
          Kneebone demonstrates quite convincingly that the black protest of
the World_War_II period caught his subjects totally off
guard. Clearly, there had been very little communication of
consequence between most whites and blacks in the South prior to the
war. As Kneebone points out, his journalists along with the rest of
the CIC leadership had very limited relations with a very limited
number of black leaders, and always with the assumption that "white
southern liberals would determine the agenda and set the pace for
racial reform." Charles S. Johnson and others were consulted for their
endorsement and cooperation, not for their critical judgment or
unqualified participation. The journalists had effectively insulated
themselves from the ferment within the black_community. This ferment
took on sustained momentum and direction during the 1930s when Charles
H. Houston and a team of black lawyers around the South began
coordinating the legal attack on the segregation system which would
culminate with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of
1954. Building on the protest surrounding the Scottsboro case, Houston
used the courtroom as a classroom to further educate, politicize and
organize local blacks. These preliminary efforts helped to revive and
expand NAACP membership in the South, which boomed during the war
years. The fact that Charles Houston is not mention in Kneebone's
study further suggests the extent to which Kneebone's subjects ignored
the dynamics for change emerging within the black_community.
          John Kneebone has written a compelling study of the evolution of a
predominant strand of southern liberal thought between the wars, and
its ultimate demise. However, it is important to note that as
Kneebone's subjects were turning inward, southern liberalism was
blossoming through the lives and careers of a number of their
contemporaries. Hugo Black, Claude Pepper, Clifford and Virginia Durr,
Clark Foreman, Aubrey Williams, Lucy Randolph Mason, C.B. Baldwin,
Frank Graham, Palmer Weber, Arthur Raper, Josephine Wilkins and others
were also rooted in the southern past. But they looked beyond the
Civil_War Reconstruction period to the Jeffersonian ideals of the late
eighteenth century. These individuals concentrated on givng the
democratic process full play in the South, and in the nation. Their
concerns complemented the efforts of Charles Houston, Ella Baker,
E.D. Nixon, Charles Gomillion, and a host of black leaders throughout
the South who were motivated by the promise of the
Constitution. Virginia Durr's Outside the Magic Circle,
and Robert J. Norell's Reaping the Whirlwind are
important companion pieces to Kneebone's Southern Liberal
Journalists. Together they help demonstrate the broad range of
"liberalism" that should be suggested by the adjective "southern."
They also direct our attention to the New_Deal-World War 11 period as
an exciting and important era in the history of the South--and of the
Civil Rights Movement-and one which historians have just begun to
explore.
          
            Patricia Sullivan is Associate Director of the Center for
the Study of Civil Rights and lecturer in history at the University of
Virginia.
          
        
