Delicate Aspect

Because Mrs. Sarah Oliver Hulswit, head of an anti-New Deal crusade called the Women's Rebellion, asked (unsuccessfully) Attorney General David T. Wilentz* of New Jersey to enforce against WPA workers an old New Jersey statute (ten other States have similar laws) denying to paupers the right to vote, President Roosevelt last week grew highly sarcastic in press conference. The "ladies' proposal," he snorted, was about as democratic as it would be to limit voters to male holders of B.A. degrees. While he was on the subject he went on also to denounce poll taxes as a relic of the Revolutionary era. (He recently endorsed a movement to repeal the poll tax in Arkansas.)

Knowing well that the poll tax is the chief device whereby Southern Democrats prevent Negroes from voting, the wariest politician in the U.S. quickly added that in condemning the poll tax he was not talking about Negroes. They, he said, were a problem to be handled separately. At this remark, political ears pricked. It was the first time Mr. Roosevelt had publicly mentioned one of the most delicate aspects of his new Liberal party. Virginia's Senator Carter Glass declared that Franklin Roosevelt had exhibited "an absolutely superficial knowledge of the matter."

To many Southern Democrats, it was strong medicine when in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt wooed the Northern Black Belt as no Democrat had done in mortal memory. When he gave Negroes prominent seats at his inauguration, put them in bigger jobs than they ever held in a Democratic administration, Southern Democrats tried hard to swallow it as political expediency. Such demagogues as Georgia's Eugene Talmadge gagged for public edification when, during the 1936 campaign, Mrs. Roosevelt was photographed between two young Negro officers of the R.O.T.C. at Washington's Howard University. But in this year's primary fight, Demagogue Talmadge's fire has been directed at Roosevelt's wooing Negro votes far below the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, for the first time in years, South Carolina's Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith, who walked out of the 1936 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia when a Negro pastor was called on to pray, last month managed to put some life into his traditional campaign plank: White Supremacy.

Other notable points in the present relations of Southern Negroes and the New Deal:

P: In South Carolina no one can vote in general elections without a poll tax receipt, but any white man can enter a primary by putting his name down in a book (often kept in a grocery store). This year some 20,000 Negroes were allowed to put their names down, a piece of official colorblindness far more advantageous to New Dealer Johnston than to unreconstructed "Cotton Ed" Smith.

P: In Oklahoma, where there is no poll tax, 60,000 of the State's 225,000-odd Negroes registered this year, an all-time high. Of these, 45,000 signed up as Democrats. When Franklin Roosevelt appeared in Oklahoma City in behalf of his friend Senator Elmer Thomas, Negroes were allotted 300 seats in the grandstand. Mr. Thomas' Negro campaign managers claimed their man got 90% of the Negro vote.

P: In Texas, where Democrats have a U. S. Supreme Court decision empowering them to close their primaries to Negroes on the ground that the Democratic Party has the status of a private club in regulating its membership, the news that 1,500 Negroes had nevertheless voted in Fort Worth in last month's primary provoked a bitter intraparty squabble.

P: In Kentucky, where Negroes used to be traded by Republican bosses but stayed out of the Democratic primary, Senator ''Dear Alben" Barkley and Governor "Happy" Chandler bid for the Negro vote this year. Dear Alben more successfully. Happy called old Negroes "Uncle" but Dear Alben had a stranglehold on the WPA rolls (see p. 13).

P: Although Maryland's Democrats have thrice tried to disfranchise Negroes by law, the majority of the 30% who vote went Democratic in 1936, shepherded by their late boss, black Saloonkeeper Tom Smith, who was a great & good political friend of Democratic Senator Millard Tydings. As Democrats they were freely invited to enter this week's primary to smear Senator Tydings. Because the Senator still had an inner track with Boss Smith's heirs, he was one purgee who did not protest.

P: Instead of the old style Negro lobbyist content to work behind the scenes, U.S. Negroes now have a Washington representative as bold, adroit and effective as any of the white breed. He is Secretary Walter Francis White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Last January the blacks' Mr. White sat in the Senate visitors' gallery, where Southern members indignantly pointed at him during debate on the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill. Lobbyist White claimed to have bagged enough votes to get the bill passed, but a hastily organized Southern filibuster kept it from a vote. Having enjoyed Franklin Roosevelt's benevolent neutrality last time, Lobbyist White hopes for better than that if he can get the anti-lynching bill revived next session.

Few Southern Democratic chieftains are above voting Negroes when the fighting gets hot, as white-crested Ed Crump has voted them for years in Memphis. Moreover, the poll tax means less to Southern Negroes since their economic status is being raised by Relief and farm subsidy funds. When their economic and social position is further bulwarked by the Wage-Hour law and C.I.O.'s bicolor unionization, the days of lily-white politics in the South may be numbered.

A sensational view of Negro voters' future was lately expressed by the Baltimore Sun's bitterly anti-Rooseveltian Pundit Frank R. Kent, who wrote:

"If the Roosevelt control is tightened by the elections, first, there will be an open Administration drive to put through the anti-lynching bill. This will be followed by legislation, now being carefully thought out, to put an end to the disfranchisement of the Negroes in the South. . . . That is the dream. . . . If they win, they are going after those five million voting fish in that untouched Southern reservoir with a legislative net guaranteed to catch them all. . . ."

* Prosecutor of Kidnapper-Murderer Bruno Richard Hauptmann in 1935.

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