Earlier today, thumbing through some old photocopies taken from archives at the University of Georgia, I came across a bunch of letters addressed to Senator Richard Russell, leading light in the conservative coalition that after 1937 effectively halted the New Deal in its tracks. The letters are from the late 1940s and mostly pertain to the battle over the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC).
Brief background: the FEPC had been created in 1941, and during the war – largely thanks to the efforts of A. Philip Randolph and other black activist leaders – had become quite a beefy enterprise. It challenged discriminatory employment practices against African Americans on military bases and required all industries that supplied the government not to discriminate against blacks. Since the war industries were (a) one of the largest sections of the economy; and (b) major potential employers for African Americans who had moved north in the interwar period and tended to be the first fired during the depression, the FEPC amounts to one of most significant challenges to segregation prior to the civil rights era.
Needless to say, Southern white supremacists hated it. When, after the war, Truman tried to extend the life of the commission (it was originally set up by FDR on the basis of wartime executive orders and Truman wanted it to be perpetuated through congressional legislation), Richard Russell and others successfully filibustered the effort. Instead of inaugurating the civil rights era, the late 1940s saw the beginning of the Age of McCarthy.
Anyway, these letters. The first – virtually incoherent, breathless and anonymous – was written entirely in capital letters and had no logical basis to its punctuation; a stream of consciousness piece that Ginsberg would have envied. As far as I can tell, it balances its invective between two groups: Jews – or, as the writer put it, “Nazi-Americanized Bologna gobbling Heinies” – and Democrats, or rather “shiteheel, rawmeal Democrats.” Ha ha. You see what he's done there. With the underlining. Ha.
The second was produced by a wonderfully named man, Harry C. Dwiggins. Dwiggins, in the circle of radical rightists, had the eminent distinction of not only being able to construct a sentence but also owning a typewriter. In his careful, close-set, and no doubt furiously constructed text, he declared the FEPC was a “unconstitutional, unamerican, Communistic, socialistic, Civil Rights Program … first in part, introduced into Soviet Russia by One Joe Stalin of World Wide Communistic Fame, in the form of the damnable (F.E.P.C.) during the year of 1920.” One Joe Stalin of World Wide Communistic Fame! His capitals. Fantastic!
To chuckles (to himself), a third correspondent declared the FEPC should be renamed the “Negro Priority Preferential Employment Committee,” since it was obviously designed to the detriment of the Southern system of white supremacy.
My conclusion from this can only be optimistic. None of today's claims being aired at the town halls have anything approaching the inventiveness of this kind of mid-century abuse. Clearly over time the radical right has lost its sense of lyricism.
Think Of the Children
49 minutes ago
