The Other Presidential Race Part II

Our Heroes

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt

Eleanor’s husband Franklin Delano had been elected in 1932 after cobbling together a grand coalition of northern city political machines, labor unions and workers, ethnic minorities and southern whites.  While FDR had to keep this fractious bloc together, Eleanor felt no such compunction.  And she could do what she wanted, since she had Franklin’s gonads in a pickle jar on her dresser after catching him philandering one too many times.*  So Eleanor, touring the country and visiting poor folk, discovered just how vicious and pernicious southern racism was, and took up the cause of civil rights.  It was Eleanor who in 1939 pitched a righteous fit when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to open up Constitution Hall for a concert by the great African American contralto Marion Anderson.  Eleanor promptly and publicly resigned as a member in good standing of the DAR and got Franklin to make the Lincoln Memorial available so that Anderson could stand on its steps and sing to an audience 75,000 Americans, not to mention the millions who turned in to the live radio broadcast.  It was a moment.  In fact it was a moment in the civil rights struggle not to be equaled until MLK stood on those same steps and sang his own songs some 25 later.

Marion Anderson and Eleanor's letter of resignation from the DAR

The Marion Anderson concert was merely the most public example of Eleanor’s many, mostly behind-the-scenes, acts to further the cause of racial justice in America. 

Chicago Defender headline (top) heralding 
Truman's desegregation of the US military (bottom)

Harry S. Truman‡

Next comes Harry. Hapless machine-hack senator from the former slave state of Missouri, after-thought of a Vice President, and accidental President after FDR died suddenly during his abbreviated fourth and last term in office.  HST took over the presidency in April of 1945, on the eve of the final Gotterdammerung of Nazi Germany, while the war against the Japanese was still raging, apparently without end, and with horrendous casualties on both side before he made the lonely decision to use the new atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year.  He was widely derided at the time as an empty suit, usually by people who later had to eat crow and admit that Harry was wilier and deeper than he seemed.  I include Truman primarily for one act – one Presidential fiat – that forever enshrines him as a courageous champion of American freedom and justice.  In July of 1948, in the midst of his campaign for reelection, HST issued executive order 9981 which, with the stroke of a pen, desegregated the US Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines.  Years later he explained his reasons: "My forebears were Confederates ... but my very stomach turned over when I had heard that Negro soldiers, just back from overseas, were being dumped out of army trucks in Mississippi and beaten."  If any institution represents America – and all Americans – it is the US Army and its sister branches.  Though Truman took several other important steps to promote equality, this one act of decency and justice would have tectonic repercussions.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Finally, Lyndon.  Lyndon Johnson of the meteoric, rocky, rough-and-tumble rise in politics.  LBJ, the poor boy from the Texas Hill Country who idolized FDR and who climbed over dozens of senior colleagues to be King of the Senate and a leading candidate for President in 1960 – only to humbly accept the number two spot from a rich, entitled upstart of a brat from Massachusetts named John Fitzgerald Kennedy.  This was not something Johnson wanted or cherished.  In fact, he privately echoed the famous quote of a friend, in assessing the job of Vice President:  “Not worth a bucket of warm spit.”  Still, he gamely did what the despised and feared Kennedys (JFK and his brother RFK)§ told him to do, which was primarily going to funerals and visiting god-forsaken corners of the world where no other politician would be caught dead in.  He thought his career was over.  Then came November 22, 1963, and a place called Dealey Plaza in Dallas in his own home state of Texas.  It was there that he became another accidental President when his boss and sometime nemesis was brought down by an assassin’s bullet two cars ahead of him.  It was not the way LBJ wanted to become President, but nevertheless he was sworn in on Air Force One within a couple of hours and was saddled with the Kennedy legacy of mostly unfulfilled initiatives, including civil rights.  Johnson, a southern Democrat, made the civil rights cause his cause, expanding on JFK’s legislative program and presideding over the most fruitful period of civil rights legislation since the Civil War.  Lyndon Baines Johnson cajoled, bullied and defied his former Senate and House colleagues, including those from the south, to vote for or at least stay out of the way of a raft of legislation, including: the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which he muscled past a 54-day Democratic filibuster); the 1964 24^th Amendment to the Constitution banning the poll tax; the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  In a 1965 address to a joint session of Congress, this profane, deal-making, arm-twisting master of the legislative process, this son of the South in his Texas drawl echoed the words of the civil rights anthem:  “We shall overcome.”  In private, however, he predicted that "We have lost the South for a generation."  He was right.  Today, some two generations later, it is hard for any Democrat to get elected south of the Mason Dixon Line.

Georgia Senator Richard Russel getting the 'Johnson Treatment' during the civil rights battles

The Republican Party lost no time in stepping in to fill the vacuum, and they’ve been the party of Racism ever since.

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* I am, of course, speaking figuratively.  She didn’t really have his actual gonads in an actual pickle jar on her actual dresser.  She did, however, tell his mom, and threatened divorce.  Mother-in-law was, apparently, something of a battle ax and threatened to disinherit Franklin if he didn’t make nice to Eleanor.  So Eleanor had some leeway in that marriage.

‡ The initial S stands for…’S’.

§ What ever happened to initialed Presidents, anyway?  JFK, LBJ, RFK (almost), RMN and all those guys.  Okay, we did have ‘W’, but that lonely initial hardly counts…