Rabble Rousers: The American Far Right in the Civil Rights Era

Introduction

1 In 1936, the United States became a fascist dictatorship. Popular discontent with the failure of the New Deal to alleviate the impact of the Great Depression led the Democrats to dump Franklin D. Roosevelt and to nominate as their presidential candidate midwestern Senator Berzelius Windrip. The November election saw Windrip comfortably defeat his Republican opponent Walt Trowbridge. Once installed in the White House, President Windrip proclaimed that it was “Zero Hour,” the time to launch a new direction in the history of the nation. Windrip used the pretext of the economic crisis to impose martial law on the country. He suspended Congress, stripped the Supreme Court of its power to overrule federal legislation, and deployed his private militia to arrest, incarcerate, and execute political dissidents.The new regime also restricted the rights of minorities, curtailing the autonomy of women, African Americans , and Jews. This is not, of course, a factual account of American history. The rise to power of a totalitarian regime forms the opening narrative of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here. Although a work of fiction, the book’s dystopian setting articulated a deep-rooted concern at the upsurge of political extremism occasioned by the unprecedented economic emergency that beset the nation. Historians estimate that there were as many as 120 fascist organizations in the United States during the 1930s. Among the many political demagogues who rose to political prominence were Fritz Kuhn of the German-American Bund, Introduction 2 Introduction Gerald Winrod of the Defenders of the Christian Faith, William Dudley Pelley of the Silver Legion, and the influential Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. These insurgents shared not only the conviction that a cabal of communist Jews had conspired to destroy the American government from within, but also that a violent revolution might be the only means to save the United States from this insidious enemy. Despite the proliferation of paramilitary organizations in the 1930s, they proved only a passing threat to the democratic process. None possessed a leader with the charisma to unite the disparate forces of the American far right. Nor could they withstand the wartime arrest and incarceration of their members for sedition.Public exposure of the horrors of the Holocaust further undermined popular support for the racial supremacist doctrines of right-wing extremists. The far right never recovered the influence that it had commanded during the Depression. This, however, did not forestall the efforts of a new generation of activists to lead its resurgence. These radicals had their own opportunity to make political capital out of a national crisis during the black freedom struggle that followed World War II. Gunnar Myrdal, author of the seminal study An American Dilemma, observed that there was a small but dedicated band of racial fanatics who “hoped to build a full-scale fascist movement out of the Southern resistance to desegregation.” Despite the recent resurgence of interest in massive resistance, the organized white southern opposition to the Supreme Court’s May 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing school segregation, the racial militants whose aggravation of racial violence provoked Myrdal’s warning have all but disappeared from the historical record. After the barren years that immediately followed World War II, the far right found newly fertile political ground in the southern states during the desegregation crisis. This book assesses the causes,characteristics,and consequences of far-right activism in the South from the 1950s to the 1970s. It uses a series of case studies of the white militants who assumed most public prominence and had the most direct political impact on the civil rights struggle, situating them within the broader context of massive resistance to racial reform.The study therefore attempts not only to analyze how the far right responded to the black freedom movement, but how this affected the broader political dynamics of white southern opposition. Part One focuses on two agitators who mobilized some of the earliest grassroots insurgencies against school desegregation. Bryant Bowles of the Introduction 3 National Association for the Advancement of White People (naawp) led opposition to school desegregation in Milford, Delaware. Although personal troubles led to Bowles rapidly disappearing from the political scene, the success of his campaign provided a blueprint for other racial militants. John Kasper, leader of the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council, precipitated a series of disorders in Virginia, Tennessee, and Florida. The strong similarities...