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3. The Battle Broadens at the end of 1946, President Harry S. Truman established a civil rights commission in an e≠ort to renew the then expired FEPC and, as he explained, “to get the facts and to publicize as widely as possible the need for legislation ” aimed at ameliorating the plight of black Americans. After investigating the problem, the commission released its findings under the title To Secure These Rights. The document analyzed all facets of America’s racial situation, just as it made specific suggestions on how to better race relations. Legislative initiatives, including a permanent commission on civil rights, an antilynching law, the repeal of the poll tax, and a renewed FEPC, figured prominently in the report. Requesting action in 1948, Truman sent a civil rights message to Congress that read, in part, “We shall not . . . finally achieve the ideals for which this nation was founded so long as any American su≠ers discrimination .” For white southerners, the president’s proposals underscored the central premise of strategic delay—that civil rights pressure would not cease until the Jim Crow system fell. During the previous decade, southern senators had defeated antilynching, anti-poll-tax, and FEPC bills, yet advocates of the legislation had not given up hope that these measures would one day pass. Now the president of the United States placed the full weight of the executive branch behind the civil rights cause, increasing the likelihood that Congress would enact at least some of the desired bills. More than a little political opportunism guided Truman’s actions. With an election looming and public support for his administration waning, Truman needed to solidify the New Deal coalition forged by Franklin Roosevelt that included organized labor, farm workers, and especially African Americans if he hoped to win. By pushing civil rights in 1948 he was following the blueprint of a plan aimed 98 delaying the dream at procuring victory. In November 1947, presidential counsel Clark Cli≠ord drew up a forty-three-page memorandum in which he urged the president to make “new and real e≠orts” to appeal to northern blacks lest they “go Republican .” Truman followed the advice to the letter, a fact that ensured that civil rights opponents would face their most di∞cult challenge yet.1 Southern senators responded to the threat on 6 March 1948 by holding a meeting in the o∞ce of Harry Byrd attended by all senators from the eleven states of the former Confederacy except Claude Pepper. During the caucus, they organized to fight the proposals and selected Richard Russell to oversee their strategy, making o∞cial the leadership role that he had held for several years. When confronted with Truman’s civil rights package, the southern leader noted that many of the proposals had appeared before, only this time the political landscape had changed. The pressure for civil rights, he claimed, had “become more acute with the infiltration of a dangerous radical element into the Democratic Party which is willing to sacrifice the integrity of our institutions for supposed political advantage.” Russell, along with other southerners , recognized a liberal shift in the ideological orientation of the national party. More than any other issue, civil rights created a schism in the party’s ranks that would culminate in a political realignment decades later. Based on the prevailing southern assumption that the American people remained fundamentally misinformed about the nature of the civil rights crusade, the caucus planned to make frequent appearances on nationwide radio broadcasts to alert those beyond the Mason-Dixon line of the threat posed by the Truman program. Russell proved pivotal in the decision to mount a countero≠ensive over the air waves as he had long claimed that the national media grossly distorted white treatment of southern blacks. The public relations o≠ensive served as an adjunct to the legislative wing of the southern fight.2 1. Donald R. McCoy and Richard T. Ruetten, Quest and Response: Minority Rights and the Truman Administration (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1973), 103; David McCollough, Truman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), 586–589; Harry S. Truman, Memoirs of Harry S. Truman: Years of Trial and Hope (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 180 (“was set up . . .”); New York Times, 23 February 1948, 22 (“we shall not . . .”); all Clark Cli≠ord quotations from Clark Cli≠ord, Counsel to the President: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 191–192. 2. For background on the caucus, see Fite, Richard...

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