Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South

3. The Politics of Decency

chapter three The Politics of Decency Later, [Graham] confided to a friend that he felt like a fellow in the s who put on a blue coat and some grey trousers—and got shot at by both sides. —Journalist Tom McMahan, 1960 You are America’s greatest ambassador and I pray for a continuation of your great strength in the good that you are doing. —Senator John Stennis (D-Miss.) to Graham, 1955 By the close of 1957, Graham had positioned himself in the middle ground between the segregationist right and the integrationist left—that is, somewhere between his nominal pastor, W. A. Criswell, and another Baptist and southerner, Martin Luther King, Jr. This middle ground held more than religious implications. In the context of Little Rock and Clinton, Graham’s calls for good citizenship and racial tolerance, which he cast as fruits of the conversion moment, dovetailed with the moderate rallying cry of law and order. On other occasions, his politics of decency played out more explicitly in the realm of governmental power. In engaging the South, Graham functioned not only in his self-described role as an evangelist but also as a type of politician. He was subject to the tendency of elected political leaders to vacillate between grandstanding and caution amid attempts to balance seemingly contradictory constituencies. The Politics of Decency 65 Even though his stature in both the South and the nation gave him great leeway to express his views, he typically strove to avoid offending all but the most intransigent defenders of Jim Crow. At the same time, his activities in the South were intimately—at times, inextricably—connected with his service as a supporter of, and adviser to, President Dwight Eisenhower. Their relationship sheds critical light on the origins of the evangelist’s seemingly obvious, yet persistently elusive, leanings toward the Republican Party. The enduring bond Graham formed with another rising star on the postwar scene, Richard Nixon, reinforced that tendency. Graham attempted to appear above partisanship even though he routinely made comments that buttressed the policy agenda and political ambitions of Eisenhower and later Nixon. His ability to link his international ministry with Cold War themes suggested his partial success in this area. Graham’s behavior during the latter half of the Eisenhower years shaped the remainder of his engagement with the civil rights movement, as well as the broader political trajectory of the South. His chosen leadership role suggests the complexities of the public and political Graham (which coexisted with the pastoral one). As an evangelist, Graham could stand removed from the fray of both the civil rights era’s politics of rage and its politics of protest. Instead, he endorsed and advocated a politics of decency, which invoked evangelical faith, combined with law and order, toward moderate ends. The politics of decency straddled and selectively engaged the polarized racial discourse of the period. Here, as with so many areas of Graham’s career, the spheres of religion and politics blended almost beyond distinction. The Parameters of Justice Graham’s initial public criticisms of desegregation raised expectations about his potential as a regional leader. President Eisenhower was not the only one asking the evangelist to play a more active role in the South. In 1956, an Oregon editorial board urged Graham to return from his travels abroad and ‘‘try and convert the Negro baiting Alabama legislators.’’1 Additional pleas for Graham to speak more forcefully about racial issues or to intervene more actively in the South came from white intellectuals, such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and leading southern liberal James McBride Dabbs, as well as African American clergymen and newspaper editorialists. The evangelist, wrote one black newspaper in 1955, ‘‘may lose a few of his friends in his own 66 chapter three dear Southland because of his stand on segregation but he won’t lose his soul.’’ Two years later, a group of black ministers from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area asked Graham to come ‘‘back to our state to tear down . . . every vestige of segregation and discrimination born of our prejudices ’’—a request he did not take up.2 In correspondence that same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., similarly urged the evangelist to ‘‘see your way clear to conduct an evangelistic crusade in one of the hard-core states in the deep south, even if it is not on as large a scale as most of your...