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8 Cheap Labor, the FEPC, and Frank Dixon as Knight-Errant of the South We will not stand for . . . social equality. “White supremacy” is the motto of our party in Alabama. —Gessner T. mcCorvey For Alabama’s privileged planter-industrialist clique, Frank Dixon’s resonance with the people was a bonanza. Alabama politics had long been riven by tensions between those who had little and those with plenty. in the domestic storms of the new Deal and World War ii, though, wealth and privilege glimpsed a way for class healing to occur, a soothing of economic differences that would allow the masses of plain people to align themselves behind the bourbon program—even if they did not fully comprehend the details or implications. The melding of economic conservatism and white supremacy into one allied and sacrosanct strain could, if handled properly, indemnify the conservative cause and compel widespread acceptance of the privileged program—acceptance that cut sharply across previously important class lines. And if the national Democratic Party came along, so be it. if not, there were other options. Throw Down Your Shovels and Sit on Your Asses The bourbons had found their long-awaited hero in Frank Dixon. in the War manpower board (Wmb) controversy Dixon emerged as a champion of white supremacy and a national figure, hubert baughn rejoiced. leading conservative and coal magnate henry Debardeleben saw in Dixon an emerging sectional champion of white supremacy and the preservation of states’ rights. The logical conclusion was that the Democratic Party that had sponsored the FePC must be either reformed or abandoned. According to Debardeleben, practically everyone in his social circle, all “‘old fashioned’” southern Democrats and states’ rights enthusiasts, felt the same way.1 i. W. “ike” Rouzer, president of the Alabama mining institute, agreed. Cheap Labor, the FEPC, and Frank Dixon / 185 Rouzer, a devout apostle of unsanctioned economic fundamentalism, thought of himself as a leading friend of the black race. he often argued that white supremacy was in the best interest of blacks—a redux of the self-serving selfdeception in such evidence at the 1901 Alabama constitutional convention. This step-by-step national Democratic retreat on white supremacy as a part of the new Deal could have but one result, Rouzer pontificated: “disaster.”2 Joe starnes, former-new Dealer from the hill country and vice-chair of the house Un-American Activities Committee, greeted the exhortations of his new bourbon handlers by echoing the call for the preservation of a conservative Democratic Party based on the cornerstones of states’ rights, white supremacy, and opposition to the new Deal. he further lamented the obvious declension of the old party into a sordid collection of undesirables. The Guntersville congressman heartily commended Dixon for his defense against the unwarranted imposition of federal power and the erosion of states’ rights and individual rights under the new Deal war effort. The “‘planned economy’ group” was to blame, starnes mused in revealing the close interplay of class hierarchy, anti-semitism, and white supremacy. in other words, it was the “negro group; the Jewish group; the Cio; and every pink and radical group” in this country that was the cause of such bothersome programs such as the Wmb. The solution, though, was national, not merely regional: a coalescence of conservatives from across the country predicated on the bedrock of the south. “This is a white man’s country,” starnes proclaimed, and for him the time had long been at hand when those who believed in our system of government and “our way of life and . . . racial integrity as well as states’ rights and individual liberty” should organize throughout the country to resist the tide of an increasingly liberal national Democratic Party.3 During the summer of 1942 the ruckus over Frank Dixon and his stand against the Wmb was but the individual expression of the more generally felt FePC threat of the time. For Alabama’s business interests, the FePC marked a low point in federal-state relations—something that far exceeded the threats of the nRA, the Wagner Act, and even the Wmb. in their view the FePC was clear encroachment on holy ground: the unfettered right of managers and owners to run their business affairs as they saw fit—including (perhaps especially) the racial aspects of hiring, firing, promoting, and paying . Further, the FePC embodied an even more obnoxious threat to southerners of wealth and privilege. in the most fundamental of ways it called into question what had never really...

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