James J. Kilpatrick: Salesman for Segregation

TWO: Jim Cronyism

41 t w o Jim Cronyism By Christmas 1955, James Kilpatrick was one of the loudest voices of intransigence toward civil rights reform and a budding star in the segregationist South and the conservative intellectual movement. In a series of columns, beginning in late November 1955 and ending in early February 1956, the News Leader editor revived the states’ rights philosophy of James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and John C. Calhoun from the annals of American history and resurrected the wizened doctrine of interposition to halt the effects of the Brown decision handed down on 17 May 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Justice Earl Warren. To Kilpatrick, Brown was an egregious example of judicial activism that breached the Constitution’s separation of powers by allowing the Court rather than Congress to make a law. States affected by the ruling could, accordingly, protest the Court’s decree and base their resistance on a defense of the constitutional order. Kilpatrick asserted that a state could “interpose” its authority between the people and the central state if the federal government stripped an individual state of its power. The appeal of state sovereignty had not diminished among many southern conservatives, even if the glory of the Old South had been eclipsed. For James Kilpatrick, Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse almost ninety years earlier had not altered the relationship between the respective states and the federal government; the war only eliminated secession as an option. Reinstating interposition as a redoubt against the spread of federal power also satisfied Kilpatrick’s desire to hinder twentiethcentury liberalism and to prevent changes in the southern racial order. His dream of returning to late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century federalism—aninsistenceontheseparationbetweenthefederalgovernment and the authority of the states—went beyond a rejection of racial equality and the liberal state, however. Kilpatrick began to present the Southland as more than a bridge to an earlier era but a stronghold of conservatism and interposition as a tool to unify the white South and find allies within the broader conservative movement. 42 | Jim Cronyism Through the language of individual freedom and protection of the local community, Kilpatrick voiced white southern disgust with integration. Instead of racial demagoguery, he offered southern conservatives a political ideology with a genealogy back to the founders of the republic. While some defenders of Jim Crow made racial spats the centerpiece of their opposition to Brown and the civil rights movement, Kilpatrick concentrated on the role of government and the separation of powers. As a means of halting Brown and civil rights reform, interposition knew limitations. The federal courts denounced it, many white southerners refused to rally to it, and the will of African Americans to end state-sanctioned segregation overwhelmed it. Interposition also tried to deny African Americans their civil rights, and it reflected Kilpatrick’s devotion to segregated public schools and a racial caste system. Though he believed that Negroes were his social and intellectual inferiors, he also understood conservatism as a defense against the central state. In a contribution to twentieth-century American conservatism , Kilpatrick mixed opposition to racial progress with rhetoric about the excesses of the federal government. He restructured traditional southern views for more mainstream consumption. By focusing on states’ rights and federalism, Kilpatrick provided segregationists with an impassioned first response against court-ordered desegregation that refrained from racial arguments. Interposition sent a message that the white South would not accept the demands of the Court, and many civil rights reformers learned the hard way. Rather than allow desegregation, a few southern state governments closed their public schools, and many waged a cold war with civil rights activists by establishing private academies and resisting court-sanctioned integration into the 1970s. Contesting the Court For a few months in the spring and summer of 1954, the shock of the Brown decision numbed subversion of and compliance with the new desegregation ruling and created an uneasy standoff between the South and the federal government. Ineffective federal supervision of the edict by the executive and judicial branches also eased tensions. The Court provided weak leadership and waited a year before implementing its verdict. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who appointed Warren, remained pessimistic about Brown and reluctant to enforce it. Congress split on the school issue with only a minority of congressmen committed to African American civil rights.1 Jim Cronyism | 43 The South found itself almost alone with...