The Cold War on Whites, Part 2

However phony, the conflicts and tensions of the Cold War were very real — for the “war” was turned into a titanic ideological battle between Communism and liberalism over which system would shape the coming postwar order.

In this struggle, racial equality and civil rights inevitably became an integral facet of the larger ideological struggle.

This was due to the fact that “the world [was] no longer white.”

Once Europe had been reduced to rubble, its prestige in, as well as its hold on its overseas empire was everywhere weakened. The nonwhites of these former European governed lands became, as such, a “constituency” to be won by rival liberal or Communist cold warriors.

In 1947, India, the world’s second largest “nation,” achieved independence, soon followed Indonesia. By the end of Truman’s administration (March 1953), most of Asia and the Middle East had freed itself of European domination. Africa would follow in the late 1950s and early ’60s.

In this new era, to maintain America’s leadership of the non-Communist “free world,” Americans could no longer ignore (or control) the world’s nonwhite majority.

The Cold War, as a consequence, would be fought largely for the hearts and minds of the former colonial world (what a French journalist in 1955 called the “Third World”).

Truman, like most of the early cold warriors, was not exactly a racial egalitarian. As a Missourian, whose heritage was more Southern than Midwestern, he was not without racial “prejudice,” though in the course of his Senate career, he came to support anti-lynching legislation and the abolition of poll taxes. It was Cold War imperatives, however, that made him into a forthright proponent of “civil rights.”

Most of Truman’s top advisers, including the “Wise Men” who helped him create the Cold War state, came from the old WASP elite and tended to be racial conservatives (contemptuous not only of Negroes, but of Jews). Though at times sympathetic to Southern concerns and with no particular affection for “the poor Negro” of liberal imagination, they too would be forced to embrace the cause of civil rights — linked, as it was, to the Cold War.

In this anti-Communist war it waged, the United States was now obliged to demonstrate that historic white racism was not part of its international anti-Communist coalition.

Anti-racism, as a result, became almost as important to US international interests as anti-Communism.

This was especially the case since the Soviets were adept at making hay out of American racial practices. In 1946, for example, when Truman’s Secretary of State, James Byrnes, denounced Communists for denying certain East Europeans voting rights, they retorted that Negroes in Byrnes’ home state of South Carolina, as well as throughout the rest of the American South, were similarly and less justifiably denied voting rights.

This would not be the only time that Byrnes was made to look like a fool.

Then, as the machinery of the Cold War was put in place, the Soviets’ anti-US rhetoric increasingly made American racial practice the centerpiece of their propaganda, which put the US on the defensive.

This would again be the case, when later, as US bombing runs over North Korea and then North Vietnam killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, the Soviets linked “the American way of waging war” to the “oppression of colored people in the US,” (which, of course, ignored the fact that Anglo-American bombers had earlier killed 900,000 German civilians, as well as many tens of thousands of French, Belgium, Dutch, Italian, and other European civilians — often doing so intentionally, striving to kill the largest possible number of innocents).

Given US claims to the mantle of the “Free World’s” leadership and the nonwhite world’s new definition of itself in terms hostile to the white man’s former attitude to it, the American color bar would henceforth be subject to unprecedented international scrutiny. Every headline reporting a lynching or another Southern effort to shore up Jim Crow took, as a consequence, a toll on America’s international standing.

One US ambassador described the country’s race problem as its “Achilles’ heel,” another called it “the greatest propaganda gift that could be given to the Kremlin,” and a third asked: “How can we persuade these Africans and Asians . . . that we believe in human dignity when we deny our own citizens the right to this basic dignity on the basis of skin color?”

In this struggle between the “Communist East” and the “liberal West,” Truman’s cold warriors had now to keep the nonwhite “South” allied with the white “North.”

US foreign relations, it followed, would no longer be insulated from the nation’s race relations.

Numerous propaganda agencies were specifically created to counter Soviet propaganda and to tell a “story” not of racial equality (which evidently didn’t exist), but of on-going racial progress. The United States Information Agency (USIF) — with its vast array of radio stations, printed materials, and foreign-based “America Houses” — endeavored, thus, to put a different spin on US race relations.

Propaganda, however, was not enough.

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All the major US Cold War initiatives of the late 1940s — the Truman Doctrine (1947), the Marshall Plan (1948), NATO (1949), NSC 68 (1950) — emerged against mounting demands for racial equality, in the US and abroad.

Truman, accordingly, would be the first president to make civil rights a concern of his administration.

In 1946, he formed a President’s Committee on Civil Rights, staffed with liberals, which reported that a major reform in race relations was needed to fight the Cold War, that on-going discrimination was undermining US diplomacy, and that the US had to take account of what “the world thinks of us and our record.”

He also urged Congress to enact civil rights laws to establish a permanent committee on civil rights, to outlaw lynching, and to protect the right to vote.

Because Southerners stymied him in Congress, he turned to executive orders to promote reforms and, at the same time, involved his Justice Department in various desegregation litigations.

His most important civil rights’ “accomplishment” was, unquestionably, his executive order of June 1948 to desegregate the army and the civil service.

It wasn’t until the Korea War, however, when manpower shortages compelled commanders to actively implement it, that the army actually began to desegregate and not until 1955 that the process was completed. It was nevertheless the most consequential step toward racial equality yet taken.

As a politician sensitive to the negative electoral implications of civil rights, he, of course, didn’t want to alienate the Southern base of the Democratic Party. But here he failed. Rather naively, he thought the introduction of a pro-civil rights plank in the Democratic Party program wouldn’t upset the party’s Southern wing (given that party programs are usually forgotten the moment the votes are counted). He was wrong: The Dixiecrats bolted and formed a States’ Rights Party (the first step toward the South’s eventual abandonment of the Democratic Party).

But once he was free of the Dixiecrats, he could openly court the black northern vote. During the campaign, he was not particularly outspoken on civil rights, knowing that northern whites weren’t much different than Southerners in this respect.

But he did become the first president to address a national convention of the NAACP and the first to campaign in Harlem, where he said: “Democracy’s answer to the challenges of [Communist] totalitarianism is its promise of equal rights and equal opportunities for all mankind” (not mentioning, of course, that such rights and opportunities were meaningful only among peoples of similar natural endowment).

In November 1948, in winning the vast majority of the black vote, he captured the White House with the narrowest of margins.

Given Congress’ on-going resistance to civil rights reform, Truman increasingly looked to the courts, especially the Supreme Court, which had already ruled against segregated interstate transportation (1946) and showed a willingness to play a role in the Cold War of ideas.

In 1948 Truman’s Justice Department filed amicus curiae briefs in the Shelley v. Kraemer case that struck down housing covenants. In 1949 it intervened in Henderson v. United States to prohibit segregation in railroad transportation. In the same year it participated in cases challenging school desegregation — McLaurin v. Oklahoma and Sweatt v. Painter. Finally, in December 1952, it intervened in the Brown v. Board of Education case (resolved in 1954).

In each of these cases, Truman’s State Department stressed their national security implications, an argument for which the court had already shown sympathy.

By the time the little cold warrior left office, Jim Crow’s days were numbered: The military had been desegregated, the Democratic Party had gone on record for racial equality, and judicial interventions had begun to lower the legal barriers to discrimination.