NC: Southern Democrats Betrayed by Party Managers

Frustrated at the drift of FDR into state-socialism and use of communist-dominated labor unions to buy votes for his fourth term, Southerner Congressmen like Josiah Bailey of North Carolina threatened a new party grounded in constitutional principles – the States Rights Democratic party.   

Bernhard Thuersam

Southern Democrats Betrayed by Party Managers:

“What’s wrong, Senator [Josiah] Bailey [of North Carolina] demanded, with being a “Southern” Senator or a “Southern” Democrat?  [He] pointed out that the Southern States had cast their electoral votes for the Democratic candidate for President, election after election, often when they stood absolutely alone and when there was nobody else in the electoral college to vote for him.  But, he warned, there can be an end of that sort of thing!

“There can be an end of insults,” he said, “there can be an end of toleration, there can be an end of patience. We can form a Southern Democratic Party and vote as we please in the electoral college, and we will hold the balance of power in this country. We can throw the election into the House of Representatives and cast the votes of sixteen States.

We have been patient. We were tried. But, by the eternal gods, there are men in the South, and women too, who will not permit men in control of our party to betray or to insult us in the house of our fathers. We will assert ourselves – and we are capable of asserting ourselves – and we will vindicate ourselves, and if we cannot have a party in which we are respected, if we must be in a party in which we are scorned as “Southern” Democrats, we will find a party which honors us, not because we are Southerners, and not because of politics, but because we love our country and believe in the Constitution from which it draws its life, day by day, as you, sir, draw your breath from the atmosphere round about you.”

To be sure, national managers of the Democratic party were mildly disturbed by the Bailey speech, but not for long.  It may have been a coincidence, of course, but it is a fact that early in January, 1944, about a month after the Bailey speech was delivered, Governor Broughton of Bailey’s own State of North Carolina told the country in a radio broadcast that while there was “great political turmoil” in the Southern States, all of them would be found in the Democratic column as usual in the Presidential election of 1944.  But the “insults” of which Senator Bailey complained didn’t end and the “betrayals” continued.

On July 7 [1943], the executive board of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, a new labor body popularly known as the CIO….decreed that every Senator and Representative who had voted for the Smith-Connally bill should be defeated for re-election. And to undertake this job it created the CIO Political Action Committee [CIO-PAC]. 

 At that time the labor leader who was closer to President Roosevelt than any other was Russian-born Sidney Hillman. Hillman had held various federal offices under the New Deal….His relations with Roosevelt were direct and intimate.  This is of significance, because Sidney Hillman was chosen to be the Chairman of the CIO Political Action Committee.  The object of the CIO-PAC at the outset was frankly that of electing a Congress that would follow the labor-union “line” and also elect President Roosevelt to a fourth term. 

“We have in this country,” said Senator Bailey, “a well-organized, well-financed movement of the left-wing of American labor to capture the Democratic party by infiltration. They propose to nominate the President for a fourth term. And they are noisy about it. They propose to defeat any Senator or member of the House who does not bow to their policy of coercing the working men of America.” 

(The South’s Political Plight, Peter Molyneaux, Calhoun Clubs of the South, 1948, pp. 4-17)