Chapter Five

North Carolina, Congress, and the New Deal

Nothing better illustrates both the extent and the limitations of Tar Heel enthusiasm for the New Deal than the behavior of the state's senators and congressmen in the 1930s. They supported, and in some cases led the fight for, many New Deal measures that extended the scope of federal government responsibility for the economy and individual welfare far beyond anything they had ever dreamed of. The support the congressmen gave reflected their acute awareness of their constituents' desperate plight during the depression-a plight that apparently could only be remedied by jobs and money from Washington. As time went on, however, it became clear that this enthusiasm for the New Deal was precisely circumscribed. Reluctant to disavow the president himself, North Carolina congressmen nevertheless were unwilling to support the full-fledged aspirations of those New Deal liberals who wanted to extend New Deal benefits permanently to the economically disadvantaged in American society. I The political styles of the austere and punctilious Senator Josiah William Bailey and of the casual and clubbable Senator Robert Rice Reynolds could not have been more different. Yet their records in the 1930s both testify to their keen perception of the strength of their North Carolina constituents' devotion to Roosevelt and the New Deal and their unwillingness to flaunt openly their conservatism until they were safely reelected. Josiah Bailey was very conscious of his own importance. Two journalists, Alan A. Michie and Frank Rhylick, noted that he was "superethical, superconstitutionaI, and supercilious," and Jonathan Daniels claimed, "he struts even when he sits down." The massive self-righteousness was allied to a thoroughgoing conservatism that sprang from his simple approval of "the accepted doctrine for 150 years . . . that fundamental economic laws are natural laws, having the same source as physical laws." Government interference in the economy and business had, Bailey thought, prolonged and intensified the depression. Not only was such intervention unsound on economic grounds, it was also unconstitutional and immoral. H e reacted therefore with apocalyptic horror to much of what the New Deal was trying to do. The consequence, for example, of the government building a furniture factory in West Virginia would be "an absolute subversion of free government . . . ; that socialistic conception which I abhor and which I am sworn in the only oath 1 took here as a Senator to abhor and to hate."
Senator Josiah W. Bailey thoroughly detested government interference with the economy, but until his reelection in 1936 he could not openly oppose the president's programs. O n c e reelected, Bailey helped fashion the conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats that stridently resisted the further extension of New Deal policies.

A 1935 amendment to farm legislation, he averred, "strikes down the soul of the American Republic, compromising us in our own eyes and presenting us defenseless before the bar of moral law." Bailey's prescription for the depression was simple: government above all should balance the budget and avoid the deficit spending that not only hindered recovery but had evil moral consequences for the American people. Not surprisingly, Bailey had one of the most conservative Democratic voting records under the Hoover administration and the seventh most conservative voting record in the Senate, 1933-1939. H e voted against federal relief spending and the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Yet despite his distaste for almost everything the New Deal stood for, between the end of the "hundred days" and the elections of 1936 he voted against only one major piece of New Deal legislation, the Wagner Act, and he voted against that before it became a piece of "must" legislation endorsed by the president. In some cases he confined himself to amendments that would have virtually nullified proposed legislation before finally voting for the bill itself. His most violent denunciations of the trends of government were reserved for legislation that had not acquired "must" status, like the Tugwell Food and Drugs bill or the Guffey Coal Act. For the most part he kept his thoughts to his private correspondence. When C. L. Shuping, his campaign manager, publicly denounced the New Deal, Bailey quickly disowned him, although simultaneously keeping up a sympathetic

[771

correspondence that indicated his full agreement. H e regularly issued statements full of personal praise of the president, wrote fawning letters to Roosevelt assuring him of the New Deal's success and of his personal support, and, in the words of Jonathan Daniels, made a "regular sugarmouth" speech seconding the president's renomination at the Philadelphia convention in 1936. He even managed for a time to maintain the appearance of friendly relations with the Daniels family, despite the fact that there was no love lost between them. Both Josephus Daniels and Jonathan Daniels were convinced that Bailey was masking his real feelings in order to secure reelection. They rightly predicted that once reelected he would become one of the most conservative members of the Senate. Bailey for his part had no doubt that "had the News and Observer been published in Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion, it would have applauded the crucifixion of Jesus since it was the popular thing to do." Bailey made much of his independence of popular opinion and his willingness to stand by his principles, irrespective of their unpopularity. This "hard way" that he chose was similar, he thought, to that followed by Moses, Christopher Columbus, Robert E. Lee, and Jesus Christ. H e often explained that he could not vote for an apparently popular piece of legislation because of the oath of office with which he had sworn to uphold the Constitution. To support the Bankhead Act for compulsory crop control of cotton would, for example, be "to take from the American people powers which I solemnly swore I would never take from them when I swore to support the Constitution." But for all this much-vaunted independence, there were few senators who were more finely attuned than Bailey to their constituents' wishes or more prepared to adapt their public stance accordingly. What made Bailey conceal his hostility to the New Deal was in part the knowledge that he had campaigned in 1930 against Senator F. M. Simmons on the ground of party loyalty, excoriating Simmons for having deserted presidential nominee A] Smith in 1928. Bailey could therefore ill afford to turn against Roosevelt too quickly. Above all, Bailey knew only too well that the New Deal was overwhelmingly supported by his depression-ridden constituents, particularly the farmers of eastern North Carolina who had been rescued from bankruptcy. Bailey had to support the New Deal or run the risk of being repudiated at the polls in favor of an out-and-out New Dealer in 1936. Agriculture perfectly illustrated Bailey's willingness and ability to disguise successfully his political feelings in order to satisfy his constituents, especially the tobacco growers. Bailey disapproved of the domestic allotment plan, voted against the Agricultural Adjustment Act, took no part in the marketing crisis of September, 1933, thoroughly objected to compulsory crop control, and voted against the Bankhead Act for cotton. Yet

Bailey knew that the tobacco program had brought economic salvation to the tobacco growers and that there had been much criticism of his votes in 1933 and his failure to participate in the efforts to resolve the 1933 crisis. Therefore, he actively helped secure passage of the Kerr-Smith Act providing compulsory control for tobacco, although it involved exactly the same principles he had so scornfully denounced in the Bankhead Act. In 1935 he privately condemned the AAA amendments in letters to North Carolina cotton manufacturers and tried to emasculate the legislation by further amendment, but he eventually voted for the original amendments and portrayed himself as a supporter of whatever the farmers wanted. In 1936 after the Supreme Court had invalidated the first AAA, he enthusiastically endorsed its replacement, the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act, even though the act embodied the domestic allotment plan that he had so criticized in 1933. The success of Bailey's endeavors were shown in 1936. H e ran for reelection as a loyal New Dealer. His campaign literature stressed the large number of New Deal measures he had supported. A note from James A. Farley, F.D.R.'s campaign manager, which he had sent routinely to all Democratic congressmen and senators, became a personal endorsement in Bailey's hands. The senator gave credence to a totally misleading account of the 1933 tobacco crisis, obtained from a friendly official in the AAA's Tobacco Section, that praised his valiant efforts on behalf of the tobacco growers. In addition, Bailey received strictly illegal help from the state WPA. His secretary and close ~oliticalallies openly solicited campaign contributions in WPA offices, received promises that reliefers would be rounded up to support the senator, and were supplied from all through the organization with lists of key administrative and supervisory personnel. Bailey did not win simply because of his ability to hide his opposition to the New Deal. His election in 1936 showed how difficult it was to find alternative candidates who were indentifiably pro-New Deal and yet also strong local candidates. In 1933 and 1934 it looked as if Governor Ehringhaus might capitalize on his popularity among the tobacco growers after his leadership in the marketing crisis and challenge Bailey. But ill health and damaging struggles with the General Assembly of 1935 laid his candidacy to rest. Congressman Lindsay Warren seriously considered running in 1935 by also appealing to rural support of the New Deal and the farmers' suspicions of Bailey, but he did not have sufficient financial independence. It is by no means clear that either of these candidates, both close associates of Max Gardner, would have been substantially more committed to the New Deal in the long run than Bailey. A more clear-cut challenge would have been presented by the congressional delegation's most vociferous New Deal supporter, Frank Hancock, but Hancock had already

Congressmen Lindsay Warren (lejt) and Frank Hancock (right) wanted to run against Senator Bailey in the 1936 Democratic primary. Neither had sufficient financial support to mount a challenge, though both had far greater sympathy for the New Deal than did Bailey.

been deserted in his Fifth Congressional District by the Winston-Salem financial interests, and he was scared off finally by the emergence of an opposition candidate for his congressional seat. Josephus Daniels would have dearly loved to challenge the senator whom he correctly predicted would be as reactionary as Virginians Carter Glass or Harry Byrd, but Daniels was old; he would have had to give up his much-loved post as ambassador to Mexico; his family opposed the venture; and his candidacy was guaranteed to provoke well-financed and intense factional opposition. It was left, therefore, to Richard T. Fountain, the antimachine candidate for governor in 1932, to take up the New Deal banner. He charged that Bailey had "opposed all New Deal legislation in the original form because he had no time to look after the interests of the farmers but plenty of time to devote to the interests of the power trust." No matter how vigorously he took Bailey to task for his lack of support for the New Deal, Fountain was a pale shadow of the man who ran in 1932. His political contacts had largely lapsed; he was in ill health, and his campaign had neither funding nor publicity. He nevertheless almost forced Bailey to a runoff. Within days of being safely reelected in the general election of November, 1936, Bailey privately announced that he would join other conservatives to block any attempt to expand the New Deal. Not up for reelection until 1942, he could now safely ignore pressure from pro-Roosevelt constituents. He was a bitter critic of Supreme Court reform and served as a

member of the bipartisan steering committee that coordinated the opposition to the president's court-packing scheme. He was the most persistent Senate voice for a vote to condemn sit-down strikes, and he launched insistent denunciations of federal relief administrator Harry Hopkins and continued spending on relief. Such spending, he argued, not only made a balanced budget impossible, but was also based on a "studied effort to magnify the problem of unemployment." It discriminated against North Carolina in favor of richer northern states and was outrageously used by Hopkins and his allies to influence elections. The recession of 1937 gave Bailey renewed hope. It encouraged him to draft with other like-minded conservatives a Conservative Manifesto, which served as an ideological underpinning to the informal coalition of conservative Republicans and southern Democrats that essentially halted expansion of the New Deal in Congress. A balanced budget, the repeal of irksome taxes, the ending of government competition with business, and the maintenance of states' rights would, the manifesto argued, bring the return of the business confidence necessary to stimulate recovery. Bailey played a full part in the anti-New Deal coalition, voting against government reorganization, minimum wage-maximum hours legislation, public housing, and further spending measures and in support of any antilabor proposals. He despaired that the Democratic party was being taken over by Socialists and, even worse, Negroes, with the result that the way lay clear to "the lowest depths of degradation" and a "labor government based on National Socialism." Only one thing tempered his opposition to the New Deal: the desire for compulsory crop control on the part of his tobacco-growing constituents. Such control contradicted Bailey's dearest principles, and he had no hesitation in voting against general agricultural legislation such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which included compulsion, but even he would not vote against special legislation designed to ensure continued compulsory control specifically for the tobacco growers. Senator Reynolds's conservatism took longer to emerge than Senator Bailey's. Nevertheless, conservatives in North Carolina who had been alarmed by Reynolds's startling campaign in 1932 need not have worried. Reynolds proved to be no Tar Heel Huey Long, the flamboyant radical from Louisiana. He did, however, in his first term give consistent if lightweight support to the New Deal, even if his active and distinctive senatorial life-style sometimes concealed it. Reynolds took the opportunity as a senator to travel widely to Europe, the Philippines, and India. On one visit to Mexico he was robbed by bandits; on another trip to investigate political conditions in the Virgin Islands doubts were cast on his sobriety. He achieved some fame by kissing movie actress Jean Harlow on the Capitol

Tlrccf~ J&
I

What We Thought They Mnvrt to Say AU Aleng. I C

By F.D.R.'ssecond term opposition to massive federal spending and the demand for a balanced budget began to coalesce. Within North Carolina's congressional delegation increasing reluctance to support domestic spending emerged, especially after the recession of 1937-1938 when the New Deal was forced to pumpeven more money into the economy. From the Greensboro D a i l y News, December 15, 1938.

steps, although Harlow was unimpressed: "It was just like a Hollywood kiss. A fake. You know we never actually kiss out there." H e endorsed Lucky Strike cigarettes, which, he claimed in the advertisements, allowed him to enjoy two of the great traditions of southern life, tobacco and oratory. He extolled the virtues of Asheville wherever possible and was voted the most popular senator by the Senate page boys. I n his votes Reynolds worked on the principle, "When the people of North Carolina are for something 75 percent, boy I'm for it 1000 percent." On the whole he therefore voted routinely in favor of New Deal measures until 1938. While Bailey opposed Supreme Court reform, Reynolds supported it enthusiasticaIly: 90 percent of the people in the state, he told the president, were solidly behind it. He backed wage-hour legislation, and in 1938 he campaigned for reelection as a staunchly liberal New Dealer. "Every vote," he declared, "1 have cast on the floor of the Senate has been a vote in the interest of the wage-earner, the farmer, the veterans, the aged, the youth, the advancement of education and the protection of business and industry." Ironically, Reynolds received a challenge in 1938 from another fervent New Dealer, Frank Hancock. Hancock's campaign was doomed from the start. Traditionally, Reynolds's seat was held by a westerner. Hancock's home in Oxford, Granville County, would have been ideal for the race against the easterner Bailey in 1936, but it was scarcely a sufficiently western base for 1938. Hancock could get no financial backing, since he had long ago fallen out with the conservative bankers of Winston-Salem, and he could get no help from Max Gardner, who told him he had no issue on which to challenge Reynolds. That roved Hancock's greatest difficulty. In 1936 he could have attacked Bailey's less-than-total devotion to the New Deal; but he could hardly make that an effective charge against Reynolds, who ~ o r t r a ~ e himself d as a 100-percent New Dealer. All Hancock could do was to cast doubts on the incumbent's sincerity and attack his playboy image. He denounced Reynolds's "frivolous and worthless missions" visiting "the nightclubs of Baghdad and studying the divorce laws of Russia" and criticized him for employing a Virginian as his secretary and for introducing liquor and racetrack legislation for the District of Columbia. Hancock made no headway and won only thirteen out of the state's 100 counties. Hancock was right in his skepticism about Reynolds's devotion to the New Deal cause. No sooner was Reynolds reelected than he joined Bailey as a member of the conservative coalition opposing Roosevelt. Hitherto, Reynolds's isolationism had not stopped him from supporting the New Deal domestic programs. Once reelected, he devoted more and more time to combating immigrants, communists, and the "Alien in our Midst," and

Thd'n S w t h i n o W a Ha rdlv Like lo Rurh Into.

Senator Robert R. Reynolds, a rockribbed isolationist, flirted dangerously with a number of right-wing organizations that not only objected to America's rearmament in the late 1930s but proposed a ban on all immigration. The senator's critics accused him of having pro-Nazi sympathies. From the Greensboro Dally News, November 29, 1938.

he formed the notorious "Vindicators Association of America," which planned to halt all immigration, keep America out of war, and purge the country of all foreignisms except Americanism. At the same time he rapidly started opposing relief spending and labor measures. His desertion of the New Deal was hastened not only by his questionable links with rightwing, American fascist groups, but also by the fact that his former opponent Hancock was given a job on the Federal Home Loan Board in the face of the senator's opposition. Thus, safe reelection, growing bitterness with the administration's foreign policy, and a major patronage rebuff combined to free Reynolds from any vestige of loyalty to the New Deal. I1 The fact that both Bailey and Reynolds had waited until they were safely reelected before daring to come out in open defiance of the New Deal testified to the strength of their belief that their constituents supported the New Deal. The behavior of the state's congressional delegation bears even greater witness to that popularity, but the caution of the delegation after 1937 perhaps provides, even more than the outright opposition of the senators, a guide to the precise limits of that popularity. North Carolina congressmen consistently and enthusiastically supported the New Deal up to 1937, as did most southern delegations. Whatever the views of a particular congressman on the wisdom of specific

measures, crisscrossing pressures compelled him to back the administration. On the one hand there were the ties of personal and party loyalty to the resident, which the lure of patronage enhanced. On the other there were the economic crisis and urgent relief needs of constituents. At no time had congressional mailbags been so full of pleas for help and jobs; at no time had a government been so keen to. implement plans to provide that aid and employment. These pressures from above in Washington and from below in their districts worked powerfully on the North Carolina representatives. Veteran fourth district Congressman Edward W. Pou, for example, chaired the House Rules Committee until his death in 1934 and sponsored the gag rules that sped so much of early New Deal legislation on its way. There is no evidence of what Pou thought about the substance or detail of the legislation that he was so instrumental in forwarding. What we do know is that in the economic emergency of the depression he thought that any action, however dictatorial, was better than nothing and he was willing to give far-reaching authority to a president whom he cast in the heroic mold of his party hero, Woodrow Wilson. He compared Roosevelt to a great surgeon who is given complete control of a blood transfusion: "I think the safest thing we can do in such an hour is trust and follow the President. " Similar pressures could be seen at work on Robert L. Doughton, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, which reported out such key measures as the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Social Security Act. Doughton's long congressional career had been spent out of the limelight until he had led the rebellion against the proposed sales tax during the Hoover administration. He relished his newfound prominence, but he still paid assiduous attention to the postmasterships and local patronage that had guaranteed him reelection from his ninth district for so long. He frankly did not understand much of the legislation that his committee approved. Increasingly deaf, he left many details of tax and financial legislation to younger committee members. What he did understand of the New Deal he did not necessarily agree with. H e never agreed with the Wagner Act, although he voted for it, and in economic matters he was probably in sympathy with those North Carolina industrialists who wrote him at such length now that he chaired such a crucial~committee. Nevertheless, he was a loyal supporter of the New Deal. His committee chairmanship, which gave him some political leverage with the Roosevelt administration, tended in fact to buttress, rather than diminish, his loyalty to the New Deal. He had a considerable personal regard for F.D.R. and an undoubted susceptibility to presidential flattery. Although he was occasionally piqued by Roosevelt's habit of acting without consultation, he

could always be soothed by a personal chat with the president. After one such occasion when he had intended to put the president right on tobacco taxation, he came away from the White House purring that " the President is obviously the finest man to work [with] I ever saw and I am not worried about any matters as long as he has the final decision." In 1935 Roosevelt played a part in persuading Doughton to stay in the House rather than run for governor, and he convinced him not to retire in 1936, 1938, and again in 1940. Roosevelt clearly had the knack of appealing to Doughton's vanity. The ties of party loyalty, patronage, and the needs of the economic emergency bound ail the North Carolina congressmen. What linked the younger congressmen above all to the New Deal was their certainty that the New Deal was popular with their constituents. Congressmen like John Ken, Lindsay Warren, Graham Barden, J. Bayard Clark, Harold Cooley, Frank Hancock, and William Umstead, who were from tobacco-growing districts, never doubted that the farmers supported the New Deal. Representatives A. L. Bulwinkle, J. Walter Lambeth, and Zeb Weaver in the West recognized increasing business hostility to Roosevelt, but they remained convinced that the bulk of the farming and laboring population firmly backed the New Deal. The loyalty of Tar Heel congressmen, however, came under great strain in 1937 with Roosevelt's plan to reform the Supreme Court to make it more amenable to liberal legislation. When the plan was announced, only Frank Hancock immediately declared his willingness to support the appointment of extra judges, and he became one of the leaders in the fight to build up public opinion behind the proposal. Bulwinkle at once declared his opposition. Eventually, Cooley, Kerr, and Weaver joined Hancock in backing the president. Cooley and Kerr, in particular, had tested the waters in their constituencies and found that they could safely support Roosevelt. Tobacco growers, whose program had been knocked down by the Supreme Court, often linked reform of the Court to the return of the compulsory crop control they so badly wanted. The rest of the North Carolina delegation remained silent. Their dilemmas were summed up by Bob Doughton and Lindsay Warren. At the age of seventyfour Doughton had little sympathy with the idea that judges four years younger than he were unfit for service, but he did not want to oppose the adm,inistration openly for fear of losing his position of influence and control of patronage. Similarly, Lindsay Warren, who had been offered the comptroller generalship of the United States in 1936 and was on close terms with House leaders like Speaker William Bankhead and Sam Rayburn, was reluctant to make public his decided opposition to the plan. Along with Speaker Bankhead, who confided his own distaste for the pro-

North Carolina's congressjonal delegation (ca. 1937) included (seated) Senator Josiah W. Bailey, Congressman Robert L. Doughton, and Senator Robert R. Reynolds and (left to right) Congressmen William B. Umstead, Graham A. Barden, Harold D. Cooley, John H. Kerr, J . Walter Lambeth, J. Bayard Clark, Lindsay Warren, Frank Hancock, Alfred Lee Bulwinkle, and Zebulon Weaver.

posal to him, Warren worked behind the scenes for some sort of compromise. Relations between the North Carolina delegation and the New Deal were never the same again. Some of the representatives moved into fairly regular and open opposition. J. Bayard Clark became a key member of the bipartisan coalition that stymied reform legislation in the House Rules Committee. Bulwinkle, responding to the textile and furniture manufacturers in his tenth district, consistently voted against spending and tax legislation. Umstead and Lambeth both announced early in 1938 their decision not to stand for reelection. Neither had been in the House very long, and it was believed that their retirements reflected growing dissatisfaction with New Deal trends. Barden led the fight to emasculate the wage-hour legislation and the Wagner Act, starting on the path that would establish him in the 1950s as one of the most conservative and antiunion members of the House.

The other representatives remained more enthusiastic supporters of the administration. Doughton and Warren continued to be key figures in the government's congressional strategy. Indeed, Warren helped lead the legislative fight for executive reorganization; he was rewarded in 1940 by the renewed offer-this time accepted-of the post of comptroller general. Hancock, Kerr, Cooley, and Weaver maintained a strong rhetorical commitment to New Deal goals and generally voted with the administration. But even these supporters were now more cautious. Hancock in 1937 led a strong attack on the Wagner bill for federally sponsored lowcost housing. Doughton voted to cut the relief appropriation in 1937. During congressional hearings on proposed tenancy legislation, which led to the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act of 1937, Cooley revealed the suspicions about rural poverty proposals that later made him a relentless critic of the Farm Security Administration. Kerr voted against the Fair Labor Standards Act, and Warren led the opposition to the domestic spending program of 1939. Despite a growing wariness about the increasingly liberal trend of the New Deal, the delegation never divided along pro- and anti-New Deal lines. If North Carolina did not produce liberals as enthusiastic for the extension of the New Deal as Texans Maury Maverick and Lyndon Johnson, neither did it produce conservatives as violent in their hatred of the New Deal as Gene Cox of Georgia and Howard Smith of Virginia. Tar Heel congressmen-did, however, worry about the direction the nonemergency New Deal was taking. Alarmingly, in their view, the New Deal appeared to be urban oriented, sympathetic toward organized labor and northern cities, and injurious to traditional relationships in southern agriculture and industry. The controversy over federal regulation of wages and hours brought all those fears together. In July, 1937, Doughton took advantage of his position as Democratic chairman of committees to appoint Graham Barden to a vacancy on the House Labor Committee. The Labor Committee had hitherto held little attraction for North Carolinians, but it now had under consideration matters of grave concern to the state. Most of the North Carolina delegation believed that minimum wage-maximum hours legislation would penalize low-wage southern industries. They therefore supported Barden's sustained efforts to defeat or at least to delay passage of such a bill. After the Fair Labor Standards Act passed, they supported his efforts in 1939 and 1940 to exempt from its provisions workers connected with the handling of food products. What Barden and his colleagues saw as a simple attempt to clarify the original intent of the legislation, the Roosevelt administration saw as a dangerous drive to undermine the act by exempting from its provisions two million of the lowest paid workers who most needed it. The

dispute symbolized the gap between what the North Carolinians and what the administration thought the New Deal was all about. Again in 1940 the delegation backed Barden's efforts to control the National Labor Relations Board, which he believed was exceeding its statutory authority in administering the Wagner Act and was biased in favor of the CIO. That the North Carolina congressmen in ,this circumspect enthusiasm for the New Deal were accurately reflecting the views of their constituents is suggested by the ease with which they secured reelection in the 1930s. Congressional elections were rarely close, and where they were keenly contested they rarely reflected national issues. The primaries for the seats vacated by Hancock, Lambeth, and Umstead in 1938 produced bitterly fought races, but no identifiable issues divided the plethora of candidates. Only in two districts-the fourth and the third-were there serious efforts to portray the issues in terms of the New Deal, but these issues merely masked long-standing personal or factional differences. In 1934 Harold Cooley campaigned for the fourth district seat, which became vacant on Edward Pou's death, by calling for a "New Man for a New Day," and he consciously tried to exploit pro-New Deal sentiment against Pou's son, George Ross Pou. But the primary contest really reflected a long family rivalry that dated back to the time when Cooley's father had tried to unseat Edward Pou. That family tension would still be there in 1966 when Cooley was finally defeated. In 1934 the New Deal was not an issue in the third district race. The incumbent Charles L. Abernethy had been ill for some time and was in no position to fulfill his duties in Congress, but he was hanging on because he was chronically in debt and desperately needed the salary. Ambitious young politicians, representatives of other parts of the district, and one perennial enemy made up the five candidates who opposed him. The story of the third district for the rest of the 1930s centered on the struggle of Abemethy's son, Charles, Jr., to recapture his father's seat from the 1934 victor, Graham Barden, and to try to pay off the continuing family debts and keep the telephone connected. To that end he would use any issue he thought would bring him success. In 1936 he ran as a supporter of the Townsend old age plan (a proposal to give everyone over sixty a monthly pension of $200) and by Barden's own admission scared the congressman by coming within 3,000 votes. But this was the peak of young ~ b e r n e t h y ' s success. In 1938 and 1940 he attempted to run as a New Dealer exploiting Barden's opposition to the wage-hour legislation. At one point in 1940 the New Republic, a leading liberal voice, ~ o r t r a ~ Abernethy ed as a genuine progressive who was poised to give the reactionary Barden the fight of his life. In fact, Abernethy was sliding to final defeat. A few days before the election he was arrested in possession of a large number of stolen ballot

papers, and in the end he only just secured more votes than one Dr. Zeno Spence, who was standing for the Townsend Plan, fair freight rates for the South, and the teachings of Jesus Christ. I11 What the North Carolina congressmen represented in many ways was the limitations of agrarian liberalism. The delegation never lapsed into the violent anti-Roosevelt rhetoric that characterized so many congressional conservatives. There were no bitter denunciations of Roosevelt as an aspiring dictator destroying American liberty, as Senators Bailey and Reynolds charged. Few of the delegation, for example, were troubled by the president's proposals for executive reorganization, which provoked such strident opposition elsewhere. They had little difficulty in accepting a third term for Roosevelt. Their rhetoric was continually studded with expressions of loyalty to the party, Roosevelt, and the New Deal heritage. But while the North Carolina congressmen accepted a powerful and permanent role for the federal government in agriculture in order to raise farm prices, they only tolerated similar help for other disadvantaged groups in American society in the emergency of the early 1930s. Representing the businessmen of the Piedmont and the farmer in his role as a businessman, the North Carolina representatives had no desire to see continued spending and regulation become a permanent extension of the New Deal to the benefit of the urban, or even the rural, poor.

Chapter Six

The Progressive Paradox

I The New Deal made ahdifference to North Carolina. It rescued the state from economic collapse. For farmers it brought better prices, more credit, and cheaper electricity. In tobacco, crop control and government aid transformed the prices the growers received and guaranteed them future prosperity. In cotton the New Deal enabled farmers to stay on the land until World War I1 when prices rose and economic opportunities outside agriculture presented themselves. In industry the New Deal stopped the slide toward liquidation. It staved off a banking collapse and checked the deflationary spiral in textiles, thereby allowing the millowners, like the cotton farmers, to survive to capitalize on wartime prosperity. In a time of mass unemployment the New Deal replaced a welfare system that simply could not cope with the demands of the depression. The New Deal gave emergency help to thousands of North Carolinians through direct relief payments and work projects and then launched a welfare system that, for all its inadequacies, provided for the first time the prospect of security for the unemployed, the old, and the needy. The uplifting effect of these changes could not be denied. The tobacco farmer enthusiastically stepping out to market in October, 1933, the tenant farmer with a government purchase loan, the young boy off to a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, the college student doing clerical work for the National Youth Administration, the Works Progress Administration laborer constructing a new government building-all these people entertained no doubts that the New Deal had wrought important changes in the fabric of day-to-day North Carolina life. And yet the New Deal left the basic economic, social, and ~olitical structure of the state largely untouched. The traditional patterns of authority in the workplace and on the farm were scarcely altered. The structure of agriculture changed little: tobacco and cotton still reigned supreme, and the position of tenants and small farmers in relation to the local merchant-banker-landlord rural elite was not significantly improved. In industry employer authority was as unchecked by unionized workers at life the end of the decade as it had been at the start. In the state's ~olitical the decisions were still taken by men who would not seriously impinge on the prerogatives of the business/industrial elite of the Piedmont. LOW wages, low per capita income, low levels of educational spending, low rates of unionization, a paucity of public services, and a rudimentary welfare system still characterized North Carolina in 1940 as it had in 1930.