Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States
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Cold War Anticommunism and the Defence of White Supremacy in the Southern United States. Richard Seymour. Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, in the Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science. !1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgment is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. !2 Acknowledgments This research was supported by funding from the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics. I am grateful for the advice of friends, colleagues and comrades, above all China Miéville, Rosie Warren, Katy Fox-Hodess, and Jen Schradie. Many people provided help with reading lists. Trish Kahle’s was particularly helpful. I also appreciate Katherine Rye Jewell’s considerate replies to my queries. Robert McRuer and Elise Thorburn both provided practical help and accommodation while I conducted archival research, which made everything so much easier. I owe them both a huge debt. Particular thanks go to my supervisors, Paul Gilroy and Chetan Bhatt, both of whom were patient and generous with their time and support. !3 Contents List of figures. — 5. Introduction: “Are these your children?” — 6. CHAPTER ONE: Literature Review: “Even its children know that the South is in trouble.” — 16. CHAPTER TWO: Methodology: Up to my neck in it. —74. CHAPTER THREE: The Strategic Pertinence of Race and Anticommunism. — 107. CHAPTER FOUR: The Geoeconomic Unity of ‘Jim Crow country’. — 150. CHAPTER FIVE: Law, Violence and Hegemony in the South. — 198. CHAPTER SIX: Discourse: Reds and race in popular and elite discourse. — 241. CHAPTER SEVEN: Social Movements I: Massive Resistance, Countersubversion and Parapolitics. — 298. CHAPTER EIGHT: Social Movements II: Civil Rights, Communism and Anticommunism. — 363. Conclusion: “The country’s turning conservative.” — 412. !4 List of figures Figure 1. “Are these your children?” United Klans of America advertisement. 7. Figure 2. ‘Exposed’ in The Citizens’ Council, Vol 2 No 1, October 1956. 441. Figure 3. ‘While We Slept’ in The Citizens’ Council, Vol 2 No 1, October 1956. 441. Figure 4. ‘Fight Communism’. United Klans of America membership card, recto. (196-?) 446. Figure 5. ‘Join A Local Unit Now’. United Klans of America membership card, verso. (196-?) 446. !5 INTRODUCTION: “Are these your children?” Thesis The thesis of this research is that anticommunism in the Cold War was centrally a hegemonic project which, through defining a largely conservative and exclusionary form of Americanism, secured, for most of the period covered, the unity of a broad ‘historical bloc’ including fractions of capital with diverse modalities of surplus extraction, trade unions and state apparatuses. In so doing, it cemented the role of the Jim Crow South within American nationhood, provided its dominant classes with techniques of violence and consent through which to suppresses challenges to segregation, and supplied an invaluable element of a complex ideological nexus in which Southern white supremacy could be understood and valued. The breakdown of the anticommunist consensus exposed great strategic and ideological fractures over the necessity and merits of Jim Crow, both within the dominant and dominated classes, and facilitated its overthrow. !6 ! Figure 1: ‘Are These Your Children?’ United Klans of America advertisement. !7 “Are these your children?” Did the Cold War free African Americans, or did it prolong their oppression? Put another way, did the Cold War imperative of resisting communism both domestically and internationally thwart the achievement of critical mass in the civil rights struggle, or did it pressure the United States government to embark, however reluctantly, on the major decisions that would lead to desegregation? Did the fear of communism limit the coalition-building potential of the civil rights movement, or did anticommunism provide the civil rights movement with an acceptable patriotic discourse within which they could articulate their democratic demands? Did it do more to unify and expand the segregationist bloc, or did it divide it and ruin its fortunes? (On this debate, see Dudziak, 2002; Hall, 2005; Marable, 2007; Arnesen, 2012; Berg, 2007) One way of addressing these questions is to ask why segregationists leaned as much as they did on anticommunist discourses and techniques. Consider the advertisement illustrated above. Particularly sinister even by the standards of the Ku Klux Klan, the flyer was published in Georgia, 1963, and featured an image of a biracial crowd of children playing in a park. The headline asked, “Are these your children?” The text, rather than making any specific comment regarding the children, left the image and headline to speak for itself, polysemically. Instead, it stated a number of “facts” concerning recent civil unrest and the connection between “the Communist Party” and “Martin Luther King’s organisation”. Finally, it invited members of the public to a “Fish Fry” and two “Cross-Burning Public Speaking” !8 events. (Southern Regional Council, 1983). The meaning was clear: communist subversion was responsible for the civil rights movement and for the scenes of ‘race- mixing’ depicted in the photograph. And the Klan was the necessary organ of white solidarity and civil countersubversion, which task undoubtedly included brutally punishing infringements on the South’s racial order. Such claims of communist instigation behind the civil rights movement were common currency on the segregationist Right. The American Nazi Party published similar claims at greater length in its ‘Rockwell Report’. The John Birch Society went further and asserted that, not only was the civil rights movement instigated by communists, but the US as a whole was “60-80%” under Communist domination. Among more mainstream Southern conservatives, the same doctrine was espoused by the White Citizens’ Council, a mass social movement in the leadership of resistance to desegregation. The issue of segregation was merely, as an article in their publication, Citizens, argued, “the leading edge of the Communist attack on America”. In Little Rock, Arkansas, at the height of the ‘Massive Resistance’ campaign, hundreds of white demonstrators gathered outside the state capitol to protest against the integration of Central High School which had been enforced by 101st Airborne two years previously. Their placards bore the legends: “Race Mixing is Communism” and “Stop the Race-Mixing March of the Antichrist”. (Woods, 2004: 145-6; Clark, 1976: 107; Bledsoe, 1959) Southern pro-segregationists were capable of speaking and acting in a complex variety of registers, far from unified on almost anything except their racism. Yet, insofar as there was a consensus upon anything in !9 Southern politics, whites at least overwhelmingly agreed on this point: that communism was behind the civil rights movement. Of course, such discourse was not purely the product and provenance of Southern segregationists or their far right allies. Its primary materials were supplied in bulk by agencies of the American federal government, notably the FBI, the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC), and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SISS). These institutions did not merely provide the information upon which charges of communist subversion were based. They legitimised the allegations made by Southern segregationists by reproducing them, justified the repressive measures deemed necessary by Southern states in the defence of segregation, and provided a model for local investigative bodies. (See Woods, 2004; Lewis, 2004; Clark, 1976) Indeed, as Schrecker (2002) points out, the state is an essential element of any successful variant of the anticommunist network in the United States. Thus, it seems that there was an articulation between the national state, Southern state apparatuses and elements of civil society in the anticommunist reaction against civil rights. There are a number of possible ways of understanding why this counter-civil rights alliance emerged as it did, bound at the nexus of anticommunism. It might be argued that the establishment of an anticommunist consensus, promulgated through civil society organisations, and the development of a series of apparatuses to police that consensus, provided segregationists with a one-off historical opportunity to !10 conserve the racial order. In this view, their anticommunism was strategic. Or, more crudely, a ruse or decoy. Another argument might be that there was an elective affinity between an ideology which claims to defend the American political-economic framework and safeguard it against communist subversion, and one which claims to defend the South’s essential Americanism and protect its political-economic order against overthrow. This is treat their anticommunism as doctrinal. A third possible explanation would be that, in fact, the civil rights movement was but one element of a global assault on white supremacy that was driven by communist political organisation and informed by communist ideology. This treats the anticommunism of segregationists as