Another said the same thing in another way. Exhibiting a full-length picture of Senator Taft, he paid tribute to the senator’s gameness. “There never has been such a brainy and nervy fighter in the Senate since Daniel Webster.5 Don’t tackle Taft unless you really mean to do some fighting. See that?” He pointed to Taft’s paunchy middle. “Don’t kid yourself that that’s fat. That’s his craw. It’s so full of grit that he just has to carry it a little low. And then to allow more room for all those brains he’s got. In fact, all the rest of him is made out of brains.”

  Still another clapped hands for Taft. “Nobody else but Senator Bob could have thrown that Bilbo clean out of the Senate.”6 With the gestures he made, you got the idea that Senator Taft had grabbed hold of his colleague from Mississippi and flung him bodily from the Senate chamber. “Don’t let his quiet way fool you. That Senator Taft is a killer.”

  It is to be remembered that Senator Bilbo, “The Man,” was re-elected to the Senate from Mississippi. For years he had amused himself by saying things from the Senate floor infuriating to Negroes. He was the sign and symbol of all that Negroes in general hated in American politics. Senator Taft, chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, personally took the lead, stood on the floor of the Senate and asked for a vote against Bilbo’s taking the oath. The Senate upheld Taft’s motion and their vote thus excluded Bilbo from his seat in the Senate. Needless to say, the Negroes all over the country rejoiced at this.

  The Negroes of Ohio point with pride to Taft’s long record on other measures affecting Negroes: anti-poll tax legislation, FEPC, consideration of the civil-rights bills, housing and rent programs, discrimination in selecting displaced persons for admission to the United States, withholding Federal education funds wherever racial discrimination was practiced, cloture, attempts to limit debate and break up filibustering, anti-lynch bills and, under the Taft-Hartley Law, a clause to protect Negroes’ right to work regardless of the discriminatory union rules. In August, 1942, he voted to exempt all servicemen from poll taxes in national or congressional elections. This enabled many Negroes to vote for the first time in the South.

  “Our Senator Taft’s record is wonderful,” an educated woman active in Ohio politics observed, “but I’m not sure that all of our people understand his motives. Senator Taft is not pro-Negro. He is not prowhite. He is not prolabor, nor promanagement. The man has some strange passion for justice. He would work just as hard to stop us tomorrow if he believed that we were oppressing anybody. And he will tell you so if you ask him. That gives what he does more weight with me. He is not trying to win our votes so much as he is trying to do what is right.”

  Others see Taft in that light also.

  In appearance, Taft is a tall man, over six feet, and with a big build on him. His hair is sandy and thinning. You couldn’t exactly call him handsome in the face, but he certainly does not look anything like the devil’s doll baby either. He has something more impressive than a Hollywood handsomeness, that look that few men are favored with—obvious intelligence coupled with equally obvious self-assurance, indicating an ego well nourished. It is as plain as day that the man is so used to things that he need make no gestures to impress you.

  And Robert A. Taft came by that look naturally. His folks had been good livers for a hundred years before he was born. He has been bred to physical comfort, good manners and public responsibility. His grandfather, Alphonso Taft, was Secretary of War under President Grant.7 His own father, William Howard Taft, held various important public offices before he became the twenty-seventh President of the United States, and after that became Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.8 Senator Taft’s mother was a somebody.9 He married a somebody. Martha Bowers Taft’s father was Solicitor General of the United States.10 She is a well-educated, witty and charming woman.

  Everything around the Taft home is bred up. You ought not to be surprised to hear that the Taft dog’s folks had belonged to Thomas Jefferson and his cat’s great-grandmamma to the twentieth power had frisked around the billowy skirts of Martha Washington.11 The Tafts, like the Adamses, the Cabots and the Lodges, have done quite some descending.12 They could line out their “begats” if they wanted to.

  This being used to things is always serviceable to white people dealing with Negroes. Raw manners quickly repel us. “Maybe he means all right,” we murmur behind his back, “but he doesn’t know how to talk to people.” We do love manners and behavior in people in high places. Otherwise, we don’t believe they should be there. That is one of the many reasons why American Negroes did not go in any numbers for communism. For the most part, the Reds were much too crude and common.

  But going back to descending: Senator Taft’s political attitude has descended, too, but not from any public figures of recent years. He is not, and makes it plain that he does not aspire to be, a people’s man in the popular concept of that term. He is never stampeded by public clamor. Loaded down with information and readied with conclusions drawn from what he has learned, his move is to direct the enthusiasm of the populace rather than to be led by it. To him, a leader is supposed to lead, and more than that, be prepared to do so.

  This attitude makes Senator Taft something right out of the Federalist.13 This was the position of the men who held high office in this republic during the period brought to a close by the advent of Jacksonian democracy.14 Beginning with him, the mob took over. It is easily possible that the men who governed this country from the end of the Revolutionary War down to the election of Jackson were not all giants, but no one can honestly maintain that the Spoils System, that looking after party stalwarts with high-paying and responsible public offices, regardless of ability and fitness, has improved the quality of American statesmanship.15 Robert A. Taft is a political throwback. Like Alexander Hamilton, Taft just will insist on principles, which makes him a lone wolf at times, but also makes him remarkable in this day and age.16

  Senator Taft is without doubt a mental man. Not even his worst enemies have ever accused him of being dumb to the fact. His public utterances emerge from massed information. Start something, and he immediately goes hunting down the facts. This habit and inclination are valuable in a public official. He is supposed to know more than his constituents about public affairs. That is what he is sent to Washington for. Only by knowing all that can be found out can he ward off all hurt and danger from those who have trusted him and sent him to look after the public welfare.

  The institution of the relief program in the early ’30’s is a case in point. The excuse given by the New Deal Administration was that they heard that somebody said they would start a revolution against the government if it was not done.17 A man like Taft would not have rushed to appease such people the moment that he heard such a rumor. If the program was necessary, he would have instituted it without a doubt, but not for that reason. The very first thing Taft would have undertaken would be to find out just who were the people thus threatening the security of the nation, and in exactly what tone of voice. As soon as possible after that, the entire country would have known who those individuals were by name.

  You may well ask what good that would do? Just this: That we would have known in the early ’30’s, and not in the late ’40’s, that communists were working in our midst. We would have learned something of their habits of boring from within, of their penchant for fishing in muddy water and taking advantage of unhappy conditions in a nation which they meant to knock over. If somebody in authority had only sought to know who was talking revolution, and why, a show of hands would have been forced, and the opportunities to worm their way into the very government, to do the evil here that they have, would have been lost to them then and there.

  It is significant that nobody asked a thing, or if they did and were told, they carefully kept the information from the American people. The recent trials and convictions of persons once high in New Deal positions and other New Deal followers, point out to us the high price that the United States has paid for ignorance. If it is denied that it was ignorance, then the implications are even more serious. Anyway, it is well known that in those days anybody who endorsed the Constitution was a “capitalistic reactionary,” and to admit patriotism was to be classed as a “dirty chauvinist.” Anybody worth a samovar of tea was a “liberal,” was known as an “intellectual,” and went about talking about “directives” instead of plain orders.

  Negroes suffered from this like everybody else. Only, if you were a Negro, you were even more detestable. You were a “black reactionary,” or a “black chauvinist,” or belonged to the hated “black bourgeois.” It came to be known that the way to a government appointment was to make with the dialectics.

  Therefore, Taft’s open-faced Americanism will be welcome to great hordes of Negroes, who, like their white compatriots, have been part of the American underground for so long. Yes, there has been an American resistance army for a number of years, a sort of guerilla hand doing what they could to restore constitutional government. So Senator Taft, should he become the candidate, is going to have to deal with that slippery word “liberal.” This egg of leftist dialectics has been sneaked into the mental nest of Negroes as well as whites, and with the same purpose and confusion. It is just another instance of the sly and cynical prostitution of the dictionary by the leftists for their own ends. The word “liberal” is now an unstable and devious thing in connotation. For example, card-carrying members of the Communist Party describe themselves as liberals to hide their party affiliation. Pinkos and other degrees of fellow travelers boast of being liberals.18 Led astray by leftists, who do not, however, admit they are pro-Kremlin, great numbers of uninformed persons believe that the proper interpretation of the term “liberal” is a person who desires greater government control and Federal handouts.19

  In the same way and for the same purpose the word has been debauched for Negroes to mean “pro-Negro.” So persons like Henry Wallace, Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt and Vito Marcantonio have all been classified in our minds as liberals.20 And that is why Negroes themselves are not spoken of as liberals, since, naturally, the relaxing of racial lines is something that must come from the other side of the race line.

  So, when Negro voters shall ask of Candidate Taft whether he is a liberal or not, there will have to be a definition of terms.

  Senator Taft speaks of himself as a liberal, but his concept is far from the new interpretations. As he sees it, “A liberal is a man who believes in freedom of thought, who is not a worshipper of dogma. . . . My objection to many of the self-confessed liberals today is that they are constantly advocating measures to reduce freedom.”

  “Senator Taft,” said the Indianapolis Star, “is a liberal in the traditional sense that Jefferson and Washington were liberal. He believes the main purpose of government is to set men free and to keep them free, to give equal opportunity to all and special favor to none.”

  This brings to our minds the picture of Alexander Hamilton leaving his sick bed to travel to Rhode Island to influence a vote to break the deadlock for the Presidency between Jefferson, with whom he had violently disagreed on many occasions and who belonged to the opposing party, and Aaron Burr.21 Hamilton persuaded the Rhode Island voter to cast his vote for Jefferson, “because he is the better man.”22 That is the kind of liberalism that Taft is talking about.

  So it can easily be seen, as the saying goes, that some changes are going to be made. We, as Negroes, will not find Taft a liberal in the sense that we have been taking the word to mean, for Taft, I repeat, is not pro-anybody. Neither pro-Negro, prowhite, prolabor, promanagement or anything else. He is for the cause and the occasion when he believes it to be right. He states this carefully in four points in his My Political Credo:

  The people and the individual retain true liberty.

  All citizens are assured equal justice under law, that they may have life and liberty.

  All citizens have equality of opportunity, particularly in their youth.

  All citizens have a standard of living which will make happiness possible.

  Therefore, it is as plain as white on rice that we, as Negroes, are included, provided we can disregard the intense political appeals to racial antagonism of the last few administrations, and see ourselves once more simply as citizens. You heard the man say “All.” And from his record, when Taft says “all” he means all.

  For this reason, we will be disappointed if we expect a continuation of the BFSUAKDOFSM, which being interpreted, means, the Bureau For the Setting Up and Knocking Down of Straw Men, to gain the Negro vote.23 Taft, from his record, will not attempt to whip up either racial or sectional antagonisms to make himself look like our valiant protector. If his record of seeking to do away with inequalities where we are concerned does not impress us, we will have to go unimpressed. He will not create any false situations and then “straighten them out” for our votes. I will try to show you what is meant by that.

  In company with four friends, I sat in the office of a prominent Negro politician in Miami in 1950. The Smathers-Pepper campaign had just come to an end, so, naturally, we talked about politics.24 At one point I got to “A-Man-Who”-ing—a peculiar cry heard around convention halls in political-nesting time—at a great rate. I was touting a prominent man who, if elected governor, would initiate certain measures bound to be beneficial to the Negroes of Florida.

  A doctor politician flagged me down. “Stop right there, Zora. You have wasted a lot of time telling us all about what the man is for. Now get down to practical, vote-getting politics and let us know whom and what your man is against.”

  He saw the astonishment, if not the dismay, in my face and smiled sardonically.

  “Negroes, Zora, don’t vote for things. You have to show us something we can vote against.”

  He went on to elaborate, and illustrated his point by cases in recent political history. The perfect example, he told me, was the Marian Anderson–Daughters of the American Revolution incident of 1939.25 It will be remembered that the manager of Marian Anderson sought a concert hall for her appearance in Washington, D.C. It had to be large, in view of the tremendous drawing power of the great artist. They applied to two places—Constitution Hall, the property of the D.A.R., and the auditorium of the White High School, the property of the District of Columbia.

  Now, there is no one so blind in the eye or deaf about the ears as not to know how tight is racial discrimination in the national capital. The D.A.R. refused their hall to Miss Anderson, allegedly on racial grounds. The school board likewise refused the auditorium of the high school, but, after some pressure and dickering, agreed to allow her to appear there, but only under the condition that no Negroes be allowed in the audience.

  The BFSUAKDOFSM saw its duty and “went and done it.” Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Harold Ickes, et al., rushed into the fray and gave with a howl against narrow-minded racial discrimination that could be heard in Addis Ababa, and probably was.26 But it was all directed against the D.A.R. No loud screaming against the school authorities. Mrs. Roosevelt, in her protest against racial discrimination, even resigned from the D.A.R. The Straw Man Knockers-Down raised the biggest crop of political corn outside the champion state of Iowa. They foamed up the biggest cloud that has hung under heaven since the Flood, and all whipped up out of political egg-white.27

  This statement is not unjust, and certainly not meant to be unkind. Mrs. Roosevelt is a very charming woman, but I like a little fact mixed in with what is handed to me as gospel truth. What happened cannot be interpreted entirely as a battle against racial discrimination, because if Mrs. Roosevelt took out after everything like that that went on in Washington, D.C., she would be hollering night and day, and every day. Restaurants, theaters—everything downtown in Washington practices Jim Crow. I can’t recall that Mrs. Roosevelt campaigned mightily against these places, as she did against the D.A.R. Therefore, there is but one conclusion to be drawn. Marian Anderson is a world-famous artist, and deservedly so. Her name was bound to be known to Negroes all over the nation. “Defending” her would attract notice and bring in the Negro vote.

  As far as the high-school auditorium is concerned, to jump the people responsible for racial bias would be to accuse and expose the accusers themselves. The District of Columbia has no home rule; it is controlled by congressional committees, and Congress at the time was overwhelmingly Democratic. It was controlled by the very people who were screaming so loudly against the D.A.R. To my way of thinking, both places should have been denounced, or neither.

  Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes. If the average American had been asked flatly to abandon his rights as a citizen and to submit to a personal rule, he would have chewed tobacco and spit white lime.28 But under relief, dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the “Little White Father,” more or less.29 Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on and on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few. The change from a republic to a dictatorship was imperceptibly pushed ahead.

  Senator Taft has taken notice of this. “What concerns me is that people gradually come to accept limitations on freedom as the necessary incidents of government. They hear of outrageous treatment given to others with a kind of dull interest, instead of the fiery resentment such incidents would have aroused in the past.”

  We Negroes will look in vain if we expect Taft to set up imaginary enemies and situations to defend us from. Look for him to do nothing but stick to the facts. He will not make a great to-do of saving us from Bilbo’s ghost, for example. He will not dramatically call “The Man” back from his grave and challenge him to mortal combat. It is hardly likely that Senator Taft will introduce a bill in the Senate around election time to bar striped tigers from entering the United States on passport to eat up Negro children. In short, he will not go into the straw-man business at all. He will give us credit for average intelligence as he has the Negroes of Ohio.