FDR - Jean Edward Smith [251]
To satisfy states’ rights concerns, the Wagner bill did not make lynching a federal crime but would hold local law enforcement officials accountable. If a lynching went unprosecuted for thirty days, federal authorities could intervene and bring charges against the local officials responsible for the delay. Fines ranged up to $5,000 with possible imprisonment for five years.36 Except for racist peckerwoods like Mississippi’s Theodore G. Bilbo, most southerners on Capitol Hill shared the nation’s shame and deplored the depravity lynchings entailed. For them the issue turned on states’ rights and the intrusion, even if one step removed, of federal law enforcement in what was seen as a purely local matter. Shades of Reconstruction colored that view—a festering memory kept alive by a steady stream of popular and scholarly writing, abetted by films such as D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.* White supremacy went to the core of the issue, and no Washington incumbent from below the Mason-Dixon Line wanted to be “outniggered” in a Democratic primary.
Wagner had initially introduced his bill in January 1934, but the rush of New Deal legislation prevented it from being considered. In 1935 the threat of a southern filibuster kept it off the floor. Nineteen thirty-six was an election year, and the last thing Democrats wanted was a split in party ranks before November. When the Seventy-fifth Congress convened in January 1937, the bill seemed to have a fighting chance. Aside from unprecedented Democratic majorities in both houses (including many new members from outside the South), recent Gallup polls suggested that more than 70 percent of the public favored an antilynching law. Southerners were 65 to 35 percent in favor.37 A ghastly double lynching in Duck Hill, Mississippi, in April in which two handcuffed black prisoners were chained to a tree, mutilated with blowtorches, doused with gasoline, and set afire underscored the urgency of the legislation. In the House, the southern leadership kept the bill buried in committee but a discharge petition (signed by 218 members) brought it to the floor, and on April 15 the bill passed 277–120, Speaker Bankhead and Majority Leader Rayburn voting against. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee reported the bill favorably in June, too late for consideration at that session but at the top of the agenda come January.
Roosevelt stayed on the sidelines. “I did not choose the tools with which I must work,” he told Walter White, the secretary of the National Association for Advancement of Colored People. “Had I been permitted to choose them I would have selected quite different ones. But I’ve got to get legislation passed to save America. The Southerners by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places in most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass.… I just can’t take that risk.”38*
At his press conference in October 1934, FDR declined to endorse Wagner’s bill.39 In 1935, when the bill faced a Senate filibuster, he refused to comment.40 When Eleanor was invited to address an NAACP protest rally, Roosevelt counseled caution. “President says this is dynamite,” wrote Missy in longhand in the margin of the invitation. Eleanor did not go.41 In 1935 ER was invited to attend the closing session of the twenty-sixth annual convention of the NAACP in St. Louis. “FDR should I go?” she asked. Missy replied for the president that it would be best if she did not.42 In private conversation FDR said he thought the antilynching bill was unconstitutional,† but the