RACES: Delicate Aspect

Because Mrs. Sarah Oliver Hulswit, head of an anti-New Deal crusade called the Women's Rebellion, asked (unsuccessfully) Attorney General David T. Wilentz* of New Jersey to enforce against WPA workers an old New Jersey statute (ten other States have similar laws) denying to paupers the right to vote, President Roosevelt last week grew highly sarcastic in press conference. The "ladies' proposal," he snorted, was about as democratic as it would be to limit voters to male holders of B.A. degrees. While he was on the subject he went on also to denounce poll taxes as a relic of the Revolutionary era. (He recently endorsed a movement to repeal the poll tax in Arkansas.)

Knowing well that the poll tax is the chief device whereby Southern Democrats prevent Negroes from voting, the wariest politician in the U.S. quickly added that in condemning the poll tax he was not talking about Negroes. They, he said, were a problem to be handled separately. At this remark, political ears pricked. It was the first time Mr. Roosevelt had publicly mentioned one of the most delicate aspects of his new Liberal party. Virginia's Senator Carter Glass declared that Franklin Roosevelt had exhibited "an absolutely superficial knowledge of the matter."

To many Southern Democrats, it was strong medicine when in 1932 Franklin Roosevelt wooed the Northern Black Belt as no Democrat had done in mortal memory. When he gave Negroes prominent seats at his inauguration, put them in bigger jobs than they ever held in a Democratic administration, Southern Democrats tried hard to swallow it as political expediency. Such demagogues as Georgia's Eugene Talmadge gagged for public edification when, during the 1936 campaign, Mrs. Roosevelt was photographed between two young Negro officers of the R.O.T.C. at Washington's Howard University. But in this year's primary fight, Demagogue Talmadge's fire has been directed at Roosevelt's wooing Negro votes far below the Mason-Dixon line. Moreover, for the first time in years, South Carolina's Ellison D. ("Cotton Ed") Smith, who walked out of the 1936 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia when a Negro pastor was called on to pray, last month managed to put some life into his traditional campaign plank: White Supremacy.

Other notable points in the present relations of Southern Negroes and the New Deal:

¶ In South Carolina no one can vote in general elections without a poll tax receipt, but any white man can enter a primary by putting his name down in a book (often kept in a grocery store). This year some 20,000 Negroes were allowed to put their names down, a piece of official colorblindness far more advantageous to New Dealer Johnston than to unreconstructed "Cotton Ed" Smith.

¶ In Oklahoma, where there is no poll tax, 60,000 of the State's 225,000-odd Negroes registered this year, an all-time high. Of these, 45,000 signed up as Democrats. When Franklin Roosevelt appeared in Oklahoma City in behalf of his friend Senator Elmer Thomas, Negroes were allotted 300 seats in the grandstand. Mr. Thomas' Negro campaign managers claimed their man got 90% of the Negro vote.