Whatever their party, men and women concerned with the protection of civil rights and the development of good inter-group relations in this country hailed the President’s Report on Civil Rights as, by common consent, the most thorough and honest analysis of the problem of civil rights that any American government has been willing to present to the public. What progress has been made in implementing the report since October 1947, when it was made public; and how can one apportion credit and blame between the major parties for the successes and failures of the legislative program that grew out of it? More important, based on their record, which of the parties contesting the election can be relied upon to fight hardest and most effectively for civil rights in the four years ahead? James A. Wechsler and his wife, Nancy F. Wechsler, here attempt a balance sheet of the past year’s gains and losses, and a forecast of future possibilities.

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One year ago a presidential commission headed by General Electric’s Charles E. Wilson produced a document that has no exact parallel in American history. It was entitled: To Secure These Rights. The report embodied a critical running commentary on the state of human freedom in this country and outlined a daring program for the here-and-now. Its press notices dramatized the explosive content of the survey. Southern editorial writers almost uniformly voiced anguish over the issuance of such a proclamation under White House auspices, leveling their heaviest fire against its challenge to segregation.

Elsewhere the reaction was mixed, ranging from enthusiastic approval in the Negro press to faint damns in some conservative journals. There were those who once again piously warned that “you can’t legislate brotherhood.” There were others who said the Committee had sounded a discordant note at a time when “slow but steady progress is being made.” There were perfectionists who solemnly concluded that the authors of the report had disastrously compromised their principles in a few esoteric areas. And finally, inevitably, there were those who decided that the document was a sinister Communist enterprise foisted upon the innocent. This claim was apparently based on the proposition that any description of American frailty must have been written in Moscow—or would at least give aid and comfort to the Soviet enemy.

The tumult had many salutary results. Not the least important was the widespread circulation which the report received in the months following its publication. It is estimated that more than one million copies have been sold or distributed in one form or another by now. And the existence of the book is at least vaguely recognized by millions who have never read the text.

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Yet the fact remains that in the twelve months since the Committee released its survey with President Truman’s blessing, there has been pitifully little accomplished towards translating the Committee recommendations into American reality. None of the legislative proposals advanced in the report was accepted by the regular 8th Congress or the summer special session. No anti-lynching law was adopted. No permanent Fair Employment Practice Committee was created. No legislative measures designed to curb discriminatory practices in elections were approved. The archaic civil-rights statutes—under which the federal government has sought to punish violators of minority rights—were not strengthened. In brief, the record of Congress has been a systematic rejection of the Committee proposals, accompanied by the sad cry—immortalized by Brooklyn baseball fans: “Wait till next year!”

The administration’s performance in the same period has been characteristically complicated and inconclusive. It is perfectly clear that the fate of civil-rights legislation ultimately rested in the hands of Republican congressional leadership; there may be long and legitimate dispute, however, as to whether Mr. Truman might have staged a more impressive offensive. At many junctures the White House backfield displayed the same penchant for fumbling the ball once it reached scoring territory that it manifested in the price-control battle and other controversies during the last two years.

Mr. Truman’s audacity in sponsoring the Committee cannot be questioned. The anti-Truman drive that preceded the Democratic convention was primarily touched off by the civil-rights report and the ensuing legislative recommendations the President submitted to Congress. He could not have been oblivious to this danger. One of the lasting ironies of his administration is that his renomination was most seriously jeopardized by the combination of Dixie disaffection and liberal revolt; few men have aroused such a strange combination of adversaries. Yet while the civil-rights report was undoubtedly his baby and he refused to disown it when the going became rough, the President unquestionably believed he could nurture the child without losing his community standing.

As in many other realms, Mr. Truman did not quite grasp the depth and subtlety of the problem he was dealing with. Mr. Truman seems to believe that few issues are genuinely irreconcilable, perhaps because he himself lacks a militant faith in anything. The administration’s course throughout the spring suggested the belief that it could carry on the fight for civil rights and still keep almost everybody happy. This attempt reached its climax at the Democratic convention, where Senators J. Howard Mc-Grath and Francis Myers sought to engineer a compromise, laboring long and hard to put through a civil-rights plank verbose enough to satisfy the North and innocuous enough to enable the Southerners to reconcile party principles with Dixie practice. They failed. But this alternate affirmation of high purpose and temporizing on specific issues was generally symptomatic of the White House’s mood in the first half of this year. (It might be parenthetically noted that Franklin D. Roosevelt employed the same strategy on occasion, but the touch was infinitely more artful.)

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In his January message to Congress—less than three months after the Committee report—Mr. Truman clearly indicated that a retreat was in prospect. His recommendations were sufficiently forthright and clear-cut to provoke the wrath of the “white supremacy” bloc. Nevertheless he withheld explicit support of the Committee’s recommendation for abolition of segregation in the armed forces, and in subsequent months he remained silent while Secretary of War Kenneth Royall, a fiery Southerner, publicly and pugnaciously opposed any change in Jim Crow in the army. As the Democratic convention neared, Mr. Truman appeared to be wooing rebellious Dixiecrats with shameless ardor. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi, whose prejudices are non-sectional, visited the White House and emerged to pronounce a generous tribute to the little man inside. In the immediate aftermath of the civil-rights report, Attorney General Clark had promised enlargement of the civil-rights section of the Department of Justice, in line with the Committee’s recommendations. But as Southern fury mounted, Clark abandoned this project, dropped any effort to streamline enforcement machinery, and quietly divorced himself from a planned campaign to rally public support for the civil-rights program.

This trend was abruptly reversed after the Democratic convention. There the liberal insurgents blocked the attempt to soft-pedal the civil-rights issue and forced through a campaign plank more affirmative and sweeping than any before written on this subject. Soon afterward, Mr. Truman resumed a fighting posture. He issued two executive orders (heralded many months before in his message to Congress) establishing an FEPC for government employes and creating a committee to work out a formula for eliminating discrimination in the armed forces. It is not yet clear whether this committee will view segregation as the ultimate form of discrimination, or whether it will seek to evade this crucial point. But the administration’s fluctuating emotional curve within the past year is plainly suggested by this series of developments. It is argued by some of Mr. Truman’s adherents that his timidity in the pre-convention months was simple political footwork: that he planned all along to revive the crusade as soon as the nomination was safely won. Others doubt that Mr. Truman is capable of such careful political design.

Despite the many zig-zags in his course, the President has plainly entered the campaign on the side of civil rights. In fact many observers believe that the support he has stirred on this level in key Northern states may save him from a debacle on the Landon scale even if he falls far short of victory. He has proclaimed a program that goes far beyond any previous Democratic efforts in this line, including FDR’s. He has taken genuine risks and suffered real damage; there is no accurate way of measuring, for example, the demoralization in Democratic ranks created by the Dixiecrat uprising. The furor created by the civil-rights report may indeed be remembered after Mr. Truman is politically forgotten. Unquestionably the performance of the Republican Congress has helped to enhance the President’s momentary stature. His own voice has often been weak and inconsistent, but by contrast with the GOP leadership, he has exhibited intrepid statesmanship.

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It is difficult to describe the behavior of the Republican-led Congress without resorting to vulgar political mind-reading. There have been many tortuous apologies for the failure of the GOP leadership to fight for civil-rights legislation within the past year. Yet the most convincing explanation remains the simple one that Republican leaders had little passion for the program and did not believe its enactment vital to their success. They had often boasted in song and story of the emancipation they would bring when they finally recaptured control of Congress. But the new day is still around the corner.

At no point in the regular session did Senator Taft and his associates seek to bring up any of the wide variety of civil-rights reforms that might have been offered. Late in the session Taft complained that there was not enough time to break a filibuster; this did not explain why he had allowed so much time to elapse before mentioning the subject. Even more desolate, however, was the calculated impotence that the Republicans exhibited in the face of an actual filibuster at the special session. Correspondents watching the performance were amazed at the crudity of what they saw; Taft acted like a tennis player determined to prolong a set with an inferior opponent, swatting his own drives into the net and crying “take another” when his rival doublefaulted on service. Seldom has the Senate chamber witnessed so calm an exhibition when great social matters were at stake.

It still seems slightly implausible that so little was accomplished by so many. When the President’s Committee submitted its report there was widespread belief that the Republican chieftains would be compelled to make some meaningful gestures before the 1948 campaign began. But the prophets did not anticipate the decisive swing toward Republican victory. In late December Henry Wallace announced that he would head an independent ticket. When the Republican Congress convened in January its nonchalance on civil rights was already apparent.

There was sound political reason for this loss of interest. Wallace’s candidacy virtually insured Republican triumph in those states where the civil-rights debate might have otherwise swayed the outcome. This is not to suggest that Mr. Wallace planned it that way. He has not planned many of the things that have happened since he entered the race. But the impact of his candidacy was unmistakable. Such states as New York and California were irrevocably lost to the Democrats with the emergence of the third party, and with them went the election. Henceforth it was safe for the Republicans to follow their own preconceptions rather than engage in fierce competition on dubious battlegrounds.

This is not the whole story. No doubt the Republicans felt they had an added immunity because of the popular confusion created by divided administrative and executive rule. Some of them hinted a fear that Mr. Truman would receive undue credit if civil-rights legislation that he fathered were enacted while he was still in the White House. Others may have believed that they took themselves off the spot by politely pointing their fingers at the Southern filibusterers during the special session. But the dominant fact was Republican self-confidence. With Wallace running, the 1948 campaign had become virtually no contest—and, to repeat, especially in those areas where the civil-rights issue counted most.

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Assuming, as nearly everybody in this capital does, that Thomas E. Dewey will enter the White House in January, the outlook for civil-rights legislation in the next Congress remains as unpredictable as the new president. With the third party cutting down liberal senatorial and congressional candidates in many areas, the incoming legislature may be even more heavily populated with Southern Democrats and conservative Republicans than its predecessor. In that setting no spontaneous and irresistible clamor for civil-rights bills is likely to arise on Capitol Hill.

Mr. Dewey, however, will not be the creature of Congress and there may be a strong compulsion for him to act on the civil-rights front. He may make a series of commitments in this realm before he finishes his transcontinental campaign travels. He has placed heavy emphasis in the past on his relatively enlightened policies as Governor of New York. It is at least conceivable that he will sponsor some legislation in this field—and particularly laws that might accelerate the breakup of the one-party system in the South. These could plausibly include measures providing stronger federal protection of election machinery as well as anti-poll tax and anti-lynching statutes.

Speculation at this stage about the character and direction of a Dewey administration is dangerous. Perhaps the safest forecast that can be made is that Dewey will be the captive neither of principle nor of prejudice. He has never manifested any tendency to battle for lost or hazardous causes. He is the caricature of the totally political man, so obsessed with the politics of power that ideas become instruments possessing no validity outside the election game. On civil rights as on many other subjects, he has certainly betrayed no fighting convictions to date. What he does is likely to reflect cautious calculation of over-all political risk. It may also be determined by the degree to which he is preoccupied with other things in the first hectic months of office. His attitudes are unmistakably civilized. Some of his best appointments have been Negroes. But his impulses are controlled and neither idealism nor sentimentality will have much bearing on his regime. His silence during the special session was an early clue to the demeanor of the incoming president.

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In the long run the victorious insurgence on the civil-rights plank that occurred at the Democratic convention may prove more meaningful than conjecture about Dewey’s program. For this upheaval suggested, among other things, that political support for civil-rights reform is not confined solely to minority groups, nor is it based exclusively on the cold arithmetic of minority votes in restricted areas. The revolt was organized and led by the neo-New Deal Americans for Democratic Action, an organization that had previously displayed greater vitality in the realm of ideas than in the politics of the precinct. It was staged in the face of the opposition of the official party leadership; on the victorious roll-call, Mc-Grath’s Rhode Island, Truman’s Missouri, and Barkley’s Kentucky all vainly supported the compromise plank designed to turn away Southern wrath. But for the first time dominant forces within the Democratic convention agreed that a clear-cut stand on civil rights was vital to the party’s national survival. Admittedly delegations such as those of New York and California were responding to the existence of large and interested minority blocs in their home states. But the rebellion was not confined to spokesmen from these areas. On the floor it was led by men like Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota and Andrew Biemiller of Wisconsin—men from states in which there was no agitation over the civil-rights program.

The meaning of this development may be easily romanticized. A number of minor accidents strengthened the insurgents. There was the general sense of desperation that enveloped the convention as the inevitability of Mr. Truman’s nomination became apparent. The party hierarchy did not put up much more than token resistance. All these factors cannot be discounted. Nevertheless the memorable point is that the one great clash between the antiquated Democrats and a rising progressive bloc focused on the civil-rights issue. This plank became the symbol of the progressive upsurge. The revolt could not have occurred without a genuine ferment in party ranks; it was the civil-rights report which set the stage and gave the Democratic party a far more meaningful platform than any document of the Roosevelt election years.

The same events also crystallized the Dixiecrat movement. It is reasonable to assume that a turbulent period of Democratic party debate and attempted reconstruction will follow the 1948 elections. In that process the civil-rights fight is certain to be a central theme. The younger liberals aspiring to Democratic leadership will carry the civil-rights flag, and this year’s convention will probably be remembered as the first skirmish of an historic battle.

All this suggests a direct relation between the fate of civil-rights reform and the emergence of a unified, purposeful liberal political structure. To those who have covered recent congressional sessions the point seems inescapable. Dewey may—or may not—offer a handout to what he regards as civil-rights constituencies. But the record of the recent national legislature reinforces the belief that there is little insistent demand for action on a national level inside the Republican party. FEPC legislation has been enacted in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut under Republican governors. These moves are not inconsequential; unquestionably, state acceptance of such institutions will make ultimate national acceptance less painful. But the exigencies of state politics—as well as the comparative enlightenment of certain state regimes—probably dictated these steps. It is equally noteworthy that no civil-rights bloc spoke out at the Republican convention, where a “compromise” plank was ratified without a moment of floor debate. This is especially significant in the light of the pleas from Negro leaders and others for a dramatic declaration from the party of Lincoln. Once again Republican reticence may have reflected certainty of nationwide victory. It also exposed a deep and pervasive lack of warmth for the very objectives which the GOP has so often and so ostentatiously embraced in the past.

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Despite the liberal Democratic rebellion and widespread promotion of the issue by the Wallace third party, real questions remain as to the existing and potential political support for far-reaching civil-rights reforms. Only the most wistful souls will maintain that the thunderous voice of The People has been cynically muffled by scheming politicians. In fact, of course, the people are bitterly divided in some places and stolidly indifferent in others. It is no military secret that there are Jewish employers who do not hire Negoes, Catholics who do not hire Jews, and Negroes who boycott Jewish stores. It is equally plain that there is varying intensity of resistance to different recommendations of the civil-rights program. The Committee report was not visualized as a package to be accepted or rejected in its entirety, and progress toward the realization of its objectives is certain to be piecemeal. For reasons previously noted, the Republican leadership, if it moves at all, is likely to move far more swiftly toward enactment of an anti-poll tax statute than toward establishment of an FEPC.

What the people think about all this is subject to the most inexact kind of measurement, but there are some illuminating hints in the most recent Gallup poll. This survey reported that a majority of the populace both in and out of Dixie favors legislation outlawing the poll tax (although residents of the seven poll-tax states dissented from this trend). With regard to anti-lynching legislation, Dr. Gallup disclosed that a bare majority of Northern voters endorses such a measure; the South opposes it by a thumping 65 to 23 per cent, with 11 per cent undecided or disinterested. On the creation of a national FEPC, the opposition was 42 per cent outside Southern territory and 68 per cent inside.

The “no” vote is undoubtedly a combination of two groups—those who are flatly hostile to the objectives set forth in the civil-rights report and those who question the timing, diplomacy, and techniques proposed. Many foes of civil-rights reform frankly avow their belief in the doctrine of “white supremacy.” Others earnestly or disingenuously invoke the principles of states rights or gradualism. The tenacity with which some Northern corporation lawyers have fought FEPC under lofty moral and legal sanctions is reminiscent of their crusade against the Wagner Act, and has at least stirred up the suspicion that they are more concerned about property than principle.

But it would be self-deception to believe that all resistance to the Committee proposals masks deliberate adherence to the economic and social status quo. Real and impressive differences exist among liberals in and out of Congress. In part the debate centers on legal issues such as the constitutionality of federal anti-poll tax legislation and of some of the proposed anti-lynching bills. Paradoxically, the bill that commands widest popular appeal—abolition of state poll taxes—is the most dubious legal document in the judgment of many constitutional lawyers. The existence of this legal doubt was conceded in the report of the presidential Committee, which urged elmination of the poll tax by either federal law or constitutional amendment.

There are also serious controversies over the timing of major actions. The Truman Committee spent many hours debating whether it is more desirable to attack segregation with a single, decisive blow or to await preliminary improvement in educational levels. There was similar discussion as to whether discrimination should be simultaneously challenged in all schools or whether the initial effort should be concentrated upon colleges and universities. It was the final judgment of the Committee that only a sharp, clear, and sweeping break with established patterns could be conscientiously advocated. But the exponents of gradualism are not necessarily spiritual brethren of the Klan, as they are sometimes depicted in liberal cartoons.

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The Gallup polls refute the picture of a solid South united in its stand against all forms of federal action. They show obvious divergences from the Southern norm. But the breach in Dixie solidarity on the legislative front is still minor and narrow, and it is overshadowed by the unanimity with which the pillars of enlightened Southern opinion—such as Hodding Carter—have delivered almost mystic defenses of the segregation system within the past year. Senators Hill and Sparkman of Alabama, who have been clearly identified with the liberal Senate block on many congressional days, have nevertheless tried to prove that they are more Dixiecrat than John Rankin on matters of racial supremacy. It may be less valuable to excoriate such conduct than to understand its deep roots in Southern soil.

There are nevertheless genuine signs that the Southern landscape is neither uniform nor unchanging. In some municipalities segregation ordinances are becoming dead-letters. One year ago the Freedom Train did not pause in Memphis because city officials refused to permit unsegregated access to the exhibit. In late August of this year Henry Wallace held an unsegregated rally at a municipal ball park with the benign protection of “Boss” Crump’s police. There was total peace despite the many forecasts that it couldn’t happen there. Organization of mixed trade unions and large-scale registration of Negro voters are proceeding; and while fiery crosses have lighted up some comers of the Southern sky—most conspicuously over Georgia—more than five hundred thousand Negroes may vote in the South this fall. In Virginia a Negro has been elected to public office and in other states Negro candidates are on the ballot for the first time. It was also within the last year that the educational rulers of Arkansas agreed to seat a Negro medical student in lily-white classrooms for the first time, even while Oklahoma was stubbornly fighting a one-woman Negro “invasion” of its law school. Oklahoma remains typical and Arkansas is the pioneer, but the situation is no longer static. In the final analysis, mass enfranchisement of Southern Negroes and the break-up of the one-party system in Dixie may be more important than intra-party maneuvers on Capitol Hill.

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Thus there are two perspectives from which one can view the year since the publication of To Secure These Rights. One is to contend that we have witnessed another classic illustration of wasted words; that, measured in tangible legislative results, the report was filed and forgotten; that we have once again substituted rhetoric for aggressive action. Yet there is a good deal of ground for a less mournful view. The fact of the Committee report remains a major fact of contemporary life. The group that produced the document was an impressive cross-section of American political, economic, and social groups. Its personnel initially suggested the likelihood of platitudinous evasion rather than impassioned challenge. On the Committee were two widely respected Southerners whose Dixie antecedents could not be questioned, two business men with Horatio Alger histories, two Negroes, two labor leaders, and a number of other citizens from varied walks of life. They finally ratified the most comprehensive and fundamentally radical program put forward by any comparable group since the turn of the century.

Release of the report precipitated a reaction which is evident throughout this autumn’s political wars. It stirred a nationwide debate; and if the debaters were sometimes more attentive than the audience, the problem was unquestionably placed before the country more insistently than ever before. The report’s warning against hysteria in carrying out the loyalty program was one of the sanest pronouncements from a respect-able source heard throughout the year. It probably contributed to the self-restraint displayed by the administration (in contrast to the Congress) in the conduct of the federal loyalty check.

In any balance-sheet, the controversy provoked by the civil-rights report must be recorded as a notable advance. There has been more thinking and discussion about the gap between American preachment and prejudice than ever before. Arthur Krock of the New York Times has contended that all this is a serious setback for right-thinking people because it has intensified division; but his premise is that enlightenment was quietly triumphing until the issues were sharply raised. The tempo of progress was apparently more satisfying to Mr. Krock than to a lot of Americans who are the victims of discriminatory patterns. One of the bases of a democratic society is that the conflict between those seeking swift reform and those defending things as they are will be fought out in public debate. The Dixiecrat uproar may have unpleasant political consequences for Mr. Truman this year. It may produce many angry words. For the first time, however, the frozen one-party structure of the South is thawing out and the chance of an ultimate realignment that makes sense can be glimpsed. This seems far more promising than survival of the fiction that John Rankin and Philip Murray are political brothers under the skin.

What happens next may be subject to many of the vagaries of national politics. The economic climate of the coming months, however, will be no less decisive. Without accepting a simplistic analysis of the economic origins of man’s inhumanity, the far-reaching consequences of a business collapse can be easily foreseen. Civil rights will be a first casualty. If men are once again reduced to a jungle struggle for jobs, neither the report of the President’s Committee nor any similar treatise will be a bestseller. The point is too obvious to be labored and too crucial to be forgotten.

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Whatever the economic form-sheets portend, there is no formula for swift and tranquil resolution of the social problems that now touch the consciousness of millions of Americans. In the aftermath of World War II it became apparent that segregated war memorials and pre-war Jim Crow patterns would not be submissively accepted as the fruits of democratic victory. These resentments have deepened. In a world-wide war against Nazism the survival of racism in America undercut our propaganda and caricatured our liberations. The anomaly is no less devastating in an era of new political conflict between democratic and totalitarian symbols—especially since the contemporary commissars officially reject the racism which the brown-shirts proclaimed. Even the most able Southern sophists find difficult their position of arguing that violations of human dignity are a matter of profound American concern in Eastern Europe but in Dixie are “a private affair.” Their moral case is as impressive as Wallace’s inference that we have no justification for “meddling” in Eastern Europe because a poll tax survives in Mississippi.

This double standard has disturbed many Southern and Northern consciences; and in a world in which the self-described Anglo-Saxons are a fraction of humanity, the strategic as well as moral consequences of segregation become a painful theme for American contemplation. In the political debates of the coming decade this public disparity between our world role and our Jim Crow playgrounds may be the most powerful weapon of psychological warfare against the folklore of white supremacy.

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