herbert hoover, MLK, and the legacy of race and partisanship in america

by nick

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
–Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Legally, the silence of the good people lasted from the start of Reconstruction to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, a period which spanned 101 troubled years. In large part, the Reconstruction project to which Dr. King ultimately gave his life was irreparably damaged by the assassination of President Lincoln, but it was the legacy of another President–Herbert Hoover–that had enormous repercussions for the future of race and politics in America.

Herbert Clark Hoover is, undoubtedly, remembered best for both his namesake dam and his inability to save the American economy from the Great Depression; but it was his actions, or rather inaction, that predated his rise to the Presidency that produced consequences far beyond his wildest imagination.

Before thoughts of the Oval Office had ever entered Hoover’s consciousness, however, he had made a name for himself as an engineer and miner of some renown while working halfway across the world in China and Australia. His true foray into public life didn’t begin until the first great War, where he became known as a brilliant social engineer–a man who manipulated both Britain and Germany into feeding starving Belgium and who returned to the United States known colloquially as both “the Great Humanitarian” and “the Great Engineer.” Herbert Hoover was indeed a brilliant mind, but, unfortunately, he was also a fool.

He was brilliant in the way his mind could seize and grapple with a problem, brilliant in his ability to accomplish a task, and brilliant in the originality, comprehensiveness, and depth of the politcial philosophy he developed. He was a fool because he deceived himself. Although considering himself as objective and analytical as science itself, in reality he rejected evidence and truths that did not conform to his biases, and he fooled himself about what those biases were (Barry 1998, 262).

Nowhere would this self-denial produce greater ramifications than for the sake of his Republican party in the aftermath of the greatest flood ever experienced in America.

In 1927, historic, torrential rains tormented the Mississippi River Delta for months. On Good Friday alone, 6 to 15 inches of rain poured over a few hundred-thousand square miles. The pressure that months of such rain put upon the many levees lining the mighty Mississippi and its tributaries was so great that when the levees began bursting, hundreds of thousands of square miles would be inundated with water. In some areas the flooding would reach heights greater than 20 feet, with tsunami-like waves pounding farmsteads and towns into ruble and reducing the land to a writhing torrent of black, muddy depths. Before the flood waters would begin receding in the late summer and fall of 1927, hundreds of thousands of people would be displaced from their homes.

Hoover had been named to the flood commission responsible for dealing with this wretched aftermath, and it was a job into which he threw his entire being. Hoover’s gift was managerial. He keenly understood the bureaucratic roadblocks that made such a task nearly impossible, so he began by decentralizing the execution of rescue and relief efforts by ceding power to local Red Cross chapters. This not only sped reaction time and saved money, but in the case of scandal, “would put responsibility squarely on the local community and not the national organization (1998, 274).”

There would be no lack of scandal.

At the time, tens of thousands of blacks lived in the Delta as tenant farmers. They were generally treated poorly by their white neighbors, but in some areas blacks had become quite successful and integrated into a larger social existence. The flood would destroy this progress.

As the river continued to rise, voluntary work on the levees in some towns transitioned into the compulsory. Whites would drive around towns rounding up blacks, who were then pressed into work gangs (often under threat of death) and forced to work 12 hour shifts while armed white guards patrolled their progress.  Lifting wet sandbags was no easy task–they could weigh up to 80 pounds when wet–but this hardly mattered. Those who struggled were simply introduced to the butt of a rifle, or, worse, shot and thrown over the levee into the angry waters of the Mississippi. Their payment, if they got paid at all, was less than what whites were paid to do for the same work. Oftentimes their efforts were simply credited to their food bills, making it nearly impossible to save enough spare cash to escape the levee camps and start life afresh. And all this to say nothing of the racketeering by whites who charged blacks for supplies that were supposed to have been freely given by the Red Cross.

While tragic, the situation would get worse. There were charges of rape and murder in some levee camps, and as Mississippi waters would recede,

a surge of violence erupted against blacks. In Little Rock, a black man allegedly attacked two girls. He was tied to an automobile and dragged through downtown streets crowded at rush hour, trailed by a dozen cars blowing their horns like celebrants of a football victory. Then he was thrown onto a pyre and incinerated; photographs showed police officers watching (1998, 329).

Elsewhere, mobs burned, lynched, and hung blacks.

Hoover, for all his skill in managing the momentous relief effort, couldn’t restrain nor contain these growing injustices. In order to investigate the abuses (he was essentially forced to do so by a growing national effort of black newspapermen), he created a “Colored Advisory Commission” (CAC) which was tasked with examining the charges of misconduct. Though this commission found rampant abuse in several levee and relief work camps, the reports given to Hoover were tempered by the man chosen to head the CAC, Robert Moton.

Moton was the head of the famed Tuskegee Institute. He was a conciliatory man, appointed to the head of the CAC by Hoover precisely because Hoover’s self-denial couldn’t allow that blacks were being mistreated. Moreover, Moton could be counted on to not rock the boat, and he added a degree of credibility to Hoover’s reports that would silence Hoover’s critics in the papers. But Moton could be hardly blamed–in a tacit exchange for downplaying these abuses, Hoover dangled a carrot in front of him: given the magnitude and scope of the flood, holding destitute black farmers to old debts on land and supplies that no longer existed hardly made sense. There was a chance, Hoover suggested, that these old debts would be wiped away, allowing thousands of blacks to begin afresh–free from a legacy of debt-bondage.

Hoover, however, had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Moton’s services, while valuable, were relatively inconsequential…or so he thought. Hoover was, by now, the Republican presidential nominee, and he hardly worried about the black vote, for

[i]n presidential politics it had always belonged to the Republican nominee. Lincoln had freed the slaves. Democrats had destroyed Reconstruction, enacted the Jim Crow laws, stripped the vote from blacks, opposed antilynching legislation. Only four years before, the Democratic National Convention had voted down a resolution condemning the Klan (1998, 412-13).

Hoover, however, was playing fast and loose. As a lily-white Republican presence burgeoned in the South, he became less concerned about the role of black voters, and would snub a number of leaders in the black community during the lead-up to his election. Though he won handily, the damage, when coupled with Hoover’s role in the tragic abuses of the 1927 flood relief programs (of which he was certainly complicit) and the fortuitous lies told to Moton about assisting the plight of black subsistence farmers (which had now been leaked to black presses), was now complete. Hoover had birthed a deep wedge in the traditional alliance between blacks and Republicans. It was a wedge that would grow to unbelievable proportions.

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It is difficult to understate the damage that Hoover did to the relationship between blacks and the Republican party. At a time when he could have become a national hero, he became a figure of failure, impotent in both his social and economic efforts.

Today, blacks vote solidly Democratic. As the two graphs below demonstrate, both in Presidential voting and in party identification, blacks have eschewed almost all ties to the party of Lincoln in favor of freer, Democratic pastures.

By the time Dr. King was leading Civil Rights marches, the good people willing to take a stand weren’t Republicans but Democrats. And whereas Republicans simply counted on the unquestionable loyalty of blacks after the Civil War–largely denying them integration into their political institutions (I say largely because Theodore Roosevelt at least made a half-hearted attempt to dialogue with blacks as President)–Democrats eventually included and became intimately involved in the plight of blacks, championing a cause that rewarded them with a monolithic base of support.

Statistically, the strength of this relationship is straightforwardly demonstrated by examining feeling thermometer scores (a type of question which asks a respondent to rank how they feel about a person on a 0-100 scale).

The two figures below represent regression outputs from both 1980 and 2008 National Election Studies survey data. The intercept of either equation is simply the feeling thermometer score of how a non-white, non-black independent feels about both the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates (each candidate has its own intercept because they represent two separate regressions). To find out how blacks feel towards the Democratic candidate, you add the number found under the Intercept coefficient heading  for the Democratic candidate (b = 47.5)  to the number which corresponds to “black” (b = 17.262). To this number, 64.8, you simply add the mean values of the other control variables (they are not pictured here for brevity’s sake), and you are then left with what the effect of being black–holding all else constant–has on the feeling score of a Democratic candidate. In the case of this example, black individuals feel about 68 points out of 100 towards the Democratic candidate, or, in other words, he or she feels relatively positively disposed towards the candidate. The stars represent levels of statistical significance, and, in both election years, the variable “black” is significant at the .01 level–meaning we can be relatively confident that this relationship is not random or artificial.

By doing some simple math and following the steps that I previously described, I can then find the values for how being black or white affects how each might view candidates in both the 1980 and 2008 elections. Pictured below are these scores:

As you can see, blacks give Democratic candidates massive boosts to their feeling scores, in both elections preferring the Democratic candidate to the Republican by significant margins. But why does this matter?

Simply, such scores are important because they undergird eventual voter decisions at the ballot box. Perceptive preferences, studies show, beget behavior (Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg 1998). And in the case of black voters, it is easy to see how they have so solidly voted Democratically over the last half century. Answering “why” blacks have voted this way is truly beyond this scope of this short article, but in many respects, the history of President Hoover’s actions and the inability of the Republican party to meaningful fold the needs and demands of black voters into the larger Republican base surely have much to do with the lack of black support for Republican candidates. And while the election of Barack Obama was a clear indicator that America is slowly beginning to realize Dr. King’s vision, that one party would engender such lopsided support by a racial group also suggests that our political institutions have not yet accomplished that dream.

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The above post draws much of its historical material from the fantastic book, Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Additional information above the statistical effects of race and party affiliation will appear in a forthcoming post.

Dijksterhuis, Ap and Ad van Knippenberg 1998. “The Relation between Perception and Behavior, or How to Win a Game of Trivial Pursuit.” Journal of Personality  and  Social  Psychology. 74: 865 – 877.

Barry, John. 1998. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. Simon and Schuster.