On May 27, 1947, predictably, an all-white jury found all the defendants not guilty. The New York Times and Washington Post ran editorials denouncing the verdict. “At least in that part of South Carolina, it’s all right for a mob to take the law into its own hands and to commit murder—provided its victim is Negro,” the Post stated. “That’s the way they want it here. And they want no interference from the world outside.” Governor Thurmond’s role in the case left him unscathed. He was praised by outsiders for seeking justice, and excused by white constituents satisfied with the verdict.
Seven months later, Harry Truman gave his 1948 State of the Union address, his kickoff to the election season, calling for civil rights for all Americans. To white southerners like the Earle jury, it was a direct attack.
In the 1948 presidential contest, black Americans were hoping to vote in greater numbers than ever before. By the NAACP’s estimate, the number of black voters registered in the South rose by 700,000 to 800,000 leading up to 1948. Harry Truman, Thomas Dewey, and Henry Wallace were fighting for the black vote. Strom Thurmond was fighting to hang on to the past. Thurmond’s presidential run would be a historic litmus test—of federal versus state power, of black southerners’ ability to exercise their right to vote, and of the Democratic Party’s hold over the South.
19
“They Are Simply a ‘Red Herring’”
ON JULY 31 TRUMAN LEFT the White House at 12:45 p.m., bound for National Airport, where he boarded the president’s airplane—the Sacred Cow. He was flying to New York to dedicate the new Idlewild Airport. The event would give the US military the opportunity to showcase cutting-edge American aerial technology, before a crowd of some 215,000 people.
Everything about the ceremony was outsize. The navy flew in a group of Washington officials aboard a Lockheed Constellation—the largest air transporter in the world. Truman stood among political luminaries watching the largest display of airpower ever seen in peacetime, as the fastest airplanes streaked by at six hundred miles per hour, and the world’s biggest bombers—the new B-36 and the B-50—dove from the blue sky.
For the president, the scene was a reminder of the power of human curiosity and the speed of innovation. He had grown up in a horse-and-buggy world. He had fought in World War I when he was in his thirties, riding on horseback. Today he was watching some nine hundred airships thunder over an “airplane city”—Idlewild, now the largest public airport on earth.*
On a speaker’s platform, Truman shook the hand of his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. The president stood a couple of inches taller than the New York governor, and his white hair made him look old enough to be Dewey’s father. It would be the only time during 1948 that Truman and Dewey would meet face-to-face. With their hands clasped, their noses just inches apart, they smiled, an offering of genuine political sportsmanship, as the camera flashes popped around them.
Truman leaned over and whispered in Dewey’s ear, “Tom, when you get to the White House, for God’s sake, do something about the plumbing.”
At 4:05 p.m., Truman’s plane took off from Idlewild, flew to Washington, dropped off some passengers, and departed seven minutes after landing, bound for Missouri, where the president was to vote in the state’s Democratic primary—a formality, since he had already been nominated. While he was in flight, the most sensational domestic nonelection story of 1948 was breaking, in newspapers and over the radio.
On July 31, the day of Truman’s appearance at Idlewild, in the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in Washington, DC, the committee chairman J. Parnell Thomas of New Jersey called a meeting to order at 10:15 a.m. The committee figures sat in a row at one end of the room, eight men in ties, including the freshman Republican congressman Richard Nixon of California and his colleague, Republican Karl Mundt of South Dakota.
The committee was conducting hearings on what these congressmen believed to be an underground Communist conspiracy that was infiltrating the ranks of American government. Chairman Thomas called for the first witness of the day: Elizabeth Bentley, a Connecticut woman who—in earlier testimony—had admitted to spying for the Soviet Union. Bentley, forty, walked to the front of the room and sat at a table just a few feet from the row of congressmen who would be questioning her. Crowds filled the room behind her, and directly to her right, a soundman wearing earphones sat hunched over recording equipment. Wearing a plain black dress and a bow in her hair, Bentley looked like any American woman who might have walked in off the street.
“Miss Bentley,” Congressman Mundt said, “please stand and raise your right hand.”
Once Bentley was sworn to oath, Senator John E. Rankin of Mississippi took the floor. He pointed out that leaders of the Communist Party of the United States, Eugene Dennis and William Z. Foster, had been arrested in July on charges of advocating for the overthrow of the American government.
“That has been known to President Truman and Governor Dewey of New York all this time,” said Rankin. “It is about time that they got behind this committee and helped . . . drive these rats from the Federal, the State, and the municipal pay rolls.”
Under questioning, Bentley began to unravel her story: she had been wooed into the Communist Party USA in the late 1930s as “an average run-of-the-mill member,” she had cultivated relationships with people in government positions and had used them to “furnish information” to contacts within the Communist Party who were, she believed,
