August 21, 1947: Senator Theodore Bilbo dies of oral cancer in New Orleans. He was 69, and would be missed only by people who were as racist as he was.
Theodore Gilmore Bilbo was born on October 13, 1877 in Juniper Grove, in the Panhandle of Mississippi, near the State Line with Louisiana. His father was a Confederate veteran and the vice president of a bank. He went to a college that was later absorbed by Vanderbilt University in Nashville, and to Vanderbilt's law school. He was elected to the Mississippi State Senate in 1907.
By 1910, he had already endured 3 things that, given the place and the time, should have ended his career. First, he nearly lost a teaching job when he was accused of "being overly familiar with a female student." Second, he left Vanderbilt Law without graduating because he was accused of cheating. And third, in 1910 -- before the passage of the 17th Amendment, meaning U.S. Senators were still elected by State legislatures -- he told a grand jury that he had accepted a bribe to switch his vote. By one vote, he avoided expulsion.
Nevertheless, he was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1911 and Governor in 1915. By the standards of most States, he was a good Governor, advancing reforms in education, banking and health care. He even passed a law against public hangings. Nevertheless, he admitted he was powerless to enforce this law, and the lynchings of black men for even minor offenses continued.
At the time, Mississippi's State Constitution prohibited Governors from serving a 2nd consecutive term. (It now allows 2 consecutive terms, but not 3.) So Bilbo ran for the U.S. House of Representatives, but lost the Democratic Primary. Given the South's hatred for the Republican Party as "the Party of Lincoln," winning the Democratic Primary, for any office in any Southern State, was then said to be "tantamount to election."
Things got worse for Bilbo. His Lieutenant Governor, Lee M. Russell, had won the 1919 election to succeed him as Governor. Russell's secretary sued him for seducing and impregnating her. She got an abortion that prevented her from having further children.
Russell talked Bilbo into trying to talk the woman into dropping her suit. He failed. The judge ordered Bilbo to submit documents for the case. He refused. He was held for contempt of court, and spent 10 days in jail. Somehow, Russell won the suit, although he never ran for office again, sold real estate and practiced law, and died in 1943. Bilbo ran for Governor again in 1923, and, still tarred by the scandal, lost. At the age of 46, that should have been the end of his political career.
And yet, in 1927, he ran for Governor again, and won. He infuriated people by attempting to move the University of Mississippi, a.k.a. "Ole Miss," from Oxford to the State capital of Jackson. He tried again in 1930, firing the Presidents of Ole Miss, Mississippi A&M (which became Mississippi State in 1932) and the Mississippi State College for Women (which became the Mississippi University for Women in 1974), doing so strictly for political reasons, not for cause. He angered people again later in 1930, introducing a State sales tax, making Mississippi the 1st State to do so. It did help make things a little easier in a State hit very hard by the Great Depression.
For most of the 20th Century, nearly every Southerner elected to the U.S. Senate had been his State's Governor first. In 1934, Bilbo followed this path. But despite a career with enough missteps to make a Louisiana politician blush, he made a national reputation as the most pro-segregation member in the Senate's history.
He also opposed many of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal reforms, even those that seemed designed to help the rural South, and did, because they helped black people as well as white people. He was also anti-labor union and isolationist. Like most pre-civil rights Southern Democrats, he acted a lot more like a modern Republican than like a modern Democrat.
Like some later Senators -- Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Ted Cruz of Texas come to mind -- Bilbo even ticked off people who should have been his allies. In 1936, the other Senator from Mississippi, Pat Harrison, recommended a local Judge to FDR for a federal judgeship. Bilbo had previously feuded with him, and delivered a 5-hour speech against him. He ended up being the only Senator to vote against the Judge. Harrison then faced a primary challenge. Bilbo supported Harrison's opponent, who lost.
The next year, Joseph T. Robinson of Arkansas, who had been the Democratic nominee for Vice President in 1928, died in office, and the Senate thus needed a new Majority Leader. The choice came down to Harrison and another Southerner, Alben Barkley of Kentucky. Harrison's campaign manager asked Bilbo to support Harrison. Bilbo said he would do so only if Harrison asked him personally. The manager reported this back to Harrison, who said, "Tell the son of a bitch I wouldn't speak to him even if it meant the Presidency of the United States!" Bilbo voted for Barkley, who won by 1 vote, 38-37.
Harrison died in office in 1941. Barkley would be elected Vice President with Harry Truman in 1948.
But it is on the issue of race that Bilbo is still remembered. He said that, regardless of the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, black people should not be allowed to vote anywhere in America, and he supported "Jim Crow" laws that violated those Amendments in Southern States. In 1938, he proposed an amendment to a federal work-relief bill, which, if passed, would have attempted to lower the unemployment rate by deporting 12 million black Americans to the African nation of Liberia.
It wasn't just black people he hated: In 1946, in the wake of World War II, he wrote to General Douglas MacArthur, the military Governor of occupied Japan, saying that the Japanese should "all be sterilized." All 77 million of them. MacArthur did not act on this suggestion.
That year, running for a 3rd term, he appeared on the NBC radio show Meet the Press (which moved to television in 1947 and is still on the air), saying that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, saying, "No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that." Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, once a Senator from Alabama, and later Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, both went on to leave the Klan and build records that became pro-civil rights.
Based on a request by liberal Democratic Senator Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, the newly elected Republican majority in the Senate refused to seat Bilbo for the term to which he was elected, because of his speeches. He was believed to have incited violence against blacks who wanted to vote in the South. In addition, a committee found that he had, yet again, taken bribes. One contractor gave him a Cadillac for Christmas in 1946.
A filibuster by Southerners threatened to delay the seating of all the new Senators. It was resolved when a supporter proposed that Bilbo's credentials remain on the table while he returned to Mississippi to seek medical treatment for cancer.
Bilbo retired to his "Dream House" estate in Poplarville, Mississippi, not far from his birthplace of Juniper Grove. There, figuring he was dying, wrote a book that essentially served as his final testimony: Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. On August 21, 1947, with his Senate case not yet resolved, he died. The Dream House burned down later in the year, with the fire consuming many copies of the book. Perhaps it was poetic justice.
Later still in 1947, the film Gentleman's Agreement was released. Although it addressed anti-Semitism rather than anti-black racism, Bilbo was mentioned in it, as an exemplar of bigotry.
The special election to fill his seat was won by John C. Stennis. From 1947 until 1978, Mississippi had 2 Senators, Stennis and James O. Eastland, who were officially Democrats, but as conservative as any Republican, including on race, although they weren't dumb enough to "say the quiet part out loud," like Bilbo was.
Eastland, who had won the special election to fill Harrison's seat, retired before the 1978 election, and lived until 1986. His seat was won by Thad Cochran, a moderate by Mississippi standards. He served 40 years, resigning for health reasons in 2018, and he died the next year. Elected to replace him was Cindy Hyde-Smith, a former Democrat who switched parties over race, and was a member of neo-Confederate groups.
Stennis retired before the 1988 election, and lived until 1995. He was succeeded by Trent Lott, who had previously been in the House, having been chief of staff to Dixiecrat William Colmer, and running after his 1972 retirement, having switched to the Republicans over race. He became Senate Majority Leader in 1996, but got himself in trouble with racist remarks, and retired in 2006. His seat was won by Roger Wicker, a former aide to Lott, who is a moderate by Republican standards.
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August 21, 1947 was a Thursday. These baseball games were played that day:
* The New York Yankees beat the Cleveland Indians, 9-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Bill Bevens outpitched Don Black. Billy Johnson went 4-for-5 with a home run and 2 RBIs. Joe DiMaggio went 0-for-5, but had an RBI on a sacrifice fly.
* The New York Giants beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 4-1 at the Polo Grounds. For the Pirates, Hank Greenberg, in his last few weeks as an active player, went 0-for-4, and Ralph Kiner, something of a protégé to him, went 0-for-3 with a walk.
* The Brooklyn Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds, 8-1 at Ebbets Field. Jackie Robinson went 1-for-4.
* The Boston Braves swept a doubleheader from the Chicago Cubs, 8-2 and 6-4 at Braves Field in Boston.
* A doubleheader was split at Shibe Park in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Phillies won the opener, 9-2. The St. Louis Cardinals won the nightcap, 13-3. Stan Musial went 0-for-3 with a walk, then hit 2 home runs and had 5 RBIs.
* The Washington Senators swept a doubleheader from the Detroit Tigers, 3-2 and 5-3 at Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) in Detroit.
* The Chicago White Sox beat the Boston Red Sox, 3-2 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Ted Williams went 1-for-3 with a walk.
* And the Philadelphia Athletics beat the St. Louis Browns, 8-5 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
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