Theodore G. Bilbo

Theodore Gilmore Bilbo (October 13, 1877 – August 21, 1947) was an American politician who twice served as governor of Mississippi (1916–20, 1928–32) and later was elected a U.S. Senator (1935–47). A lifelong Democrat, he was a filibusterer whose name was synonymous with white supremacy—like many Southern Democrats of his era, Bilbo believed that black people were inferior; he defended segregation and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, the US's most notable white supremacist terrorist organization. He also published a pro-segregation work, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.

Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo

Quotes

1910s

• I am utterly powerless. The State has no troops, and if the civil authorities at Ellisville are helpless, the States are equally so. Furthermore, excitement is at such a high pitch throughout South Mississippi that any armed attempt to interfere would doubtless result in the deaths of hundreds of persons. The negro has confessed, says he is ready to die, and nobody can keep the inevitable from happening.
  • Governor Bilbo's speech before the mob lynching of John Hartfield in Ellisville, Mississippi, on June 26, 1919 ^{[citation needed]}

• This is a white man's country, with a white man's civilization and any dream on the part of the Negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end.
  • In a statement arguing that would have been practically impossible to prevent Hartfield's lynching ^{[citation needed]}

1930s

• To defeat this measure, so help me God, I would be willing to speak every day of the year 1938.
  • In a speech opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• When once the flat-nosed Ethiopian, like the camel, gets his proboscis under the tent, he will overthrow the established order of our Saxon civilization.
  • In reference to NAACP head Walter White in a speech opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• If you succeed in the passage of this bill, you will open the floodgates of hell in the South. Raping, mobbing, lynching, race riots, and crime will be increased a thousandfold; and upon your garments and the garments of those who are responsible for the passage of the measure will be the blood of the raped and outraged daughters of Dixie, as well as the blood of the perpetrators of these crimes that the red-blooded Anglo-Saxon white Southern men will not tolerate.
  • In a speech opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• It is essential to the perpetuation of our Anglo-Saxon civilization that white supremacy be maintained, and to maintain our civilization there is only one solution, and that is either by segregation within the United States, or by deportation of the entire Negro race to its native heath, Africa.
  • In a speech opposing a Senate anti-lynching bill on January 21, 1938 ^{[citation needed]}

• It is the height of folly to assume that environment, discipline, education, and all other external devices can affect the blood, smooth down inequalities between individuals of the same breed, much less between different breeds, or transmute racial qualities... The Germans appreciate the importance of race values. They understand that racial improvement is the greatest asset that any country can have...They know, as few other nations have realized, that the impoverishment of race values contributes more to the impairment and destruction of a civilization than any other agency.”
  • In a May 24, 1938 speech proposing legislation to return US blacks to Africa ^{[citation needed]}

• It is further a plan of the almighty that the Negroes may be transferred back to the land of their forefathers.
  • In a speech on the Senate floor in April 1939 ^{[citation needed]}

1940s

• When this war is over and more than two million Negro soldiers, whose minds have been filled and poisoned with political and social equality stuff, return and ‘hell breaks out’ all over the country, I think I’ll get more help in settling the Negroes in Africa.
  • In a speech to the Mississippi State legislature on March 22, 1944 ^{[citation needed]}

• Of course, she did not understand my ultimate plan. If I can succeed eventually in resettling the great majority of Negroes in West Africa— and I propose to do it— I might entertain the proposition of crowning Eleanor queen of Greater Liberia.
  • In reference to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt’s opposition to his plan to repatriate blacks to West Africa, summer 1944

• “I continuously travel the United States and give my word from close examination that the birds behind all this social race equality stuff are Jews— from that rat Winchell to the most illiterate second-hand man."
  • An excerpt from a letter that came from a man Bilbo described as “an old friend of mine”, June 1945

• Do Senators propose that we spend $446,000 of the people’s money for 66 Negroes, 12 Jews, a few gentiles, and two Japs, just to be ‘lollypops’ for this country, ‘sugar boys’ going around pacifying?
  • In the second debate over appropriations for the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC), June 1945

• I have just heard this Sunday night’s broadcast by you, the most limicolous liar and notorious scandalizing kike radio commentator of today.
  • Bilbo's reply to criticism from radio commentator Walter Winchell, summer 1945

• There are five million Jews in the United States and the majority of them are fine public citizens, but if Jews of your type don’t quit sponsoring and fraternizing with the Negro race you are going to arouse so much opposition that they will get a very strong invitation to pack up and resettle in Palestine, the homeland of the Jews, just as we propose to provide for the voluntary resettlement of the American Negro in West Africa their fatherland. Now do not pop-off and say I am in favor of sending the Jews to Palestine. What I am trying to say to you is that there are just a few of you New York ‘kikes’ that are fraternizing and socializing with the Negroes for selfish and political reasons and if you keep it up you will arouse the opposition of the better class of your race.
  • To Leonard Golditch, executive secretary of the National Committee to Combat Anti-Semitism in 1945 ^{[citation needed]}

• Its purpose is to plant the seeds of devilment and trouble-breeding in the days to come in the mind and heart of every American Negro ... It is the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece of writing that I have ever seen in print. I would hate to have a son or daughter of mine permitted to read it; it is so filthy and so dirty. But it comes from a Negro, and you cannot expect any better from a person of his type.
  • Bilbo's denunciation of Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, on the Senate floor in 1945 ^{[citation needed]}

• I am ready to wage the most strenuous fight of my life to defeat the Fair Employment Practices Commission, the anti-poll tax bill, the anti-lynching bill, and the $4 billion loan to England...If you draft Negro boys into the army, give them three good meals a day, a good uniform and let them shoot craps and drink liquor around the barracks for a year, they won’t be worth a tinker’s damn thereafter.
  • In an announcement that he would seek re-election in 1946 ^{[citation needed]}

• I call on every red-blooded white man to use any means to keep the niggers away from the polls[;] if you don’t understand what that means you are just plain dumb. I’m calling on every red-blooded American who believes in the superiority and integrity of the white race to get out and see that no nigger votes...and the best time to do that is the night before!”
  • In a speech to his white supporters during his successful re-election campaign in June of 1946 ^{[citation needed]}

• No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux.
  • On the radio program “Meet the Press.”

• I deny that I exhorted, agitated, and made any inflammatory appeals to the passions and prejudices of the white population to foster, stimulate, inspire, create and intensify a state of acute and aggravated tension between the white and Negro races in the state of Mississippi... I want to say right here off the record that the Negroes of Mississippi have never had a better friend.
  • United States Senate, 79th Congress, 2nd session, Hearings Before the Special Committee to Investigate Senatorial Campaign Expenditures

• I am honestly against the social intermingling of Negroes and Whites but I hold nothing personal against the Negroes as a race. They should be proud of their God-given heritage just as I am proud of mine. I believe Negroes should have the right [to indiscriminate use of the ballot], and in Mississippi too— when their main purpose is not to put me out of office and when they won't try to besmirch the reputation of my state.
  • Deathbed statement made to Leon Louis, the editor of the black newspaper Negro South ^{[citation needed]}

Take Your Choice, Separation or Mongrelization (1946)

• The principle of segregation of the White and Negro races in the South is so well known that it requires no definition. Briefly and plainly stated, the object of this policy is to prevent the two races from meeting on terms of social equality. By established practice, each race maintains its own institutions and promotes its own social life.
  • Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

• What is the real issue at stake? Why this determination on the part of the South to maintain the color line and to fight back with all her strength against the combined efforts of certain groups in our Nation, white and black, to break down segregation and to destroy Southern ideals and customs? The answer is simple. The South stands for blood, for the preservation of the blood of the white race. To preserve her blood, the white South must absolutely deny social equality to the Negro regardless of what his individual accomplishments might be. This is the premise - openly and frankly stated - upon which Southern policy is based. This position is so thoroughly justified in the minds of white Southerners that it is sometimes difficult for them to comprehend the reasoning of those who seriously dispute it.
  • Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

• If we sit with Negroes at our tables, if we attend social functions with them as our social equals, if we disregard segregation in all other relations, is it then possible that we maintain it fixedly in the marriage of the South's Saxon sons and daughters? The answer must be "No." By the absolute denial of social equality to the Negro, the barriers between the races are firm and strong. But if the middle wall of the social partition should be broken down, then the mingling of the tides of life would surely begin. It would be a slow process, but the result would be the same. And though the process be gradual, it would be none the less irresistible and inevitable. The lower strata of the white population would probably feel the first effects, and within the foreseeable future the middle and upper classes would be invaded. Then, the Southern White race, the Southern Caucasian, would be irretrievably doomed.
  • Chapter Four: Southern Segregation and the Color Line.

Quotes about Bilbo

• Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, white elites outside the South—defined here as leading daily newspapers, weekly magazines, organizations, and political leaders—largely ignored Bilbo’s racist incitements.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)
• Stripped to his shirtsleeves, wearing a flaming red necktie with a diamond stickpin, he campaigned with a contagious passion, whipping crowds into frenzied excitement with his denunciations of ‘Wall Streeters,’ entrenched political interest groups, corporate monopolies and the establishment press.
  • Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 219.

• Hypnotic in his power, a master of invective, and making astute use of his familiarity with the Bible, he swayed the white tenants, small planters and the bankrupt with his assaults on Wall Street...Like Huey Long of Louisiana, his stronghold is the rural sections. There he is hailed as a courageous and unfailing defender, and his public appearances have the flavor of revival meetings.
  • New York Times, September 30, 1934.

• Last week, in the Senate, Theodore Bilbo finally cut loose with his first unprovoked outburst of rabble rousing... Hardly a newspaper reported it.
  • Newsweek, June 6, 1938. While the article described Bilbo’s proposal to return blacks to Africa in unflattering terms, it ignored important segments of the speech, particularly Bilbo’s praise of German racial theories. Moreover, Bilbo’s plan received precious little attention elsewhere in the white press.

• While some 500 Negroes listened with sympathetic interest in the public galleries, Senator Bilbo of Mississippi today urged Federal aid for colonization of large numbers of that race in Liberia.
  • New York Times, April 25, 1939. Time ran an article on the speech, but its tone was more mocking than condemning. The only other mention in the white press came in a small New York Times piece, buried on page 16. Again, Bilbo’s black repatriation proposal drew little attention and even less condemnation.

• He was out of office for three years, then won election to the Senate. There he has seldom spoken on national affairs.
  • New York Times, September 1, 1940. Bilbo ran for re-election to the Senate in 1940, defeating former Governor Hugh White in the Democratic primary in August. The Times still described Bilbo as an obscure member, not mentioning his militant defense of white supremacy or the black repatriation bill.

• Furthermore, Bilbo’s racism did not seem to bother his fellow Democrats. Following his primary victory in 1940, he stumped for his party brethren in fifteen states during the fall campaign. Bilbo gave the keynote address to the Young Democrats of New York. Senator Joseph Guffey of Pennsylvania, noting that Bilbo’s speeches were well received in the Keystone State, called him "tops among Southern statesman as a campaigner." In addition to Pennsylvania and New York, Bilbo campaigned in several other states where Democrats competed for black votes. For instance, then-senator Harry S. Truman often relied on the African American vote in Kansas City and St. Louis. Still, Truman—who would desegregate the military less than a decade later—campaigned with Bilbo in Missouri. After his re-election, the future president wrote to Bilbo, “Can’t thank you enough for what you did in Missouri.”
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Furthermore, elites often expressed or ignored other forms of bigotry. Anti-Italian sentiment, while less acceptable than anti-black sentiment, could still be seen in major news publications before the war. Indeed, this rhetoric appeared in descriptions of the most popular Italian-American of the day, New York Yankees star Joe DiMaggio...Similarly, anti-Semitism frequently went ignored within the larger culture.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• World War II, however, brought about a significant change in elite attitudes. Due to the ideological war against Nazism, America’s emergence as a superpower, and the unifying nature of the conflict, the kind of virulent public racism that was a trademark of Bilbo’s career was no longer tolerated outside of the South. Bilbo’s career, from his return to the governor’s mansion in 1928 through the Senate debate over his seating in 1947, parallels and illustrates the declining tolerance of overt racism and nativism in the United States.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Bilbo’s racism continued to be ignored during the first two years of the war, even though he led filibusters against anti-poll tax legislation in 1942 and 1943. Bilbo’s rhetoric, however, began to receive attention in the spring of 1944.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Between the spring of 1944 and the summer of 1946, changing perceptions of racism and nativism transformed Theodore Bilbo from an unremarkable southern senator to a national, and indeed, international symbol of bigotry. His anti-black rhetoric, which had changed little since the late 1920s, became an outrage outside of the South as white elites became more conscious of the contradiction between American ideals and American practice. His anti-Italian and anti-Semitic statements, which appeared to be a relatively new part of his rhetorical arsenal, were especially unwelcome in the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Dr. Goebbels himself could not have hewed more faithfully to Nazi racial doctrines...Is there any possible reason then for keeping at the head of the District of Columbia a man who is using Hitlerian doctrine to disrupt national unity and sow seeds of discord and make our democracy appear ridiculous before the world?... So long as Mississippi wishes this kind of representation in the Senate the preponderant majority of citizens who believe in democracy and tolerance, live and let live, will have to endure it.
  • Washington Post, March 23, 1944.

• We believe there are days when Washington, as the Nation’s capital, should set an example to the Nation and the world, that persons in high positions, such as the chairman of your committee, should show calm, reasoned and sound judgment, together with a clear understanding of our American way of life.
  • Washington Post, March 25, 1944. Ten leading white Washington clergymen had petitioned the Senate District of Columbia Committee for Bilbo’s removal as chairman. For the first time, whites were suggesting that Bilbo’s rhetoric made him unfit to hold public office.

• The Senator is as much surprised as anybody over the notoriety achieved by his proposal to send Negroes to Africa. For that scheme had become a cold potato until revived by the furor among his excited critics when he mentioned it recently. He proposed it as a Senate bill in 1939 and it died a very natural death. He did not even bother to reintroduce it in subsequent sessions. But now it is given the dignity of controversy—something it never possessed before. The same sort of thing applies to the Senator’s recent speech before the Mississippi legislature. He undoubtedly has been making the same speech, off and on for years. The feverish reception accorded it here in the District must be the source of profound gratification to Senator Bilbo... Senator Bilbo is a duly constituted representative of the voters of Mississippi and they have supported him rather faithfully for over three decades. It is a waste of effort to quarrel with Senator Bilbo over his views or with the fact that he is here.
  • Washington Star, March 25, 1944.

• From the opening until the final passage vote, debate was conducted with a bluntness as to racial questions which appeared to surprise and at times astound observers in the visitor’s galleries.
  • New York Times, June 21, 1944, in reference to Bilbo's remarks during the first debate over appropriations for the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC). The Times had ignored earlier instances of Bilbo’s racism.

• The FEPC appropriation was sustained today, after a vicious, dirty speech by Bilbo, who was hissed from the galleries and deserved it.
  • Allen Drury, A Senate Journal: 1943–1945 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 200.

• Senator Bilbo’s exhibition last Thursday made it appear that at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives we had destroyed Hitler’s racial obscenity in Europe only to have it parade in all its shameless arrogance at the very center of our democracy...Perhaps we should warn the other nations that Bilbo is an atavistic survival and not an effective symbol of American democracy...the challenge is nothing less than to extirpate from American public life all the evil intolerance that Bilbo and [Representative John] Rankin personify.”
  • The Nation, July 7, 1945, p. 2.

• Bilbo is a one-man chamber of horrors, an unanswerable argument in favor of elimination of an obscene evil from a free society of men.
  • The Nation, August 4, 1945, p. 101.

• But elsewhere in the nation, still with fresh memory of the savagery against European minorities, there was a murmuring of real concern. . . . he [Bilbo] had chosen the aftermath of a war against the Nazis to invoke mob invective against ‘dagos’ and ‘kikes’ who had urged equal opportunity for the Negro.
  • Newsweek, August 6, 1945, p. 39.

• Your conduct is a chilling deterrent to the world-wide belief that America is the symbol of democracy and human rights.
  • New York Times, August 10, 1945. The Committee of Catholics for Human Rights was among a number of groups who also sharply criticized Bilbo.

• For a long time now we have engaged in a long and bloody war to wipe out a regime which fostered racial antagonism . . . . Statements insulting to one or more of the many diverse groups which make up our great nation are a disservice to the principles on which this nation was founded and to those of our boys of all races and creeds who during the past few years have fought and in all too many instances died for the preservation of these principles.
  • New York Times, August 10, 1945. A statement by Senators Robert F. Wagner and James Mead of New York.

• Proceedings [on removal] as soon as possible so that the people of our nation may retain the fruits of the victory which we have gained in the successful waging of war against Hitlerism, fascism, and Japanese militarism.
  • New York Times, August 16, 1945. The Communist Party was one of a number of groups that used the new anti-Bilbo rhetoric to call for his removal, passing a resolution to do so on August 15.

• I am one of those unfortunates whose kids did not come back [from the war], and there were thousands of them, Catholic, Protestant and Jews, Negro and white, who died to keep this sweet land free. I hate and despise those bigots, like the nefarious Senator Bilbo of Mississippi.
  • New York state senator Lazarus Joseph, August 17, 1945.

• I would gladly give Bilbo and Rankin to the other side. Speaking personally, I’d be glad to see them both out of public life altogether.
  • Jimmy Roosevelt, March 1, 1946.

• It’s been six years since the voters have seen him, six years since they elected him as their senior senator to Congress. In that time, he has made himself known throughout the nation. Indeed, his infamy has spread across the high seas. In Germany, today, citizens of the Reich sometimes ask the American military, ‘What kind of man is this Senator Bilbo?’
  • Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1946, p. 18. As Bilbo began his bid for re-election, the Saturday Evening Post, traditionally an organ of small-town American conservatism, published a cover story on Bilbo entitled, “Bilbo: America’s Worst Demagogue Runs Again.” The story called Bilbo “America’s most notorious merchant of hatred.” The magazine had supported immigration restriction on racialist grounds in the 1920s and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 due to his anti-communism. Now, in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, the journal condemned Bilbo. The attitudes of white elites, both liberal and conservative, were changing.

• We have considered filing a petition to oust him [Bilbo] by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, senators cannot begin denouncing other senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not on the same basis as any other senator that I know of.
  • Saturday Evening Post, June 29, 1946, p. 19. Prior to 1946 most of the political opposition to Bilbo had come from liberals such as Robert Wagner of New York. However, in March 1946 Life quoted Senator Robert Taft of Ohio, the conservative leader of the Senate Republicans, as referring to Bilbo as “a disgrace to the Senate.” Taft wrote to a constituent in June indicating that while he did not yet support an effort to remove Bilbo, he appeared very close to approving one.

• When Bilbo went home to campaign in the summer of 1946, he faced a dramatically different situation from that of 1940. Northern and border state Democrats no longer wished to campaign with him. An extraordinarily broad coalition of elites— including both the Nation and the Saturday Evening Post, the Communist Party and the Jewish War Veterans, Robert Wagner and Robert Taft— desired and/or seriously considered his expulsion from the Senate.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• But it took more than just a change in white attitudes to bring down Bilbo. A more energized black civil rights movement emerged from World War II as many African Americans, having fought for democracy abroad, demanded changes at home...Indeed, the remarkable courage of southern blacks who tried to vote during the 1946 election despite the threat of violence—along with pressure from the NAACP and black newspapers—was key to Bilbo’s removal. The changing attitudes of white elites, however, also helped to seal “The Man’s” fate.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• In the end, Bilbo defeated his four opponents, garnering fifty-one percent of the vote to avoid a runoff and win re-election to a third term. Although Bilbo’s opponents shared his views on segregation, the attacks by northern politicians and newspapers had allowed “The Man” to portray himself, in classic southern tradition, as defending Mississippi’s way of life against outside interference... Indeed, Bilbo achieved his broadest geographic support ever, winning seventy-six out of eighty-two counties, including all but one in the Delta, the traditional center of anti-Bilbo sentiment.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Thousands who voted for him would have preferred to cast their ballots for a candidate of finer character and better qualification. . .. But the major issues in her senatorial campaign were shaped by outside extremists and propagandists of demagogue stripe whose stupid tactics made Bilbo’s election all but inevitable from the campaign start. The Senator shrewdly capitalized and exploited their stupidity.
  • New Orleans Time-Picayune, July 4, 1946.

• I heartily indorse [sic] the stand you have taken against the Social Equality of the negros.
  • Bilbo papers, Box 932, Folder 5. A letter written by a white man from Mississippi on June 18, 1946.

• I thank God that there are men like you who are not afraid to tell the truth about the past.
  • Bilbo papers, Box 945, Folder 5. A letter written by a white Winnetka, Illinois, man in reference to Bilbo’s black repatriation proposal.

• You are a menace to democracy and to the people defending it.
  • Bilbo papers, Box 1037, Folder 1. A letter written by a World War II veteran on June 23, 1946.

• I see Mississippi had disgraced itself again.
  • Bilbo papers, Folder 6, July 20, 1946.

• The attacks on Bilbo only intensified in August when he revealed his old Klan membership on the radio program “Meet the Press.” He was unrepentant... The reaction to his admission was another example of changing elite perceptions. Dixie Demagogues, published in 1939, had exposed Bilbo’s Klan membership but drawn little notice; in 1946, however, the Federation of Italian Americans and the Shriners joined the chorus demanding Bilbo’s removal.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• His endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and his boast of membership appear to have genuinely shocked many Senators.
  • The Nation, September 28, 1946, p. 341. Bilbo’s admission of his Klan ties also exacerbated his difficulties with his Senate colleagues.

• He has become so vile that the men who would sit with him in Congress can bear him no longer.
  • Amsterdam News, November 30, 1946. Amsterdam News was one of several black newspapers that were important in the anti-Bilbo effort.

• To those on the lowest rung of the ladder he does not offer a lift; he merely offers to create another rung, still lower, so that the progress of man will be a series of descending steps. This is the same sort of cheap thrill that was peddled in Germany by an ambitious house painter some ten years ago.
  • Cong. Rec., 80th Cong. 1 Sess., p. 13. A statement made by Glenn Taylor, the leading Democrat in the anti-Bilbo effort, during a debate over Bilbo’s seating in the 80th Congress that began on January 3, 1947.

• The same groups which for the past four years have been fighting Senator Bilbo and what he stands for are behind this movement. But instead of having the courage to come into the Senate and say, “Throw him out because of his views on the poll tax bill,” they have camouflaged the issue.
  • Cong. Rec., 80th Cong. 1 Sess., p. 78. A retort by Senator Allen Ellender during the debate over Bilbo’s seating.

• Virtually the entire national media supported the move against Bilbo. The Boston Globe, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times all editorialized in favor of his removal. In a sign that Bilbo’s support was declining in the South, the Atlanta-Journal Constitution strongly approved of his removal, although it cited the war profiteering charges rather than his racist incitements as its rationale.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• There are diverse opinions as to the parliamentary means of preventing Theodore Bilbo from taking or holding a seat in the United States Senate, but there can be no reasonable or honest doubt of his unfitness to do so.
  • Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 3, 1947.

• The Bilbo compromise reached by the Senate late Saturday afternoon was really a victory for those who carried on the fight against the Senator-elect.
  • New York Times, January 6, 1947. Democratic senators Clyde Hoey of North Carolina and Claude Pepper of Florida separately approached Bilbo about stepping aside. Bilbo appeared willing but said he needed his salary to pay for surgery for his throat cancer. As a result, the Senate agreed to delay action on certifying his credentials until his health allowed.

• The chances were very slim that he [Bilbo] would ever enter it [the Senate] again as a U.S. Senator.
  • New Republic, January 13, 1947, p. 6.

• The Senate ‘compromise,’ so-called, on the issue of Senator Bilbo’s admission, may be defended on the grounds of expediency, but not it seems to us, upon constitutional or moral grounds.
  • New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 7, 1947. Both sides felt the anti-Bilbo forces had succeeded.

• I am very sorry that you are physically unable to continue your ‘fight’ in Washington at this time. As I see it, our civilization is already in the evening twilight of its existence, and nothing can stop it.
  • Bilbo Papers, Box 957, Folder 1. A letter written by a white West Virginia woman who went on to praise his opposition to miscegenation on January 8, 1947.

• Like everybody in Mississippi, I have been watching the newspapers and listening to the radio and have kept up with you, and just want you to know that friends and foes alike are for you 1000%... In Kemper, Winston, and Sunflower counties I have heard, during the past week, a score or more men who have never voted for you in their lives say that if the election was being held now they would vote for you regardless of who opposed you.
  • Bilbo Papers, Box 957, Folder 9. A letter written by a white man from Jackson who commented on how the opposition of the national media and northeastern politicians continued to strengthen Bilbo's support in Mississippi, January 13, 1947.

• Bilbo never took his Senate seat again. He went to a New Orleans hospital to have surgery for throat cancer and died there six months later on August 21, 1947. In death, he was hailed as a hero by defenders of white supremacy and condemned as a symbol of racism by Jim Crow’s opponents.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Senator Bilbo died a martyr to southern traditions, and his name will long be remembered when those of his most bitter critics will be forgotten before they are cold in their graves.
  • New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 23, 1947. A statement by Senator Allen Ellender.

• We would be hard put to find a kinder word for Theodore G. Bilbo than the classic observation that he was not always as bad as he was sometimes.
  • The Nation, August 30, 1947, p. 195.

• News of Senator-Elect Theodore G. Bilbo’s death in New Orleans brought on unparalleled rejoicing throughout civilized America...bartenders throughout the country [are] giving free drinks with which to toast the end of four decades of racial hatred.
  • Richmond Afro-American, August 30, 1947.

• The Senate’s effort to deny Bilbo his seat was clear evidence of change. The war against Nazi Germany, the unifying effect of World War II, and America’s new role as the leader of the Western world altered elite attitudes outside of the South toward public racism. By 1947, such extreme rhetoric had become unacceptable from a major public figure.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

• Theodore G. Bilbo was perhaps the most controversial public figure on the national scene.... The extremism of his pronouncements on race relations had polarized much of the country... To the vast majority of southern whites, Bilbo had become the leading spokesman in the fight to preserve that section's structure of racial segregation from those who wanted to bring about racial equality. To liberal whites and blacks, on the other hand, Bilbo was America's most vicious race-baiter.
  • Charles Pope Smith, Theodore G. Bilbo's Senatorial Career. The Final Years: 1941–1947 (PhD dissertation, The University of Southern Mississippi, 1983), p. 249.

• Bilbo’s ejection was the official repudiation of the rotten southern political system based on racial hatred, the system that had kept southern congressmen in Washington for decades. Bilbo was a symbol of the past.
  • Truman Defeats Dewey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), p.104, by Gary Donaldson

• Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes.
  • Robert L. Fleegler, Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947 (Spring 2006)

External links

• Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938-1947