Passing Through the Ranks: North Carolina After WWI


Postwar America

The America of the postwar period was far different from the one that had entered the war in 1917. The divisions of Civil War and Reconstruction were partially bridged, and forty-eight united states emerged as a major world power. An exaggerated sense of patriotism expressed itself in a wave of "Pure Americanism," which implied superiority of the nation's traditional values. The "American Way" was associated with the white race, Protestant religion, conforming behavior, and free enterprise. Conversely, there was fear of and resistance to foreigners, non-Protestants, organized labor, political "isms," and new ideas. Vigilante-type organizations again stalked the land, and Afro-Americans remained second-class citizens.


Building a Political Dynasty: North Carolina After WWI

Paradoxically, an almost unbridled confidence pervaded political and economic policies, and progressive advances were made. Cameron Morrison, elected governor in 1920, crusaded for an extensive network of roads connecting the county seats and major towns, and, with the aid of a remarkably able and popular officer of the North Carolina Good Roads Association, Harriet Morehead Berry, won approval of a $50 million bond issue that paid for construction of six thousand miles of improved roads. Morrison's administration also increased expenditures for public education, including extending the school term to six months, strengthening teacher certification requirements, establishing a salary schedule for teachers, consolidating small schools, and aiding counties in the construction of school buildings.

If Morrison earned the title of the "Good Roads Governor," his successor, Angus Wilton McLean of Robeson County, deserved that of the "Businessman's Governor," for he modernized the administration of state government by creating new agencies, abolishing old ones, and reallocating functions of others. His most significant accomplishments were the establishment of the Budget Bureau, which assisted the governor in preparing a more realistic balanced budget for presentation to the General Assembly, and the creation of study commissions whose findings and recommendations were of value when the Great Depression occurred.

In 1928 the nomination of Alfred Emanuel Smith for the presidency split the Democratic party. Big-city bred, a wet, and a Catholic, Smith was on all three counts unacceptable to many Southerners, including Senator Simmons, whose defection contributed to his own defeat by Josiah William Bailey two years later. Herbert Hoover became the first Republican to win the state's electoral votes since 1872; two Republicans--Charles Andrew Jonas and George Moore Pritchard--were elected to the Congress; and a larger than normal delegation of Republicans was sent to the legislature. Oliver Max Gardner, however, remained loyal to the party and won the governorship by a comfortable margin.


A Transitory Time

As Gardner took office, farm prices were dropping, industrial workers were restless, and the states credit rating was precarious in light of the highest debt in history; Under these conditions, his program was only partially adopted. The legislature passed a workmen's compensation act (to be administered by the new Industrial Commission) and authorized the Australian (secret) ballot, but it refused to extend the school term to eight months. Gardner's troubles, moreover, were immensely aggravated by the October crash of the stock market, which signaled the beginning of the deepest economic depression ever suffered by the nation. Employment, wages, profits, and property values began dropping, followed quickly by a decrease in tax revenues.

The governor resisted the temptation to panic; instead of calling a special session of the legislature he commissioned the Brookings Institution to make a comprehensive study of state and local governments and to propose changes to improve efficiency. The institution's proposals were far-reaching, and not all of them were acceptable to Gardner. At his urging, however, the General Assembly of 1931 supported four fundamental changes in the operation of government: the state took over from the counties the responsibility for constructing and maintaining roads and for the operation of the six-month school term; a greater University of North Carolina was created by the consolidation of Woman's College at Greensboro, State College of Agriculture and Engineering at Raleigh, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Local Government Commission was given supervision over the borrowing practices of county and municipal governments. The state left ad valorem taxes to the use of local governments, while corporation taxes were increased at the state level. Finally, economies were adopted, including the reduction of salaries of state employees and teachers.

These bold actions, however, failed to halt the economic downturn, and John Christoph Blucher Ehringhaus of Elizabeth City assumed the governorship in 1933 in the midst of the nation's worst economic crisis. Employment, wages, prices, and profits were at rock-bottom, and thousands of North Carolinians were delinquent in their taxes. State and local governments also were on the verge of bankruptcy; together they owed more than a half billion dollars.


Battle for Survival: The Great Depression

A first order of business was a further slashing of expenditures, but the drama of the legislative session came in the battle between schools and taxes. Sentiment for lengthening the school term to eight months and for improving schools generally was hardly diminished by the deteriorating economic conditions; yet neither could be accomplished without higher taxes. After a marathon battle featuring an outpouring of public opinion both pro and con, the General Assembly passed a 3 percent sales tax on virtually all purchases except bread, flour, and meat. The tax was criticized as regressive, but it enabled the state to extend the term and to assume almost all of the costs of operating the public schools. Thereafter the counties furnished physical facilities , but the state provided funds for a minimum educational program in all units.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had carried North Carolina and won the presidency on a platform of economy in government, shelved his rhetoric and launched the federal government on the radical economic course to which the term "New Deal" was applied. By exercising unprecedented powers granted him by the Congress, he moved boldly to restore confidence in the banking system, then pushed through the Congress a long list of costly programs, many of them overlapping, some of them unclear in objective, most of them designed to put money into the hands of the poor as quickly as possible, and all of them known by acronyms. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), for instance, had relief as its main objective through a variety of productive jobs, make-work activities, and adult education classes. Nearly seventy-five thousand young North Carolinians--black and white--were enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), given drab uniforms, sent to one of sixty-six camps in the state, provided subsistence and a small salary, and put to work encouraging farmers to plant leguminous crops, build strong fences, and control erosion by contour terracing of hillsides and constructing meadow strips. Among the legacies of the CCC was kudzu, an Asiatic vine imported to fight erosion but which showed some of the attributes of the mythical Jack's beanstalk. The National Youth Administration (NYA) employed thousands of high school and college youngsters in nearly 500 projects, many of them clerical in nature.

Of the dozens of such agencies, the ones that left the most tangible accomplishments in North Carolina were the three "works" programs--the Civil Works Administration (CWA), the Public Works Administration (PWA), and the Works Progress Administration (WPA ). The WPA spent nearly $175 million in North Carolina and employed thousands in building roads, airfields, outdoor privies (63,311 of them in three years), hospitals, schools, and other permanent improvements. It also hired artists to decorate public buildings and paint pictures, musicians to teach and conduct concerts, actors to produce dramatic performances, and historians and clerical workers to inventory the records of public agencies. Under the WPA the Federal Writers Project conducted interviews, compiled folk tales, and published guides to institutions, cities, and states. In the first five years of the New Deal these and scores of other federally funded projects brought into the state nearly a half billion dollars, although this was the lowest per capita allocation of all the states.

These New Deal programs were rife with politics, and whether they accounted for the improvement in the economy was a question of legitimate debate. Nevertheless, conditions did improve, whether owing to the New Deal or to the stimulation of war-preparatio n policies, and by the outbreak of World War II the economy appeared to be in better condition than it had been prior to the Depression. Critics of the New Deal, of course, pointed to the high federal debt contracted under an administration first elected on a platform of economy in government.


The Machine Grinds to a Halt

With the defeat of Simmons and the death of Senator Overman in 1930 came the end of the machine that had heavily influenced North Carolina politics for a third of a century. A political machine exists when enough people think that it does, and the public perception was that the "Shelby Dynasty" succeeded to the title. At the heart of the new faction were Governor O. Max Gardner and his brother-in-law, Clyde Roark Hoey. In the gubernatorial primary of 1936, Hoey turned back a strong challenge from Ralph W. McDonald, a liberal candidate of pronounced New Deal leanings. Though conservative, Hoey worked well with the Roosevelt administration and maintained an unusually high popularity among the people. He was succeeded by Joseph Melville Broughton, a Raleigh attorney, who gained the largest majority ever given a gubernatorial candidate. Despite apprehension over breaking the two-term tradition, North Carolinians cast their electoral votes for Roosevelt over Wendell Willkie. Roosevelt also carried the state in 1944, at which time Hoey replaced United States Senator Robert Rice ("Our Bob") Reynolds, the flamboyant pre-war isolationist who did not seek reelection after twelve years in office.