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CHAPTER THREE

The Politics of Decency

Later, [Graham] confided to a friend that he felt like a fellow in the 1860s who put on a blue coat and some grey trousers—and got shot at by both sides. —Journalist Tom McMahan, 1960

You are America's greatest ambassador and I pray for a continuation of your great strength in the good that you are doing. —Senator John Stennis (D-Miss.) to Graham, 1955

BY THE CLOSE OF 1957, Graham had positioned himself in the middle ground between the segregationist right and the integrationist left—that is, somewhere between his nominal pastor, W. A. Criswell, and another Baptist and southerner, Martin Luther King, Jr. This middle ground held more than religious implications. In the context of Little Rock and Clinton, Graham's calls for good citizenship and racial tolerance, which he cast as fruits of the conversion moment, dovetailed with the moderate rallying cry of law and order. On other occasions, his politics of decency played out more explicitly in the realm of governmental power.

In engaging the South, Graham functioned not only in his self-described role as an evangelist but also as a type of politician. He was subject to the tendency of elected political leaders to vacillate between grandstanding and caution amid attempts to balance seemingly contradictory constituencies. Even though his stature in both the South and the nation gave him great leeway to express his views, he typically strove to avoid offending all but the most intransigent defenders of Jim Crow. At the same time, his activities in the South were intimately—at times, inextricably—connected with his service as a supporter of, and adviser to, President Dwight Eisenhower. Their relationship sheds critical light on the origins of the evangelist's seemingly obvious, yet persistently elusive, leanings toward the Republican Party. The enduring bond Graham formed with another rising star on the postwar scene, Richard Nixon, reinforced that tendency. Graham attempted to appear above partisanship even though he routinely made comments that buttressed the policy agenda and political ambitions of Eisenhower and later Nixon. His ability to link his international ministry with Cold War themes suggested his partial success in this area.

Graham's behavior during the latter half of the Eisenhower years shaped the remainder of his engagement with the civil rights movement, as well as the broader political trajectory of the South. His chosen leadership role suggests the complexities of the public and political Graham (which coexisted with the pastoral one). As an evangelist, Graham could stand removed from the fray of both the civil rights era's politics of rage and its politics of protest. Instead, he endorsed and advocated a politics of decency, which invoked evangelical faith, combined with law and order, toward moderate ends. The politics of decency straddled and selectively engaged the polarized racial discourse of the period. Here, as with so many areas of Graham's career, the spheres of religion and politics blended almost beyond distinction.

The Parameters of Justice

Graham's initial public criticisms of desegregation raised expectations about his potential as a regional leader. President Eisenhower was not the only one asking the evangelist to play a more active role in the South. In 1956, an Oregon editorial board urged Graham to return from his travels abroad and “try and convert the Negro baiting Alabama legislators.”¹ Additional pleas for Graham to speak more forcefully about racial issues or to intervene more actively in the South came from white intellectuals, such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and leading southern liberal James McBride Dabbs, as well as African American clergymen and newspaper editorialists. The evangelist, wrote one black newspaper in 1955, “may lose a few of his friends in his own dear Southland because of his stand on segregation but he won't lose his soul.” Two years later, a group of black ministers from the Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, area asked Graham to come “back to our state to tear down…every vestige of segregation and discrimination born of our prejudices”—a request he did not take up.² In correspondence that same year, Martin Luther King, Jr., similarly urged the evangelist to “see your way clear to conduct an evangelistic crusade in one of the hard-core states in the deep south, even if it is not on as large a scale as most of your crusades. The impact of such a crusade would be immeasurably great.”³ The letter arrived soon after King had delivered an invocation at Graham's heavily publicized 1957 New York City crusade.

The early contact between Graham and King revealed both the potential and the limits of the evangelist's social ethic. Around the time of the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott, King and Graham commenced what evolved into a mostly cordial and, at times, consultative relationship. Their common southern background and shared status as Baptist ministers provided them with important bonds. Moreover, at least by 1957, they stood as the national spokespersons for their respective presumed causes: evangelism and civil rights. During a time when King still sought recognition from moderate whites (such as Nixon) and when Graham had promised Eisenhower to consult with southern ministers about the race issue, their paths inevitably inter-sected.⁴ The evangelist spoke highly of King from an early date, declaring in an April 1957 interview in the New York Times Magazine that the civil rights leader was “setting an example of Christian love” in the area of race relations. King soon accepted an invitation to give an invocation during the New York crusade. With characteristic eloquence, he called for liberation from “the dungeons of hate” and “the paralysis of crippling fear” in order to create a “brotherhood that transcends race or color.”⁵ While in New York, King also held consultations with the Graham team on race relations. In a gesture Graham would long recall, King asked the evangelist to call him “Mike,” a birth name used mostly by black intimates.⁶ Afterward, King added Graham to the list of southern white moderates and liberals with whom he corresponded. With intentionally flattering prose, King praised him for applying the message of the Gospel to race, since Graham “above any other preacher in America can open the eyes of many persons on this question.” Graham's southern background, the civil rights leader suggested, gave his message “additional weight.”⁷

The continuing intimacy of Graham with segregationists eventually tested their relationship, however. One such friend of the evangelist was Texas governor Price Daniel, an outspoken Christian. As a U.S. senator, Daniel had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto opposing school desegrega-tion.⁸ Around the time of the Southern Manifesto's release, Graham discussed with Senator Daniel his decision to run for the governorship.⁹ Following Daniel's 1956 victory, Graham led an inauguration-day prayer breakfast and attended the inauguration ceremony with John Connally.¹⁰

King entered the picture in July 1958 during the heart of Governor Daniel's reelection campaign. One day before the Democratic Party primary (then the election of consequence in Texas), Daniel was slated to introduce Graham at a San Antonio evangelistic rally. The suspicious timing drew protests from prominent black ministers in San Antonio. The president of the local Baptist Ministers Union wired an urgent note to King, who soon wrote Graham expressing concern. Either dissociate yourself from Daniel, King told the evangelist, or at least “make crystal clear your position on this burning moral issue.” Supporting a segregationist would severely hamper Graham's influence among blacks, he added.¹¹ In a sharp reply to King, Billy Graham Evangelistic Association (BGEA) associate Grady Wilson disavowed any political motivation on Graham's part. “Even though we do not see eye to eye with [Daniel] on every issue,” Wilson snapped, “we still love him in Christ, and frankly, I think that should be your position not only as a Christian but as a minister of the gospel of our risen Lord.” Wilson added that Graham had gladly invited King to New York City despite the “scores” of critical responses the BGEA had consequentially received.¹²

For Graham, evangelistic priorities trumped matters of social concern; Daniel's segregationist politics did not by definition undermine his Christian loyalties. The service proceeded as planned in San Antonio, where Graham told a nonsegregated crowd of thirty thousand that God judges individuals by their hearts, not their skin colors. Daniel went on to victory. Interestingly, a primary opponent mocked the governor for bringing in “a certain integrationist evangelist from an outside state” for an “11th hour appearance…. Is Billy being deceived and rushed to the Alamo City to try to save the Governor's [s]oul, or save his fast-sinking campaign?” Daniel, however, may actually have benefited from public complaints about the San Antonio service by African American U.S. representative Adam Clayton Powell, who also contacted Graham.¹³ The relationship between King and Graham, meanwhile, vacillated between mostly private warmth and occasional public frostiness into the 1960s, when the ideological and theological differences between them widened even further. (Meanwhile, Graham remained close enough to Daniel to stay with him during his final night as governor, in 1963.)¹⁴

Graham's encounters with liberal Protestants were likewise generally less tense than they became a decade later. Here, the much-publicized criticism he received from theologian Reinhold Niebuhr served as the exception proving the rule. During the run-up to the 1957 New York City crusade, Niebuhr, a renowned professor at Union Theological Seminary and an influential liberal anticommunist, dismissed Graham's social ethic as “pietistic individualism” and “moralism,” irresponsible atavisms in light of the complexities of the nuclear age. The “evangelical perfectionism” inherent in Graham's style of revivalism (that is, his focus on the conversion moment as a source for personal regeneration) represented a simplistic and potentially escapist response to the challenges of the twentieth century, argued Niebuhr. Thinking exclusively in terms of saving souls ignored the gravity of “collective evil.”¹⁵ Graham responded politely to this criticism, yet yielded no theological ground to Niebuhr.¹⁶

Niebuhr, however, grew significantly more charitable toward Graham when the topic turned to race, going no further than to urge the evangelist to address the matter more extensively in his sermons. Their views on desegregation at the time were closer than either would likely have wanted to admit. Despite their many theological differences (not to mention their political, cultural, and stylistic ones), they responded with striking similarity to the Brown decision, favoring gradual implementation of desegregation rooted in respect for the rule of law. Niebuhr, who took pride in his realist gravitas, was only slightly less skeptical than Graham about legislative solutions. Their gradualist positions, though, derived from differing emphases on the individual: for Graham, a stress on individual conversions and human relationships over policy prescriptions; for Niebuhr, a profound caution regarding the ability of individuals to avoid social evils larger than themselves. Niebuhr's significantly more incisive pessimism about group and individual behavior ironically led him to a place similar to Graham's often reflexive optimism about human regeneration. They both worried about the adverse effects of legally coerced justice and tended toward caution when confronted with the mobs surrounding Central High School in Little Rock.¹⁷ They shared their concerns with many other white intellectuals and Protestant leaders.¹⁸

Niebuhr's critique of Graham resonated with two leading southern liberals, James McBride Dabbs and Francis Pickens Miller. Dabbs, a South Carolina Presbyterian active in the liberal Southern Regional Council, expressed the hope that Graham would mature as an evangelist and urged him to “step into the breach and make his own the power that lies both in the Negroes’ insistence on equality and in the whites’ shame at maintaining inequality.”¹⁹ Miller, a Virginian and former New Deal official, as well as a leading southern Presbyterian, abandoned hope in the evangelist after drawing initial inspiration from Graham's willingness to address race during the New York City crusade. Soon afterward, however, he observed how the evangelist shied away from offering similar remarks at a Presbyterian laymen's conference in Miami. Had Graham spoken like a “true Christian prophet,” Miller later reflected, he would not have been “idolized by the rank and file of Southern Protestants.” By saying “what he thought his audiences wanted to hear,” Graham squandered an opportunity “to create an atmosphere favorable to compliance with the law of the land.”²⁰ In truth, Graham had never ceased crusading in parts of the South and had addressed race in several speeches in the region. Still, as his critics could not help but observe, the evangelist had exhibited little desire since the Brown decision to crusade in the Deep South (a sentiment the 1958 Columbia, South Carolina, rally undoubtedly reinforced).

The Eisenhower Network

Many of Graham's critics also noted the way in which his social ethic operated not just within the framework of his theology but within the parameters of the Eisenhower White House as well. Graham's impulse to compromise derived not only from his evangelistic priorities but also from his political connections, which complemented and occasionally clashed with his racial moderation. Indeed, his private communication with political leaders would have confirmed the suspicions of many of his critics. The highest profile of these political allies, Dwight Eisenhower, revealed Graham to be a Republican at heart, if not in name. The Graham-Eisenhower alliance also suggested the way religion and region blended in the evangelist's analysis of contemporary politics.

The relationship between the evangelist and the war hero took root during the run-up to Eisenhower's successful bid for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. Graham's faith in President Truman, who remained a threat to seek reelection until March of that year, had waned. After the hoopla surrounding their one and only visit, Truman pointedly made no time for the evangelist, despite repeated attempts by Graham to convince the president to appear at the 1952 Washington, D.C., crusade.²¹ By then, Graham had joined a host of powerful GOP officials (along with a few optimistic Democrats) in urging Eisenhower to enter the race. Included in this group were several of Graham's political friends, such as Republicans Frank Carlson, a Kansas senator, and Walter Judd, a Minnesota representative.²² Graham's contribution came primarily by way of Sid Richardson, a Texas oil baron close to both the general and the evangelist. In the fall of 1951, Richardson gave Eisenhower a letter, written by Graham, in which the evangelist expressed the hope that Richardson would convince Eisenhower to seek the presidency. In a quick response to Graham, Eisenhower (then serving as commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces in Europe) politely balked at assuming a partisan political identity while still in his post. At the behest of Richardson, Graham responded to Eisenhower with a flurry of theologically tinged hyperbole. “Upon this decision could well rest the destiny of the Western World,” the evangelist wrote of Eisenhower's possible run. Graham asked for an audience with the general in order “to share with you some of the information I have picked up” from “your many friends” in the United States. With assistance from Richardson, they met in France during March 1952.²³

After Eisenhower had taken destiny by the reins and entered the race, Graham's public statements routinely echoed the GOP theme of cleaning up a corrupt Washington, D.C. Graham also criticized the Cold War policies of the Democratic administration. “The Korean War,” he told an audience in Houston, “is being fought because the nation's leaders blundered on foreign policy in the Far East…. [Accused Soviet spy] Alger Hiss shaped our foreign policy and some of the men who formulate it [now] have never been to the East.”²⁴ As Graham would attempt to do in subsequent presidential campaigns, he carefully avoided an official endorsement of his preferred candidate. His public appeals on behalf of Eisenhower, however, were no more subtle than his altar calls. By emphasizing the importance of personal character when choosing elected officials, Graham played to a perceived strength of Eisenhower, who ran on stature more than platform. Even before the Richardson letter, Graham had declared during his 1951 Greensboro, North Carolina, crusade that the “Christian people of America are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters…and regardless of political affiliation we are going to vote for the right man.” He chuckled when noting that Republican senator Robert Taft, the eventual chief rival of Eisenhower, had “been running for years.” A newspaper clipping about the sermon found its way into Eisenhower's files.²⁵ For his part, Eisenhower was keenly aware of the usefulness of the evangelist. At the behest of Frank Carlson, the candidate sought Graham's advice on injecting a religious tone into campaign speeches. The evangelist talked briefly with Eisenhower at the Republican National Convention in Chicago (to which Graham had received tickets from House Minority Leader Joseph Martin of Massachusetts) and later met with the candidate at campaign headquarters in Denver. In communications with Washington governor Arthur B. Langlie, Eisenhower supported organizing Graham and other sympathetic pastors on an informal basis.²⁶

Graham specifically viewed Eisenhower as a viable candidate in the South, someone who could garner the votes of conservative nominal Democrats like himself. In a 1952 letter to Walter Judd, the evangelist praised Eisenhower as “the strongest possible candidate, particularly throughout the South.” Graham went on to note that he had “been in close touch with Democratic leaders throughout the South,” including the Mississippi delegation to the Democratic National Convention. The annual gathering of the Mississippi Democratic Party that election year had overlapped with his Jackson crusade. The chair of the Jackson crusade, hotelier E. O. Spencer, was a prominent Eisenhower Democrat. City newspapers highlighted Graham's visible presence at the meeting, as well as his eagerness to pitch Eisenhower to a prominent area businessman. To Judd, Graham touted the possibility of state conventions endorsing Eisenhower: “I have strongly encouraged these [southern Democratic] leaders to nominate General Eisenhower if they do not get a platform and a candidate suitable to them. They are going to have their Conventions again when they return from the Democratic Convention, as you know. I believe the General can carry great sections of the South.”²⁷ Graham's increasingly apparent leanings raised concerns among his Democratic friends. Well before Eisenhower officially received the GOP nomination, Virginia Democratic senator A. Willis Robertson sent the evangelist a friendly but pointed letter expressing the sentiment of their mutual friends that Graham was crossing the line into partisan politics. Graham replied that he would heed the warning, although his attempt to do so likely differed from what Robertson had in mind. Graham turned down an invitation from Democratic official Leslie Biffle, a longtime secretary of the Senate and native Arkansan, to serve as honorary assistant sergeant at arms at the Democratic National Convention. The title would have granted Graham access to the convention floor; more important, it would have neutralized his seeming support for Eisenhower. Graham claimed that a number of his Democratic congressional friends had advised him to decline the position. Still, he found time to attend the Democratic convention that year.²⁸

The 1952 campaign represented Graham's inaugural contribution to the postwar emergence of the Republican Party in southern presidential politics. His support for Eisenhower, while by no means uncommon among evangelists around the nation, also paralleled larger developments in the South.²⁹ Political scientists Earl Black and Merle Black have described Eisenhower as “the human triggering mechanism for the first Republican breakthrough in the South.” In 1952, the GOP candidate departed from party tradition and actively sought votes from the region's many conservative Democrats, beginning the formal part of his campaign with a train tour of the South. Eisenhower captured the peripheral southern states of Tennessee, Virginia, Texas, and Florida, attracting half of all southern white votes. The “partial realignment” of southern whites toward Republican presidential candidates had commenced.³⁰

Eisenhower appealed to white southerners for a number of reasons other than the attention he gave them. Obviously, many white southerners were dissatisfied with the national Democratic Party. Most remained loyal, if only for reasons of patronage and tradition. The unsuccessful Dixiecrat rebellion of 1948, when a group of largely Deep South Democrats broke with incumbent Harry Truman, stood as a lesson that the national Democratic majority could withstand southern defections. All of this served to make Eisenhower more attractive. Eisenhower's military stature and Cold War bona fides also helped. Finally, the growing economy of the post–World War II South led some southerners to identify more with the business wing of the GOP. In both the 1952 and 1956 elections, Eisenhower received particularly strong support from affluent white residents of large and small southern metropolitan areas, the very types of growing southern cities—the Greensboros and the Charlottes—that Graham frequented throughout the decade.³¹

Graham worked to bolster this new line of support. During the reelection campaign, he pledged to Eisenhower to “do all in my power during the coming campaign to gain friends and supporters for your cause.”³² At the time, Graham had more social ties with southern politicians than with any other political group (although his congressional friends were by no means limited to his home region). His own words and behavior reveal his deep admiration for those southerners whom he considered the region's “better sort” of leaders. This group included moderates, such as Tennessee governor Frank Clement and Oklahoma senator Robert Kerr—but also strong conservatives like Mississippi senator Stennis and South Carolina governor and former secretary of state James Byrnes. On this list were many persons who backed Eisenhower in 1952, including Byrnes, South Carolina congressman Mendel Rivers, and Alabama congressman Frank Boykin. As a friend and occasional confidant of numerous southern politicians who were supportive of Eisenhower, Graham could serve as an informal conduit between these Democrats and a Republican Party now seeking votes in Dixie. Graham team member Grady Wilson claimed to have also done his part to aid Eisenhower's cause in North Carolina during the 1952 election, but complained to Rivers about “those thick-headed Tarheels [who] would vote Democratic straight down the line even if the Devil himself were running.”³³

Strategic interests aside, Graham held a deep personal attraction to Eisenhower as a national leader. The evangelist clearly delighted in his role as a spiritual influence on the president, having suggested that the denominationally unaffiliated Eisenhower join a Presbyterian church. On inauguration day in 1953, Eisenhower attended a private prayer service at the church Graham had recommended, National Presbyterian. (Soon afterward, Eisenhower was baptized there.)³⁴ The election of Eisenhower raised Graham's hopes that evangelical Christianity had returned to national prominence. Days after the 1952 election, the evangelist told an audience that he had “sensed a dependence upon God” during two previous conversations with the president-elect.³⁵ Graham desired to perpetuate the new status quo. The BGEA soon announced a new “permanent national headquarters” in Washington, D.C., for what Graham called the “non-political” purpose of “bring[ing] what influence I can, from a spiritual standpoint, to our national leaders.”³⁶

Still, the evangelist was conscious of the precarious status of Eisenhower's gains in the South. Along with his father-in-law, Nelson Bell, Graham saw the need for more GOP outreach in the region.³⁷ In 1956, Graham urged the president to wait until after the campaign to enact specific policies on desegregation. “I hope particularly before November you are able to stay out of this bitter racial situation that is developing,” wrote Graham. Meanwhile, he advised, “it might be well to let the Democratic Party bear the brunt of the debate.” Two months later, Graham expressed concern that the GOP's efforts to attract northern black voters might hinder its southern ambitions: “I am somewhat disturbed by rumors that Republican strategy will be to go all out in winning the Negro vote in the North regardless of the South's feelings. Again[,] I would like to caution you about getting involved in this particular problem. At the moment, to an amazing degree, you have the confidence of white and Negro leaders. I would hate to see it jeopardized by even those in the Republican Party with a political ax to grind.” Eisenhower took notice of the recommendation, although his campaign garnered many African American votes, including that of Martin Luther King, Jr.³⁸

Even as Graham supported Eisenhower, he remained a registered Democrat. At the time, he rarely mentioned this status. The correspondence between Graham and Eisenhower revealed the evangelist as someone who, at least in the area of political strategy, thought like a national Republican during the 1950s. In 1954, Graham heard his friend Walter Judd speak at a Lincoln Day dinner in Asheville, an area of North Carolina with a traditional GOP presence. Graham recalled telling Judd afterward that if only his address could be delivered on national television, “we wouldn't have to worry about Congress remaining GOP controlled this fall” (emphasis mine).³⁹

Graham and Nixon: Act 1