Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link

Abstract

Reviewed by: Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World by William A. Link Tracy Campbell Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World. By William A. Link. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 343. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6493-4.) North Carolinian Frank Porter Graham occupies a lofty perch in twentieth-century southern history, compared by some of his admirers to Gandhi and Christ. In William A. Link’s well-researched biography, Graham emerges as more complex and human, and his career exposes the limitations of white liberalism in the post–World War II South. After graduating from the University of North Carolina (UNC) in 1909, Graham earned an M.A. in 1916 at Columbia University under William A. Dunning and then attended the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. Although known affectionately as “Dr. Frank,” Graham never finished his Ph.D., but that did not keep him from returning to UNC to teach history. In 1930, Graham was president of the university, and during the height of the Great Depression, he battled legislative budget cuts and countered attacks on academic freedom. His outspoken support of labor causes made him many powerful enemies throughout the state. In 1938, at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, Graham proclaimed racial justice was “the primary test of American democracy and Christianity” (p. 106). Throughout his life, Graham sought to bridge divides through education and religion, while avoiding federal directives or legislation. A frustrated John Hope Franklin, like so many others who witnessed Graham’s focus on evolutionary change, was unimpressed. “Graham’s reasonableness, sweet as it was, was on one side. On his side,” Franklin recalled (p. 111). During World War II, Graham served on the National War Labor Board, where, in a crucial 1943 case, he supported equal pay for equal work. He used the occasion to proclaim that the nation should celebrate “‘the vigor and variety of its differences’” and “refuse to become a ‘stronghold of bigots,’” but he retreated when the opportunity arose to further loosen the grip of segregation (p. 147). After the war, President Harry S. Truman appointed Graham to the President’s Commission on Civil Rights. Graham dissented from the committee’s landmark 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, because he opposed federal efforts to ensure voting rights and to pass an antilynching bill. Instead, he encouraged a tepid philosophy of “nondiscrimination, not nonsegregation” (p. 166). In the end, Graham’s attempt to reconcile gradualism and goodwill with the reality of white supremacy satisfied no one. When U.S. senator J. Melville Broughton died in 1949, Governor W. Kerr Scott appointed Graham to fill the seat. Link describes Graham’s 1950 campaign to remain in the Senate as “weak and overconfident” and the candidate himself as “disinterested” (p. 205). Graham relied on his reputation for personal integrity to overcome charges of communist subversion. He won more votes than his opponent, Willis Smith, in the Democratic primary but fell short of the required majority. In the runoff election, Smith’s supporters, in a pattern that became all too common, warned that Graham favored Blacks working and living alongside “your wives and daughters.” They urged white people to “Wake Up!” if they wished to avoid a “mingling of the races” (p. 211). [End Page 182] Graham lost the race by 19,000 votes and never ran for elective office again. Afterward, during his appointment as a United Nations mediator, Graham failed to resolve a dispute in Kashmir between Pakistan and India. When he died in 1972, one friend eulogized that the martyred Graham may have “lived too long” (p. 250). Link’s well-crafted and thoughtful account can be paired with his excellent biography of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, Righteous Warrior: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (New York, 2008). The differing tactics and political trajectories of Graham and Helms tell us much about the contours of southern history and American politics since the 1950s and provide a timely context for understanding our current dilemmas. Tracy Campbell University of Kentucky Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association