James F. Byrnes

• 1. Introduction

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  James Francis Byrnes was born on the 2nd of May, 1882, at 538 King Street in Charleston, South Carolina, into a household shaped by loss before it had truly begun. His father died shortly after he was born. His mother, Elizabeth McSweeney Byrnes, was a dressmaker who held the family together. At 14, Byrnes left St. Patrick's Catholic School to work in a law office. He would never earn a law degree, yet he would one day sit on the United States Supreme Court.

  That paradox sits at the heart of who Byrnes was. Historian George E. Mowry called him "the most influential Southern member of Congress between John Calhoun and Lyndon Johnson." He served in the House, the Senate, the Supreme Court, the wartime executive branch, and the State Department, and then won the governorship of South Carolina at 68. No other American politician of the twentieth century moved through so many branches and levels of power.

  Yet Byrnes also spent years in the political wilderness after a narrow runoff defeat engineered in part by a forged Catholic endorsement. He championed New Deal legislation, then blocked anti-lynching bills. He drafted the Stuttgart speech that redirected American policy in postwar Germany, then resigned from the Cabinet with feelings of bitterness toward the man he had once mentored. What drove a man so gifted at acquiring power to lose it, abandon it, and reclaim it so many times?

• 2. The Self-Made Lawyer

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  In 1900, Byrnes's cousin, Governor Miles B. McSweeney, appointed him as a clerk for Judge Robert Aldrich of Aiken. There was a problem: Byrnes was not yet 21, the minimum age for the position. So he, his mother, and McSweeney simply changed his date of birth on the record to match that of his older sister, Leonora.

  That willingness to quietly bend a rule in the service of ambition would define Byrnes's early ascent. He apprenticed to a lawyer, then read for the law as was common at the time, and was admitted to the bar in 1903. In 1908, he was appointed solicitor for the second circuit of South Carolina. His patron, Senator Benjamin "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, was one of the most virulently racist figures in American political life, yet Byrnes is described as often having a moderating influence on him.

  Byrnes's courtroom apprenticeship left him with an intimate sense of how the law actually moved. As a teenager working as a court stenographer, he transcribed the 1903 trial of South Carolina Lieutenant Governor James H. Tillman, who was charged with murdering a newspaper editor. That experience, sitting at the edge of high-stakes legal drama and recording every word, likely sharpened the probing, detail-oriented intellect that would later make him one of the most effective legislators of his generation.

  In 1906, he married Maude Perkins Busch of Aiken, South Carolina. Around this time, he also converted from the Catholic Church to the Episcopal Church, a decision that would later become politically significant in ways he could not have anticipated.

• 3. The Coalition Builder

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  In 1910, Byrnes narrowly won the Democratic primary for the U.S. Representative seat from South Carolina's 2nd congressional district. He was formally elected and then re-elected six times, serving from 1911 to 1925. His platform included better conditions for workers in textile mills, a progressive note that signaled his interest in governing beyond the interests of the state's planter class.

  Byrnes proved a brilliant legislator. He worked behind the scenes to form coalitions and deliberately avoided the high-profile oratory that characterized much of Southern politics at the time. President Woodrow Wilson noticed, and often entrusted important political tasks to the capable young Representative rather than to more experienced lawmakers.

  In the 1920s, Byrnes championed the "Good Roads Movement", which attracted motorists and politicians to large-scale road-building programs across the country. That issue, now forgotten, was central to the transformation of American life in the age of the automobile.

  The Senate years brought his biggest legislative achievement in domestic policy. South Carolina's politicians had dreamed since the colonial era of an inland waterway system that would aid commerce and control flooding. By the 1930s, Byrnes took up the cause for a massive dam-building project called Santee Cooper. It would accomplish those goals and electrify the entire state with hydroelectric power. With South Carolina financially strapped by the Great Depression, Byrnes got the federal government to authorize a loan for the entire project. The loan was completed and put into operation in February 1942, and it was later repaid to the federal government with full interest, at no cost to South Carolina taxpayers.

• 4. The Senate and Roosevelt

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  Byrnes had been friends with Franklin D. Roosevelt long before 1932, and when Roosevelt sought the Democratic nomination that year, Byrnes was an early supporter. He made himself Roosevelt's spokesman on the Senate floor and guided much of the early New Deal legislation to passage.

  He won an easy re-election in 1936, declaring: "I admit I am a New Dealer, and if the New Deal takes money from the few who have controlled the country and gives it back to the average man, I am going to Washington to help the President work for the people of South Carolina and the country."

  But Byrnes's New Deal loyalty had limits drawn precisely by his state's economic interests. He voted against the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage, because that minimum wage would make the textile mills in South Carolina uncompetitive against lower-cost production elsewhere. He opposed Roosevelt's attempt to purge conservative Democrats from the party in the 1938 primaries.

  Byrnes also played a key role in blocking anti-lynching legislation, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill of 1935 and the Gavagan bill of 1937. His stated justification was stark. He said that "rape is responsible, directly and indirectly, for most of the lynching in America."

  In 1937, Byrnes supported Roosevelt's controversial court-packing plan, a position that required political courage given how broadly unpopular the scheme was. On foreign policy, he was a champion of helping the United Kingdom against Nazi Germany from 1939 to 1941, and he denounced isolationist Charles Lindbergh on several occasions.

• 5. The Blease Rivalry

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  Coleman Livingston Blease was everything Byrnes was not: flamboyant, openly racist, a demagogue who made high-profile oratory his entire political personality. In 1924, when Byrnes left the House to seek a Senate seat, Blease was also in the race.

  Blease led the primary with 42 percent. Byrnes came second with 34 percent. The incumbent, Nathaniel B. Dial, finished third with 22 percent.

  The runoff turned ugly. Byrnes had been raised Catholic, and the Ku Klux Klan, which backed Blease, spread rumors that he was still secretly a practicing Catholic despite his Episcopal conversion. Byrnes fought back by citing endorsements from Episcopal clergy. Three days before the runoff vote, twenty men who claimed to have been altar boys with Byrnes published a professed endorsement of him. That group's leader was a Blease ally, and the endorsement was circulated in anti-Catholic areas to inflame prejudice against Byrnes. The tactic worked. Blease won the runoff 51 percent to 49 percent.

  Byrnes moved his law practice to Spartanburg in the industrializing Piedmont region. Between his legal work and investment advice from friends such as Bernard Baruch, he became a wealthy man. He spent the years between 1925 and 1930 cultivating Piedmont textile workers, who had been key Blease supporters.

  In 1930, he challenged Blease again. Blease again led the primary, with 46 percent to 38 percent for Byrnes. This time, Byrnes won the runoff 51 to 49 percent. The reversal of the 1924 result was nearly exact. He was elected to the Senate in 1931, and the defeat that had once seemed to end his career had instead redirected it toward a more powerful chamber.

• 6. Wartime Power

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  On the 12th of June, 1941, Roosevelt nominated Byrnes as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court, and the Senate confirmed him that same day. He served on the Court from the 8th of July, 1941, until the 3rd of October, 1942, a tenure of just 15 months. That makes him the shortest-serving Supreme Court justice in history. He was also the last justice not to hold a law degree.

  Roosevelt asked Byrnes to leave the Court after America's entry into World War II and join the executive branch. Byrnes headed the Office of Economic Stabilization, which dealt with prices and taxes, then became head of the new Office of War Mobilization in May 1943. That agency supervised the stabilization office and managed newly constructed factories, civilian and military production, and transportation for U.S. Armed Forces personnel. Washington insiders reported that Byrnes was fully in charge. Members of Congress and the press began calling him the "Assistant President."

  As head of wartime mobilization, Byrnes also provided oversight and financial resources for the Manhattan Project. He then served on an Interim Committee making recommendations on the use of the atomic bomb. The committee was headed by War Secretary Henry L. Stimson and included scientists such as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Ernest Lawrence, as well as a separate branch of business leaders and additional input from the Committee on the Social and Political Implications of the Atomic Bomb, chaired by James Franck and including Leo Szilard and Glenn T. Seaborg.

  Many expected Byrnes to be the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1944, replacing Henry A. Wallace. Roosevelt refused to endorse anyone other than Wallace outright. He had a personal preference for Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In a July meeting at the White House, party bosses pressed hard for Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, and Roosevelt said he would support either Truman or Douglas. Byrnes was regarded as too conservative for organized labor; some city bosses opposed him as an ex-Catholic who might offend Catholic voters; and Black voters were wary of his opposition to racial integration. The nomination went to Truman.

• 7. Secretary of State

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  Roosevelt died on the 12th of April, 1945, and Truman immediately turned to Byrnes for counsel. Byrnes had been a mentor to Truman from Truman's earliest days in the Senate. When Truman went to meet Roosevelt's coffin in Washington, he asked Byrnes and former Vice President Wallace, the two other men who might have succeeded Roosevelt, to join him at the train station.

  Truman appointed Byrnes as U.S. Secretary of State on the 3rd of July, 1945. As Secretary, Byrnes was first in line to the presidency, since there was no Vice President and the 1947 succession act had not yet been passed. He played a major role at the Potsdam Conference, the Paris Peace Conference, and other postwar meetings.

  Byrnes had been part of the U.S. delegation at Yalta, and Truman assumed this meant Byrnes had full, accurate knowledge of what had been agreed there. It would take many months before Truman discovered that was not the case. Byrnes nonetheless advised that the Soviets were breaking the Yalta Agreement and that Truman needed to be resolute and uncompromising with them.

  The friction between the two men grew visible at the Moscow Conference in December 1945. Truman felt that Byrnes was setting foreign policy independently and informing the President only afterward. Truman later wrote bluntly to Byrnes: "I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference." A subsequent letter took an even harder line on Iran, with Truman writing: "Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language, another war is in the making. I am tired of babying the Soviets."

  In September 1946, Byrnes delivered what became known as the "Speech of Hope" in Stuttgart, Germany. Heavily influenced by General Lucius D. Clay, who had been a top aide to Byrnes in 1944, the speech formally repudiated the Morgenthau Plan, which would have permanently deindustrialized Germany. The speech marked the transition toward American policy of economic reconstruction. Byrnes was named TIME Man of the Year. He resigned from the Cabinet in January 1947.

• 8. Governor and Later Years

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  At 68, Byrnes won the governorship of South Carolina in the 1950 election. He served from 1951 to 1955. In his inaugural address, he stated plainly: "Whatever is necessary to continue the separation of the races in the schools of South Carolina is going to be done by the white people of the state."

  Byrnes poured state money into improving Black schools, buying new textbooks and buses, and hiring additional teachers. He also passed a law prohibiting adults from wearing a mask in public on any day other than Halloween, a measure aimed at the Ku Klux Klan, whose members feared exposure without their hoods. He hoped to make South Carolina a model for other Southern states in modifying their Jim Crow policies without court-imposed integration.

  The NAACP sued South Carolina to force desegregation. Byrnes requested Kansas, a Midwestern state that also segregated its schools, to submit an amicus curiae brief supporting a state's right to segregate. That request gave NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall the idea to shift the suit from South Carolina to Kansas, which led directly to Brown v. Board of Education. Byrnes vigorously criticized that decision.

  In his later years, Byrnes moved steadily rightward. He endorsed Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, segregationist candidate Harry Byrd in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1960 and 1968, and Barry Goldwater in 1964. He gave his private blessing to U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond to leave the Democratic Party in 1964 and declare himself a Republican, while Byrnes himself remained a Democrat.

  Byrnes died at the age of 89 and was interred in the churchyard at Trinity Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina. In 1948, Byrnes and his wife had established the James F. Byrnes Foundation Scholarships, and his papers are held at Clemson University's Special Collections Library, where he had served as a Life Trustee.