Theodore G. Bilbo - Senate

Senate

In 1934, Bilbo defeated Stephens to win a seat in the United States Senate. There he spoke against "farmer murderers", "poor-folks haters", "shooters of widows and orphans", "international well-poisoners", "charity hospital destroyers", "spitters on our heroic veterans", "rich enemies of our public schools", "private bankers 'who ought to come out in the open and let folks see what they're doing'", "European debt cancelers", "unemployment makers", pacifists, Communists, munitions manufacturers, and "skunks who steal Gideon Bibles from hotel rooms".

In Washington, Bilbo feuded with Pat Harrison, the senior senator from the state. The feud started when Harrison nominated Edwin R. Holmes for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Bilbo disliked Holmes, and spoke against him for five hours; he was the only senator to vote against Holmes' confirmation. When the Senate majority leader’s job opened up in 1937, Harrison went after it. Nose counts put him in a tie with Kentucky’s Alben Barkley.

Harrison’s campaign manager asked Bilbo to consider voting for his fellow Mississippian. Bilbo, whose base was among tenant farmers, hated the upper-class Harrison, who represented the rich planters and merchants. Bilbo said he would vote for Harrison only if he were personally asked. Harrison replied, "Tell the son of a bitch I wouldn’t speak to him even if it meant the presidency of the United States."” Harrison lost by one vote, 37-to-38, and his reputation as the senator who wouldn’t speak to his home-state colleague remained intact. Bilbo had taken revenge by voting against the fellow Mississippian. His former law partner Stewart C. "Sweep Clean" Broom aided Harrison with a speech, as noted by Time magazine.

In the Senate, Bilbo supported the Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Bilbo's outspoken support of segregation and white supremacy were controversial in the Senate. Attracted by the ideas of black separatists such as Marcus Garvey, Bilbo proposed an amendment to the federal work-relief bill on June 6, 1938, proposing to deport 12 million black Americans to Liberia at federal expense to relieve unemployment. He wrote a book advocating the idea. Garvey praised him in return, saying that Bilbo had "done wonderfully well for the Negro". But, Thomas W. Harvey, a senior Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League leader in the US, distanced himself from Bilbo because of his racist speeches.

The Democrats assigned Bilbo to what was considered the least important Senate committee, one on governance of the District of Columbia, to try to limit his influence. He used his position to advance his white supremacist views. Bilbo was against giving any vote to district residents, especially as the district's Black population was increasing during the Great Migration. After re-election, he advanced to sufficient seniority to chair the committee, 1945–47. He also served on the Pensions Committee, chairing it 1942–45.

Bilbo revealed his membership in the Ku Klux Klan in an interview on the radio program Meet the Press. He said, "No man can leave the Klan. He takes an oath not to do that. Once a Ku Klux, always a Ku Klux."

Bilbo was outspoken in saying that blacks should not be allowed to vote anywhere in the United States, regardless of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the Constitution. Black World War II veterans complained of longstanding disfranchisement in the South, which Mississippi had achieved in 1890 by changes to its constitution related to electoral and voter registration rules. (Other Southern states followed with similar changes through 1910, which survived most court challenges.) Bilbo's campaign was accused of provoking violence related to voting. Critics accused Bilbo of giving war contracts out to his friends.

He was a prominent participant in the lengthy southern Democratic filibuster of the Costigan-Walker anti-lynching bill before the Senate in 1938. Bilbo said:

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.

Bilbo denounced Richard Wright's autobiography, Black Boy, on the Senate floor:

"Its purpose is to plant the seeds of devilment and troublebreeding 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 was re-elected to a third Senate term in November 1946. Based on a request by liberal Democratic Sen. Glen H. Taylor of Idaho, the newly elected Republican majority in the United States Senate refused to seat Bilbo for the term because of his speeches. He was believed to have incited violence against blacks who wanted to vote in the South. In addition, a committee found that he had taken bribes. A filibuster by his supporters delayed the seating of the Senate for days. It was resolved when a supporter proposed that Bilbo's credentials remain on the table while he returned home to Mississippi to seek medical treatment for his oral cancer.