BYRNES, JAMES F.

Born in Charleston, South Carolina, of Irish Catholic parents, James Francis Byrnes (May 2, 1879–April 9, 1972) matured into the most influential southerner in the Depression-era Senate. Raised by his mother, a dress maker, and his maternal grandmother, the young Byrnes received a parochial school education and became a full-time clerk for a Charleston law firm at the age of fourteen. He studied law independently, and was admitted to the South Carolina bar in 1904. In 1910 Byrnes won South Carolina's second district by fifty-seven votes and entered the U.S. House of Representatives. Dark haired and sharp featured, the young politician possessed an encompassing public persona that shielded a skillful, sly mind and an industrious spirit.

Intent on maintaining white supremacy, South Carolina's minority of Protestant white males controlled Byrnes' electoral base, which had suffered since 1876 from corrosive race baiting. Although Byrnes could have appeal to racial prejudices, he preferred to campaign on economic and social improvement platforms. He supported Woodrow Wilson's World War I administration and the formation of the League of Nations. He met Franklin Roosevelt at the 1912 Democratic convention, and during the Wilson years Byrnes benefited from Roosevelt's friendship. Byrnes refused to join the Ku Klux Klan and, in 1924, ran unsuccessfully for the Senate against the demagogic Coleman L. "Coley" Blease. Six years later, with the help of a new friend, Bernard Baruch, and the growing economic crisis, Byrnes defeated Blease.

Upon his nomination for president, Franklin Roosevelt drew politically shrewd Byrnes into the "Brains Trust," and the two men sustained a warm relationship throughout the 1930s. Possessing such confidants as Carter Glass, Joseph Robinson, and Byron "Pat" Harrison, Byrnes emerged as a key legislative leader for much New Deal legislation. Convinced that the Depression's origins lay at home, Byrnes opted for a planned economy. He participated as a calculating compromiser to help create the Emergency Banking Act, the Farm Credit Act, the Homeowners' Loan Act, the 1933 Economy Act, and such agencies as the Agriculture Adjustment Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the National Recovery Administration. As a member of the Senate conference committee Byrnes also forged understandings that facilitated the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

Byrnes used work relief funds from the Public Works and the Works Progress Administrations (WPA) to alter the face of South Carolina. He sided with veterans to override a presidential veto of a bonus bill. Driven by the race-based politics of his constituency, he fought in 1935 the Wagner-Costigan proposal, a federal anti-lynching bill. Although Byrnes was ill during passage of such 1935 reforms as the National Labor Relations Act, the Eccles Banking Act, the Revenue Act, the Public Utilities Holding Company Act, and the Social Security Act, he nonetheless endorsed them on the basis that these new laws would benefit South Carolinians. In 1936 he easily won reelection to the Senate.

In 1937 Byrnes joined Roosevelt's attempt to reorganize the court system. Despite the alarm of many wealthy South Carolinians, Byrnes understood that the average voter preferred reform. When the reform effort failed, Byrnes bemoaned the political errors that prevented passage. Byrnes' votes against the Fair Labor Standards and Child Labor Acts also had their roots in the South Carolina electorate and the increasingly urban tilt of the New Deal. Concurrently, his resistance to extension of the WPA was also rooted in the concerns of rural precincts where the agency's wage scales drew away labor and earned cotton growers' wrath. Byrnes actions were further shaped by his belief that the Depression was by this time lifting. After telling Roosevelt that he would stand with his friends, he supported conservative senators Walter George, Millard Tydings, Guy Gillette, and Ellison D. Smith when Roosevelt attempted to purge them from the Congress in 1938. Yet, Byrnes also helped reelect such New Dealers as Florida's Claude Pepper and Alabama's Lister Hill. While pundits claimed these actions marked a break with Roosevelt, the South Carolinian had refused to sign the southern Conservative Manifesto authored by Josiah Bailey, who touted a conservative opposition to the course of the New Deal. Byrnes endorsed the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act, composed the 1939 Administrative Reorganization Law, and managed the refunding of the WPA.

After trips to Japan and Germany in the mid-1930s, Byrnes feared future aggression. In 1938 he urged the Roosevelt administration to accept Jewish émigrés from Nazi persecution, and, as chair of the Navy appropriations subcommittee, he supported the expansion and increased preparedness of the U.S. Navy. Byrnes was appointed an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1941, but he resigned that post in 1942 to serve as Roosevelt's director of the economic stability. He later served as secretary of state from 1945 to 1947 during the Truman administration and as governor of South Carolina from 1951 to 1955.

See Also: BRAIN(S) TRUST; ISOLATIONISM; SOUTH, GREAT DEPRESSION IN THE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Byrnes, James Francis. All in One Lifetime. 1958.

Byrnes, James Francis. Papers. Clemson University Special Collections. Clemson, South Carolina.

Byrnes, James Francis. Speaking Frankly. 1947.

Hayes, Jack Irby, Jr. South Carolina and the New Deal. 2001.

Moore, Winfred B., Jr. "New South Statesman: The Political Career of James Francis Byrnes, 1911–1941." Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1976.

More, Winfred B., Jr. "'Soul of the South': James F. Byrnes and the Racial Issues in American Politics, 1911–1941." The Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association (1978): 42–52.

Morgan, Thomas S. "James F. Byrnes and the Politics of Segregation." Historian 56 (summer 1994): 645–654.

Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography ofJames F. Byrnes. 1994.

Henry C. Ferrell, Jr.