James F. Byrnes

Born May 2, 1879
Charleston, South Carolina
Died April 9, 1972
Columbia, South Carolina

U.S. secretary of state, senator,
Supreme Court justice, governor

J ames F. Byrnes was the first American to serve as a U.S. congressman, U.S. senator, Supreme Court justice, secretary of state, and governor. In the early 1940s, he was sometimes called the "assistant president," but by the late 1940s he was a forgotten man in federal government.

Byrnes was at the side of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945; served 1933–45) and Harry S. Truman (1884–1972; served 1945–53; see entry) as the Cold War was taking shape. The Cold War was an intense political and economic rivalry between the democratic United States and the communist Soviet Union that lasted from 1945 to 1991. Byrnes strove hard to establish a friendship between the Soviet Union and the United States as World War II (1939–45) drew to a close, but he was overcome by the Soviets' aggressive efforts to expand their influence and, as noted in David Robertson's Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes, Truman's frustration over what he viewed as "disastrous compromises." As a result, Byrnes lost influence in the United States and faded from national prominence, but resurfaced as governor of South Carolina.

A self-made man

James Francis Byrnes was born to Irish immigrants in May 1879 in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, for whom he was named, died of tuberculosis, a respiratory disease, only weeks before James was born. His mother, Elizabeth McSweeney Byrnes, was a dressmaker who worked hard to provide for her family. Though his family was needy at times, young James was never deprived. Byrnes attended Catholic school until age fourteen, when he left to become a messenger for a law office. He needed to take this job to help support the family. By age twenty-one, he had become a circuit court stenographer (a type of note taker) in Aiken, South Carolina. Under the fatherly guidance of two judges, Byrnes studied law and successfully passed the South Carolina bar exam three years later in 1903. In 1906, he married Maude Perkins Busch of Aiken. They did not have children. Known by friends as Jimmy, Byrnes won his first public office in 1908, becoming a public prosecutor. In 1911, in a very close race, he won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democratic candidate. He served in the House until 1924.

Byrnes was short and thin; he lived modestly but dressed well. Other congressmen considered him tireless and shrewd in diplomacy. He was always thought of as highly ambitious. Byrnes held some extreme personal and political views: He was a white supremacist, one who believes that people of color are naturally inferior to whites. He also actively opposed an antilynching bill in Congress. (Lynching is execution-style murder—often by hanging—carried out by a mob. Lynchings of black Americans frequently occurred in the South.) Despite his vote against antilynching legislation, Byrnes said he opposed the violent tactics of the Ku Klux Klan, a militant white supremacy group that had a large membership in South Carolina. Byrnes was also against women's suffrage, or the right to vote.

While in Congress, Byrnes showed unusual skill in bringing people together to reach compromises and pass legislation. He supported the creation of the federal highway system and became a member of the important House Appropriations Committee after reelection in 1912. Byrnes steadily moved up in prestige in the House and, while working on naval funding, formed a friendship with future president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was assistant secretary of the navy at the time. In 1924, Byrnes decided to run for the U.S. Senate but lost the Democratic nomination to a longstanding popular figure, Coleman L. Blease (1868–1942). Out of public office, Byrnes moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he practiced law for six years and remained active in civic affairs.

Senator, justice, and administrator

Beginning in 1930, the economic downturn of the Great Depression (1929–41), which began when the stock market crashed in 1929, hit South Carolina hard. People were looking for new leaders. With the backing of wealthy financier and fellow South Carolinian Bernard Baruch (1870–1965), Byrnes won election to the U.S. Senate in 1930 by a slim margin. Byrnes quickly moved up in the Senate to a position of great power. He campaigned hard for Franklin Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election. Once in office, Roosevelt used Byrnes as a key Democratic Senate leader and assigned him to various important committees so Byrnes could push New Deal legislation through Congress. The New Deal was Roosevelt's program of economic and social relief and reform designed to ease the painful effects of the Depression on the nation. Like Roosevelt, Byrnes easily won reelection in 1936. He greatly desired to be Roosevelt's running mate in the 1940 presidential election but lost out when Roosevelt selected Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace (1888–1965) instead. In June 1941, President Roosevelt appointed Byrnes to a different lofty position: justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Byrnes would sit on the Supreme Court for only sixteen months before he became restless. He wanted to become more involved in the growing home front effort during World War II. Roosevelt responded by appointing Byrnes as director of economic stabilization. He was to control the domestic economy, especially by keeping prices of goods down, during the war. Byrnes was highly successful in this important role, so in May 1943 Roosevelt expanded Byrnes's responsibilities. The president appointed him chairman of the War Mobilization Board for coordinating all war agencies and federal departments. From his office in the White House, Byrnes was now fully in charge of the domestic economy, allowing Roosevelt to concentrate on the war effort. Some people referred to Byrnes as the "assistant president." However, in 1944, he was again passed over as Roosevelt's running mate; the Democratic Party selected U.S. senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri instead.

Cold War negotiator

In 1945, Byrnes began applying his strong negotiating skills to foreign relations. In February, he accompanied President Roosevelt to the Yalta Conference in the Soviet Union. There they met with Soviet premier Joseph Stalin (1879–1953; see entry) and British prime minister Winston Churchill (1874–1965; see entry). During the conference, Byrnes had lunch each day with Roosevelt and took detailed notes, reminiscent of his court stenographer days. Following Roosevelt's sudden death from a cerebral hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain) just two months later, Vice President Truman became president; Byrnes organized Roosevelt's funeral. Upon becoming president, Truman immediately called on Byrnes and his Yalta notes. Truman wanted to study Roosevelt's thoughts and postwar plans so he could make decisions consistent with those plans; he also wanted to follow through on private commitments Roosevelt made at Yalta.

Byrnes was a central figure in the developing rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, a rivalry that eventually came to be called the Cold War. He was confident that he had the necessary negotiating skills to establish a productive relationship with the Soviets. He traveled with President Truman to the next meeting of the Big Three leaders, at Potsdam, Germany, in June 1945. (The Big Three refers to the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union; the Big Three also referred to those nations' leaders: Truman, Churchill, and Stalin.) For the rest of 1945, Byrnes served as the key U.S. representative at various high-level meetings, including the London Conference of Foreign Ministers in September, a December meeting in Moscow with the Soviet and British foreign ministers, and the United Nations (UN) organizational meeting.

In the December meeting in Moscow, Byrnes made an all-out attempt to establish friendly relations with the Soviets. Byrnes made several deals regarding international control of atomic energy and the postwar governments of Bulgaria, Hungary, and Japan. However, his concessions (issues he agreed to) to the Soviets proved highly unpopular back in the United States. Byrnes's preference for diplomacy over military confrontation attracted increasing criticism. He was accused of being soft on communism. When Byrnes returned from

Moscow, Truman personally rebuffed him for being too eager to concede to the Soviets in order to make a deal. According to Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes, in a letter to Byrnes, Truman said, "I'm tired of babying the Soviets." Byrnes's influence soon began to decline; his role as a skilled compromiser and negotiator during the Cold War occurred at a time when both the United States and the Soviet Union were unwilling to compromise.

Byrnes tried toughening his approach toward the Soviets through 1946. At Stuttgart, West Germany, on September 6, 1946, Byrnes announced in a major speech that it was now U.S. policy to reestablish an independent Germany, something the Soviets strongly opposed. Many saw this speech as the end of the wartime alliance between the West and the Soviet Union.

Byrnes's efforts to befriend the Soviets were ultimately unsuccessful, but his departure from Truman's cabinet was not about job performance; it had more to do with a personality conflict. Byrnes and Truman simply did not get along. Byrnes envied Truman for succeeding Roosevelt as president and often negotiated with foreign nations without consulting with Truman. In addition, Byrnes's position on white supremacy was in stark contrast to Truman's domestic policies. Byrnes finally resigned in January 1947. Just before leaving office, he negotiated peace treaties with the Soviet Union and Italy, Romania, Hungary, and Finland. It was a last-gasp effort at U.S.-Soviet friendship. General George C. Marshall (1880–1959; see entry) replaced Byrnes as secretary of state.

Governor Byrnes

Byrnes kept quiet in public on national issues for two years after leaving the State Department. By 1949, Byrnes began openly criticizing some of Truman's domestic policies. Returning to public life, Byrnes won election as governor of South Carolina in 1950, receiving 85 percent of the vote. While in office, he pressed Truman to bomb the People's Republic of China (PRC) during the Korean War (1950–53) because he had been so criticized for being soft on communism that he adopted a more warlike position on issues.

Byrnes also supported racial segregation, or separation of the races, in public schools. An opponent of the civil rights movement, which stressed equal rights for African Americans, Byrnes, like many Southerners in the early 1950s, switched his party affiliation and became a Republican. His fight against public school desegregation directly contributed to the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, a court case that combined cases from several states, including South Carolina. The Court decided to ban racial segregation in public schools, but Byrnes vowed to fight implementation of the decision. He fought the adoption of segregation policies with limited success when implementation was delayed. Byrnes retired from office in 1955 and died in April 1972 in Columbia, South Carolina.

For More Information

Books

Brown, Walter J. James F. Byrnes of South Carolina: A Remembrance. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1992.

Byrnes, James F. All in One Lifetime. New York: Harper, 1958.

Byrnes, James F. Speaking Frankly. New York: Harper, 1947. Reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Graebner, Norman A., ed. An Uncertain Tradition: American Secretaries of State in the Twentieth Century. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961.

Messer, Robert L. The End of an Alliance: James F. Byrnes, Roosevelt, Truman, and the Origins of the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Robertson, David. Sly and Able: A Political Biography of James F. Byrnes. New York: Norton, 1994.

Yergin, Daniel. Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Yalta and Potsdam

James Byrnes had perhaps his best moments in foreign affairs while attempting to forge a friendly relationship with the Soviet Union during the two 1945 summit meetings at Yalta and Potsdam. The summits involved the leaders of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Great Britain, the countries known as the Big Three. In February, Byrnes traveled with President Franklin Roosevelt to Yalta, a town on the Crimean Peninsula in the Soviet Republic of the Ukraine.

At the meeting, Soviet premier Joseph Stalin agreed to attack Japan to help the U.S. war effort in the Pacific. Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill conceded to the Soviet Union veto power in the newly developing United Nations organization. They also gave in to Stalin's demands to shift the west border of Poland westward to include parts of Germany. In return, Stalin agreed to allow free elections in Poland. The leaders also agreed to divide Germany into four postwar occupation zones, with the Soviets, the Americans, the British, and the French each controlling one zone. In addition, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to require war reparations from Germany, another demand Stalin made for the Soviet Union. (Reparations are payments a defeated country must sometimes make for damages it caused during a war.) Despite reaching these agreements, the leaders of the three countries revealed in their negotiations a growing division between East and West over future goals.

The next meeting of the Big Three came on July 26, 1945, in Potsdam, Germany. Harry S. Truman had replaced Roosevelt after Roosevelt's sudden death in April, and Clement R. Attlee (1883–1967; see entry) had replaced Churchill as Britain's prime minister. Because the two Western leaders were new, Byrnes played a stronger role in orchestrating agreements. Regarding war reparations, he proposed that the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France obtain reparations only from their own German occupation zones. If Stalin accepted this arrangement, the Americans, the British, and the French would formally accept the new Polish boundaries that Stalin and the Soviets wanted. Through Byrnes's negotiations, the four German occupation zones became more permanently fixed. In addition, Italy became part of the Western sphere of influence, and Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary became part of the Eastern sphere. Through Byrnes's personal orchestration, the division of Europe had become firmly established.