Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,713

This is the grave of Theodore Bilbo, an odious human.

Born in 1877 in Juniper Grove, Mississippi, Bilbo was born in an auspicious year for a white supremacist. Reconstruction was over and violent white dominance was on, which Bilbo would dedicate his whole life to defending. He grew up in the town of Poplarville, where his upwardly mobile father became VP of the town’s bank. Bilbo went to college on scholarship at Peabody Normal College in Nashville. He went back to teach school, probably had sex with an underaged student (at the very least he was accused of unacceptable advances and was fired), and then ended up at Vanderbilt Law. He never graduated and was accused of cheating, but it didn’t matter. He was admitted to the bar in 1906.

It didn’t take long after his law degree for Bilbo to go into politics, serving four years in the Mississippi state senate from 1908-12. While there. he was credibly accused of taking bribes. Anyone see any behavioral issues thus far? Don’t worry, it never stopped Theodore Bilbo! He ran for lieutenant governor in 1912, won and served there until 1916. Then it was governor. He was in that office for four years, until 1920. If you were white, he wasn’t half bad. He was interested in the Progressive movement, to some extent anyway, put a bunch of money into the white schools, and put resources into public works projects too. But when he ran for Congress in 1920, he lost the primary.

After years in the political wilderness, Bilbo decided on another run for governor in 1927. He won and did another four years there. While governor, Al Smith won the Democratic nomination. A Catholic would have a hard time winning Mississippi. So Bilbo intervened, creating a rumor that Herbert Hoover had socialized with Black women. That did the trick to keep Mississippi in the Democrats’ camp. Interestingly, Bilbo led the fight for the first state-level sales tax, instituted in his state in 1930. He also decided on a political purge of professors at the state’s universities, as well as university leadership, to place political allies in these positions. In response, major academic governance institutions basically, in the parlance of our times, stripped the entire state university system of accreditation, while the Department of Agriculture stopped funding programs at Mississippi State. Bilbo didn’t care. He had the state’s voters in the palm of his hand due to his open embrace of lynching. Not surprisingly, his real base was the poor white, the small farmer, the sharecropper. The “respectable” classes of Mississippi whites believed in most of these things too, but didn’t talk about them in the same way, so they really hated Bilbo and he really hated them.

In 1934, Bilbo ran for Senate. This was the New Deal, but what did that really mean in Mississippi. He was such an open white supremacist and just race-baited his way through the rest of his political career. He won easily and then went on a crusade to send all the Black people back to Africa, which was also promoted by certain Black separatists of this era, most notably Marcus Garvey. He and Garvey expressed admiration for one another. He just got worse and worse and worse over his time in the Senate. At first, he was a fairly reliable vote for the New Deal but after 1936, he became an open opponent of it and happily worked with other far-right southern Democrats and Republicans to shut down major legislation, He voted against most of the New Deal labor legislation and tried to kill the Fair Employment Practice Committee and led the fight against Aubrey Williams, National Youth Administration head, to then head the Rural Electrification Administration, basically accusing the southern liberal of being a Black loving communist. And let’s not beat around the bush, Bilbo was a piece of shit in other ways. He was a tiny man, only 5’2″ and he had serious Napoleon syndrome. He dressed super flashy for the time and, most terribly, constantly referred to himself in the third person. And don’t forget the many, many demanded and accepted bribes.

This was the kind of guy Franklin Delano Roosevelt had to deal with among his Democratic “allies” in the Senate. In 1938, as an unemployment relief bill went through the Senate, Bilbo attempted to include a rider that would deport all Black people to Liberia. That was his kind of unemployment legislation–kick all the Blacks out for the whites to have more jobs. Roosevelt’s response was to actively support Bilbo’s 1940 reelection bid, while Bilbo called himself the “redneck liberal.” It goes without saying that Bilbo was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan the whole time, which he talked about publicly.

Democrats did try to isolate this idiot as much as possible. Even for your pretty staunch segregationist in Washington, Bilbo was an embarrassment. He was thrown onto the committee governing Washington, D.C., to give him something to do, but even here he tried to find ways to limit Black voting in the District. After 1940, he got even worse, embracing isolationism among all his normal racism. He hated Jews, so what was so wrong with the Nazis anyway? He made fun of how all the real FDR supporters were Jews, Italians, and Blacks and what kind of politics was that? He had wins too. He very strongly opposed to the FEPC’s renewal and helped kill the program, though the postwar world was so different than the prewar that Bilbo was losing the war for white supremacy.

Things got so bad that when Bilbo won a third term in 1946, the Idaho leftist senator Glen Taylor (imagine Idaho electing this guy today!) led a fight for the Senate to no longer seat him. That was because, since the Supreme Court had now ruled agains the white primary, he openly urged his supporters to use violence to stop Blacks from voting. Also, more of his corruption had come to light, including a supporter giving him a Cadillac for Christmas. There was a decent amount of support for this, as only the very worst people could tolerate Bilbo and Republicans, who had taken the majority that fall, saw a way to get rid of a Democrat. This was based on both his racism but also his open acceptance of bribes, which probably scared off more senators from supporting him. But by this time, Bilbo had oral cancer. He never again would sit in that seat. But before he died, he had one more contribution to American life. He wrote a book titled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. What a guy. Naturally he included the title on his gravestone.

Bilbo died from his cancer in 1947. He was 69 years old.

There is so, so, so much more to say about this person. I was going to call him a cancer, but a comparison would require an apology to cancer. But this post is 1200 words as is.

Also, let me make one last point–we can talk about how Tommy Tuberville and Ron Johnson are the stupidest senators in American history and Lord knows they have a claim to the title. But we need historical context. When you are comparing them to Theodore Bilbo or Cotton Ed Smith, the bar is very, very high.

Theodore Bilbo is buried in Juniper Grove Cemetery, Poplarville, Mississippi. Let’s just say it was no great place to visit.

If you would like this series to visit other terrible southern senators of the early 20th century, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. After all, if you don’t want to support visits to the Bilbos of the nation, why are we doing this series anyway? John Bankhead is in Jasper, Alabama and Park Trammell is in Lakeland, Florida. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.