THE NEW DEAL’S BLACK CONGRESSMAN:
A Life of Arthur Wergs Mitchell
By Dennis S. Nordin
University of Missouri Press, 320 pages, $39.95
Arthur Wergs Mitchell’s claim to historical significance lies in his election in 1934 as the first black Democrat in Congress. He served four undistinguished terms and did nothing before, during or after his tenure in office that would attract the attention of a biographer. A man who “did not allow ideals to obstruct his quests for personal goals,” according to Dennis Nordin, he stood for no great principles. Nor did he command loyalty or affection from peers or constituents. ” `The more men Mitchell met, the more enemies he made,’ ” Nordin quotes one observer as saying.
What, then, is the purpose of this carefully researched book? Nordin, a resident of Sweden who has previously written on the history of the Granger movement in rural America, considers Mitchell’s career a clear indication of “how far an African American in the age of Franklin Roosevelt could go by making himself the tool of a power structure” that had no interest whatsoever in black Americans.
Mitchell’s life provides a good test case. His rise appears on the surface to follow the classic lines of American bootstrap values. Born in a one-room cabin on a Southern farm, Mitchell was named after President Chester Alan Arthur. He walked 10 miles to school, but had to drop out at age 10 to contribute to his sharecropping family’s labor in the fields. Four years later his father died. Mitchell subsequently enrolled in Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, which stressed values of hard work, thrift, patience and accommodation to the social and political status quo. He spent his 20s as an entrepreneur and educator, and then moved to Washington, D.C., where he became a successful real estate investor. In 1929 he relocated to Chicago after a three-month stint here as an operative in Herbert Hoover’s presidential campaign. After practicing law for five years he secured the Democratic nomination for Congress, served eight years, and then retired to an estate in Virginia.
It all sounds rather dull. But it is not, despite Nordin’s penchant for long paragraphs and minutely detailed narrative. The end of the story provides a ready clue: “reflecting Tara” (the O’Hara family estate in “Gone With the Wind”), Mitchell’s Virginia home stood on Jefferson Davis Highway. From the beginning, observes Nordin, “his obsession was to become a black copy of the genteel Southern white gentleman.”
And virtually from the beginning, his career embodied a combination of deception, manipulation, fraud and opportunism. Although he frequently implied he had received a degree from Tuskegee, he never had. He claimed to be an apostle of Booker T. Washington’s, a man who considered Mitchell a rascal at best, a fraud at worst. Misguided or not, Washington’s accommodation to Southern racism was a strategy; Mitchell’s was a hustle. He opened and closed four schools, claiming to be teaching black youths how to be farmers but more likely “exchanging token education for compulsory labor.” Each enterprise was somehow related to a real estate venture undertaken in partnership with white landholders eager to attract a black labor force and aware of the attraction the right kind of school might provide. Nordin describes the general approach as “fleecing and fleeing.” The Washington, D.C., real estate investments followed in the same vein, perhaps even reaching the level of a stock swindle (a judge said no, his widow told Nordin yes).
Mitchell’s move to Chicago rested on his assessment of African-American political opportunity in the city, a judgment that rested less on genius than on a willingness to do whatever it took to seize the main chance. Given the size of the black Republican organization, that meant becoming a Democrat. “Ambitious for himself more than accountable to the race,” Mitchell moved immediately toward a regular Democratic organization that was only beginning to see the potential for black votes. Party leaders were readily drawn toward a black candidate unlikely to let principles get in the way of winning–especially considering that the alternative was Earl Dickerson. Chicago’s leading black Democrat, Dickerson was burdened not only by principles but also by an independent streak and a commitment to civil rights. The newcomer from Washington, D.C., arriving with connections to Alabama Democrats forged in his days in the rural South, was the breath of stale air that the machine needed.
Mitchell’s basic philosophy in Congress rested on three rules: Vote with the Illinois Democratic delegation, support the national party and don’t interfere in local politics. He occasionally spoke up on civil rights issues, but was a mild voice at best. He steadfastly refused to play the role sketched by his predecessor, Oscar DePriest, as a representative of all black Americans–even to the ridiculous extent of writing Southern black petitioners that they should contact their own representatives for assistance. He tended to fight discrimination only in situations involving blacks who had earned full citizenship through the hard work, thrift and moral rectitude he perceived in himself. Hence he fought discrimination in the federal civil service and battled the railroads over the right of black passengers to first-class service. He disliked activists, “complainers,” like the NAACP, and much of the black press.
Nordin occasionally softens this portrait of a conniving Uncle Tom, taking issue with even more critical scholars, such as the Du Sable Museum’s Charles Branham, who has characterized Mitchell as an utter failure, a man who ” `seemed destined to sabotage each good deed with insensitivity and ineptitude.’ ” Nordin’s Mitchell is politically astute, craftily manipulative and careful. As a congressman, he progresses from “please and appease” to “temperate African American representation.”
What’s missing, however, is the context. Nordin eschews an in-depth study of Mitchell’s personal life (somewhat frustrating, considering that his third wife shot out the tires of his car to protest his “blatant lechery”), and he focuses the book largely on Mitchell’s brief political career. This should leave room for more comparison with his contemporaries. Even if Mitchell seldom actually engaged men like Chicago Defender Editor Robert Abbott or labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph in debate, there was a conversation across black America–one that few white Americans have encountered and even fewer have tried to understand. Nordin is right to assess Mitchell’s significance in terms of the constraints on black politics, but other black voices would lend texture to the argument.
