Philleo Nash Oral History Interview, August 17, 1966

Notice
This is a transcript of a tape-recorded interview conducted for the Harry S. Truman Library. A draft of this transcript was edited by the interviewee but only minor emendations were made; therefore, the reader should remember that this is essentially a transcript of the spoken, rather than the written word.

Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview.

RESTRICTIONS
This oral history transcript may be read, quoted from, cited, and reproduced for purposes of research. It may not be published in full except by permission of the Harry S. Truman Library.

Opened October, 1973
Harry S. Truman Library
Independence, Missouri

[52]

HESS: Dr. Nash, at the conclusion of our last interview, I inadvertently let the tape run off the reel. Perhaps we should start by having you finish the statement you were making at that time.

NASH: I'd be glad to.

We had been discussing the Detroit race riots and the role that Ted Poston and I played in the quelling of that riot, working together from the Office of War Information, but under the general direction of Jonathan Daniels, administrative assistant to Mr. Roosevelt, and had mentioned some two hundred Negro leaders we were in touch with. I didn't mean that the Negro leaders I was speaking of were in any formal network or anything like that. I merely mean that it was Ted's job to know who they were and to be in touch with them so that we would have the closest personal informational contact that was possible with the Negro community in each of the major communities of the nation which had been identified as probably productive of race tension.

So we had a kind of a temperature taking system

[53]

and then we had a method for taking some action once we determined that the patient had a temperature. But that action was coordinated through the White House; and my job with Jonathan was not only to keep track of the incoming information, but to try to be imaginative and creative about possible solutions. And here our formula was a very simple one, a very commonsense one, simply to stop the little ones before they got to be big ones.

In those days it was common theory that race riots were both unpredictable and uncontrollable. This is like supposing that a tornado or a hurricane is unpredictable merely because you can't control it after it gets started, but if you have good information, good incoming intelligence, you can anticipate the developments, you can anticipate the course of the hurricane and even of tornadoes and you can take evasive action Communities can be warned; people can get out of the way. This is the very least that modern science ought to be able to do.

The belief that a race riot has no means of control is equivalent to saying that it has no cause. I doubt if anybody really believes this. Twenty years ago the

[54]

cause wasn't very well-known or understood but to say that you can't do anything about it is to take a defeatist attitude which nobody would have accepted even those days in terms of labor relations, and in more delicate areas of human relations such as child care and divorce, family relations, already the principle had been established that government can do something about family relations and so there are courts of domestic relations and children's codes.

So we were in at the very beginning of the development of a kind of race relations service. Neither Ted Poston nor Jonathan Daniels nor I or anybody else that we were associated with accepted for one minute the proposition that race riots don't have a cause, anymore than any other social upheaval is without cause. There are causes for all these things and it's merely a question of applying research and knowledge, inquiry and analysis to them until you find out what they are. So we operated on the premises that we didn't know what the causes were but that they could be found, especially if you could detect them in the early stages. So we first set about a simple kind of detection system and then we began to create an analysis

[55]

of the patterns that we discovered to see whether you could find long-term trends.

And, of course, we had to operate on an ad hoc basis and therefore we assumed that the little ones we discovered, if they could be handled as little ones, could be prevented from growing into big ones. And so we rather quickly discovered that a work stoppage over whether a Negro person was about to be employed on a streetcar line or an assembly line in a plant, or a civil disturbance in a housing project over whether a Negro family was going to be allowed to move in, or a disturbance connected with a recreation facility such as a park, or a disturbance that might arise over some interference with the formation of a crowd outside a place of recreation, like a dancehall or a bar, that none of these was without provocation and if there was provocation then you could find out what the provocation was, and this might lead to an amelioration of the situation.

The application of this principle enabled us to detect and stop all major racial disturbances from the end of the summer of 1943 to VJ Day, a period of approximately two years. The operation was one that had

[56]

the direct approval of the President; Jonathan Daniels was in charge, I was detailed from the Office of War Information as his assistant, although I continued to do my OWI job. Both of us felt we needed a kind of a contact with the Negro community that only a respected and known member of the Negro community can provide, and Ted Poston was that person, and then we made full use of every research and intelligence facility of the Federal Government to detect these disturbances, these seismic disturbances in the human community, before they had reached mountainous proportions. Then, we used the facilities of the Federal Government, the operating agencies, the War Labor Board, the National Labor Relations Board, the inspection service of the military, the Office of War Information, the Office of Civilian Defense, any Government agency that had programs in the area that could be put to work to ameliorate the situation, were used to this purpose at the direction of the White House, and this was .the secret of our success.

We ranged all the way from little upheavals based on rumors that the street march was going to develop into a riot, to the great Philadelphia crisis of 1944

[57]

in which we stopped a major riot but only by the device of Federal seizure of the transit properties of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit System by presidential order under the War Powers Act.

Now, I can describe this in all parts, in detail or in depth, but this was the heart of our wartime operation, and it was the granddaddy of all of today's programs which are operated through the Equal Opportunity Commission, the Department of Justice, whether you're calling out the marshals at Little Rock, as was done by President Eisenhower, or whether you're sending troops into Alabama, fundamentally you are using the presidential power for the purpose of insuring equal rights and are doing so on the basis of some kind of estimate of the situation with an evaluation of a possible course of action, which in our system of government, if it involves race relations, must be presidential.

HESS: Does that pretty well cover that aspect of your job?

NASH: Well, it's very much of a "once-over-lightly." This is the most important period of my life. It set the pattern for almost everything that took place in the Civil Rights field in the past twenty years. Its

[58]

never been written about, never been told about. Jonathan Daniels knows about it, Ted Poston knows about it, and I know about it, and I doubt if very many other people do.

HESS: Do you have anymore that you'd like to say here on that?

NASH: I have a lot I'd like to say, particularly if you want to get into individual episodes.

HESS: Why don't you give me an example or two, and maybe we can show how it worked.

NASH: Well, I think a good example would be -- let's take the Philadelphia Rapid Transit strike. You start out with the Fair Employment Practice Commission and its decision that eight Negro track workers should be upgraded to maintenance men.

It had been believed that this would be very carefully, thoroughly, worked out in detail with the union, with the company and with the municipal authorities of Philadelphia. Yet when the August 1 deadline came of 1944, on a Monday morning, all the workers reported sick at the same time. It was not a strike, it was wartime and a strike would have been illegal. They were just all sick.

[59]

It took five days to get that situation resolved. It came at a time when I was out of town, and Jonathan and Ted Poston handled this pretty much by themselves, but using procedures that we had all worked out together.

Of course, this is disappointing when something like this happens without you, but it is a matter of pride that it works, you know, devoid of personalities; and it did work without personalities. So the President was out of the country, and it was rather quickly determined that the situation was of a national emergency character, that it required prompt action and rather large scale action, and three steps were taken immediately: One was in line with, let us say our detecting system to keep track of the police blotters so that we would know from hour to hour how large the groups were that were involved in action with each other; and then on a simple scale of severity, such as words only; words and blows; words, blows and missiles. It was a very simpleminded, commonsense scale, but as you can see, if people are shouting as drivers do at each other when they meet on a red light, you don't have a very tense situation, but if they get out of the car and they start slugging

[60]

each other you have potential trouble, and if one of them picks up a brickbat, then you're really in for it. This is application of the same common-sense principle. We kept track of it all over Philadelphia, blotter by blotter, on an hour by hour basis during the time of the mounting tension. Consequently you could see the tension growing, you didn't have to rely on rumors, but if the average group today is twenty-five, and the average group tomorrow is fifty, and the average group the day after that is one hundred . . . you better get ready to move.

Now, the second thing in preparation for basic trouble, was to get a seizure order out with the President's personal signature on it so it couldn't be challenged on constitutional grounds, and he was making a wartime inspection and therefore a courier had to be dispatched for this and there was an inner limit as to how fast you could move.

The third thing was to be completely ready with the manpower and the force that would make the thing foolproof so that you wouldn't have a recapitulation of the terrible Detroit disaster. I've forgotten what was on our tape at the end of the last session, but

[61]

if I related the entire Detroit account, I should have explained that the commanding general of the 5th Service Command came out with the necessary seizure papers in his hand and only discovered after he got there that they were inapplicable, and some thirty lives and five million dol