Summury of Excuses Made to Honor Hatton W. Sumners

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EXCUSES MADE FOR HONORING WHITE SUPREMACIST HATTON W. SUMNERS 1. The Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) handbook doesn’t mention any racist elements in Sumners’ biography and so an individual or organization might claim that they were uniformed. No competent historian believes that the TSHA handbook is reliable and considering that Sumners represented Dallas in the U.S. House for decades, that should have been a clue that the entry wasn’t reliable.

For those who wish to know who Sumners really was there are pages and subpages with documentation at this URL. http://templeofdemocracy.com/hatton-w-sumners.html 2. Some try separating the constitutional scholar Sumners from the racist Sumners.

Sumners’ racism wasn’t carried along in a travel bag.

Sumners in his speeches would talk about the Anglo-Saxon constitution versus jazz ideas, such as “Jazz philosophy” etc. Sumners labeled ideas he opposed as “jazz” ideas versus his favored Anglo-Saxon constitutional ideas. He would talk about “watermelon time” and that the nation had “jazzed off into the jungle” in his speeches. At the time jazz was seen as African American music and Sumners was employing Negrophobia in the exposition of his constitutional ideas.

He did this starting in the 1920s and through his career as a congressional representative and in his final book, “The Private Citizen and His Democracy,” published in 1961 by the Southwestern Legal Foundation.

More importantly, in 1944 when the Supreme Court struck down the white primary in Texas, he faced some serious criticism from his associates as to why he wasn’t raising hell. In reply Sumners, in a series of letters, and in particular one to a really angry supporter, Cleo Thompson, how Sumners’ exposition of his constitutional ideas was to get national support to block civil rights legislation.

Sumners explained that the South is one-quarter of the federal legislature and needed allies and these allies could be found on the basis of his constitutional arguments and not specifically Southern partisan arguments or racist arguments.

3. Someone might want to frame Sumners as some type of prophet against too much government or government centralization or federal bureaucracy, you should understand he was afraid of these things because they might be used to end white supremacy as revealed in his letters.

4. A person might be tempted to want to just focus on the proposed Supreme Court expansion by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 and Sumners’ opposition to it as to why you think he should be honored.

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In 1937 it was very much in the news that the proposed Supreme Court expansion could threaten white supremacy. The Secretary of the National Negro Congress, John P. Davis, in detail, in testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, made it very clear how the Supreme Court was critical to the maintenance of white supremacy in the South. This got fairly widespread news coverage.

Sumners wasn’t stupid. He always critically considered the eventual impact of federal action in terms of it potentially being a threat to white supremacy in the South. When he considered something a threat to white supremacy, as he explained in his 1944 letters, he never framed it in terms of race but in terms of constitutional principals which he was defending.

5. A person might want to claim that nevertheless he was a great constitutional scholar, but unfortunately directed to bad ends. To read his speeches and to read his book, “The Private Citizen and His Democracy,” is to realize that he was no such thing. His thinking was a cobbled together hodgepodge of simplistic ideas and historical mythologies.

6. Sumners contributed little or nothing to the Philippine constitution. In fact, when word got out that Americans might be involved in the drafting, things got so heated he had to cancel his visit though the did mail some ideas to the Filipinos.

The claim that he help draft the Philippines constitution is a fiction.

Sumners was a blistering racist from the beginning to the end of his career. Reported in the Dallas Morning News (DMN), in 1913 Sumners is alarmed about JapaneseAmericans in California and states racial antipathy is inherent in human relationships and that means that unless separated, “the white and yellow races must indulge in a warfare that will exterminate one or the other races.” Later in 1957 he is reported as comparing the response of the National Guard in Little Rock, to the Soviet invasion of Poland. In between he expressed a wide variety of racist opinions.

There are other issues also. He was an opponent of women suffrage. He was against Sicilian immigrants and wrote about their “Saracen” blood, and in general talked about the “scum” of Europe immigrating to the United States and the “foreign born” being the cause of labor problems. Then there was his congressional speech about giving labor leaders the “electric chair” during World War 2.

Historically, Sumners has been overlooked as a major opponent of civil rights in America. As the head of the Judiciary Committee, he was a major figure in developing the strategy and deploying it of blocking civil rights on the pretext of defending the constitution and stoking fears of over-centralized government.

His legacy is the horrific damage he did to the civil rights of minorities, crushing their lives and hopes, contributing to the creation of a racially damaged nation. Every organization that has honored Sumners needs to retract all honors given to him and apologize to the nation.