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N.C. Senator Josiah Bailey

by GARLAND S. TUCKER III

TThe most enjoyable aspect of writing my second book, Conservative Heroes: Fourteen Leaders Who Shaped America, from Jefferson to Reagan, was that I got to choose the heroes. I set out to identify a consistent philosophical thread, lived out chronologically down through American history by leaders of real ability and integrity. All 14 of these leaders were admirable public servants who made important contributions and served, in Newton Baker’s words, as members of a “faithful band fighting for a philosophy as old as the Republic itself.” Some of these 14 are well known (e.g., Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan), but others are largely forgotten. I found it was much more fun to write about the largely forgotten ones, and it was a joy to introduce the modern reader to the more obscure members of this “faithful band.”

Of the 14 leaders featured, there are roughly one-third with whom the reader would be well acquainted, another third whose contributions would be vaguely appreciated, and a fi nal third about whom the reader would know little or nothing. Among this third group, without question the most obscure is Josiah W. Bailey. Countless times I have been asked, “Now, who was this Josiah Bailey?” I actually grew up hearing about “Senator Bailey” om my father, who was raised two doors down om the Baileys on Blount Street in Raleigh. My grandparents and the Baileys were close iends, and my father and the Bailey’s son, Pou, were lifelong iends, serving as best men in each other’s weddings. While Senator Bailey had long since died by the time I came along, I can well remember tagging along with my grandmother to visit his widow, known a ectionately to our family as “Miss Edie.” Like all the Baileys, Miss Edie was what’s known colloquially as a “real character” in her own right: witty, caustic, irreverent, and very humorous. My favorite Senator Bailey story involved e News & Observer. As a diehard conservative, Senator Bailey had clashed early and o en in his career with Josephus Daniels, the equally die-hard progressive editor of the N&O. In a fi t of exasperation, Bailey had very publicly canceled his subscription to the paper, and Daniels had equally publicly announced that his newsboys would forevermore toss a complimentary copy of the N&O onto the Bailey porch. According to my father, he could always tell when Senator Bailey was in town by peering out toward the Bailey house around 7 a.m. If the Senator was in residence, one could see him stride on to the porch in his pajamas and bathrobe, snatch up the N&O, march to the curb, and hurl the paper ceremoniously into the middle of Blount Street. Despite this general familiarity with the Baileys, I never really had any sense of Josiah Bailey’s national prominence until a few years ago when I somehow happened to read a book entitled Congr sional Conservat m and the New Deal. It was here that I fi rst learned about Bailey’s rise in 1937 to the fore ont of American political life. In mid-1937, Bailey led a successful Senate fi ght to block President Roosevelt’s “court packing scheme.” is proposal was designed to add enough Roosevelt-appointed justices to the Supreme Court to insure judicial approval of New Deal legislation. Its defeat represented the fi rst signifi cant reassertion of congressional, constitutional authority during the New Deal years. Emboldened by the successful defeat of the court packing scheme, Bailey led a second challenge to FDR when he authored and championed e Conservative Manif to in late 1937. Joined by a bipartisan coalition of fellow conservatives, Bailey hoped to secure the endorsements of a majority of senators for his 10-point statement of basic conservative principles and thereby to alter the le ward direction of national policy. Premature leakage of the e ort to e New York Tim resulted in faint-hearted supporters running for cover, while Bailey stoutly defended the manifesto on the Senate fl oor. For days, the Raleigh native was ont page news – not just in the N&O, but also in e New York Tim and e W hington Post. While the Conservative Manif to never attained the support which Bailey had envisioned, it does stand as a landmark in American conservative history. Because of these two incidents in 1937, Senator Bailey was, appropriately I would argue, enshrined in the panoply of conservative heroes I included in my book. A parting aside: ere are no doubt hundreds of WALTER readers who a ectionately remember Senator Bailey’s colorful son, Pou. A respected Raleigh lawyer and judge, James H. Pou Bailey was the source of innumerable witty comments, humorous anecdotes, and outrageously non-PC statements. ere’s no question that Pou Bailey would be a great subject for a future book. But there’s just one problem: My father o en said he was sure that “only half of what Pou said was true, but I never could tell which half!” Josiah Bailey was in every way a product of his native state. Born in Warrenton, North Carolina, into a devout Baptist family, he graduated om Wake Forest College in 1893 with distinction in Greek and English classics. Family fi nancial hardship prevented his attending Johns Hopkins for graduate study, but his father, a well-respected Baptist minister, assisted him in securing the editorship of the Biblical Recorder, the o cial organ of the State Baptist Convention, in 1895. For the next twelve years he ran the Recorder, o en taking political positions on public education, the disen anchisement of black voters, prohibition, women’s su age, and other critical issues. At the age of thirty-three he resigned his editorship to begin the study of law. He quickly became one of the twenty best-paid attorneys in the state and a force in Democratic politics. In 1912 Bailey endorsed Woodrow Wilson and led his campaign in North Carolina. By 1914 he was widely acknowledged as the leader of the more liberal faction within the state Democratic Party and asserted unabashedly, “I am a progressive Democrat.” Under Wilson, Bailey was appointed collector of internal revenue for eastern North Carolina, where he served for eight years. With the 1920 Republican victory, Bailey returned to private practice in Raleigh but remained an important party leader, even running for governor (unsuccessfully) in 1924. He supported Al Smith for president in 1928, when many party leaders in North Carolina opted to sit out the election because of Smith’s urban Catholicism.

BOOK EXCERPT

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