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James Francis Byrnes

Also Known As James F. Byrnes , Byrnes

Former United States Secretary of State

Education

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Overview

James Francis Byrnes was an American judge and politician from South Carolina. A member of the Democratic Party, he served in U.S. Congress and on the U.S. Supreme Court, as well as in the executive branch, most prominently as the 49th U.S. Secretary of State under President Harry S. Truman. Byrnes was also the 104th governor of South Carolina, making him one of the very few politicians to have served in the highest levels of all three branches of the American federal government while also being active in state government.

Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina, Byrnes pursued a legal career with the help of his cousin, Governor Miles Benjamin McSweeney. Byrnes won election to the U.S. House of Representatives and served from 1911 to 1925. He became a close ally of President Woodrow Wilson and a protégé of Senator Benjamin Tillman. He sought election to the U.S. Senate in 1924 but narrowly lost a runoff election to Coleman Livingston Blease, who had the backing of the Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacist domestic-terrorist organization. Byrnes then moved his law practice to Spartanburg, South Carolina and prepared for a political comeback. He narrowly defeated Blease in the 1930 Democratic primary and joined the Senate in 1931.

Historian George E. Mowry called Byrnes "the most influential Southern member of Congress between John Calhoun and Lyndon Johnson". In the Senate, Byrnes supported the policies of his longtime friend, President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Byrnes championed the New Deal and sought federal investment in South Carolina water projects. He also supported Roosevelt's foreign policy, calling for a hard line against the Axis powers. He also opposed some of the labor laws proposed by Roosevelt, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage that hurt his state's competitive advantage of very low factory wages. Roosevelt appointed Byrnes to the Supreme Court in 1941 but asked him to join the executive branch after America's entry into World War II. During the war, Byrnes led the Office of Economic Stabilization and the Office of War Mobilization. He was a candidate to replace Henry A. Wallace as Roosevelt's running mate in the 1944 election, but instead Harry S. Truman was nominated by the 1944 Democratic National Convention.

After Roosevelt's death, Byrnes served as a close adviser to Truman and became U.S. Secretary of State in July 1945. In that capacity, Byrnes attended the Potsdam Conference and the Paris Peace Treaties, 1947; however, relations between Byrnes and Truman soured, and Byrnes resigned from the Cabinet in January 1947. He returned to elective politics in 1950 by winning election as the governor of South Carolina. As governor, he opposed the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education and sought to establish "separate but equal" as a realistic alternative to the desegregation of schools. Though he remained a Democrat himself, he endorsed most Republican presidential nominees after 1948 and supported Strom Thurmond's switch to the Republican Party in 1964.

Secretary of State

Upon his succession to the presidency after Roosevelt's death, on April 12, 1945, Truman relied heavily on Byrnes's counsel, Byrnes having been a mentor to Truman from the latter's earliest days in the Senate. Indeed, Byrnes was one of the first people seen by Truman on the first day of his presidency. It was Byrnes who shared information with the new president on the atomic bomb project (until then, Truman had known nothing about the Manhattan Project). When Truman met Roosevelt's coffin in Washington, he asked Byrnes and former Vice President Wallace, the two other men who might well have succeeded Roosevelt, to join him at the train station. Truman originally intended for both men to play leading roles in his administration to signal continuity with Roosevelt's policies. Truman quickly fell out with Wallace but retained a good working relationship with Byrnes and increasingly turned to him for support. 388 

Truman appointed Byrnes as US Secretary of State on July 3, 1945. Despite personally objecting to any guarantees of retaining Emperor Shōwa, Byrnes remained ambiguous on that point in a draft reply to Japan's offer of surrender of August 10.[34] As Secretary of State, he was first in line to the Presidency since there was no Vice President during Truman's first term. He played a major role at the Potsdam Conference, the Paris Peace Conference, and other major postwar conferences. According to historian Robert Hugh Ferrell, Byrnes knew little more about foreign relations than Truman. He made decisions after consulting a few advisors, such as Donald S. Russell and Benjamin V. Cohen. Byrnes and his small group paid little attention to the State Department experts and similarly ignored Truman

Because Byrnes had been part of the US delegation at Yalta, Truman assumed that he had accurate knowledge of what had transpired. It would be many months before Truman discovered that not to be the case. Nevertheless, Byrnes advised that the Soviets were breaking the Yalta Agreement and that Truman needed to be resolute and uncompromising with them.  

Byrnes and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin issued a joint statement announcing that they were combining the U.S. zone of Germany and the British zone of Germany into one new territory called "West Germany."General Lucius D. Clay, who had been a top aide to Byrnes in 1944, heavily influenced Byrnes' famous September 1946 speech in Stuttgart, Germany. The speech, "Restatement of Policy on Germany," marked the formal transition in American occupation policy away from the Morgenthau Plan of economic dismantlement to one of economic reconstruction.

Truman was rapidly moving toward a hardline position on Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe and Iran, but Byrnes was much more conciliatory. The distance between them grew and ties of personal friendship weakened. In late 1945, Byrnes argued with Soviet Foreign Minister Viacheslav Molotov over Soviet pressures on Bulgaria and Romania. Byrnes sent Mark Ethridge, a liberal journalist, to investigate; Ethridge found conditions were indeed bad. Ethridge wrote a damning report, but Byrnes ignored it and instead endorsed a Soviet offer. Truman read Ethridge's report and decided that Byrnes's softline approach was a failure and that the US needed to stand up to the Kremlin.

Personal relations between the two men grew strained, particularly when Truman felt that Byrnes was attempting to set foreign policy by himself and to inform the President only afterward. An early instance of the friction was the Moscow Conference in December 1945. Truman considered the "successes" of the conference to be "unreal" and was highly critical of Byrnes's failure to protect Iran, which was not mentioned in the final communiqué. "I had been left in the dark about the Moscow conference," Truman told Byrnes bluntly. In a subsequent letter to Byrnes, Truman took a harder line in reference to Iran: "Without these supplies furnished by the United States, Russia would have been ignominiously defeated. Yet now Russia stirs up rebellion and keeps troops on the soil of her friend and ally— Iran. .. Unless Russia is faced with an iron fist and strong language another war is in the making. Only one language do they understand.... I do not think we should play compromise any longer.... I am tired of babying the Soviets". That led to the Iran crisis of 1946 in which Byrnes took an increasingly hardline position in opposition to Stalin, culminating in a speech in Germany on September 6, 1946. The "Restatement of Policy on Germany," also known as the "Speech of Hope", set the tone of future US policy by repudiating the Morgenthau Plan, an economic program that would permanently deindustrialize Germany. Byrnes was named TIME Man of the Year. Truman and others believed that Byrnes had grown resentful that he had not been Roosevelt's running mate and successor and so was showing disrespect to Truman. Whether or not that was true, Byrnes felt compelled to resign from the Cabinet in 1947 with some feelings of bitterness.

Early Life

James Francis Byrnes was born May 2, 1882 in Charleston, South Carolina, and was reared in Charleston. Byrnes's father, James Francis Byrnes, died shortly after Byrnes was born. His Irish-American mother, Elizabeth McSweeney Byrnes, was a dressmaker. In the 1880s, a widowed aunt and her three children came to live with them; one of the children was Frank J. Hogan, later president of the American Bar Association. At 14, Byrnes left St. Patrick's Catholic School to work in a law office, and became a court stenographer. Notably, he transcribed the 1903 trial of South Carolina Lieutenant Governor James H. Tillman (nephew of Senator and former governor "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman), for murdering a newspaper editor. In 1906, he married the former Maude Perkins Busch of Aiken, South Carolina; they had no children. He was the godparent of James Christopher Connor. At this time, Byrnes converted from the Catholic Church to Episcopalianism.

In 1900, Byrnes's cousin, Governor Miles B. McSweeney, appointed him as a clerk for Judge Robert Aldrich of Aiken. As he needed to be 21 to take this position, Byrnes, his mother, and McSweeney changed his date of birth to that of his older sister, Leonora. He later apprenticed to a lawyer, then a common practice, read for the law, and was admitted to the bar in 1903. In 1908, he was appointed solicitor for the second circuit of South Carolina and served until 1910. Byrnes was a protégé of "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman and often had a moderating influence on the fiery segregationist Senator.

In 1910, he narrowly won the Democratic primary for US Representative from South Carolina's 2nd congressional district, which was then tantamount to election. He was formally elected in the general election, and was re-elected six times, serving from 1911 to 1925.

Byrnes proved a brilliant legislator, working behind the scenes to form coalitions, and avoiding the high-profile oratory that characterized much of Southern politics. He became a close ally of US President Woodrow Wilson, who often entrusted important political tasks to the capable young Representative, rather than to more experienced lawmakers. In the 1920s, he was a champion of the "Good Roads Movement", which attracted motorists and politicians to large-scale road building programs.

Career

  • United States - Former Secretary of State

Reference

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