The crushing defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War was the greatest blow to the primacy of rural values as the guiding force in the South. When the United States was struggling at its inception with how to structure a democratic government, Benjamin Franklin helped mediate a “solution” that would protect vast tracts of land with fewer people in agricultural states from concentrated masses in population center states dedicated to manufacturing and trading. His “New Jersey Compromise” traded an even number of Senators from every state, regardless of population, against the controller of our purse strings (all appropriations bills must original in the House), the House of Representatives based on the number of people in such states.
The Civil War challenged the South’s perception that their way of life – including slavery – were protected values under that compromise. As additional states were added to the union, the South’s “protective” mantle became diluted and effectively overruled. The Civil War was their statement that this was not the system they bought into. After the war was over, carpetbaggers flooded into the South, self-righteous and greedy. They pushed and shoved southerners and southern values down, payback to those who lost the war. But those southern values didn’t go away.
The South was still largely agrarian. As farmers grappled with Reconstruction and extracting crops without slaves, the seething anger at Northern, urban values, did not dissipate. Anger over emancipated slaves still simmered, hot and sometimes violent. Here are some of the most important leaders the South produced when it was able to push their “values representatives” into public office (per Wikipedia):
Benjamin Ryan "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman, Jr. (August 11, 1847 – July 3, 1918), was an American politician who served as the 84th Governor of South Carolina, from 1890 to 1894, and as a United States Senator, from 1895 until his death in office. Tillman's outspoken support for white supremacy and lynch law provoked national controversy.
James Kimble Vardaman (July 26, 1861 – June 25, 1930) was an American politician from the state of Mississippi, serving as Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908 and in the U.S. Senate from 1913 to 1919. Vardaman, known as "The Great White Chief", advocated white supremacy. He said "if it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy."
Theodore Gilmore Bilbo (October 13, 1877 – August 21, 1947) was an American politician. Bilbo, a Democrat, twice served as governor of Mississippi (1916–20, 1928–32) and later was elected a U.S. Senator (1935–47). A master of filibuster and scathing rhetoric, a rough-and-tumble fighter in debate, he made his name a synonym for white supremacy. Proud of being a racist, Bilbo believed that black people and Jews were inferior, defended segregation, and was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
George Corley Wallace Jr. (August 25, 1919 – September 13, 1998) was an American politician and the 45th Governor of Alabama, having served two nonconsecutive terms and two consecutive terms as a Democrat: 1963–1967, 1971–1979 and 1983–1987. Wallace has the third longest gubernator… Wallace took the oath of office on January 14, 1963, standing on the gold star marking the spot where, nearly 102 years earlier, Jefferson Daviswas sworn in as provisional president of the Confederate States of America. In his inaugural speech, Wallace said the line for which he is best known: ‘In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ .. This sentence was written by Wallace's new speechwriter, Asa Earl Carter.
In 1963, President John F. Kennedy's administration ordered the U.S. Army's 2nd Infantry Division from Ft. Benning, Georgia to be prepared to enforce the racial integration of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In a vain attempt to halt the enrollment of black students Vivian Malone andJames Hood, Governor Wallace stood in front of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama on June 11, 1963. This became known as the "Stand in the Schoolhouse Door". (Some of this display was arranged for the public; Robert F. Kennedy, the Attorney General, had been in touch with Wallace behind the scenes to arrange some of the events.)
In September 1963, Wallace attempted to stop four black students from enrolling in four separate elementary schools in Huntsville. After intervention by a federal court in Birmingham, the four children were allowed to enter on September 9, becoming the first to integrate a primary or secondary school in Alabama.
Writing in the Opinion Pages of the August 12th New York Times, writer Curtis Wilkie reminds of how these trends worked their way into recent history: “In the early 20th century, these men rose on an agrarian revolt against Big Business and government corruption. They used that energy, in turn, to disenfranchise and segregate blacks, whose loyalty to the pro-business Republican Party made them targets of these racist reformers.
“Their activities spawned a second wave of Southern Democratic populists, who defied federal court orders and civil rights legislation during the 1960s, even as more moderate politicians were moving on. Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, among others, portrayed himself as a tribune of the working class while championing segregation…
“A considerable body of literature about the populist rebellion was once required reading in college for a generation of Mississippians old enough to remember the second reactionary period 50 years ago.
“In ‘The Mind of the South,’ still in print seven decades after it was published, W. J. Cash wrote that populist forces in the region were driven by ‘the rage and frustration of men intolerably oppressed by conditions which they did not understand and which they could not control.’ And A. D. Kirwan’s 1951 history, ‘Revolt of the Rednecks,’ traced the political rise of the Mississippi racists Vardaman and Bilbo to the disillusionment of white farmers who felt ‘forgotten’ and singled out by ‘an enemy class’ of Wall Street speculators and railroad owners backed by big government. The economic struggle, Kirwan wrote, was ‘complicated by the Negro,’ who became a victim of the politicians’ zeal to prevent blacks from holding any power.
“Education became their whipping boy. A century ago, the first wave of populist demagogues withheld funds for poor, segregated schools and tried to purge college faculties of nonbelievers. The second wave, citing ‘states’ rights,’ threatened to shut schools rather than integrate and denounced federal aid to education as a sinister investment. In the Cochran-McDaniel race [the recent Mississippi GOP primary where Tea Party Candidate Chris McDaniel, a state senator, was defeated by Senator Thad Cochran] you could hear that same strain in Tea Party criticisms of the federal government, of federal aid to education and of the ‘establishment.’” None of these older movements generated the restraint of change and the return to white supremacy that these leaders proselytized. Each concept was overwhelmed by both history and a powerful federal military and judicial response.
But while direct racism is no longer a sustainable path, indirect racism became a new mantra for many socially conservative politicians. Voting rights restrictions and opposing immigration reform became the new “acceptable” form of racism. Denial of minority rights and immigrants would, hopefully, stem the tide of a rising population of minorities that was urban, not bound to evangelical values and most definitely multicultural and open to tolerance and individual differences… the antithesis of the above rural southern values.
But despite being perpetually trounced – sooner or later, peacefully or violently – by history, this stubborn rural supremacy (laced with lots of indirect racism) has resurfaced once again. This time, it’s called the Tea Party, and while it has not generated the level of GOP candidates it may have wanted in the recent primary elections, the entire GOP is tripping over itself to insure that this throwback-political movement is taken seriously.
“It’s hard not to hear echoes of those eras today. Tea Party candidates have targeted federal taxes and spending, while attacking Chamber of Commerce interests and the leadership of the Republican Party. Racism has been replaced with nativism in their demands for immigration restrictions, but the animosity toward the ‘other’ is the same. And there remains a whiff of the ancient fumes of bitter-end resistance: Chris McDaniel, a state senator who took Senator Thad Cochran into a runoff in Mississippi, still refuses to accept the validity of the election.
“Mr. McDaniel had all the bona fides of an old-time demagogue. He was once a conservative radio talk show host who dabbled in ethnic innuendo. He made appearances before neo-Confederate organizations. When Mr. Cochran solicited votes in the runoff from black Mississippians, Mr. McDaniel’s supporters vowed to monitor polling places in black-majority precincts, a move reminiscent of old-fashioned Election Day intimidation.
“Tea Party spokesmen, as well as the Republican establishment, complain that the movement was unfairly trumped by a race card. Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster working for Mr. Alexander, says the movement isn’t racist, but rather it represents people ‘who are economically pressed, who feel betrayed, who feel leaders in Washington caused their housing values to decline, for their retirement accounts to plummet.’” Wilkie in the NY Times.
As Mid-Term elections approach, it is interesting what voter’s priority issues are at this time. Accord to a recent Gallup poll, Americans care about the following three issues in the following order of importance: government (gridlock, dysfunction, waste and polarization), immigration and the economy. Immigration trumps the economy? That phenomenon is a product of the recent gathering of children at our border with Mexico and Congress’ rather complete inability to create any sort of realistic plan to deal with it, choosing rhetoric and grandstanding (strong voter turn-offs) instead. Anachronistic policies clash with current realities. Rural battle urban… and in too many ways, make that “white” rural against an urban reality with a very large racial and ethnic minority component.
Perhaps as younger, more educated generations rise in the South, as minorities begin to assert themselves against the gerrymandering that has diluted their vote, these ancient values will finally fade away. But the underlying forces of disenfranchisement are also buried in the new economy, structural unemployment, lower real wages and few opportunities for advancement. These are not just issues for the South; they are the new American problems that we all face. Wouldn’t we be so much better off if we could join forces and deal with them together. Alas, we are likely to have to have to go through another cycle of attempts to turn the clock back to an earlier century… an emotion that just won’t let go.
I’m Peter Dekom, and I so wish we would stop fighting with ourselves and deal with the world as it really is.
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