Considering the role of race in this encounter suggests the continuities and differences with the Jim Crow era. If mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow in Michelle Alexander’s formulation (See, Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, it is because it is a legal structure that is also a racial order but not because it carries the same beliefs or mentalities about race on an either conscious or unconscious basis. Zimmerman is unlikely to turn out to be some postmodern equivalent of Mississippi's Milam brothers who tortured and murdered 14 year old Emmet Till, an African American teen visiting his Misissippi family from Chicago in 1955 (the incident helped galvanize northern public opinion for federal enforcement of civil rights laws in the South in the year after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, read the Wikipedia article here).An older version, also as manifested in Sanford FL, from Dave Zirin, Jackie Robinson, Trayvon Martin and the Sad History of Sanford, Florida The Nation 03/23/2012:
Zimmerman, whoever he turns out to be, is more likely to reflect a new kind of law and order subject constituted by programs like Neighborhood Watch, and other cultural expressions[] of the war on crime, than the traditional racialized vigilante or racist neighborhood lynch mob member of the sort that afflicted Mississippi or even parts of Brooklyn and Queens as late as the 1980s. Till's banter with a married white woman in 1955 affronted the racialized Jim Crow honor code of the murderers. Zimmerman's lethal viiolence seems to have been activated by different set of nonetheless racialized codes which Trayvon traduced, one in which African American young men wearing hoodies are presumed to be cruising for criminal opportunities and should be prepared to perform their innocence visibly at all times (and not be distracted talking to their girlfriends). Zimmerman drove his SUV around his gated community, gun and cell phone at his side not to enforce a racial order in which miscegenation is the gravest moral breach (indeed he was the product of a mixed racial marriage), but to enforce a civil order anchored in fear of crime in which fitting a racialized risk profile is a breach that can cost a young man his life.
... Sanford, Florida, does have its own history and it includes a collective moment of intolerance and bigotry that almost derailed the man Martin Luther King Jr. called "a freedom rider before freedom rides," Jackie Robinson.As Arlo Guthrie once put it, "Some things don't change, you know. Some things do."
Before Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s color line in 1947 as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he spent a season desegregating the minor leagues, playing for the Dodgers AAA team, the Montreal Royals. The Royals held Spring Training in Sanford.
Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey, after so many years, thought he knew Florida. He believed that Robinson’s presence could go over if efforts were taken to ruffle as few feathers as possible. Robinson, on Rickey’s instructions, didn't try to stay at any Sanford hotels. He and his wife didn't eat out at any restaurants not deemed "Negro restaurants." He didn't even dress in the same locker room as his teammates.
Rickey thought that would be enough. He thought he knew Florida. But he didn't know Sanford.
As Jean West, a school teacher in Florida, wrote, "Branch Rickey had miscalculated the degree to which Jim Crow was entrenched in Sanford. As an example, an inanimate object, a second-hand piano, purchased in 1924 from the courthouse for use in a segregated school in nearby Oviedo, was filed as a 'Negro Piano' in the school board's record; living human beings challenging segregation certainly would not be tolerated."
It wasn't. The mayor of Sanford was confronted by what the author describes as a "large group of white residents" who "demanded that Robinson...be run out of town."
The Mayor caved. On March 5th, the Royals were informed that they would not be permitted to take the field as an integrated group. Rickey was concerned for Robinson’s life and sent him to stay in Daytona Beach. His daughter, Sharon Robinson, remembered, "The Robinsons were run out of Sanford, Florida, with threats of violence."
[Salon:]You were elected governor and president as a white male Southern Democrat, which is a segment of the population that has deserted the Democratic Party. In some Southern states now it will be maybe 30 percent of white Southern males who back the Democrats. This is something your grandson Jason is dealing with now, certainly, as he runs for governor of Georgia. But why do you think this is? The economy only gets tougher, inequality only worsens, and the response of white men in the South is to back the party of the 1 percent. Is it race? Gender? Fear?I guess Carter didn't get the memo that it's wicked to suggest that Republicans might be demagoguing with white racism.
[Carter:] No, it’s race. It’s race. That’s been prevalent in the South, except for when I ran, I secured every Southern state except Virginia. Ever since Nixon ran — and ever since Johnson didn’t campaign in the deep South, the Republicans have solidified their hold there. And even this year, as you may know, the Republicans have put forward a proposal that we have a license plate made available in Georgia with a Confederate flag on it. Well, those kinds of things, the subtle things and the appeal to richer people, which is almost always white people, and the derogation of people that get food stamps and that sort of thing, which are quite often poor people. And the allegation that people who go to jail are just guilty people, when they’re mostly black people and Hispanics and mentally ill people. Those kind of things just exalt the higher class, which is the whites, and they draw a subtle, but very effective racial line throughout the South.
It's not an overstatement to say that we're now living in Plantation America. As Lind points out: to the horror of his Yankee father, George W. Bush proceeded to run the country exactly like Woodard's description of a Barbadian slavelord. And Barack Obama has done almost nothing to roll this victory back. We're now living in an America where rampant inequality is accepted, and even celebrated.Sara is a bit too ambitious in her historical generalizations, though. She's working with a theory that the ruling elite in the US has, since the 18th century or even earlier, been divided between "a New England-based Yankee aristocracy that was rooted in Puritan communitarian values" and "the plantation aristocracy of the lowland South, which has been notable throughout its 400-year history for its utter lack of civic interest, its hostility to the very ideas of democracy and human rights, its love of hierarchy, its fear of technology and progress, its reliance on brutality and violence to maintain 'order,' and its outright celebration of inequality as an order divinely ordained by God." It's too much a an historical meta-theory to be easily contained in an article the length of the one linked.
Torture and extrajudicial killing have been reinstated, with no due process required.
The wealthy and powerful are free to abuse employees, break laws, destroy the commons, and crash the economy -- without ever being held to account.
The rich flaunt their ostentatious wealth without even the pretense of humility, modesty, generosity, or gratitude.
The military -- always a Southern-dominated institution -- sucks down 60% of our federal discretionary spending, and is undergoing a rapid evangelical takeover as well.
Our police are being given paramilitary training and powers that are completely out of line with their duty to serve and protect, but much more in keeping with a mission to subdue and suppress. Even liberal cities like Seattle are now home to the kind of local justice that used to be the hallmark of small-town Alabama sheriffs.
Segregation is increasing everywhere. The rights of women and people of color are under assault. Violence against leaders who agitate for progressive change is up. Racist organizations are undergoing a renaissance nationwide.
We are withdrawing government investments in public education, libraries, infrastructure, health care, and technological innovation -- in many areas, to the point where we are falling behind the standards that prevail in every other developed country.
Will this trend [of increased Sunbelt political clout] continue?This is a very impressionistic view as he summarized it there. Johnny Cash's inclusion in the "Cowboy" group as he describes it makes me wonder if he had any clue about either Johnny's music career or his politics. And while Lyndon Johnson may have shared some of the stereotpyical Sunbelt swagger, it makes it difficult to trace any coherent "Cowboy" and "Yankee" political trends with New Society liberal LBJ lumped with the Cowboys and National Review founder, segregation supporter and Joe McCarthy admirer William Buckley included among the "Yankees".
Today the 15 sunbelt states have 184 electoral votes, compared to 218 for the Northeast and Great Lakes. In 1980 that will narrow, giving the Southern Rim 196 versus 206 for the North. By 1990, if the trend continues, and all evidence shows it will, the Southern Rim will have more electoral votes.
You use the terms "Yankees" and "Cowboys." Who are the Yankees?
By the Yankees, I mean the button-down, Ivy League, tight-lipped, New England WASP types personified by the likes of David Rockefeller, Charles Percy, John Lindsay, Edmund Muskie, Bill Buckley, Henry Ford and Kingman Brewster.
And the Cowboys?
The aggressive, restless, swaggering, Southern-rooted Baptist types like Bebe Rebozo, George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Billy Graham, H.L. Hunt, John Wayne and country singer Johnny Cash.
Do Tennessee Williams or poet James Dickey represent the Southern Rim?
They may be from the South, but they think like Yankees. They are darlings of the Yankee culture.
Can you fairly lump Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace and Richard Nixon in the same category?Without knowing more details about the context, it's far more plausible that Johnson meant that he had been expecting ghetto conditions to produce chaotic violence on a large scale if those conditions weren't changed.
They are all Cowboys — all brothers under the skin. One of my favorite stories about Lyndon Johnson involves a statement he made during the Washington riots after Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. When LBJ was told that the riots were moving closer to the exclusive Georgetown district, he said, "I've been waiting for this to happen for 30 years." That pretty much sums up what he felt about the Eastern Establishment elite.
Such conditions broke many, and for the first time in the Cotton Kingdom, white tenantry developed. This was a definite social loss. With an entirely different race to serve the rich men as in slavery, the small white man could feel no very strong social inequality, and those who lived in isolation none at all. Now, economic dependence brought about social lines drawn, not upon a comparative use and enjoyment of nature, but upon a possession of cash. [my emphasis]Lytle's idyllic society of virtuous white farm families presupposed a substantial supply of African-American tenant farmers, whose well-being was irrelevant to his view of the ideal agrarian paradise, at least so far as the reader can tell from this essay.
One common answer [for farmers in the struggle against Yankee Industrialism] is heard on every hand: Industrialize the farm; be progressive; drop old-fashioned ways and adopt scientific methods. These slogans are powerfully persuasive and should be, but are not, regarded with the most deliberate circumspection, for under the guise of strengthening the farmer in his way of life they are advising him to abandon it and become absorbed. Such admonition coming from the quarters of the enemy is encouraging to the landowner in one sense only: it assures him he has something left to steal. Through its philosophy of Progress it is committing a mortal sin to persuade farmers that they can grow wealthy by adopting its methods. A farm is not a place to grow wealthy; it is a place to grow corn. [my emphasis]The reality was in 1930 that even large farms weren't looking like places to grow wealthy, and small farming wasn't even looking like a way to survive. In the latter part of his essay, he expands on this vision of rejecting Yankee progress for this imaginary agrarian ideal:
The Agrarian South, therefore, whose culture was impoverished but not destroyed by the war and its aftermath, should dread industrialism like a pizen [poisonous] snake. For the South long since finished its pioneering. It can only do violence to its provincial life when it allows itself to be forced into the aggressive state of mind of an earlier period. To such an end does bookkeeping lead. It is the numbering of a farm's resources - its stacks of fodder, bushels of corn, bales of cotton, its stock and implements, and the hundreds of things which make up its economy. And as the only reason to number them is to turn them into cash—that is, into weapons for warfare - the agrarian South is bound to go when the first page is turned and the first mark crosses the ledger.It's amazing to see him argue even against good roads. And against farmers trying to keep track of their own financial accounts. But that's where this kind of Blut und Boden argument takes him. He quotes with approval a comment from one of his virtuous farmers, supposedly from the days of the Martin Van Buren administration, "as soon as a farmer begins to keep books, he'll go broke shore as hell." Even worse, from reactionaries' point of view, he might even begin questioning the crooked dealing of his tenant-farming landlord or the store owners who are cheating him on measures and prices.
The good-road programs drive like a flying wedge and split the heart of this provincialism - which prefers religion to science, handcrafts to technology, the inertia of the fields to the acceleration of industry, and leisure to nervous prostration. Like most demagoguery, it has been advertised as a great benefit to the farmer. Let us see just what the roads have done and who they benefit? They certainly can be of no use to the farmer who cannot afford to buy a truck. He finds them a decided drawback. The heavy automobile traffic makes it hazardous for him even to appear on the main highways. But if he has the temerity to try them, they prove most unsatisfactory. Besides being a shock to his mules' feet, it is difficult for the team to stand up on the road's hard, slick surface.
The large farmers and planting corporations who can afford to buy trucks are able to carry their produce to market with less wear and tear than if they drove over rougher dirt pikes. But this is a dubious benefit, for the question is not between trucks on good or bad roads, but between teams [of animals drawing wagons] on passable roads and trucks on arterial highways. [my emphasis]
"We regard the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress as usurpations, and unconstitutional, revolutionary and void." - Democratic Platform.
The three standing figures represent what Nast considers to be the three wings of the Democratic party. The cartoonist incorporates into the picture several symbols and stereotypes that he uses frequently.In that case, Nash's cartoon combines anti-immigrant prejudice against Irish immigrants and Irish-Americans with a defense of civil rights for blacks. The Republican Party in the 1850s had campaigned against the Democrats accusing them of being the Party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion", lumping the Irish Catholic immigrants in with Southern seditionists, and not entirely without cause. The post-1848 Catholic hierarchy in Rome opposed the abolitionist movement, regarding it as a form of "Red Republicanism".
The figure on the left is a Catholic-Irish-American man. He wears working-class clothing, has an alcohol bottle in his hip pocket, a pipe and a cross in his hat, and holds a club in a striking position. The name on his hat-band-"5 Points"-refers to a neighborhood in New York City, populated at the time by poor Irish immigrants. The man's features are ape-like, a common way the Irish were portrayed in 19th-century illustrations.
In the background Nast adds the burning Colored Orphan Asylum and a lynched figure to remind viewers of the Irish-American and Democratic involvement in the Civil War draft riots in New York City. As New York governor, Seymour had vigorously opposed the draft and notoriously addressed the rioters as "My friends."
The middle figure is Nathan Bedford Forrest, who represents the influence of former Confederates in the post-war Democratic party. He wears his Confederate uniform, with a lash-symbolizing slavery-in his back pocket, and stands ready to plunge a knife-signifying the Confederate war effort, "The Lost Cause"-into his black victim. On Forrest's coat is a medal honoring his command at Fort Pillow, the epitome of Confederate atrocities against black soldiers.Forrest was also a founder of the original Ku Klux Klan terrorist group.
In the background, pictorially balancing the inflamed orphanage, Nast includes a burning freedmen's school, representing the violent resistance of many white Southerners to the freedom and advancement of blacks in society. Forrest was one of the organizers of the Ku Klux Klan.
The figure on the right is August Belmont, a financier who was the national chairman of the Democratic party. His apparel is upper-class, and the "5th Avenue" medallion on his coat refers to the wealthiest neighborhood in New York City where he lived (a numerical and cultural counterweight to "5 Points").Whatever vote fraud the Democratic Party was committing in 1968 was kid's stuff compared to the chronic voter fraud and voter suppression that would become standard features of segregation after the overthrow of the democratic Reconstruction state government in the 1870s.
Republicans often charged Democrats with various types of vote fraud, so Nast draws Belmont holding aloft a packet of money designated for buying votes. One could infer that by contrast with the representative figures of Belmont and the Irish-American, that the Republican party is, in Nast's estimation, the party of the honest, hard-working, middle class.
Underneath the three Democratic characters is a black Union veteran, holding an American flag and reaching for a ballot box. Nast felt obliged to emphasize the fact that black men had earned the right to vote through their participation in the Union war effort. In having the Democrats trample the American flag, as well as the black man, the artist implies that they are attacking basic American principles and the entire nation, not merely one minority.What "the artist implies" was, of course, the plain truth.
What the South needed after the war was political democracy, protection of basic human rights, and Northern capital. Their failure to provide the first two contributed mightily to their inability to attract the third. The political unrest, including the violent activity of the Ku Klux Klan and other white terror groups that were extensively documented at the time in Congressional hearings, created a climate of uncertainty and fear that was anything but conducive to Northern investment and in-migration. Those were disadvantages that conservative white Southerners chose for themselves, not ones imposed on them by federal failures. For the white power structure in the South, preserving white supremacy even in the absence of slavery was more important than democracy, the Constitution or Northern capital investment.Tags: confederate heritage month 2012, reconstruction, us south
Voter intimidation and vote suppression had long been a part of Democratic politics in the South, in places where African-Americans had been granted an illusory right to vote. But as the South made its dramatic shift to the Republican Party in the wake of the Civil Rights Act, and as African-American voters in the North then shifted to the Democrats, the Republicans began to dominate the process and thus began the decades-long GOP project to suppress the vote. Along the way it has developed into a full-blown operation to undermine democracy in general, at whatever choke points are available. [my emphasis]Hal Crowther, columnist for the Oxford American, writes about the not-always-enlightened nature of Southern Christianity and its political manifestations in A chorus of Global Village idiots 05/30/2011. The global village angle he explains this way:
The success of Egypt's current revolution has been credited to the Internet and the devices that connect its initiates. Popular movements learn, brainstorm, strategize, and raise money online. Even the implacable bullies who rule China and North Korea have been frustrated by technology that enables a freedom-starved younger generation to conspire without congregating. Still, there's a dark side of the Global Village, a wrong side of the global tracks. In Gainesville, Florida, a fundamentalist minister with a double-digit IQ burns a Koran, for the amusement of thirty malnourished peckerwoods who make up his congregation-and in Mazar-I-Sharif, Afghanistan, a mob of Muslim fanatics slaughters twelve United Nations workers to avenge this insult to the Prophet."Peckerwoods" is an excellent Southern word I need to put back into my regular vocabulary.
Pastor Terry Jones of the (ironically named) Dove World Outreach Center had the burning videotaped, of course, and streamed it on the church's website. In just ten days, this remote spark, launched online, became a conflagration halfway around the planet. The day after the massacre at the UN compound, thousands of protesters rioted in Kandahar. Nine more people died and eighty were injured. The final body count from Pastor Terry's stupidity may exceed American military casualties for the month of April.
It's not unfair to say that there are more and deadlier idiots in Kandahar than in Gainesville. But the point is that the Global Village harbors a million village idiots, and no idiot is an island. Not anymore.
Evangelical religion of an extreme stripe-fire and brimstone, biblical inerrancy-thrives in many far corners of the republic, but the South is its wellspring and its homeland. A county-by-county map of America constructed by Dante Chinni and James Gimpel for their book Our Patchwork Nation indicates that nearly all the counties colored yellow for "Evangelical Epicenters" are in the traditional South and the border state of Missouri. Feral religion has been the South's second greatest embarrassment, after race. Unfortunately, they've been closely linked. We can never afford to forget that those were crosses the Ku Klux Klan burned at their rallies and lynchings. And there's no denying that most segregationist Protestants of the Jim Crow generations believed that heaven itself was segregated."Feral religion" is an inspired phrase that I'm also going to add to my vocabulary.
When Rob Bell, the influential pastor of an evangelical Michigan megachurch, suggested in his new book Love Wins that it's high time Christians set aside archaic notions of a literal, sulfurous, demon-infested hell, all hell broke loose in the Southern synod. They cling passionately to their inferno, these least and cruelest of our Christian brethren, because there's no way on earth they can take adequate revenge on those of us who disagree with them-though they claim they love us and hope to save us in spite of ourselves.
Hell is the sturdy keystone of gloomy Calvinism. [my emphasis]
No avowedly democratic state has made a serious effort to make equality of economic opportunity a social relaity; for this concession to the peole would haved jeopardized the plutocratic aims of the middles class [here he means capitalists]. In this country Jacksonian democracy stopped with the fiction of social equality. Economic inequality and the fictitious character of social equality provide the first step of American capitalism to rationalize its power. Working with the reality of economic disparity, capitalism made secure the doctrine of social equality, and fought on that basis the War Between the States, which finally consolidated its power. [my emphasis]Tate's Southern Agrarian vision insists that the "Jacksonian" policy of social equality is a lie. Part of the Southern Agrarian schtick was to use "capitalism" as a pejorative against Yankee industrialism. There actually is a serious discussion among historians as to what extent the antebellum Southern economy had feudal as distinct from distinctly capitalist features. But the business of Southern agriculture was carried on within a capitalist economy. It takes some imagination for the Agrarians to conceive of the antebellum South or of postwar subsistence forming as somehow other than "capitalist."
Our capitalism [Yankee industrialism] has contrived to make, first, a special myth of its own origin: the myth that it rose with the salvation of democracy and the Union. It has constructed, secondly a pseudo-moral sanction fo itself: its origin being heroic, its mission to the American people is necessarily to give them the benefits of "democracy". ...For those of us not blessed with the conservative passion, this kind of convoluted argument is less a wonder to be admired than a headache-inducing mind-twister. My own translation of this would be: The Yankees are big ole hypocrites, because they like to talk about democracy and national unity but really they destroyed both! We had real democracy when chattel slavery was legal, when the slaveowners shut down freedom of speech and the press even for whites who wanted to criticized slavery in the South and worked hard to impose the same regime on the North, and when slave states thought they could just overthrow the Constitutional government in a bloody civil war whenever they decided the Yankees were offending their Sacred Honor too much. And so now, everyone - even inferior sorts like blacks and women - theoretically have the right to vote and to fair trials and the like, and that's un-democracy. And the nation is united but that's just a big fake and the Civil War actually destroyed the Union.
American capitalism has thus followed the pattern typical of all ruling classes: it has disgusied its origins and it has issued a "moral" sanction. It is becoming increasingly evident to the historians that the transitional period of early American politics, known as democracy, was not perpetuated, but was crushed out of existence by the Confederate War; and that the Union, instead of being preserved as a real union of interests, survived as a fiction by which capitalism enormously extended its power, at the expense of local, agricultural interests.
[L]incoln had no knowledge of the economic revolution that was taking place, no prevision of its effects on politics. It is this ignorance that accounts for Lincoln's belief that the Southerners were seceding because of what they thought was a threat to slavery. When they disregarded his honest and explicit promsies that their slave property would not be touched, Lincoln thought they were bemused by disloyal leaders. ... There is no telling whether he would have made [war] if he had realized that the South was fighting for an agrarian society against the threat of a business man's oligarchy. Lincoln would have hated that oligarchy almost as much as did Jefferson Davis, and if he had grasped the main issue, Lincoln might have felt that his real fight lay elsewhere.We can safely count this as proof that crackpot history did not begin with Glenn Beck!
Because the real fight lay outside the false issue of freedom or slavery, capitalism was able to step in, in the Reconstruction, and seize the power. After we have bemused ourselves with the equally false issue of "capitalism v. the work", what monster will rise upon our delusion to enslave us again? It is likely that its name will be Communism - a new rationalization of industrial power copleting the reduction of free citizens to the ignominy of servitude.Tate's review is another grounds to suspect that Southern Agrarianism had less to do with imagining an agrarian ideal than with defending Southern "folkways" with all the Lost Cause pseudohistory baggage that came with it.
On his several tracts of land, the gatherings of inheritance and purchase, are some one hundred and fifty Negroes whom he furnishes housing, food, and a little money; they do his labour - men, women, children together - the are his "hand". He is expected to call them by name, to get them out of jail, to doctor them, even sometimes to bury them when "lodge dues" may have lapsed. They are no longer his laves; but though they do not now utter the word, they do not allow him to forget that he has the obligations of a master.All the duties of mastership without the advantages of owning his "hands" outright! How can we fail to pity the generous white landlord?
By some it may be said that dark clouds hang over Yankeetown and Rebelville - clouds of menace, maybe of destruction. I do not deny their presence, but my story is not of such clouds. In this strange modern world it may be observed that men talk continually of the good life without producing a specimen of it, to convince an inquirer. Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick do not talk about the good life. They lead it. If government is intended to serve human interests, what does it propose to do about them? If science is really intelligent, what does it mean by conniving to put a stigma upon them or to destroy them? I cannot believe that a government or a science which ignores or depreciates them is very trustworthy. I believe that government and science will fail unless they are taken into account. They, and others, are the incarnations of the principle of diversity through which the United States have become something better than Balkan, and without which the phrase "my country" is but a sorry and almost meaningless abstraction.Yes, what's important is for fictional white guys like Brother Jonathan and Cousin Roderick be able to keep living the "good life." If that means that African-Americans in Cousin Roderick's Georgia have to settle for whatever piece of the "good life" that Cousin Roderick is generous enough to toss their way, then, well, as Davidson said in the first installment in the previous issue, they are after all only "amiable children of cannibals" who should be glad of the "continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian" like Cousin Roderick felt toward them.
Mount Vernon was all right, she thought; there the legend was safely frozen. But beyond, on the road to Richmond, what had become of all the great mansions she had read about, the cotton fields with Negroes carolling, the old gentlemen in goatees and white vests, sipping mint juleps in the shade? They were not visible. There were only a few scattered shacks and tumbledown barns in miles of impenetrable wilderness that looked for all the world as it must have looked when John Smith first invaded it. If she could have encountered the legend, the lady would have been content. But not seeing it or knowing how to locate it, she was smitten with a housewifely desire to get at this ragged land with a good broom and whisk it into seemliness.Such vague tales about feckless Yankees visiting the South and being clueless about it are still popular today among segregationists. But such disappointed tourists were relatively harmless. Others were considerably more annoying:
Other sojourners had been anxious to do a far more drastic tidying-up. The Harlan County visitors, the Scottsboro attorneys, the shock troops of Dayton and Gastonia asked no questions about the genius of the place. Wherever they went on their mission of social justice, they carried with them a legend of the future more dangerously abstract than the legend of the past, and sternly demanded that the local arrangements be made to correspond with it, at whatever cost. The only American they knew or cared about was an overgrown urban America, that was forever in process of becoming one laboratory experiment after another.This "overgrown urban America" was apparently about fair trials for black defendants as well as industrialization.
Since Burgoyne's expedition no invader had come upon them to ravage and destroy. They had freed the Negroes, replying "I can" to duty's "Thou must"; but they were fortunately exempt from the results of emancipation, for no Negroes lived among them to acquaint them with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt. ... In a land [New England] where everything was so right, it was hard to imagine a perverse land where so much could be wrong without disturbing either a people's composure or their happiness. [my emphasis]There had been an extensive proslavery propaganda prior to the Civil War about the supposed moral fanaticism bred in "New England." The non-Southern part of the United States in 1933 consisted of 48 states, only a few of them in New England. But the Southern Agrarians were great respecters of Southern tradition. So Davidson reached back to the venerable tradition of trashing "New England" for its indulgent attitude toward the black citizens who lived "with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt."
The Georgia landscape had a serene repose that lulled a man out of all need of conscience. [?!?] It was anything but swept and garnished. It could be mild or majestic or genial or savage, depending on what view you got of pines against red earth, or Negro cabins underneath their chinaberry trees, or sedge grass running into gullies and thence to impenetrable swamps, or deserted mansions lost in oak groves and magnolias. Rivers were muddy and at times unrestrained; they overflowed at embarrassing moments. In the pine barrens you might get an impression of desolation and melancholy; but things could grow lushly too, with the overpowering vegetable passion that harrowed the Puritan soul of Amy Lowell, when she visited the Magnolia Gardens at Charleston. But finally, it was a well-tilled country, where you were forever seeing the Negro and his mule against the far horizon, or the peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink.Happy Negroes were pleasant enough for whites, at least as long as they were out working happily a safe distance away at their subsistence sharecropping with a mule pulling a plow. Though perhaps not not as attractive as other parts of the Georgia backdrop, like "peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink."
And everywhere was the Negro, a cheerful grinning barnacle tucked away in all the tender spots of Southern life, not to be removed without pain, not to be cherished without tragedy. The [white] Georgian, when reproached for his intolerance, told himself that actually nobody outdid him in fond tolerance of the Negro. Lynchings, the work of hothead and roustabouts, were regrettable; but what did a few lynchings count in the balance against the continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian felt he exercise toward these amiable children of cannibals, whose skins by no conceivable act of Congress or educational programme could be changed from black to white. The presence of the Negro, which had its advantages in agriculture and domestic service, made the [white] Georgians' life both comfortable and ramshackle; it gave him devoted servants and social problems, cheap labour and hideous slums, an endless flow of folk-lore and anecdote, and eternal apprehension for the future. But in his own way, the [white] Georgian respected the Negro, as another irregularity, taking a human and personal form, that had somehow to be lived with. He distrusted all ready-made prescriptions for bringing about regularity. In Georgia, life went along horizontally: you never crossed a bridge until you came to it - and maybe not then. [my emphasis]At the risk of repeating myself, would Wendell Berry find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Davidson with his own words in that passage?
... industry was scarcely in the game for the ultimate benefit of agriculture. Our Civil seemed to be fought on a certain issue [slavery], but perhaps what it settled chiefly was quite another issue, and probably a war was required to settle that issue: between farmers who wanted free trade in which to sell and buy, and industrialists who wanted them to sell, for the time being, but were already beginning to use protective tariffs for the industries emerging from embryo, and forcing the farmers to buy in an artificially high market with the proceeds of their free exports. It is useless to tickle the gland of indignation at this distance. The Civil War was won, and then the industrialists put through the last item of their programme.Even in an article that actually was primarily devoted to farming, Lost Cause pseudohistory plays a part.
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The weak point in Jefferson's defense [of property rights] was his own belief in a distorted conception of property, albeit a specific kind, landed property and the kind of life it supported. This meant that his political activity concerned itself fundamentally with the same thing the Federalists espoused: the principle that the chief duty of the State is the protection of the property of individuals and aggregates of individuals. This is certainly one duty of government, but only as a means of guaranteeing the security and self-perpetuation of the family. Prohibiting kings, then allowing private citizens to own the State is certainly hopping from a very slow pan to a very hot fire. Instead of laying the broad foundations a State needs to rest upon - and these foundations are best laid upon the dogma of one religion - he raised the question as to which will, the middle-class or the agrarian, would own the continent.The aesthetic joys of the rural life clearly weren't the only concerns of the Southern Agrarians.
South Carolina, under the prompting of such men as Rhett and Hammond, made such active opposition that the great leader of the state, Calhoun, abandoned his nationalistic stand and proposed his Nullification theory of redress. Andrew Jackson's romantic idea of the Union and his dislike of Calhoun joined together in his stubborn mind to play him into the hands of the enemy. Although he had destroyed the National Bank, he threated to send troops into Carolina to make tariff collections. For a moment war seemed inevitable; but Henry Clay came forward with a compromise, Calhoun accepted it. The Congress voted favourably on Jackson's force bill, and voted to reduce the tariff. Two great blows to State rights were struck at once. The South got temporary relief, and for this relief agreed to a sacrifice of principle. There can be no compromise between two antithetical ways of life. What appears a compromise is a postponement of the issue. The South, by accepting this postponement, doomed itself to ruin. The high prejudices of his heart and a limited political vision led Jacxkson to squander the great strategic moment by which his backwoods could have established its rule. Life a good backwoodsman, he took "the responsibility" and Calhoun refused it; but the South, not Calhoun or Jackson, suffered the consequences.Jackson's "romantic idea of the Union" was his notion of the United States as a united country based on democracy. He articulated the idea of democratic national patriotism to which the North held in the Civil War and which still defines the formal notion of American patriotism today.
There was after this [Jackson's defeat of the secessionists in the Nullification Controversy] only one avenue left open to the South - secession. Calhoun still hoped to concetrate Southern leadership and make the fight within the Union. But his plans of effecting his ends by controlling the Democratic Party failed. With desperation he took up a last position, secession through the common action of all the Southern States. But Clay's American plan - an extension of capitalism - and his compromises, the god of all opportunists, had done their work. In this crisis Calhoun's chief lieutenant, Robert Barnwell Rhett, proposed a policy of coercion. He contended that if one State acted separately, the other State, all believing in their own sovereignty, would follow the lead. He supported his contention by reminding his political peers that the revolt against England did not take place until the tea had been thrown into Boston Harbour.At least one Southern Agrarian in 1933 was looking at the Tea Party as a useful symbol to defend the white South!
When common action did take place, it came about by South Carolina's single-handed withdrawal; but it came ten years too late and brought Appomattox, not independence.And he notes in the Calhounian demogogic mode, "The fall of the Confederacy removed the last great check to the imperialism of Big Business."
The white man, especially the small farmer and the poorer classes, returned the hatred of the Negro with interest. The slave-holder of former days was more tolerant of the Negro's irresponsible acts, for he regarded the Negro as a juvenile race badly advised; but being human, he came to distrust and n many cases to hate the Negro. Despite the military support given the Negro governments, retaliation was frequent and violent. ...No, there is no language from Owsley in this essay to indicate that there was anything regrettable about this, except the sneering reminder that "the Negro" had better learn his lesson or the "white race" will again discipline "him severely." He continues directly:
The Negro should have learned then that in the end the relationship good or bad between himself and the white race of the South must be settled between them and that no outside power could dictate permanently the terms of this relationship. He was quickly disfranchised by indirection - and constitutionally, for the Supreme Court has not been able to void the legislation by which it was done - driven from politics, brought under rigid social discipline, in short completely subordinated socially, economically, and politically. The white race disciplined him severely for his conduct during reconstruction.[my emphasis in bold; italics in original]
At length, however, with outside interference largely removed, old friendships were renewed between the races; new ones were formed until something of the old affection which had existed between the black man and white man returned. His condition gradually improved; though he has never yet been given back the ballot nor allowed to sit on juries. The experience of reconstruction was too bitter to be soon forgotten. It has formed and will continue for many years to form the background of Southern social and political attitudes. In considering any political action either state or national, the Southern white first considers how that action will ultimately affect the relationship between the races. It has crippled and at times destroyed the political value of the South in the national councils; it has created and will indefinitely perpetuate the solid South, solid against the Republican Party. [my emphasis]If we understand that by the "experience of reconstruction" Owsley means the thoroughly dishonest Lost Cause pseudohistory of Reconstruction, that last quote is accurate. Lost Cause ideology about the Civil War and in particular about Reconstruction was the framework for segregationist and white-supremacist politics in 1933.
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| John C. Calhoun |
In order to subordinate the South it would be necessary to destroy [the] balance [of power between the North and South]. But the industrialists, carefully coached by their lawyers and statesmen and "intellectual" aides, realized the bad strategy of waging a frank struggle for sectional power; they must pitch the struggle upon a moral plane, else many of the intelligentzia [sic] and the good people generally might become squeamish and refuse to fight. Shibboleths and moral catchwords must be furnished. It was therefore found convenient to attack slavery as an evil and the slaveholder as a criminal, in fact to impugn the morality of the South, in order to create opinion in the East and North in favour of the industrialists' plans of Southern restriction.The actual history of the abolition movement - including the sometimes violent rejection of it in the North - the need for fugitive slave laws to return human property that had absconded from the humane and civilizing conditions of slavery, the slave revolts and the paranoid panics over possible slave revolts that increasingly characterized conditions in the slave states: all of that has to be ignored or minimized for the Lost Cause pseudohistory to maintain a thin film of credibility even to those predisposed to accept it. For the Lost Cause, abolition was just a nasty Yankee plot against the put-upon whites of the South.
... when ... the moralist crusaders of the Northeast were painting a picture of universal prostitution and miscegenation in the South, information was available to those same moralists which showed sexual degradation in the factories of the East to have reached depths hitherto unknown in the experience of a modern civilized nation.He goes on to gripe about the nastiness of working conditions in Northern factories. All of this was standard slaveowner polemics prior to the Civil War.
Illegitimacy was more common in the industrialized East than in any country in the world. Yet these crusaders offered little criticism of a society which forced young girls into semi-prostitution.
The furious debates of the 1850's over the question of slavery presented a rare spectacle of the two quarreling sectors of capitalism - the Southern planters, with their obsolete production system, and the Northern industrial capitalists, representing the interests of capitalism as a whole. They exposed and denounced each other's system of exploitation, and many true words were spoken in these mutual unveilings. Never, in any country, have the sinister workings of capitalism been so thoroughly aired from within.Which is true enough, as far as it goes, although I can't vouch for the international comparison. John Calhoun actually incorporated such a conception of exploiting class differences into his political strategy and theory, as Richard Current explains in John C. Calhoun (1963). At the beginning of the Martin Van Buren Administration in 1837, Calhoun was becoming increasing unhappy with the Democratic Party:
There was much that he disliked about the party, including its name. He was himself no democrat, and he had little in common with the city workingmen to whom, among others, the party catered. That is, he had little in common with them except for the votes which they could cast and which he, in some future presidential election, might receive. In practice he was fond of "the people," including the workers. In principle he feared the "needy and corrupt" many, whom he expected to rise sooner or later in revolt against their betters, the rich and wellborn few. At heart he preferred the Whigs to the Democrats, the party of the rich to the party of the poor.That appeal to urban labor was key to what "Jacksonian democracy" meant. Calhoun, to put it mildly, was no Jacksonian.
"It is useless to disguise the fact," Calhoun frankly informed his fellow senators (1837). "There is and always has been, in an advanced state of wealth and civilization, a conflict between capital and labor."And he provides the following quotes from the Senator from South Carolina. From 1847:
Where wages command labor, as in the non-slaveholding States, there necessarily takes place between labor and capital a conflict which leads, in process of time, to disorder, anarchy, and revolution, if not counteracted by some appropriate and strong constitutional provision.
For, as the community becomes populous, wealthy, refined, and highly civilized, the difference between the rich and the poor will become more strongly marked; and the number of the ignorant and dependent greater in proportion to the rest of the community. With the increase of this difference, the tendency to conflict between them will become stronger; and, as the poor and dependent become more numerous in proportion, there will be ... no want of leaders among the wealthy and ambitious, to excite and direct them in their efforts to obtain the control.It worth noting that in 1847 Karl Marx at this time was still an obscure Young Hegelian German scholar and polemicist with a tiny group called the Communist League (Bund der Kommunisten).
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| The "Scottsboro Boys" |
... nine young blacks, the youngest of whom was thirteen, were arrested and jailed in Scottsboro, Alabama, and sentenced to death on charges of raping two white women on a freight train. After a fight with NAACP lawyers, ILD lawyers and the Communist party made an international issue of the case. The Supreme Court ordered a new trial when it was proved that at the original trial the defendants did not have adequate counsel. In the new trial the Scottsboro boys were sentenced to terms up to ninety-nine years, but by 1950 the last of them had been released.The Communist Party's involvement with the case gives Owsley's imagination material for considerable creative fantasy. In fact, his fantasies about the Commies are about the only thing about the case that does interest him, as he pretty much admits:
I am not here concerned with the guilt or innocence of the Negroes - though I wish justice done; I am interested in pointing out the meaning of these cases and of the general emotional disturbance in the East over the "injustices" committed in the South against the Negro. I wish to examine the relationship between this new attack upon the South and the former attacks, and by so doing gauge the probably motives and the final results.The "former attacks" to which he refers are the pre-Civil War antislavery movement and the postwar Reconstruction period. His article is a great example of how the pseudohistory of the Lost Cause was used as an ideological framework for the defense of segregation, corrupt Southern justice and white supremacy in real time.
It urges the Negro to rise and seize the lands of his oppressors and divide them out. ... It even promises to create a Negro State out of the Southern black belt and grant the Negro autonomy or allow him to secede from the Union. That is, it offers to help the Negro set up a black peasant state formed out of the confiscated or expropriated lands of the white man who is to be either exterminated or completely subordinated to the black race.The Scottsboro case functions mainly for Owsley in this essay as a half-plausible way to equate Yankee industrialism (including Yankee democracy and rule of law) with his image of "Communism," which he then takes into such satisfying flights of white political paranoia and masochistic fantasy. Whatever the faults of the American Communist Party in 1933 may have been, calling for the extermination or complete subordination of "the white man" was not one of them.
But in the meantime, before the issues is settled, Communist agitation - and such conduct as Judge Lowell's - is creating a dangerous situation in the South. The criminal Negro, seeing those who have been accused of murder or rape such as the "Scottsboro boys" or the defendants on trial at Dadeville assiduously championed by an outside group, seeing them granted immunity in Judge Lowell's court or, perhaps, even in the Supreme Court, is bound to feel that he himself is above the reach of the law in a Southern State. It is hardly to be supposed that the Southern whites will tolerate such a situation. One has only to read the history of the abolition crusade or more particularly the history of reconstruction to be able to predict what will follow such flagrant interference either by the capitalist industrialists or by Communists. An extra-legal government would quickly spring into existence and such cases as that of the "Scottsboro boys" would be tried in courts whose decrees could not be appealed to a Federal tribunal In other words, the outside interference with the relationship of the whites and blacks in the South can result in nothing but organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and in violent retaliation against the Negroes - themselves often innocent. Such interference makes justice difficult, not only by creating friction between the races, but by arousing anger against those who interfere ... [my emphasis]And this is a highbrow defender of segregation!
We are very near an answer to our question - How may the Southerner take hold of his Tradition?Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
The answer is, by violence.
For this answer is inevitable. ...
This method is political, active and, in the nature of the case, violent and revolutionary. Reaction is the most radical of programs; it aims at cutting away the overgrowth and getting back to the roots.
