Fear Itself (87 page)

3
Quoted by Virginius Dabney,
Liberalism in the South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932), p. 247. See also Ray Stannard Baker,
Following the Color Line: American Negro Citizenship in the Progressive Era
(New York: Doubleday & Page, 1908); Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, “De-Centering the South: America’s Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction,”
Past and Present,
no. 194 (2007): 219–57.

4
Richard Bensel,
Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 425.

5
Taft understood that without a federal withdrawal from the racial affairs of the South, the Republican Party’s prospects would be dim, and the chance either “to effect a change in the electoral vote of the Southern States,” or develop “a respectable political opposition in every State” would be unsuccessful.

6
Five years after Taft spoke, Maurice Evans, a South African segregationist, visited the American South. His remarkable travel account reports amazement at the parallels and similarities, despite the difference between the colonized status of blacks in South Africa and the formal citizenship status of blacks in the United States. See Maurice S. Evans,
Black and White in the Southern States
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). For a retrospective view covering this period, see Anthony J. Marx,
Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

7
For a discussion, see Leo Damrosch,
Tocqueville’s Discovery of America
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), pp. 165–81.

8
Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, trans. George Lawrence (1835; reprint, New York: Anchor Books, 1969), p. 345.

9
Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,”
American Historical Review
34 (1928): 30. An important volume of essays that stresses how the South has both been southern and American is Charles Grier Sellers Jr., ed.,
The Southerner as American
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1960).

10
U.S. Bureau of the Census,
United States Census of Population, 1960. United States Summary, Number of Inhabitants, PC(1)-1A
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 52.

11
The South, of course, was more than a place or a racial system. It was, as Marian Irish put things in 1952, “a myth, a dream, a sentiment, a prejudice.” See Marian D. Irish, “Recent Political Thought in the South,”
American Political Science Review
46 (1952): 121. See also Michael O’Brien,
The Idea of the South, 1920–1941
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979). O’Brien shows how a southern culture was shaped by social perceptions that were developed by an indigenous intellectual class, albeit one that has often hidden its own intellectuality. For a discussion of the book’s reception, and for a consideration of this argument that the South “is a relationship, not a thing,” see Michael O’Brien,
Rethinking the South: Essays in Intellectual History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 207–18.

12
Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
pp. 345–46.

13
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, “The Plantation as a Civilizing Factor,”
Sewanee Review
12 (1904): 257–67. His core arguments anticipated econometric studies of plantation life, notably including Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman,
Time on the Cross,
2 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974). Key works by Phillips include
American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment, and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Régime
(New York: Appleton, 1918);
Life and Labor in the Old South
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1928). Phillips defended the antebellum southern system as having effectively combined racial paternalism with economic dynamism. He considered the plantation to have been “a civilizing factor” that “drilled” and “controlled” “heathen savages,” making them fit “for life in civilized, Christian society.” To record his admiration, Phillips dedicated his second book,
History of Transportation in the Eastern Cotton Belt
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1908), “To the Dominant Class of the South.” For summaries and evaluations, see Fred Landon and Everett E. Edwards, “A Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Ulrich Bonnell Phillips,”
Agricultural History
8 (1934): 196–218; Richard Hofstadter, “U. B. Phillips and the Plantation Legend,”
Journal of Negro History
29 (1944): pp. 109–24; Daniel Joseph Singal, “Ulrich B. Phillips, The Old South as the New,”
Journal of American History
63 (1977): 871–91; John David Smith and John C. Inscoe, eds.,
Ulrich Bonnell Phillips:
A Southern Historian and His Critics
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).

14
Charles S. Sydnor, “The Southerner and the Laws,”
Journal of Southern History
6 (1940): 2.

15
Janet Hudson’s excellent study of World War I–era South Carolina takes note of how white supremacy was the South’s “nonnegotiable cultural value.” See Janet G. Hudson,
Entangled by White Supremacy: Reform in World War I–Era South Carolina
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2009), p. 4; Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,”
American Historical Review
34 (1928): 31.

16
Ulrich B. Phillips, “The Central Theme of Southern History,” p. 30.

17
Ibid., p. 31. On southern political styles, see Allan Michie and Frank Ryhlick,
Dixie Demagogues
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1939).

18
Gunnar Myrdal,
An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944).

19
Bunche,
The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR,
p. 10. The very idea of southern distinctiveness is sometimes contested by underscoring the region’s diversity, on the one hand, and its various similarities to other regions, on the other. A good example is Jack Temple Kirby, “The South as Pernicious Abstraction,” in
Perspectives on the American South
, vol. 2, ed. Merle Black and John Shelton Reed (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1984), 167–79. Both aspects of this position contain a good deal of truth, but they do not ultimately contradict both the self-consciousness of the region or the compelling reasons to treat it as a coherent, and sometimes cohesive, entity in American life.

20
W. T. Couch, “The Negro in the South,” in
Culture in the South
, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1934), p. 434.

21
Rayford Logan, “The Negro Wants First-Class Citizenship,” in
What Does the Negro Want?
ed. Rayford W. Logan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 7.

22
James Weldon Johnson,
Negro Americans, What Now?
(New York: Viking, 1935), pp. 98–99.

23
W. T. Couch, “Publisher’s Introduction,” in
What Does the Negro Want?
ed. Logan, p. xxiii.

24
Ibid., pp. xii–xiii.

25
Charles Wallace Collins,
Whither Solid South? A Study in Politics and Race Relations
(New Orleans: Pelican, 1947), pp. 77, 75. For an uncommonly thoughtful discussion of Collins, see Joseph E. Lowndes,
From New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 11–44.

26
Rather than being designated by color, as “any person in the United States is known to have any trace of Negro blood, he is classified as a Negro,” not just culturally but in census reports.

27
Collins,
Whither Solid South?
pp. 75, 76.

28
Ibid., pp. 83, 84, 85.

29
Ibid., p. 80.

30
Nancy MacLean,
Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 165.

31
H. C. Brearly, “The Pattern of Violence,” in
Culture in the South,
ed. Couch, p. 679.

32
Ralph Ginzburg,
100 Years of Lynching
(Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1962), pp. 211–15. See also, Arthur F. Raper,
The Tragedy of Lynching
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933); Michael J. Pfeifer,
Rough Justice: Lynching and American Society, 1874–1947
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Philip Dray,
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America
(New York: Modern Library, 2003); Christopher Waldrep,
Lynching in America: A History in Documents
(New York: NYU Press, 2006).

33
Barbara Sinclair,
Congressional Realignment, 1925–1978
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), p. 9.

34
Anne O’Hare McCormick, “The Promise of the New South,”
New York Times,
July 20, 1930; reprinted in
The World at Home: Selections from the Writing of Anne O’Hare McCormick
, ed. Marion Turner Sheean (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), p. 60; Marian D. Irish, “The Southern One-Party System and National Politics,”
Journal of Politics
4 (1942): 80. Additional characteristics making southern politics distinctive, Irish added, were the section’s “pronounced nativism,” “fervid evangelism,” and a pronounced rural makeup, with only a slight degree of industrialization and urbanization, the very forces that had propelled economic growth in most of the country.

35
J. Morgan Kousser,
The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), p. 261.

36
Bunche,
The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR,
p. 28; V. O. Key Jr.,
Southern Politics in State and Nation
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), pp. 578–618. See also Frederic D. Ogden,
The Poll Tax in the South
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1958).

37
This data is recorded in Michael J. Dubin,
United States Congressional Elections, 1788–1997: The Official Results
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998), pp. 522–25.

38
Not every southern state elected a senator in 1938. In those that did, Lister Hill of Alabama secured 113,413 votes; Hattie Caraway of Arkansas, 122,883; Claude Pepper of Florida, 145,757; Walter George of Georgia, 66,897; Alben Barkley of Kentucky, 346,735; John Overton of Louisiana, 151,585; Bennett Champ Clark of Missouri, 757,587; Robert Reynolds of North Carolina, 316,685; Elmer Thomas of Oklahoma, 307,936; and Ellison “Cotton Ed” Smith of South Carolina, just 45,751. In part, of course, these numbers reflected the population size of their states; unlike those in the House, not all Senate seats are designed to be demographically equivalent. But southern voting rates were well below the national norm. Missouri, by far the best turnout achiever, had a population of 3,784,664 in the 1940 census and a total vote of 1,248,278. A comparable state, Indiana, with a smaller population—3,427,796—and with a southern section that had much in common with the more formally racist South, turned out 1,581,490, its electorate casting nearly four votes for every three cast in Missouri. Most everywhere in the South, disparities were far larger.

39
Collins,
Whither Solid South?
pp. 77, 81. “The dire racial problem of the South,” Ralph Bunche noted, “puts the liberal there to a severe trial. Quite understandably, he has a deep-seated emotional inheritance on the Negro question that cannot be easily overcome. There is a violent conflict between this emotional inheritance from the traditional regional background and the more rational demands of the newly-acquired liberal social philosophy.” See Bunche,
The Political Status of the Negro in the Age of FDR,
p. 39.

40
R. Charlton Wright, “The Southern White Man and the Negro,”
Virginia Quarterly Review
9 (1933): 179, 182, 179, 177.

41
Cited in Collins,
Whither Solid South?
p. 81; cited and discussed in Michael J. Klarman,
From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 180.

42
Congressional Record,
75th Cong., 1st sess., August 12, 1937; cited in William E. Leuchtenburg,
The White House Looks South: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Lyndon B. Johnson
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005), p. 59.

43
A superb overview of the southern position on these issues is provided by the treatment of the agrarian program in Elizabeth Sanders,
Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). This treatment of the agrarian model and the role of the South in promoting it, however, is curiously silent about matters of race. Also downplaying race and region is the otherwise-useful study by David Sarasohn,
The Party of Reform: Democrats in the Progressive Era
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989). A portrait of the interplay between sectionalism, agriculture, and labor is provided in Arthur N. Holcombe,
The Political Parties of To-Day: A Study in Republican and Democratic Politics
(New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924).

44
Benjamin F. Long to Walter Page Hines, March 15, 1913; cited in Dewey W. Grantham Jr., “An American Politics for the South,” in
Southerner as American,
ed. Sellers, p. 159.