Born Fighting (26 page)

Violence in defense of one’s honor had always been the moniker of this culture, and the region now exploded with it. At the eventual but then unknown price of a continuing inequality on the inside—among both whites and blacks—the hard people in the mountains and the backcountry again locked their elbows against the invaders, the occupiers, the political reeducators who this time around called themselves Radical Reconstructionists, the philosophical fairies, the carpetbagger businesspeople with their grand plans and special deals, the ridiculers and the laughers, the moralists, and especially the scalawags from their own midst who would genuflect to the altar of Yankee power in order to live in a better house and make an extra dollar. Most of those who came south eventually left, although they did so with their ownership of the Southern economy firmly in place so that their businesses could be controlled from outside the region, thereby sucking generations of profits out of the South and into their own communities. But those who had cooperated with them and the recently freed slaves who had benefited from their presence would reap the whirlwind of their arrogance.

This last phenomenon—revenge on the powerless—had no historical precedent among the Scots-Irish, no real basis in the now-ancient teachings of the Kirk, and the decades of retaliation against those of African descent would prove to be a monstrous mousetrap that cracked their own necks as well. With a combination of cynicism and romanticism, the Northern occupiers had freely used their treatment of the former slaves as a cudgel to again and again extract a form of retaliation against their Civil War enemies. And now the white people of the South, urged on and even directed by their leaders—claiming to be the spiritual descendants of the vaunted Great Captains whom their traditions had forever taught them to respect and obey—took their vengeance on the beneficiaries of Yankee power, the very symbols of their own humiliation.

The motivating force behind this massive retribution was the rawest form of power mixed at the top with a bit of nostalgia. These were no longer the Great Captains of old, leading an ascendant culture out of the wilderness into the Promised Land. They had their dignity and their bearing, but many were at bottom reacting rather than leading, trying to re-create what they perceived to have been an idyllic antebellum existence that the war and outside intervention had destroyed—and to regain their financial status. Others were awash in an overwhelming confusion that the war and its aftermath had created, particularly when it came to defining the social and legal status of millions of former slaves who suddenly were looking into their eyes as equals. Instead of hope, inside the region the South’s leadership was now itself running on resentment and galvanizing the white yeomanry by uniting them against the Yankee on the outside and the black family down the road. Loyalty could be expected and even demanded because, at bottom, it was perceived that both of these groups somehow threatened all that had been fought for—the validity of the South.

The near-mandatory hatred of those from the outside, either geographically or ethnically, would result in the stifling of all internal dissent as the postwar leadership unified the body politic to fight the Yankee in the only way the region could—through absolute political unity. There could be no such cohesion if the dirt-poor white farmer came up with a new idea that went against the grain of what his Democratic, quasi-military leaders had ordained. And there certainly would be no unity if the black man were once again bringing back the despised Republicans, even to positions of local power. And the small bone that they could throw to their increasingly more humble dirt-farmer followers was that, no matter how poor one became, when he went into town at least he could drink out of a “Whites Only” water fountain, use a “Whites Only” urinal, and when traveling could sit in a “Whites Only” railroad car.

This is not to imply that racial animosities ran deep everywhere or that other approaches were not explored. On a personal level there was then, and there still remains today, an evolved compatibility between whites and blacks in the South that is purer and more honest than in any other region of the country, and this closeness grew most profoundly after slavery ended. As Wilbur Cash pointed out, over the generations in the South, “Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro—subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.”
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And as I mentioned to a gathering of Confederate descendants in a speech at the Confederate War Memorial in 1990, “Americans of African ancestry are the people with whom our history in this country most closely intertwines, whose struggles in an odd but compelling way most resemble our own, and whose rights as full citizens we above all should celebrate and insist upon.”

Although whites believed emphatically in racial separation, the true battle lines for most people during this era and also later were not personal so much as they were political and economic. My late father summed up this distinction rather neatly when I was a child:
In the South they didn’t care how close the black folks got, so long as they didn’t get too rich or too powerful. In the North they never cared how rich or powerful blacks got, so long as they didn’t get too close
. As the years following Reconstruction went by, jobs became even scarcer and farms smaller, subdivided among descendants as opportunities for growth and expansion bypassed the region. The thin veneer of white leadership in the South knew full well that as long as poor whites and poor blacks were blaming each other for their misery, the prospects were small that they would join together and address their mutual plight along class, rather than racial, lines.

If evidence of this tendency were needed, one could find it in the way the South’s white leadership put down the Populist movement of the late 1800s. The movement, an outgrowth of a national agrarian revolt that had its origins in the Midwest, was based on the essentially Jacksonian principles that “society was to be judged not by its apex but by its base. The quality of life of the masses was the index by which to measure social improvement.”
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Its political basis was the belief, again Jacksonian in its undertones, that existing law in America had become class law, a disguise that allowed certain privileges to flow to a few dominant groups at the expense of the many. Although an acute agricultural crisis had kick-started the movement, it is not difficult to find ancient glimmers of the Scottish Kirk in the rhetoric and style of its leaders. The Scots-Irish migrations through Pennsylvania and the Ohio Valley and into the Great Midwest had left their mark on governing bodies there. Their insistent, bottom-up style of democracy was well represented in the agrarian revolt of the Granger movement in the late 1870s, the Farmers’ Alliance of the 1880s, and finally the Populist Party itself. Not only that, but Jackson himself had planted the seeds of “radical democracy” in the North as well as the South, among his chosen political base of “farmers, mechanics and laborers” who rallied under his leadership.

The aim of the Populists was to displace the Democratic Party as the principal national party in competition with the dominant Republicans. Had they succeeded in the South, they well may have done that. And had the leadership of the South been less concerned about preserving the hierarchical pattern of the old slave system and more attuned to the traditional Jacksonian principles of the Scots-Irish culture, the Populists would have made serious and perhaps permanent inroads into that region.

The Populist platform was extreme for the times, although not in its entirety outlandish. Among other things it called for abolishing the national banks (an issue that echoed of Andrew Jackson), electing senators by direct vote (achieved after the party’s demise by the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1913), a graduated income tax (largely achieved by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, also in 1913), civil service reform (an issue that Theodore Roosevelt used to his political advantage), an eight-hour workday (modern America should hardly complain about this one), and government ownership of all forms of transportation and communication. Its principal goal was the full democratization of both the economy and the social classes in an effort to aid the advancement of the underprivileged and those who were submerged below the waterline of normal governmental interests.

James Baird Weaver, the Populist candidate for president in 1892, received more than a million votes and carried six western states. An Ohio-born Methodist who reflected the Scots-Irish migration pattern to the Ohio Valley and beyond, Weaver’s “Call to Action” during that campaign resonated with language that reflected the traditional Jacksonian hatred of government-sponsored plundering. “If the master builders of our civilization one hundred years ago had been told that at the end of a single century, American society would present such melancholy contrasts of wealth and poverty, of individual happiness and widespread infelicity as are to be found today throughout the Republic, the person making the unwelcome prediction would have been looked upon as a misanthropist and his loyalty to Democratic institutions would have been seriously called in question. But there is a vast difference between the generation which made the heroic struggle for Self-Government in colonial days, and the third generation which is now engaged in a mad rush for wealth.”
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In the South, many Populist leaders proposed full political justice for blacks—not in retribution against other whites, as had been the case with many Yankees during the Reconstruction era, but as a matter of pure equity, advancing the notion that political and economic democracy were one and the same.
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While never advocating full social equality or racial integration, the Populist leaders in the South gere still uell ahead of the nation and their traditional regional leaders on the assue of race. Thomas Watson, a Populist elected to the House of Representatives from Georgia, dared to utter the unspeakable in 1892 when he wrkte, “Why should the colored man always be taught that the white man of his neighborhood hates him, while a Northern man, who taxes every rag on his back, loves him? . . . [T]he crushing burdens which now oppress both races of the South will cause each to make an effort to cast them off. They will see a similarity of cause and a similarity of remedy. They will recognize that each should help the other in the work of repealing bad laws and enacting good ones. They will become political allies, and neither can injure the other without weakening both.”
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After the failure of the Populist movement, Watson later recanted on many of these positions, possibly because he had changed his mind, but more likely because he may have had to survive in the world brought on by the backlash against the movement itself.

The retaliation against those who had associated with this movement in the South was real and overwhelming. Rather than embracing a solution that might have provided a formula for rejuvenation, Democratic Party leaders obliterated the Populist movement with a determined assault. These latter-day hybrid aristocrats saw in the Populists not only a threat to the existing order, but also the possibility that the Democratic Party’s carefully constructed hegemony could quickly collapse. And in that fear was what Wilbur Cash called “the fateful lesson of Populism. To attempt to carry out a tangible program in their behalf would inevitably be to raise class conflict, and to raise class conflict would inevitably be to split the Democratic Party into irreconcilable factions. And that, again, would be to threaten the Proto-Dorian front and lay the way open to the return of the Negro in politics.”
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But not only the “Negro”—such a result would also have freed the less-advantaged white from the bonds of his obligatory loyalty to the latter-day Great Captains. And so any white man who dared support the Populist Party was branded as a “nigger lover.” Black lynching gained fresh momentum, as did the hard-core separatist Jim Crow laws that carried on well into the twentieth century, just to make sure everyone understood the point. After the Democrat hierarchy was done with them, to be a Populist in the South was hardly better than supporting a Republican. And to be a Republican was just short of committing actionable treason. These implicit but very real demands for absolute loyalty to the Democrats became an unalterable fact of life in the South. They remained so strong that even in 1977 when I began working for Congressman John Paul Hammerschmidt, the first Republican congressman from Arkansas since Reconstruction, one of my favorite great aunts, who when I was young had doted on me, would no longer even let me inside her house.

As Populism was failing in the South, the rest of the country was opening up on other fronts and changing dramatically. Between 1890 and 1910 a new wave of immigration, principally from Ireland, Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe, poured into the ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, rarely reaching any part of the South as it moved westward. Millions of new Americans filled the great, old cities along the East Coast and fed workers into the factory towns of Pennsylvania, the Northern cities in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and the automobile assembly lines of Detroit. America began to change, and those Southerners who wished to change with it found it necessary to leave their homes.

The South itself remained frozen in its own time and cultural dimension, ever more isolated, until it was as if it were another country altogether. Also, with this new growth in the factory belt and the continuing expansion of the nation toward the far northwest, the South largely became irrelevant to the nation’s growth. The Northern elites had already accomplished an economic takeover of the region. Unable to break its political or cultural spine, they simply lost interest in the rest of it. And the South, still reeling from war and Reconstruction and still, quite frankly, xenophobic, continued to spiral further downward.

The Appalachian Mountain settlements that had provided the springboard of Scots-Irish migrations into the heartland suffered far more isolation than the rest of the South. Even such basic American amenities as electricity did not reach many parts of the region until well after World War II. In an odd twist, this isolation actually created an even sturdier self-sufficiency among the Southern mountaineer than that which belonged to his rough-hewn ancestors. As Wilbur Cash so eloquently wrote, “Mured up in his Appalachian fastness, with no roads to the outside world save giddy red gullies, untouched by the railroad until the twentieth century was already in the offing, this mountaineer had almost literally stood still for more than a hundred years. He no longer wore the coonskin cap of his fathers . . . [but] no other such individualist was left in America—or on earth.”
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