Sin and Silence

IT IS NOT surprising that talk of sin is what we Northerners are hearing from the South this election year; fundamentalist religion and absolutist values come naturally to a region whose dominant social sensibility is even now shaped by humiliation and betrayal.

The grandparents of present-day Southerners were occupied by a vicious army of their countrymen; they were told that they had less rights than black people who were once slaves; they had to face up to a brain-cleaving guilt: the young men of the region had begun a slaughter that resulted in nothing, killing other members of a national family and gaining simple retribution in return. The bitterness remains, even now, as a legacy. Ask someone from, say, Barnwell County, South Carolina about the War Between the States; he or she might tell you that if only Hooker had been relieved of his command earlier, if only Stonewall had done this or that... There is some meaning in the ancient secession and war, both black and white Southerners know--but they are unsure what.

What happened after Reconstruction was worse--the cruel first cousins left the region (militarily) but stayed on in spirit to plunder it by proxy, eventually coming to make easy money through the South's cheap raw materials--oil, timber, coal, cotton--and cheap, uneducated labor. And the people who had fought the war, the dirt farmers, were ruled over by their own brothers. The rich planters on the land and the merchant lackeys in the towns did the bidding of their New York and Chicago masters. Poor white people stood up for their rights, in the North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia textile strikes of the 1920s and '30s, and they were beaten and gunned down just like uppity Negroes. One cold comfort eased the lives of poor whites: they were better off than blacks. Even that status that was manipulated by wealthy bourbons and their political representatives if a phenomenon like Populism or trade unions flared on the landscape.

There has always been class struggle in the South, submerged by racism (just as, in the North, working class discontent has been diffused largely by ethnic differences that separate the mass of immigrants who fueled industrial development). Northern working class people escaped into privatism and a waxing standard of living; white Southerners, living in a perpetually underdeveloped region, had no such luxury--aside from racist rage, they escaped into tradition and religion. Fundamentals millenarian cults and hysterical revival meetings in one way, opened outlets for the frustration of feeling dumb and oppressed.

Bass and DeVries do not sketch the background quite that way. Not that they don't agree; they're just more interested in how the foregoing portrait of Southern politics has shattered since the post-war ascendance of economic development and black equality. Southern politics rested, until the last few years, on a consensus of sorts between upper and lower class whites: most white political leaders did nothing to eradicate the inefficient small holdings of poor white farmers, nor did they try to diminish the privileges of poor whites in general versus blacks. For their part, the mass of Southern whites mainly steered clear of radical movements--despite support for neo-populists like the Longs or Jim Folson in Alabama--and contributed votes of, at least, apathetic tolerance to the coalition. (The South has long had the lowest voter turnout of any region in the Western democratic world.)

The white politicians put in power under these circumstances most often fell in the George Wallace/Orval Faubus mold, that is, rhetorically populist and politically conservative. They did nothing to help organized labor and little--as far as eradicating consumer taxes or properly financing education and health, or eliminating residency requirements for receiving unemployment compensation--to meet poor whites' social needs. The local business and landed establishment in states like North Carolina and Alabama, consequently, stayed within the state and nominally, the national, Democratic coalition, giving the South its one-party character.

Starting in about 1948 that began to change. The progress took place mainly through the efforts of Southern blacks allied with Northern liberals and labor unions. The story gets complicated here, Bass and DeVries say, because the pressure exerted on behalf of racial equality changed major and minor features of politics very quickly. First, the Southern racists were read out of the National Democratic party at Truman's convention, and formed their own National States Rights Party. The civil rights movement won crucial successes after that, chief among them the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which insured the franchise for Southern blacks and ultimately, their political power in states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina, where they comprise between 30 and 40 per cent of the total population.

In reaction, Southern whites left the Democratic party in droves--voting Republican only at the national level in the '50s, then starting to enter the party as local campaign workers and straight-ticket voters with the Nixon election of 1960. Goldwater carried all five "Deep South" states landslide margine in 1964; by 1972, Republicans--almost every one somewhat to the right of Ronald Reagan--held 31 per cent of the congressional seats in the Old Confederacy, four times as many as their party held 12 years before.

The phenomenon of rising Republicanism differed from state to state, Bass and DeVries point out: in Arkansas, Georgia and Louisiana there is nothing approaching a viable statewide Republican party; South Carolina and Texas have strong Republican state organizations, while the party in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia has been able to build on a nucleus of "mountain Republicans," whose loyalty stems from their support of freedom for the slaves (they didn't own any) and the Union during the Civil War. In these latter places, the Republican party has, in large measure, kept its traditional stance as a center-right group on economic measures while maintaining an occasionally liberal approach to the race issue. But in the rest of the region, where Republicanism grew up as an odd coalition of lower class racists and country club Goldwaterites, the party is an expression of right-wing extremism.

ODDLY ENOUGH, the creation of a genuine conservative party in response to the aspirations of Southern blacks has liberated the Democrats. So many blacks now vote in Mississippi, for example, that a candidate for state office needs to get only about one-quarter of the white vote to win if he or she receives a solid black vote. One of the great significant changes has been the Southern blacks who have been voting nearly 100 per cent for liberals like Jimmy Carter, Gov. Reubin Askew of Florida, Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas, and Gov. Cliff Finch of Mississippi. Southern Democrats now often look on a coalition of poor and working class whites and blacks as the central constituency of their party. Uncomfortable with the "New South" Democrats, the corporate establishment in most of the region has joined up with the Republicans, potentially setting up a type of class-based two-party system that the North, with its continued ethnicity and racism, is further from achieving.

Bass and DeVries' book heaps on documentation for these trends--almost too much, really, even though I happen to be into most of the approximately 100 pages of tables and maps. On the matter of Southern culture they are less satisfactory, perhaps because the authors may be like many Southern liberals, a little ashamed of what could be perceived as an unbelievably hatefilled past. But Bass and DeVries could take a different view of the heritage: that the passion and faith of the Southerner, white and black, freed from racism, can be translated into a striving for justice and a rage at his exploitation. A young Mississippian was recently talking about the upcoming presidential election in that state, saying that "the people who talk--the Chamber of Commerce crowd--they're all for Ford; but the people who don't talk--the dirt farmers--are going to vote for Carter." He added something to the effect that a heavy vote from those who didn't say much was enough to carry the state of Mississippi any time.