The Great Melding: War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America's New Conservatism

By Glenn Feldman

2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Audacious in its scope, subtle in its analysis, and persuasive in its arguments, The Great Melding is the second book in Glenn Feldman’s magisterial recounting of the South’s transformation from a Reconstruction-era citadel of Democratic Party inertia to a cauldron of GOP agitation. In this pioneering study, Feldman shows how the transitional years after World War II, the Dixiecrat episode, and the early 1950s formed a pivotal sequence of events that altered America’s political landscape in profound, fundamental, and unexpected ways.
 
Feldman’s landmark work The Irony of the Solid South dismantled the myth of the New Deal consensus, proving it to be only a fleeting alliance of fissiparous factions; The Great Melding further examines how the South broke away from that consensus. Exploring issues of race and white supremacy, Feldman documents and explains the roles of economics, religion, and emotive appeals to patriotism in southern voting patterns. His probing and original analysis includes a discussion of the limits of southern liberalism and a fresh examination of the Dixiecrat Revolt of 1948.
 
Feldman convincingly argues that the Dixiecrats—often dismissed as a transitory footnote in American politics—served as a template for the modern conservative movement. Now a predictable Republican stronghold, Alabama at the time was viewed by national political strategists as a battleground and bellwether. Masterfully synthesizing a vast range of sources, Feldman shows that Alabama was then one of the few states where voters made unpredictable choices between the competing ideologies of the Democrats, Republicans, and Dixiecrats.
 
Writing in his lively and provocative style, Feldman demonstrates that the events he recounts in Alabama between 1942 and Dwight Eisenhower’s 1952 election encapsulate a rare moment of fluidity in American politics, one in which the New Deal consensus shattered and the Democratic and Republican parties fought off a third-party revolt only to find themselves irrevocably altered by their success. The Great Melding will fascinate historians, political scientists, political strategists, and readers of political nonfiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9780817388140

Book preview

THE GREAT MELDING

THE GREAT MELDING

War, the Dixiecrat Rebellion, and the Southern Model for America’s New Conservatism

Glenn Feldman

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Goudy and Goudy Sans

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: George Wallace, Ronald Reagan, and a cleric represent a foreshadowing of the melding between white supremacy, economic fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism under the new conservatism. Courtesy of the Alabama Department of Archives and History

Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feldman, Glenn.

The great melding : war, the Dixiecrat rebellion, and the southern model for America’s new conservatism / Glenn Feldman.

pages cm. — (Modern South)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1866-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8814-0 (e-book)

1. Southern States—Politics and government—1865–1950. 2. Conservatism—Southern States—History—20th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—1933–1945. 4. United States—Politics and government—1945–1953. 5. United States—Race relations—Political aspects. 6. States’ Rights Democratic Party. I. Title.

F215.F429 2015

320.975—dc23

2014047479

For the memory of my grandfather, Sam Feldman, of Boston and Brooklyn, and the memory of Judy Karn, who made the best key lime pies . . .

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Sophistic Pruning and Smoke-and-Mirrors Politics

1. We Must Not Holler Till We Are Clean Out of the Woods

2. Social Darwinism, Free-Market Fundamentalism, and The Status Quo Society

3. We Must Wake Up the Roosevelt Worshippers to What the New Deal Is Doing to Torpedo White Supremacy

4. Gathering Clouds

5. Grits and Circuses

6. The Laws of God and Alabama

7. Feeding the Monster: Volume I

8. The Inexorableness of Cultural Continuities

9. An Oasis of Liberalism?

10. Brewing Rebellion

11. They Crucified Us

12. The Conservative Revolt against Civil Rights and the National Democratic Party

13. The Dixiecrat Revolt in Perspective: Meanings and The Southern Road to America’s New Conservatism

14. Let Us Not Wince Any More When We Hear the Word Republican

Conclusion

Notes

Select Bibliography of Primary Sources

Index

Acknowledgments

Thank you to everyone at the University of Alabama Press for their help and assistance with this book. I am especially grateful to Curtis Clark, director, Dan Waterman, editor-in-chief, and Donna Cox Baker, history acquisitions editor, for their encouragement and support throughout. Many thanks also to Joanna Jacobs, assistant managing editor, for her fine and detailed reading of the manuscript, and for expertly shepherding this project through to completion. I also want to thank others at the press with whom I have worked a number of times: Jon Berry, project editor; Rick Cook, production manager; and J. D. Wilson, sales and marketing director. Thank you to Jennifer Manley Rogers for an excellent copyediting job. I owe a debt to the two external readers for the press. Their suggestions helped make this a stronger book.

Many thanks go to Dean Robert Palazzo of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and to Colin J. Davis, chair of the History Department, for their enthusiastic support of research and scholarship at UAB. I am appreciative to my colleagues—especially George Liber, Ray Mohl, Harriet Amos Doss, Bob Corley, Brian Steele, Pamela Sterne King, Jordan Bauer, Beth Hunter, and Kaye Nail—for their discussion of scholarly subjects, technical assistance, and camaraderie.

I would like to express a special thanks to those scholars whose work has long inspired me and gotten me to think: Wayne Flynt, Dan T. Carter, and the late Sheldon Hackney, C. Vann Woodward, V. O. Key, and Richard Hofstadter, among others.

Among an army of archivists and librarians, several stand out: Norwood Kerr, Debbie Pendleton, and Ed Bridges at the Alabama Department of Archives and History; Jim Baggett at the Birmingham Public Library Archives; Mary Beth Newbill at the Tutwiler Collection of Southern History; Debbie Fout, Donnette Lurie, and the late Trudie Roy at the Homewood Library; Liz Wells at Samford University; Peggy Greenwood at the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis; Ned Dirlik at Columbia University and the New York Public Library; Paul Crater at the National Archives, Southern Regional Branch; Dwight M. Miller at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library in Iowa City, Iowa; and Brad Bauer and Dennis E. Bilger at the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri.

Friends Johnny Sherman, Becky and Owen Stayner, Jimmy and Tracy Wooten, Bryan Vroon, Phil Dowd, George Theodore, Lori Jack, Julie Ryan, Stephanie Diethelm, Frank LaRussa, Anna Russell Friedman, Mo Hajialilu, Chris Morris, Mark Westfall, Richard Grooms, Marc Dierikx, Jack Owens, and Jak and the late Judy Karn, are much appreciated. My parents, Brian and Julia Garate Burgos Feldman, and my brother, Richard Feldman, know how deeply I feel about them. Family members Danny Feldman, Vicky F. Menke, Julianna Menke, Ronnie Feldman, and Eulogio and Chi-Chi Pena also have been constantly supportive.

There are no words to describe the gratitude and love I have for my wife, Jeannie, and my precious daughters, Hallie and Rebecca. They are everything.

Introduction

Sophistic Pruning and Smoke-and-Mirrors Politics

Ryland Randolph was a very rough man.¹ During Reconstruction in Alabama, Randolph beat, whipped, knifed, stabbed, shot, and terrorized black freedmen and any white person (Yankee carpetbagger or native scalawag) who dared to assist blacks—even in matters as mundane as learning to read and write, visit town, vote, leave the plantation, choose a job, or otherwise exercise any of the political, social, economic, and civil rights guaranteed to all citizens of the recently re-United States. Randolph engaged in street fights, duels, and almost certainly midnight rides at which he presided over unspeakable depredations. He achieved local celebrity. He was the founder of the local Klan in Tuscaloosa County, a particularly violent den even by Alabama standards. His newspapers printed ghoulish Klan warnings to freed blacks and whites who dared to buck Conservative rule. He tried to get the University of Alabama shut down because he felt it was not run under sufficiently Conservative auspices. In one incident Randolph stabbed in the back a black man fighting a white man in broad daylight. He celebrated the deed in print the next day: the cutting and beating of the insolent fellow . . . in [the] presence of crowds of his fellow niggers, has had a salutary influence over the whole of niggerdom hereabouts. They now feel their inferiority, in every particularity.²

Beyond celebrity, Randolph eventually gained status as something of a living legend. The federals temporarily muzzled his newspaper. The U.S. Army arrested him. The locals responded by electing him to the state legislature. His antics were outrageous; his rhetoric even more so. At one point a University of Alabama professor became so enraged by the Klan editor that he hired a graduate student to assassinate him. The attempt was bungled, a shootout ensued, and Randolph kept his life but—by the capriciousness of a bullet’s ricochet—lost his leg. In Reconstruction Alabama the amputated limb served as a badge of honor. It cemented Randolph’s status and legend. With the loss of the leg he gained that much more gravitas—and a certain kind of kinship with the sleeveless numbers who had actually fought at Shiloh, Gettysburg, or Antietam. But as much as Ryland Randolph traded in the physical, the editor of the Tuscaloosa Independent Monitor and Tuskaloosa Blade did perhaps even more damage with his pen than with his sword.

For Randolph, Reconstruction was a motley thing, half military and half nigger.³ Like the cream of Alabama society as well as its more plebian elements, Randolph invoked conservative religious beliefs long ingrained in the region. Black, Republican rule, he explained, is unchristian and born of hatred. Anyone who favored black voting deserves death at the hands of the black savages. Randolph thought that no people had been given more chances to succeed than the African slave. According to him, all fields had been open to blacks but no step forward has been taken [because] . . . Niggers are wooly ‘nothings.’ Look at him, smell of him, feel him . . . hear him, and taste of him . . . and then tell me if he is a brother. A brother? Randolph laughed. He may be a blotted copy of a Man, but never a brother. Make him a citizen, and a voter and all that. Caligula made his horse a consul . . . [but] the Negro has no soul. He could not possibly be the offspring of Adam. . . . If the Negro was on the ark he went in a beast and he is a beast today.⁴

At this point it is important to note that these were not the ravings of some madman lurking on the fringes of society. Ryland Randolph was one of the most respected, admired, and feared mouthpieces of conservative, white, southern society. He was one of the leading exponents of the power, rule, and government—of civilization—by, for, and of white, male-dominated, Christians. He was the ultimate insider in Reconstruction Alabama.

It is with some puzzlement, then, even befuddlement that we turn to hear Randolph call—publicly, emphatically, and passionately—in 1874 for an end to violence against Negroes and for actual kindness to be shown to black people in the exercise of their legal and constitutionally guaranteed rights—even the vote. Or as he would put it in his own Randolphian language: We must treat the African elephant in our midst kindly. . . . Moderation and forbearance must be our motto. . . . Let us pocket all past insult and wrong.⁵

Grover C. Hall won the Pulitzer Prize in 1928 for a series of hard-hitting, aggressive editorials on the powerful KKK in Alabama. As editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, the state’s oldest newspaper, Hall’s attacks on the Klan in the belly of the beast were celebrated far and wide, taken by northerners as evidence of public, liberal, outrage and disgust with the narrow-minded intolerance, proscription, and sectarian dogmatism of the sheeted order; as proof that a treasure trove of progressivism lay buried in the Deep South—courageous and enlightened attitudes just waiting to emerge and assume their rightful place in the sunlight of southern government and society. Less than a decade later, though, we find Hall standing with the most reactionary forces of southern intransigence in stridently rejecting a federal antilynch law. We also find, perhaps even more strangely, Hall arguing against a pardon for the ill-fated Scottsboro Boys but then swinging—suddenly, dramatically, full of his characteristic verve—to advocate for a pardon. Only, Hall did so in terms that hardly recommend him for inclusion in a hall of racial liberals—or even one of moderately enlightened individuals. After resisting a pardon for years, in 1938 Hall argued, in numerous private entreaties to key decision makers, for pardon. Only, the Pulitzer-winning editor explained that he didn’t care if the accused young blacks were innocent of the rape of two cut-rate prostitutes, nor whether the moronic beasts would kill and eat one another without benefit of pepper sauce. What was at stake was Alabama’s image and reputation, not the ’honor’ and ‘dignity’ of two hookwormy Magdalenes.⁶ And after six uninterrupted days of haranguing against the antilynch bill from congressmen, editors, and politicians throughout Dixie (a bill that Hall also opposed), the Senate moved to other business.⁷

One can imagine, then, our confusion in approaching such contradictory statements and beliefs within just a few short years. How to account for such towering contradictions? Is this a case of people simply changing their minds? Do figures such as Ryland Randolph merely mellow over time? Do those like Grover Hall grow bitter? Do others just get tired of being racists?

Well, yes, sometimes that’s exactly what happens. But, for the most part, what is really going on (for decades) in Alabama and the South is something far different and much more important. Understandably, scholarship has been somewhat befuddled by these yawning gaps in consistency, tending to approach them with a tentative if studied blindness or a benign but conscientious neglect. That, or the even-more jolting and frequent dichotomy of celebrating the liberal sentiments of figures like Grover Hall (where they may be found) while ignoring, minimizing, or dismissing their more narrow and intolerant convulsions. This approach also rather consistently, and perhaps jealously, reserves the reactionary tag and demagogic label for Ryland Randolph and those like him later (Bull Connor, Strom Thurmond, Leander Perez, and Horace Wilkinson) while ignoring, lightly passing over, or simply failing to account for their more enlightened moments. At times academics have been reduced to cheering from the sidelines when a member of the forces of reaction apparently turns over a new leaf or expresses some sentiment that might be called tolerant, inclusive . . . liberal. Of course the other side exists too: the predilection for scholars to wring their hands when a former progressive like John Temple Graves II goes sour. For some there is even the tendency to ignore, downplay, or, perhaps worse, explain away as mere expedience episodes when figures who have been elevated into paragons of southern liberalism (the Lister Hills, George Huddlestons, and Harry Ayerses) express, and even participate in, ugly proscription, narrow intolerance, and bigoted forms of illiberalism.

But despite such vicissitudes, something more significant is happening beside serendipity or the variances intrinsic to human nature. If the whole record is examined, then a majority pattern slowly becomes discernible—a reality that is far different than received wisdom. But once uncovered, the pattern has much to say about what was really going on in Alabama and other southern states beneath the soothing rhetoric of politicians, power brokers, and other key actors. It has much to say about what would evolve into a Southern Model of sorts—one that would provide a priceless foundation for the growth and exportation of reaction and even an extreme rightism that has passed itself off in modern times as mere conservatism; one that has eventually achieved powerful and widespread acceptance far beyond the borders of Dixie.

The answer to our present riddle is better found in something that may be termed Sophistic Pruning or smoke-and-mirrors politics. It is a phenomenon—actually a set of practices—perfected in the American South over decades; one predicated upon, and perhaps born as a form of, compensation for the trauma of military defeat, occupation, and massive physical as well as psychological destruction. But it set a model that, once adopted by far-seeing conservatives, actually facilitated a historic rightist ascendance that found enduring purchase far beyond the Mason-Dixon. The abstruse utterances and actions of individuals like Ryland Randolph and Grover Hall did not appear out of thin air. They took place in a specific context, a particular time and place that has much to say about what these historical actors said and did.

Put simply, white southerners constructed a regional approach to the prospect of impending racial and cultural crisis. Forged as a response to the cataclysmic and (in American history) unprecedented events of military defeat, economic ruin, and martial occupation, conservative whites became adept—even expert—at clipping the most egregious excesses of white supremacy precisely in order to keep the more central parts of white supremacy healthy and intact. They pioneered the game of denouncing the most blatant and indefensible aspects of white supremacy (lynching, the Klan, race riots) in order to convince northern and federal critics that responsible whites had the situation in hand; to back off and leave southerners alone to deal with their racial and social problems; ultimately, to fortify the more central and defensible pillars of white supremacy: segregation, suffrage restriction, and employment discrimination.

What these white conservatives improvised was a remarkably sophistic game: a strategy based on the smoke and mirrors of apparent and conspicuous reform in the areas of most egregious offense. Once these reforms were accomplished—usually with a great deal of fanfare—conservatives intent on actually preserving the status quo could bank enough capital with nonsoutherners to argue that Dixie needed no federal oversight because whites had shown immense goodwill toward blacks; race relations were progressing. Indeed, once sufficient lip service to—and symbolic—reform had been effected, federal oversight could be portrayed as intrusive, unjustified, a sign of distrust, and bad will on the part of the North and Washington (increasingly conflated in the southern mind as one and the same). An implied threat was also clear: continued attempts to make over the South would delay, perhaps indefinitely, a sectional reconciliation that promised mutually beneficial interchanges of land, labor, and capital. Eventually this blueprint for Bourbon rule—or the Southern Template—could be exported to model conservative white control in racial prerogatives in other climes and regions. Sophistic Pruning—cutting back the ugliest and most extreme parts of the tree of white supremacy and states’ rights in order to keep the same tree of elite rule and antidemocratic tendencies growing bigger, stronger, and more healthy—became arguably the South’s most significant contribution to American political history.

This is not to suggest that there were not some whites of genuine goodwill in the South who rejoiced in the demise of obscenities such as lynching, race riots, and the convict lease. Or, even, that many whites were wholly conscious of the sophistic game that was being played. Only that whites of privilege realized full well the benefits that could be gained by pruning. Realized full well that they were engaged in an elaborate shell game of shedding crocodile tears over the most brutal excesses of the white supremacy regime—but only once those excesses had proven their worth: pruning away Klan violence, lynching, fraudulent and forcible disfranchisement (practices so blatant and universally objectionable that they risked ongoing federal scrutiny and, possibly, the disaster of another federal intervention). To become a candidate for Sophistic Pruning, the practice had to be—like race riots—so indefensible that it was offensive to all but the most hardened Negrophobe. But actual pruning of the excess—like that involved in pruning a tree—was not designed to kill the tree so much as to make strategic changes that would produce a stronger tree; one that could endure the inevitable winds and rains and storms of the future. Spurred by necessity, ambition, and the drive for survival, the Bourbons put their strategy into place in the South and experienced wild success. What they did not realize is that they were perfecting a model that would allow conservatism (and a striking southern and extreme version of it) to eventually become ascendant in many other parts of America.

They Will Eat It Up

Central to all this was maintenance of the myth that limitless reservoirs of goodwill toward blacks existed among the southern white people—if only blacks stayed in their place and the Yankees and federals kept their noses out of Dixie. Quite often, really, in private correspondence the rules and results of the game were spelled out but rarely for public consumption, lest the curtain be pulled back on the whole enterprise. Proof of goodwill was invaluable to white southerners. If enough could be demonstrated, it could serve as a firewall to prevent future Yankee and federal intrusion into southern racial and economic relations. In 1943, for example, Champ Pickens, founder of the Blue and Gray Football Game between college all-stars from the North and South, covertly suggested to his friend, Alabama governor Chauncey Sparks, that the state issue a special commemorative coin to celebrate famed Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver. The real purpose beyond honoring a famous black son, Pickens explained to Sparks, was—with the war in full swing—to stave off northern and federal meddling in southern affairs. National tabloids like Time and Readers Digest, Pickens predicted, not without reason, would eat it up. Then, should real race trouble arise, southerners could draw on their reserves of demonstrated goodwill to counter charges from the North that the white South was narrow-minded and still crush the insurrection. Of course, it went almost without saying that goodwill would be extended to the African only if he stayed in his place.⁸

Perhaps at once the most obvious—and most hidden—form of Sophistic Pruning was segregation itself. In many ways Jim Crow was the ultimate form of Sophistic Pruning. For what was pruned away—stated explicitly or not—was exclusion and the prospect of violence (although it remained a constant specter). Segregation was pushed by southern whites as a reform that would protect peace, order, stability, and a favorable economic climate—all underwritten by society’s best whites. The alternatives were categorically worse, the argument went. If blacks, radicals, and the nation did not agree to segregation—or inclusion on a separated basis—outright exclusion would be the result. If the wall between the races should ever fall, miscegenation and the loss of the perquisites of race that went along with racial purity would result. Worse, the region itself would descend into anarchy, chaos, and bloodshed.

But of course this was classic sophistry because separate but equal already meant precisely exclusion and certainly subjection: the exclusion of black people from superior white jobs, programs, facilities, schools, housing, transportation, and access to credit. But segregation was an act of Sophistic Pruning so effective that, once accomplished, it was signed off on by a retreating federal government in a succession of cases culminating with the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson.⁹ For sixty years separate but equal would be the law of the land. And, as argued by white southerners interested in preservation of the racial status quo—both economic conservatives and economic liberals—segregation was a reform that avoided the abyss and Armageddon. That is Sophistic Pruning at perhaps its greatest if most ugly moment.

Part of the sophism involved, of course, deep, frequent, and passionate expressions of friendship for the lesser race—provided blacks stayed in their place. Eventually college football teams—another form of religious expression in the South—would feature black athletes, even black quarterbacks. And white crowds would cheer them along with black fans, making Saturday the most integrated day in the South, in contrast to Martin Luther King’s observation about 11:00 A.M. on Sundays. But this could continue only as long as blacks stayed in their place—as long as sports did not spill into political or economic equality. Suburban megachurches, temples of the modern Religious Right, would one day take in blacks and other minorities as members. But, again, as long as they stayed in their place—the price of admission and inclusion. Place would vary over time, from segregation to forms of inclusion at controlled levels. But the possibility of peace and goodwill between the races in the South still rested on the stipulation that blacks (no matter how impressive their social advancements) would occupy a place set out for them by the white majority—one subordinate to, and dependent upon, whites.

Harry Truman’s 1948 package of federal laws aimed at lynching, segregation, employment discrimination, and the poll tax was exactly the thing the Southern Model had been working to prevent for all these years through demonstrated friendship to blacks, opposition to obvious excesses like the Klan and lynching, and the sponsorship of safe channels such as the Tuskegee model of vocational education. But in 1948 all of that was suddenly and dramatically put in jeopardy; a potential trauma for white southerners that would be immense. And why? Because Harry Truman and the abomination that had become the Democratic Party under Franklin Roosevelt coveted the northern black vote. For the white South it was that simple. And that is why the Dixiecrat Revolt happened. That is what was intolerable enough to result in actual rebellion against the long-sainted Democratic Party. Because the limitless, treacherous political ambition of national Democrats willing to give away anything to get the northern black vote—even the heart and soul of what their party had always stood for in the South—threatened to upset the apple cart that had been in place since Redemption and Ryland Randolph and the end of Reconstruction.

That is why 1948 is so important. Rebelling against the party of one’s fathers is, to put it mildly, a serious thing. For white southerners it was gut-wrenching and emotional. The revolt was not about one president or even one set of civil rights proposals that southerners found obnoxious. Such things were simply not sufficient to warrant the scope and scale of what occurred. The revolt was about seventy-five years of careful, painstaking preparations, gymnastics, and smoke and mirrors. For the white South, the issue was not a single election. It was the survival of conservative white rule in the South, of home rule, of culture—of civilization itself. That is why for the whites who bolted—as well as for those who eventually stayed inside the Democratic Party—the national Democratic move toward racial liberalism was intolerable. It was a cynical sellout for votes and had nothing to do with moving the nation in the direction of inclusiveness, democracy, or its founding ideals.

The 1948 revolt became, in the South, a fratricidal conflict over means rather than ends. The ends were agreed upon by all but the most exotic: the preservation of white supremacy. What was up for debate was whether that primeval goal could best be accomplished by bolting to a third party or staying within the sacred confines of the Democratic and Conservative Party. Thus the 1948 debate over bolting must be evaluated within the broader context of decades of back-breaking, pretzel-twisting gymnastics that conservative whites had painstakingly contrived; machinations they had put into practice and endured since Reconstruction to prove to outsiders that it was best for whites to rule Dixie and for black people to live in it as a cheap labor force. That is the crux of the 1948 revolt: a struggle not only for the past but also for the future of what the South would look like.

The chapters that form this book will closely examine the protection, perpetuation, and extension of these strategies and tactics during the critical 1942–52 period, climaxing with an analysis of the millennial conflict that shook the South in 1948. The book will end moments before the emergence of Eisenhower Republicanism in the South, fittingly with yet another conservative, elite pruning of the Klan: this one taking place from 1949–51 and bearing more than just a few similarities to the 1874 crackdown, the Progressive Era war on lynching, and the soft opposition waged against the 1920s incarnation of the Klan.¹⁰

Events after the Dixiecrat Revolt failed and just before the emergence of Eisenhower Republicanism demonstrate a number of things clearly. They show how the conspicuous, ostensible, elite-driven pruning of the Klan after 1948 fit the sophistic model precisely, especially with the Dixiecrat menace still threatening to split the white South. With this threat as a backdrop the essentially conservative white South was desperate to prove again that the region could be safely left alone to govern itself without northern and federal encroachments. But, as before, the pruning of hooded vigilantism was a screen because the real action occurred behind it even as the smoke and mirrors of a high-profile, elite-driven, crackdown on the KKK and vigilante violence took place.

By 1951 Alabama elites became almost frantic, desperately trying, once again, to tie the bane of extralegal violence exclusively to lowbrow people—in this case labor unions. This was the smoke and mirrors. But the real action in 1950–51 constituted one of the most important unknown political events in American history: an effort by the forces of regular Democracy to recapture the machinery of Alabama politics from the bolters in order to stave off a repeat of the 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt in 1952. The outcome, ironically, revealed just how ruthless the economically liberal loyalists could be in (as they put it) cutting the balls off the Dixiecrat Party. ¹¹ The result would have long-lasting regional and national implications. Almost simultaneously the States’ Righters failed to deliver a coup de grâce to their factional adversaries when they had the chance—a mistake they would live to regret. The subsequent demise of the Dixiecrats as a proper party would provide an unforgettable lesson for conservatives in the virtues of ruthlessness. The forces of white economic privilege would never again repeat the mistake of leniency. They would never again leave the wounded alive.

Events in 1951 Alabama, little noticed by later scholars, mesmerized national politicos of the time. The White House and national pundits fixated on the Alabama situation. The outcome was seen as a bellwether on the question of whether another Dixiecrat Revolt could happen in 1952, this one with more time, money, and organization, and with potentially far-greater repercussions. The consequences of the Alabama conflict would actually play an outsized role in dictating future possibilities for national politics. To be precise, with third-party indepentism or rump revolt rendered an impossibility in 1952, southern whites would increasingly be forced to choose between one of only two viable alternatives: continued affiliation with a national Democratic Party hurtling toward economic liberalism and racial inclusion, or consideration of the anathematic step of aligning with the long-hated GOP. To a large extent the period most intensely covered by this study—1942 to the election of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952—saw the formation of much of what would become the foundations of modern American political realignment.

1

We Must Not Holler Till We Are Clean Out of the Woods

Let us return for a moment to Ryland Randolph’s Reconstruction. Because with words and deeds as simultaneously repellent and hypnotic as Randolph’s, we are—at root—talking about the construction of mechanisms to ensure conservative, white, patriarchal rule that would eventually be exported to like minds and interests far beyond the confines of Dixie. In 1872 Congress passed the Amnesty Act, which reenfranchised over 100,000 former Confederate soldiers, leaving only five hundred former Confederate military leaders disfranchised. As much as any single act could, it heralded the imminent triumph of Democratic and Conservative politics in the South. Redemption arrived in Alabama in November 1874, as the Democratic and Conservative Party took back the reins of government. Gone was the need for—or the viability of—a secret, paramilitary order. Ku Kluxism died in Alabama because the federal government took action against the Klan at the precise moment Conservative Democratic forces regained political power and made the order’s existence moot—even a potential liability. With the Redeemers back in the saddle, there was no reason for the terror to continue. Even Ryland Randolph called for an end to the violence.¹

Everyone in Alabama knew the stakes involved before the first ballot was cast in 1874: white supremacy.² And, if Conservatives were to regain control, it would be essential for whites from every section and class to close ranks.³ Perhaps the most enduring lesson of Redemption was that black, Yankee, Republican, and federal rule could be broken in the South if whites put aside their economic differences to cooperate.⁴ And so passion and pan-white solidarity resulted in north Alabama cooperating with south Alabama to elect George S. Houston governor.

Houston ran an intensely racial campaign as every Bourbon heavyweight weighed in. Hilary Abner Herbert and John Tyler Morgan joined other Redeemers to stump for white votes throughout the poorer north Alabama and hill country—Morgan invoking the folks’ affinity for conservative religion by using a Bible as his main campaign prop. John Witherspoon DuBose, a member of the Reconstruction Knights of the White Camellia and later a Populist leader confirmed that the appeal for united race action was heard by common whites aroused to meet the menaces of fanaticism . . . from without. South Alabama raises her manacled hands in mute appeal to the mountain counties . . . and begs piteously for relief, wrote Alabama’s leading Black Belt newspaper. The chains on the wrists of her sons, and the midnight shrieks of her women, sound continually. . . . Is there a white man in North Alabama so lost to all his finer feelings of human nature as to slight her appeal?⁵ Plain whites from across north Alabama’s hill country and the Tennessee Valley responded to the privileged appeals and finally achieved Redemption from Republican rule.

It is insufficient to say simply that Redemption marked a sea change. After a decade of the most blatant repression and violence, Conservative Democracy—with virtually one voice—called for prudence, forbearance, and moderation toward Alabama’s vanquished blacks and Republicans. Above all, they called for peace. Newspaper after newspaper, politician after politician took the exact same line, providing a taste of the repetition and consistency of message southerners would pass on to their conservative cousins outside Dixie.

But why? And why the moment Redemption was accomplished in November 1874? Because at stake was the holiest of holies: states’ rights and home rule concerning race relations and a cheap, regular, and plentiful supply of labor—black and white. With federal troops leaving Alabama, continued truculence served no useful purpose. In fact it risked the state losing that which it prized most: to be left alone in its racial customs and revitalized economically with an infusion of northern capital and docile labor. It really was quite remarkable. Here we have a civilization that had perpetrated, excused, apologized for, and tolerated one of the most systematic programs of violence and brutality in American history. It had refused to punish such acts even when they occurred in broad daylight.⁶ Now, suddenly, it called for its utter opposite.

Houston did not disappoint. In his inaugural address the governor called for peace, moderation, and the protection of all citizens without regard to race, color, or previous condition, to safeguard every citizen and their property. His words echoed those of W. L. Bragg, chair of Alabama’s Democratic and Conservative Party, who, in the glow of victory, pledged a shocking, new cheerful obedience to the laws of the United States.⁷ Alabama’s press followed the party line with one voice from every section. Let us be just and generous, called the Union Springs Herald from the Black Belt. The battle has been fought and won, answered the Jacksonville Republican in north Alabama. Let there be no excesses or vindictive retaliatory measures. Your rights will be inviolate, the Opelika Times assured blacks in east Alabama.⁸

The new era would bring bountiful business prospects and, with it, an emphasis on the prerequisites of affluence: law, order, cheap labor, government aid, the protection of property, and northern capital. Our greatest responsibility, adjudged the Eutaw Whig and Observer, is to restore tranquility, peace, confidence, and prosperity . . . so that industry will be encouraged [and] business . . . fostered. We will show the world that we will protect black laborers in all things. Retrenchment and reform . . . peace and prosperity, the Southern Argus cried in connecting tax cuts, austerity, and fiscal conservatism to the resumption of white supremacy and right-thinking religion. The Greenville Advocate weighed in with justice, peace, and prosperity for all.⁹ Essential to these well-laid plans was the clear demonstration of Dixie’s newfound reliability as a conservative, pro-business haven for the profitable infusion of northern capital. Peace and security were essential to assure outside investors that their money would be well spent.¹⁰

Yet just as essential to the new order was a policy of northern and federal laissez-faire on race; local rule by the South’s better whites. Linked to the hegemony of privileged whites was also a budding regional defensiveness that would eventually descend into a kind of paranoia and detachment from reality. In other words, despite their past—despite their present—southern Bourbons would come to believe their own press. People from all over the country would learn that under the rule of white southerners their interests . . . will be protected and their property greatly enhanced, vowed the Montgomery Daily Advertiser. The paper urged their readers to stop talking about the Klan. Show . . . the world . . . and the North in particular that the South has been slandered and misrepresented about alleged abuses during the Reconstruction years.¹¹

Now, it is one thing to proclaim a new era. It is wholly another to assert, with a straight face, that the old terror never existed. Yet the tendency of some southern conservatives to make the leap provided a glimpse of what was eventually to come on a national level.

Yet not every Bourbon was, at this stage, ready to dispense with reality. Most in fact freely admitted that a reign of terror had existed and (boasted that it) was now over. After all, this was the essence of Sophistic Pruning. The important point was that the credit of the state would be restored and outside capital attracted. States’ rights and home rule would be the pound of flesh that allowed mutual financial gain to commence. The surest way to make Dixie a place where business would flourish was to let the people adjust these matters for themselves. With the return of native white conservative men to power, a new era of peace and prosperity begins, explained the Tuscaloosa Times. Businesses of all kinds would revive, emigration would set in from other sections of the country, and people would be happy to live and work in the sunny South. As hoped, erstwhile northern enemies, visions of profits dancing in their heads, responded enthusiastically.¹²

Because of his ultraviolent past, perhaps no one had the bona fides in this volte-face of Ryland Randolph. Redemption and the corresponding decline of the KKK were intimately entwined with the dominance of capital, the seemingly eternal quest for cheaper and cheaper labor, the attraction of outside investment, and racial control of the ballot by economic means. It is with special interest, then, that we turn to Randolph’s remarks in the wake of 1874’s political victory and the decline of the sheeted reign of terror:

The State of Alabama is redeemed, perhaps forever . . . perhaps because it rests with the white people of the State to determine. If [the Negro] must go through with the farce of voting, he must be made, by the controlling influence of capital, to vote with his employers. . . . The negro will resume his normal condition of undisputed inferiority; and both races will be happier and better off. [But] never forget or forgive those insidious [white] enemies who have pulled with the negro hounds. . . . We, the white men of Alabama have just gained a signal victory, and it behooves us to conduct ourselves so that we may enjoy, fully, all the fruits. . . . Moderation and forbearance must be our motto [so that we may reverse] . . . this revulsion of political feeling created over the North. [If we are not careful] the tide of public opinion may yet be turned against us as suddenly and overwhelmingly as it has been moved in our favor. By proper precaution and obedience to the laws we will, in two more years, elect a Democratic President, and thus completely get our necks from under the yoke of Radical [Republican] oppression. Let us prove to the world the blessings of the white man’s government in Alabama. . . . Our policy should be to invite, attract, and welcome all capital and white labor to our great State; throwing no barrier in shape of insecurity to life, liberty or property. We must treat the African elephant in our midst kindly. . . . Let us white men, prove to the satisfaction of the misled masses of the North that a Southern State under our rule is freer from crime and outrage than it was under Radical misrule. Let us pocket all past insult and wrong for our own sakes. . . . We must not holler till we are clean out of the woods. . . . Discipline, prudence and moderation. Restrain ourselves [and] Alabama will be forever free from negro domination [italics mine].¹³

As is well known, after Redemption southerners busied themselves constructing a conservative Lost Cause Myth and a New South Creed to rebuild along the lines of sectional reconciliation, local control of social customs, the importation of industry, a rabidly probusiness, antiunion climate, and an acute resentment of regional slights. Armed thus, epidemic violence toward freed slaves and those whites who had aided them faded like an ancient mist before the new memory. Federal investigations, if they occurred, would henceforth be considered needless, divisive, and partisan—inaugurated by Republicans only for political purposes. Blacks had been used without regard to their true interest, but only for the oppression of southern whites by outsiders posing as the false friends of the African; aliens who would prey upon their simple and ignorant nature to subvert the wise counsel and generosity of his real friends, the better whites. As they had during Reconstruction and would again during the New Deal and modern civil rights movement, rapacious outsiders would work to turn the black man against the very people upon whom his prosperity depended. In the process these users would deny the socially separated, ineffaceable lines traced by God Himself. And so conservative religion, as it had before the Civil War, was again mobilized to buttress a prosouthern cause; this time business dominance, industrial development, and white supremacy.

Southerners had most assuredly lost the war. Just as surely, though, they had every intention of winning the peace. As in the aftermath of so many wars, thus came the rewriting of history—and again the disturbing hint of unreality. Things hadn’t really been that bad down South, the Selma Southern Argus opined. Despite plenty of bad press up North, there hadn’t really been any antagonism between the races in Alabama during Reconstruction, only false and exaggerated reports of isolated instances that could just have easily occurred in Massachusetts or Pennsylvania. Indeed the editor (a future Populist) wrote, with a breathtaking disregard for reality—even banality—that we know of no single case in Alabama in which a negro has suffered . . . violence because of his color, or . . . a republican has been maltreated or wronged because of his political opinions. So, now, let us put all of that nonsense behind us for we . . . believe in the manhood of the northern people, in their sense of justice, in their love of truth.¹⁴

Again and again the Sophistic Pruning yielded fruit. An upstate New York paper, for example, gushed with gullible praise at the remarkable coincidence of the return to power of the Democratic and Conservative Party in Alabama and the striking decline of violence there.¹⁵ Maybe conservative Bourbon rule was good for the region after all. Perhaps the strategy worked so well because southern elites were telling northern investors exactly what they wanted to hear: that the erstwhile warring sections could get along and, in the process, get rich together.

As the smoke and mirrors of conspicuous self-pruning went on up front, the more important business of reinstalling conservative government, and all that that entailed, proceeded behind it. One of the most integral components of the restoration of Bourbon rule was the almost ineffaceable engraving of the antifederal creed onto the region. It was a resentment and bitterness toward all things federal, racial, and liberal so deep, so powerful, so unutterably profound that it would endure for as long as there would be a discernible South. Along with it many southerners cultivated a hyperdefensiveness and distinctly unattractive yet useful victimhood—one they came to believe with every ounce of their being. The honest belief of the white southern people, wrote one astute tourist, is that they are the most grossly wronged and outraged people on the face of the earth. As if on cue a white Sumter countian remembered that, under carpetbag and scalawag domination, Dixie had degenerated into one vast cess-pool of political maggots, stenches, and corruptions. So determined were white Alabamians to see that the federal government should remain a foreign and antagonistic threat in the minds and hearts of the people that state Democratic and Conservative officials actually hoarded food, medical supplies, and provisions sent from Washington. Then—in order to prevent the federals from receiving any credit, they redistributed the aid to the people as something that had come from the South.¹⁶

And so began the South’s strange and tortured relationship with the federal government, one climaxed in the New Deal. In a large sense it was one of perpetual adolescent rebellion in which the region accepted—indeed supplicated with outstretched hands—federal bounty, only to take a perverse pride in what it liked to call its stubborn independence and dislike of all things Yankee and federal, things that were increasingly conflated as one in the southern mind.

Religion was scarcely an antidote, and gender seemed to make no difference. In fact conservative theology served as one of the strongest bulwarks for a society that blended politics and religion so thoroughly. As one religious Alabama woman confessed: When I let my mind dwell on all of our wrongs, oh how wicked I get. . . . The Yankee Congress have filled the bitter cup of the Southern people to overflowing. Such sentiment pervaded the South. You could travel to any corner of Alabama, a Freedmen’s Bureau agent agreed, and you will see no signs . . . hear no words of nurturing for blacks or of loyalty to the central government. "No union is cherished; nothing national is cultivated. Another woman, who swore the war would never actually end, put it perhaps as plainly as it could be: I will teach my children and they shall teach their children to hate the government."¹⁷

It Is Christianity, but Not Orthodox. . . . It Is Wrong but Right

With 1874 Redemption (reinforced by the infamous Compromise of 1877 that saw the last federal troops ride out of Dixie), the sophistic strategy took on new life. With time it was so effective at keeping the central government at bay that it achieved a kind of reverential status. Force Bills, independent parties, and sporadic attempts at biracial unionism were all either brushed aside or crushed in the 1870s and ’80s, often with a ceaseless regional drumbeat about progress for good blacks, vocational and industrial education, the prospect of looming sectional reconciliation, and, of course, loud, regular, and conspicuous denunciations of mob rule, (at least public) remorse for the sin of chattel slavery, and an insistence that the most promising course of progress for both races—and sections—was home rule. This program called for the best whites to protect black people from the emotional, unpredictable, and violence-prone common folk of the South: the poor white redneck cracker so fond of the lynch knot and cruelty toward the powerless Negro.¹⁸ All the while, though—through all the smoke and mirrors—the real engines of southern white conservatism ground on, growing larger with each passing year: the heartless and unforgiving yoke (for blacks and plain whites) of the crop-lien or furnish system with its seemingly endless cycles of debt, debt, and more debt; the unspeakable obscenity of convict lease; rapidly tightening black codes and Jim Crow statutes; and, of course, a system of debt peonage that (along with the lease) rivaled the horrors of chattel slavery.¹⁹

It is worth pausing for a moment to take a look at one of the worst of the conservative South’s mechanisms for social control and economic enrichment: the convict lease. The convict lease was the state’s practice of renting out prisoners as workers in the burgeoning industries of the New South—coal mines, steel mills, iron foundries, railroads, and turpentine camps. Arguably the crown jewel of the New South, the barbaric system was a blight on the southern mind, soul, and psyche. A purely southern phenomenon, a bona fide child of Reconstruction, the lease was born in 1865 and made its appearance in—and only in—the former Confederacy. Yet despite its barbarity, its profanity, its pure capacity to conjure inhumanity toward other human beings, the lease had one overwhelmingly redeeming quality that guaranteed its survival for over sixty years. It was profitable—fantastically profitable. And, for that reason it came into existence and it thrived.

Because feeding, clothing, lodging, and disciplining the inmates were in the hands of the leasers (the employers), the most appalling practices ensued—occasionally the fruit of individual sadism or depravity but more often from the endless desire to fatten the bottom line. Prisoners were scourged, sometimes to death, for minor infractions or failure to meet quotas. Men and women were housed in the same cells, sometimes in rolling iron cages that resembled a crude traveling circus, moving from site to site as the southern sun beat down mercilessly, and summer insects swarmed. Children were actually born into the lease. Employers used medieval, almost unimaginable, forms of discipline for convicts failing to meet work quotas or other petty offenses: beating, crucifixion, the rack. Some convicts were hung by their thumbs; survivors bore hands that resembled the paws of certain animals. Gangs of shackled men labored in ice-cold water in the mines. If just one failed to meet quota, employers flogged the lot so viciously that skin came off bone. Foremen placed others into tiny wooden isolation boxes, no bigger than doghouses. Under the southern sun bodies swelled and burst before they were pried out days later, if still alive. Men, women, and children relieved themselves in the same filthy buckets from which they bathed and drank. Their food was spoiled and filled with worms; their bedding was infested with lice and other vermin. Mortality rates were appalling. At more than one railroad site they reached over 50 percent, the bodies simply buried in shallow graves along the line.²⁰

At construction projects inmates fell into concrete mixing vats and drowned, or were asphyxiated while their bosses made no attempt at rescue. It cost less to simply rent a replacement than halt production. One dies, get another, became the macabre colloquialism with validity.²¹ In 1907 an Alabama prisons board member found conditions so ghoulish that he wrote, If the state wishes to execute its prisoners, it should do so directly. A relief surgeon at the Corona, Alabama, coal mines pled vainly for Alabama governor W. W. Plain Bill Brandon to abolish this odorous, malicious, and malignant thing.²² Paperwork was not a priority. Prison records went missing, and inmates could easily get lost