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Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism 469
there are solitary idealists living all over the huge region—teachers, some
doctors, a few lawyers, occasionally a queer businessman or planter, a num-
ber of ministers, and many educated married women of the upper and
middle class who enjoy the culture of leisure. Many women^s organiza-
tions, for instance, the American Association of University Women or the
League of Women Voters, are locally strong forces for liberalism. There
are other liberal organizations j
for example, the interracial commissions®
or the Fact Finding Committee of Georgia—a Southern state where such
a group and such work would be least expected, judging by the office-
holders and the policies pursued.
But Southern liberalism has generally not reached even this preliminary
stage of organization. The nearest approach to an organized political front
was the Southern Conference on Human Welfare, which met in 1938 in
Birmingham, Alabama, in 1940 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and in 1942
in Nashville, Tennessee. The author, who was present at the first occasion,
had a feeling that the real importance of this meeting was that here for the
first time in the history of the region, since the era of the American Revolu-
tion, the lonely Southern liberals met in great numbers—actually more
than twelve hundred—coming from all states and joined by their col-
leagues in Washington j
and that they, in this new and unique adventure,
experienced a foretaste of the freedom and power which large-scale politi-
cal organization and concerted action give.
At these conferences Southern Negroes were present and played an
important role. It is a fact of more potential than actual political impor-
tance that practically all Southern Negro intellectuals and probably a
majority of the Negro professionals and business people are, at heart,
liberals. It is natural both that their interests are concentrated upon the
Negro problem and that their attitudes toward other issues, where they are
practically without a voice, are less well considered and articulated.**
,
When attempting to map the political opinions of white Southern
liberalism, it must first be recalled that the region is exceptional in Western
nonfascist civilization since the Enlightenment in that it lacks nearly every
trace of radical thought.^ In the South all progressive thinking going
further than mild liberalism has been practically nonexistent for a century.
‘See Chapter 39, Section xi.
See Part IX.
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