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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism - 2. Southern Conservatism
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Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism 457
to . . The poor white Southerners are apparently still prepared to pay
the price of their own distress in order to keep the Negro still lower.
Liberals commonly describe this argument as a ^Ved herring,” intention-
ally used by the reactionaries to distract and deceive the ignorant public
and to discredit reforms. But this argument is not merely deceptive. It
most certainly has a kernel of truth in it. Of necessity, social reforms
involve changes which are general, and social cooperation, to be effective,
cannot remain confined exclusively to whites. All social reforms involve
an element of economic and social equalization which, by the very logic
of th\ng;s, cannot wholly set the Negroes apart. In addition to technical
factors and the constitutional barriers against making social legislation
openly discriminatory, there is also the sense of rationality and fairness in
the minds of the white Southerners themselves. “Social equality,” in a
sense, will be promoted in a society remade by social reforms j
the caste
order was more easily upheld in a conservative laissez-faire society. In
spite of much discrimination, this has been the experience of the South
during the New Deal. There is, therefore—and this should not be con-
cealed 7
i measure of logic in the political correlation between the anti-
Negro attitude and the traditional conservatism of the South generally.
As the South is now gradually accepting social reform, it will also have
to give up a considerable part of discrimination against the Negroes both
in principle and in practice.
If social reforms have been lacking in the South, certain other changes
have been going strong. The Prohibition movement, for example, has had
widespread political support. William Archer, when he toured the South
in the first decade of the twentieth century, could report that “the most
remarkable phenomenon in the recent history of the South is the Vave
of prohibition’ which has passed, and is passing, over the country. There
are 20,000,000 people in the fourteen Southern States, 17,000,000 of
whom are under prohibitory law in some form.’”- Even today, nearly a
decade after the abolition of the Eighteenth Amendment, two Southern
states—Mississippi and Oklahoma (and one Northern state—Kansas)
have laws prohibiting the sale of hard liquor. Even those states which do
not have prohibition laws have strong prohibitionist sentiments. For
example: in 1938 the Virginia legislature ordered the burning of a study
of the physiological effects of liquor after they had paid to have this study
made, simply because it observed that liquor in small quantities was not
harmful.^® These demonstrations against liquor are apparently not meant
to affect white people j
in most Southern states they are directed solely
against the Negro.® Archer remarked that: “The presence of the negro
in the South is a tower of strength to the prohibitionist.”^*
* In Mississippi, which is an absolutely dry state, the author saw more hard drinking
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