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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism - 3. Is the South Fascist?
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460 An American Dilemma
had promised to have the Democratic state committee abolish the white
primary rule in return for boosting the Garner candidacy for President
among Northern Negroes.
Related to the South’s individualism and frontier heritage is its strong
democratic temper. Even the old harshly conservative slavery philosophy
of the ante-bellum South stressed the fundamental equality of all white
men." “White supremacy” and, to a lesser degree, the defensive ideology
of the alleged superiority of the pure Southern white stock to the mixed
Northerners, tended to promote a feeling of fellowship and fundamental
equality among Southern white men. In spite of economic class differences,
accentuated by the slavery and plantation system, there was also much real
democracy in the outer forms of social relations. The planters usually
preferred to keep their aristocratic pretensions to themselves and to encour-
age the high-brow writers in their philosophizing about equality. The
literature did not reach the masses anyway. The origin of most of the
planter class from the same stock of people as the poor whites was a tie,
particularly in the Deep South.^® Democracy in daily human relations had,
thus, much the same origin in the South as in other parts of America. The
Civil War and the social convulsions during the succeeding decades cer-
tainly did not strengthen the feeling of rigid class differences. Even if in
reality the South until this day remains much of a political oligarchy
where, however, the individual oligarchs are often changing—this oligarchy
always has to appeal to the common white man as an equal and as the
ultimate arbiter of political affairs.
Religion also tends to create a feeling of equality among human beings
in the South—not even excluding the Negroes. An even stronger influence
has been created by the American Creed. Southerners have been denounc-
ing the North and its leveling theories on every convenient occasion for a
hundred years, but they cannot help being gradually drawn into its orbit.
In the middle of the ’eighties, Walter Hines Page and George Washington
Cable—^Page as editor of a weekly magazine, the State Chronicle (1883),
in North Carolina and Cable with the publication of his book. The Silent
South (1885)—started Southern self-criticism, and since then the South
has had a growing school of nonscalawag liberals, all working in line with
the national democratic ideals. They have been violently denounced. Some
have abandoned work in the South and moved to the North. Even today
they are denounced by perhaps the majority of Southerners. But most of
the people who denounce them, nevertheless, take a regional pride in them.
Their status in the South is definitely higher than is that of intellectual
liberals in the North. And what is more, the Southern liberals have
‘ See Chapter 20, Section 4*
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