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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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Chapter 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism 461
actually influenced considerably the thinking of the South far outside the
circle of their direct followers.*^
Despite all professions to the contrary, the acceptance in principle even
by the conservative white Southerners of the American Creed explains why
so many exceptions are made to the rule of excluding Negroes from voting.
It opens many possibilities for a persistent strategy on the part of the
Negro people to increase their political participation. It makes it possible
that the barrier against them might, in the future, fall altogether. In
fields other than politics, it is equally important to remember that the
white conservative Southerner harbors the American Creed. Otherwise it
would, for example, be difficult or impossible to explain why the Negroes
in the South are getting so much, and are gradually getting even more,
education. It would be just as impossible to explain why, in the local
application of New Deal measures. Southern discrimination against the
Negroes stops where it does. It would generally be inexplicable why the
South, with all its traditions of inequality and illegality, is so definitely
on the way toward social democracy and law observance, and why it is not
headed the other way. The conservative Southerner is not so certain as he
"
When discussing Southern politics with reactionary intellectuals and semi-intellectuals
in the South—among them a high officer of the Ku Klux Klan—the present author had
the following type of conversation : after my informant had expounded his social and politi-
cal theory—a somewhat modified version of the aristocratic, patriarchal, solidarity philoso-
phy discussed above—I tempted him with the following response: I accepted his ideal of
political society, but I criticized the methods used to achieve it. We are living in a modern
civilization, with vastly improved methods for political domination. In this era the old-
fashioned methods of the South—election treachery, intimidation, occasional mob-justice
—
are outmoded} they are inefficient and socially wasteful. If modern techniques—which 1
described without going into detail—were to be applied to the Southern situation, a much
greater security for the upper strata could be realized with much less cost and efiFort. It
would indeed be beneficial even to poor rural whites and to the Negroes who could rapidly
be brought to paint their shacks, screen their windows, keep up gardens, wash their babies<
and take better care of their land and their crops. Industry could perhaps afford to pay
somewhat higher wages if it were insured against outside interference with its workers^
and if the workers were brought to feel a fundamental identity of interest with Capital.
Having thus been shown the ideal fascist state, the Southern reactionary’s immediate and
emphatic response would invariably be a version of the following: “No, sir! This is a
country of liberty and equality of opportunity. Everyone in this American nation, high and
low, white and black, rich and poor, values his freedom higher than anything else. Not
for any promises of order and material well-being are wc Americans willing to give up the
fundamental tenets of our democracy.”
In these or similar terms I have, time and again, been rewarded for projecting construc-
tively the basic principles sometimes so freely pronounced by conservative ‘white Southerners.
The secret, I have been gradually convinced, is that the Southerner, too, and even the
reactionary Southerner, harbors the whole American Creed in his bosom. It certainly does
not dominate his political behavior: he is inconsistent and ambivalent. But it would be
equally wrong to try to analyze the situation in the South without taking his allegiance to
the American Creed into account.
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