Azalea Death Trip: A Journey Through the Land of Southern Living

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979, pp. 7-10,32

In the beginning,” it is written in Southern Living magazine, “man created Florida “Later on, men got around to creating Puerto Vallarta, where “luxury hotels are beginning to change the red-tile and adobe skyline of this picturesque little fishing village on the west coast of Mexico.” And, somewhere along the way, arose the Land of Oz, a theme park constructed by Grover and Harry Robbins’ Carolina Caribbean Corporation atop North Carolina’s Beech Mountain: “there was this wild top-of-the-world mountain that could overwhelm you, and the Robbins didn’t want to see it forever wasted.”

It is in such sentences of contradiction and divided allegiance that Southern Living reflects the plight of the modern South. To answer the question – What is the sound of six flags waving? – SL’s publisher Emory Cunningham conceived an annual section (“The Future of the South”) in his magazine to seek free enterprise solutions to free enterprise. He wrote: “Convinced that it is absurd to believe that the South’s natural beauty can remain intact without vigilance, we urge the preservation of vulnerable natural attractions that could disappear forever.” Yet the advertisements in Southern Living always suggest something else. One of them, for Bear Paw, a Southern mountain resort, soft-sells: “How to own a piece of God’s country. Before it’s all gone.”

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Commercial Affection

Southern Living sprang full grown from the Progressive Farmer in 1966, the parent providing some 200,000 subscribers and a shower of garden tractors, riding lawn mowers and pickup trucks loaded with fertilizer, herbicides and nursery stock . An affluent market of urban and suburban White families was easily sold to the manufacturers of ovens, carpet, liquor, televisions, automobiles, etc. By 1967, Southern Living led the US magazine field in percentage of advertising revenue gains. In April of 1969 it proudly announced to its 576,000 subscribers the use of 239 tons of paper for that month’s issue. At year’s end, 1975, when Emory Cunningham became the first Southern magazine publisher to receive the publisher of the year award from the Magazine Publishers Association of New York, there were 1,200,000 subscribers and a yearly advertising revenue of eleven million dollars. Presently with its 1,600,000 subscribers, Southern Living is among the top ten monthly magazines in advertising volume.

Turning the pages on thirteen years of back issues provides some insight into the grand and continuing financial success of Southern Living. The magazine caters to the pursuit of leisure in a culture where the skills of outdoor sport and neighborly hospitality have legendary expectations. There are genuine needs here – for play and rest, for travel and the discovery of new peoples and places, for artistic expression in wide variety. Southern Living has seized upon these needs like no other publication.

Ultimately, however, what SL offers its hungry audience is a false fulfillment. In the clever hands of those modern engineers of desire, the admen, human-centered needs are promised satisfaction through saleable goods and a lifestyle of comfortable non-controversy. It is no coincidence that ol’ Alabama boy Emory Cunningham rose to the position of publisher through the ranks of advertising, first as ad

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salesman for the Progressive Farmer, then its ad manager, then to Southern Living as advertising director. “Advertising,” he has written, “is the fuel which powers our journey.”

That the fuel itself can become the chief purpose of the journey has not worried SL‘s engineers. That such a journey requires the exchange of distinctive landscapes, communities and regional cultures for the coins of entropy is evident even in the titles of Southern Living articles: “Where Tradition Meets Its Match,” “Blazing a Trail into Remotest Florida,” “Shopping for Memories,” “Tradition Is For Sale in the Ozarks.” So well-fueled is SL that it is often difficult to find the articles amidst the ads or, having found them, to distinguish between the two. “Why not,” asks the bustling ghost of Henry Grady, “turn the entire South and Southwest into one vast theme park with turnstiles in Houston, Nashville and Richmond?”

A Safari Through Afrikaner Cuisine

“Southern Living,” noted its editor Gary McCalla on the magazine’s tenth anniversary,” reflects only those positive aspects of the South within the scope of our editorial format. Instead of editorializing on what might or could be done, we find positive examples of what has been done and report them.” It is easily agreed that Southern Living is at its best amidst the prospering restaurants, electronic kitchens and prize winning flower gardens of White Southerners of positive aspects. Countless mouths drool monthly over the full page color pinups

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featuring glorious spreads of pickled peaches, slender string beans, stuffed quail, dependable cornbread and freshly hooked trout. Innumerable hands follow SL‘s instructions as to the care of dozens of varieties of camellias and roses. Millions of feet march along the hiking trails to pitch tents in the wildernesses approved by Southern Living. Squadrons of ears know from their reading that all fiddle and guitar players are alike, that the music they make is “bluegrass,” and that the tin flag of Opryland wags happily over the home of the quaint.

Applied to personal relations, this theme of positive aspects is explained by publisher Cunningham: “If a family is about to disintegrate there’s not much chance of them finding real help in a complex explanation of what the problems are. I don’t think a counselor will help. But if you get a couple to start gardening and not get into the marriage thing at all I think the chances of patching things up are a lot better.” In case of horticultural complications, such as the husband who has failed to deliver on a rose garden, the means of patching things up can be shifted to backyard barbecue skills.

Despite such good intentions, however, old fears die hard and Southern Living frequently (yet perhaps only semi-consciously) calls up attitudes older than Dixie and prospects as bogus as the Sun Belt . Racial and sexual stereotyping as well as the privileges of class are easily tied to the tug of a nostalgic heartstring. Selfishness, profit making and ecological violence can be encouraged with the promises of technological deliverance or hidden under a haze of azaleas.

Black folk are consistently ignored by Southern Living. Doubtless they lack the requisite positive aspects. Perhaps they lack the requisite incomes. Possibly they might look a little frightening to the typical subscriber if they came sliding up to poolside dripping wet and in full color in an article entitled “Serenity Among the Southern Pines.”

It took months for the first Black faces to appear in Southern Living. When they did, they belonged to Aunt Jemima on a box of corn meal mix and to a young employee at Aunt Fanny’s cabin, a restaurant where the plantation tradition lives on:

There is no printed menu at your table. A young Negro boy in a white jacket comes up wearing a slate around his neck and chanting the main courses listed thereon…

As you eat happily, several Negro boys put on a singing and dancing show of century-old songs. The waitresses sing when they are not too busy.

A South African vacation advertisement from 1967 invites readers to come to “where language and culture are mirrors of your own.” Ten years later, when a depiction of a tennis-shoed Black kid would have been out of step, an article entitled “Shine Mister” finds its humor in “shoeshine boys with ragged shirts, dirty tennis shoes and eyes that laugh at you. They’re the most loveable little con artists in Mexico.”

In the early 1970’s, within the two pages given to a monthly feature, “This Is Their South,” an occasional Black face or Spanish sounding name finds a segregated space alongside the cameos of nontraditional Southern women – those not chiefly noted for their hostessing or cooking abilities or their beauty contest victories. More recently Blacks seem to be returning to the roles of waiters or Caribbean drummers. Writing in May of 1972, publisher Cunningham noted that “the South has a unique oppor-

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tunity and responsibility to provide moral and ideological leadership for the nation.” But in the thousands of pages which Southern Living has devoted to city living, community development or architectural design, the issues of white flight, integrated neighborhoods and low income housing are conspicuously absent. “Major new choices in residential ownership” turn out to be exclusive communities planned for the affluent and built on a foundation of private profit.

Technological Fetishism

Complete the title of this 1976 Southern Living article: “Making the Most of Your_____________”

1) Marriage

2) Retirement Years

3) Neighborhood

4) Leisure Time

5) Trash Compactor

An Alabama friend told a story several years ago, when these gadgets were first reaching the popular market, about his father’s buying the family a trash masher for Christmas. He introduced the gift by announcing, “You’ve heard of that ecology? Well, this thing here does away with it.” Southern Living too, has heard of ecology. It has frequently won environmental awards from the Discover America Travel Organization, another vehicle fueled by advertising, whose membership includes such citizens of self restraint as the oil companies, travel attractions, transportation companies and accommodations firms.

Reaching out in all directions to embrace every species of mechanical contraption, the harmlessness of “A Blender Does More Than You Think” easily becomes the high technology visit to a delightful South Carolina nuclear reactor described in “An Atomic Kind of Fishing.” Although the title of a January, 1970, article, -It’s a Rocket; It’s a Robot: It’s a Barbecue,” seems to forecast the grim and toasty future awaiting a technocentric South in the post takeoff stage, this story actually turns out to be about the backyard cooking invention of a former NASA electrician. Formed like the offspring of a midnight graveyard rendezvous between a nosecone and the tin man, this device for “controlled fire” is quickly pointed at a familiar target: ” ‘I’ve written instructions three times for my wife,’ says the inventor grinning. ‘And she still doesn’t know how to operate it. She’s afraid of it.’ ”

Ultimately, journalistic visits to space colleges and features on the wives of astronauts turn a romantic. fascination for NASA and the space program into a source of metaphor for Southern Living‘s equally specious benchmarks of success. By April, 1971, editor McCalla was well launched on such a fantasy flight. “To publish a 200 page issue has been a goal of ours for some time,” he wrote. “It is an achievement, we think, somewhat akin to Al Shepard’s suborbital flight in Freedom 7. We’ve still got a long way to go to the moon.”

Azalea Death Trip

If once the Atlanta Journal and its radio station WSB could fairly boast of covering Dixie like the dew, a high tide has risen with Southern Living to cover the coffee tables and night stands, the beauty parlors and barbershops of sixteen states and the District of Columbia. By appealing to Southerners’ traditional love of food, travel, neighborly visiting, gardening, outdoor sports, home care and family life, Southern Living is able to wrap its pursuit of profit with the symbols of the good life. What it offers, however, is a mirage. Not only are historically rich folkways given an eye-catching or sentimental treatment which ultimately trivializes them, but sanction is given to a way of looking at life which eliminates its unpleasant or tragic realities, its historical burdens and its future obligations. Somewhere down the azalea trail, Homer’s lotus eaters come to mind. They too were victims of “positive aspects.”

SIDEBAR: The representations of women through the images and words of Southern Living is a subject too rich for an essay this short. Here, however are a couple of provacative items. First, a sentence worth a thousand pictures: “Charles and Mary Fraser — she was Mary Stone of the Stone Manufacturing Company in Greenville, South Carolina — an attractive brunette, and their two little girls live in a house– cypress, of course,, of a particularly fetching yet functional design on the 12th fairway of the Ocean golf course, one of three in the Sea Pines complex.”(Jan. 1970)

Now and then, this grocery list imitation of life gives way to a purer self-absorption, as in a February, 1971, interview with writer James Dickey:

(Southern Living): What were you flying then

Dickey:F=94’s, C. That’s a jet interceptor. It’s the one with the ring of rockets around the nose. And then when I came back my first boy, Chris, was born. He is married now, and I’m a grandfather. He’s a junior at the University of Virginia.

SL: And your other son is Keven?

Dickey: Yes.

SL: Let’s get your wife’s name in.

Dickey: Maxine. But then, let’s see, when I cameback out of the Service from the Korean War. I went back to Rice and I was still a freshman teacher. I was writing….

Allen Tullos is the editor of this special issue of Southern Changes. A native Alabamian, he currently lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Correction

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 2, No. 2, 1979, pp. 3

There seems to be an item which slipped by all our dutiful proofreading in the July issue of Southern Changes probably because the error had the sound of being grammatically correct — but unfortunately it left an incorrect impression — and I have promised the author, Paige Gutierrez — that we will print the correction. The error comes on page 25, midway through the first column. It should read “The Genteel Acadian is likely to be a speaker of standard French, whereas the “Proud Coonass” is more likely to speak a nonstandard Cajun dialect.”

Protest and Survive. Edited by E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981 $4.95.

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 2, 1982, p. 4

Protest and Survive is a powerful gift from European Nuclear Disarmament (END) to the growing American movement. The book originated as a reaction to “Protect and Survive.” a take-cover pamphlet prepared in 1980 by British civil defense. The U.S. version contains historian E.P. Thompson’s “A Letter to America,” and 11 other essays exploring the current arms race, nuclear war, military bureaucracy and the prospects for peacemaking.

The introduction by Daniel Ellsberg details the secret history of U.S. nuclear threats against other governments since the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The instances include Korea, Berlin, Cuba, Vietnam and Iran. “Every president,” writes Ellsberg, “from Truman to Reagan, with the possible exception of Ford, has felt compelled to consider or direct serious preparations for possible imminent U.S. initiation of tactical or strategic nuclear warfare, in the midst of an ongoing, intense, non-nuclear conflict or crisis.” Most recently, the threats have appeared as public policy in the Carter Doctrine endorsed by the present administration, which would start World War III to protect Western oil interests in the Persian Gulf.

Emma Rothschild opens her essay with the observation that “the United States may buy itself two things with its $1 trillion defense budget of 1981 to 1985. The first is an economic decline of the sort that comes about once or twice in a century. The second is a nuclear war.” She examines the destructive costs of the American arms boom.

A former U.S. War Department analyst, Henry T. Nash, writes about his job with the Air Targets Division of the Air Force in the 1950s and 60s. He tells of the secrecy and professional competition existing in the bureaucratic preparation for mass homicide. Ambitious young analysts select and justify targets in the Soviet Union appropriate for receiving our nuclear warheads. If an analyst’s proposed target is selected for the official “Bombing Encyclopedia,” he may merit promotion and entree into even deadlier, more classified information.

Having left the Air Force project and become a teacher, Nash is now visited by “haunting memories of his work.” “What,” he asks, “enabled us calmly to plan to incinerate vast numbers of unknown human beings without any sense of moral revulsion?” He describes some of the “forces within the system that work against such self-examination.”

Amid insane circumstances worthy of all despair, the present disarmament movement now stirs on an international level. Protest and Survive is one sign that there is still a chance to save ourselves from ourselves. That the chance is genuine we can believe from the history of one of the nuclear threats which Dan Ellsberg recounts. In November of 1969, Henry Kissinger conveyed the warning to the Vietnamese at Hanoi “that Nixon would escalate the war massively, including the possible use of nuclear weapons, if they did not accept his terms.” Hanoi didn’t accept the terms and Nixon didn’t carry out his nuclear threat. Why not? As Nixon himself records in his memoirs, there were already too many Americans in the streets protesting the U.S. war policy.

Allen Tullos is a native Alabamian who is now completing his doctoral dissertation in history at Yale University.

Figures of Speech–Can a Country Boy Survive?

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 1-3

You have to stay up awful late in Alabama nowadays to put nostalgia and melancholy under the table. In cahoots, Action News and the jukebox are blowing the null breath of extinction. Some of the good ol’ boys feel the hair rising on the backs of their necks. They even have a tune: “Who’s Going to Sing the Last Country Song?”

But it is the NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks who asks the musical question. Blacks, he says, have lived so long with hard times and thwarted hopes that they know the territory. What will the white folk do? Spook and go off halfcocked, he fears. Realize a common plight? Not likely. Hooks is familiar with the shape and color of banty messiahs and traditional scapegoats.

As I drive a car-full of friends across Birmingham’s Red Mountain one night this May, the signals come clear. Vulcan, the iron man, holds high a red torch to show a death on the highway. The familiar cracks about his near-nakedness are more biting: how the Vulcan forgot to cover his ass, how Birmingham is mooning the affluent, over the-mountain community of Homewood for its failed merger vote. Looking down upon miles of city lights, we hear the car radio offering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. Down home this song is always in revival but tonight I hear, in a new way, the line “In Birmingham they love the Governor . . .” For the last twenty years, Alabama has really had only one Governor.

The news in Birmingham, bad for months, got worse in May and June. Magic City unemployment hung around twelve percent even before word came that U.S. Steel (a major employer for three-quarters of a century) was closing its Fairfield Works and even before local schools turned out for the summer. As a state, Alabama s jobless rate is second only to that of Michigan. The Governor, who carried Michigan in the 1972 Presidential primary, insists that he left the Heart of Dixie a different legacy. “When I was Governor the last eight years,” he proclaims, “we were first in the Southeast in new and expanded industries.”

On the radio, some Fairfield workers are interviewed.

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Twelve thousand steelworkers punched in at Fairfield just five years ago. Now, their numbers cut to nothing, their feelings are variously strong and resigned. Almost all of them resent the secrecy and hard-heartedness of U.S. Steel. Some blame the Japanese, some the “business cycle.” The district’s Congressman, Republican Albert Lee Smith, audaciously blames the workers themselves.

“I’d be willing to take a cut in pay,” says one veteran, “if we could keep the plant open. But the big man has to do some giving back too.” The Big Mules at U.S. Steel refuse comment. They check their digital watches and have their secretaries dust decades of fly ash and tailings off of ancient carpetbags.

Such were the Steel City’s ironies this May that among all the layoffs and rumors of layoffs, the AFLCIO was holding its Southeastern labor conference. Union officials heard the growing rank and file anger, noted the increasing toll that Reagonomics was taking on industrial membership and speculated. that momentum, continuing to build from Solidarity Day, would bring some election results this fall. The Southern union leaders pledged stronger organizing campaigns among service workers. Black and white women working in hospital, office and food service jobs may help shape labor’s direction in the l980s.

Meanwhile, a quarter gets you only two plays: Merle Haggard ringing the jingo bell with his latest “Okie From Muskogee” spinoff, one called “Are the Good Times Really Over For Good?” and George Jones singing “It’s the Same Ole Me” as he fails to show for a performance at Boutwell Auditorium.

Birmingham’s Post-Herald observes that as of January 1982, more than 45,000 people, about seven percent of the Jefferson County population, take their guns to town. Thousands more keep them handy at work or at play.

Guns take the worry out of being close. “Knowing what’s going on in this town,” says one citizen, “you need a gun.”

No matter how early you wake up in Alabama nowadays, a mean taste whispers in your mouth. A whisper that sometimes rises to a scream. Lately, it has found voice in Hank Williams, Jr., providing an unauthorized campaign anthem for a re-tuned George Wallace, The Governor:

I live back in the woods, you see,
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me.
I got a shotgun, rifle, and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

It hurts that Hank Jr. has chosen this tact that country boys will be boys. For several years his considerable musical gifts and poignant Iyricism have shadowboxed his father’s awesome legacy and struggled against country music cliche. But his toughest opponents remain the sexism and the half-snarling, half-plaintive, go-it-alone stance which plagues the genre, the culture and the family tradition of which he sings. On his recent album, The Pressure Is On, Hank Jr.’s antagonisms too often invoke the emotions of reaction. Codewords are just a shot away. He sings in his powerful solo voice, while the electric guitar drives in dead earnest:

I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just “Hillbilly.’
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to he a businessman.

He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I’d send him some homemade wine.
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For forty-three dollars my friend lost his life.

I’d love to spit some Beech Nut in that dude’s eyes
And shoot him with my ol’, forty-five.
Cause a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Hank Jr. turned thirty-three in May and allowed the photographers to snap him hunkering at his daddy’s graveside in Montgomery. Yet along with the new confidence that he gives off, it is as if at the entrance to his country-rock domain in Cullman, Ala., Bocephus has thrown up a guardhouse and razor wire fence. Here, the passwords–“We say grace and we say ma’am”–give clues to the same fierce anger which, in part, propels the Wallace candidacy–“if you ain’t into that, we don’t give a damn.”*

* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Behind the swagger, and despite the worthy call to more self-sufficiency, the message is one of romantic retreat and retrenchment. And this in a state where country boys’ farm debts now total more than two billion dollars, a rise of eighty-four percent since 1977. What happens when the bank comes to repossess the four-wheel drive? The romance of outlawry is thin solipsism to pour over the hard biscuits of attrition. Perhaps country boys can survive. Can they grow up?

For George Wallace, May brought another sort of commemoration and a resurrection–that most miraculous of survival tactics. First elected Governor in 1962, Wallace has served three terms, four really, if you count

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the time his late wife Lurleen sat in for him until her death by cancer. Now, after a self-imposed four-year “retirement,” and with a new wife, Lisa, who once sang country songs with her sister (Mona and Lisa) in the 1968 Wallace For President campaign, The Governor is ready to honor the state again with his service. Ten years to the month after he had been shot and partially paralyzed, he made the announcement. As of today, his chances for election seem excellent. Much depends on whether he can maintain the appearances of strength, stamina and coherence. It’s hard for anyone to campaign against a man come back from the grave with an electorate desperate to prevail with ah’ its myths intact.

“So hell,” The Governor told a Post-Herald interviewer, “I nearly died ten times after I was shot. I’d get well and peritonitis would develop. I would never do anything that would injure my health because I have a God-given instinct to want to survive as long as I can.”

In June, as he hops about the state from barbecue fundraiser to television studio, it is not George Wallace who appears immobilized, but many of Alabama’s voters and politicos. The spectrum of opposition appears ideologically narrow, tentative and uninspired. A few black leaders, most prominently Montgomery’s E. D. Nixon (the bus boycott leader) and Tuskegee Mayor-Johnny Ford, have even made horse trades with The Governor and are willing to swallow their history lessons in exchange for the promise of small leverages and front seats on the early-rolling bandwagon.

So back to the jukebox and one more play. This time however, it’s Tammy Wynette singing, not “Stand By Your Man,” or “Take Me To Your World,” but a different story. In it, a woman begins to find herself only after her man has moved out. She is glad to be rid of his hang-ups, gives his favorite chair to charity, wears her jeans a little tighter, changes her hair style and learns how to dance. Then, when her used-to-be wants to do her the favor of moving back in, Tammy sings, “Maybe you better wait a little bit longer, before you come back and give me another chance.” It is a promising tune which Alabamians ought to consider in this season of survival.

Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929-1959. Edited by Anthony P. Dunbar, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 14-15

The past remains as unpredictable as ever. As proof, we have Tony Dunbar’s fine book, Against the Grain. From scattered, vagrant and half-forgotten sources, he has fashioned a story which is not only important in its own right, but also is suggestive of what remains uncollected and as yet, untold.

Dunbar himself acknowledges that his narrative is only “a piece of the history” of Southern radicalism and protest in the 1930’s. “No single work,” he writes, “could record all that happened in the mines and factories, all that was attempted by women’s organizations, or all that resulted from the dissatisfaction of blacks and the poor in little towns without number.” In its fashion Against the Grain now joins several recent books already on the shelf: Donald Grubbs’ Cry from the Cotton, Thomas Krueger’s exploration of The Southern Conference for Human Welfare, H.L. Mitchell’s autobiography, Ted Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers, Nell Painter’s edition of Hosea Hudson’s recollections and essays and oral histories in numerous issues of Southern Exposure. Additionally, these volumes of printed word have appeared concurrently with a rediscovery and reissuance of the 1930s music of Southern working folk. Record labels such as Folkways, Rounder, County, Flyright and Clanka [unclear] have tracked down the scratchy old seventy-eight rpm recordings and made them available, with extensive annotation, on shiny new albums. (This is a story for another occasion, however; readers interested in surveying the range of these musical materials should write Roundup Records, P.O. Box 147, E. Cambridge, MA 02141 and ask for a catalog or the current issue of The Record Roundup.)

All this energy betokens several genuine cravings. First in mind are the empowering effects which come through the rediscovery of indigenous traditions of Southern protest and activism. Each generation needs to know the persistent themes of its predecessors, the context of their temperaments, the campaigns waged, the findings and keepings. Awareness of kinship with the critical past, Dunbar knows, can help clarify insights and shore up our courage. A rock in a weary land.

Against the Grain traces the origins, emergence and transformation of the South’s “radical gospel”

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uprising. This was a movement which shook not so much the established church as the lives of many farmers and millworkers. For a time it restored grass-root meaning to the word Protestant. Ultimately, of course, it had its failures. The redress of class power and racial prejudice are no modest goals. The movement’s ommission from or slighting by standard history books testifies to Lillian Smith’s understanding that history’s winners name their age and to the selective orientation of historians interpreting backwards from these winners.

But as the swift ages roll, new possibilities appear and old alternatives revive, provided there’s someone like Tony Dunbar around to prod us with the memories. His interpretation first establishes the influence of teachers, people such as Alva Taylor of the Vanderbilt School of Religion, Reinhold Niebuhr and Harry Ward at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. These teachers themselves carry the spirit of a generation older than Dunbar’s central characters: Claude and Joyce Williams, Don and Constance West, Miles and Zilphia Horton, Ward Rogers, Alice and Howard Kester, James Dombrowski, Elizabeth Hawes, and others. Dunbar then follows these “students,” their ideas, institutions and influences primarily through the 1930s, but also, in more summary fashion, right down to now.

Yet, Dunbar is far from suggesting that the orders went out from an old line of graybeards to a young cadre of ideologues. Perhaps the most important notion in Against the Grain in is that Southern farmers and working people carry, within their own cultural resources, the seeds of populist revolt. And that organizers and teachers who can speak the language of the culture, who can, for instance, bring home a radical gospel, can help these seeds to flower. Such was clearly the case in the mid-1930s with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. Thousands of black and white Mississippi and Arkansas tenants risked their lives in several strikes. This rising, before it was broken by state and vigilante violence and by the political clout of certain Southern Democrats within the New Deal coalition, “marked the high point of agricultural unionism in the South and provided an example of the races working together which would not be repeated until the civil rights movement emerged two decades later.”

Finally, a note on the book itself as object and artifact. From the dust jacket to the photographs which bind it’s beginning and end, the University of Virginia Press has done an excellent bit of handiwork. Photographs of the participants are interspersed throughout, along with occasional copies of period handbills, posters, poems and song texts. The type is large and easily readable and the overall design speaks of that rarest of modern productions, a work of thought and care.

The Germ of Laziness: Rockefeller Philanthropy and Public Health in the New South. by John Ettling, Harvard University Press, 1981.

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 15-17

Toward the end of his study of the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease, John Ettling writes that “so large a hand has the [Rockefeller] Foundation had in shaping the features of our society that any wholesale indictment of its operational philosophy or potential consequences usually reflects the individual critic’s disenchantment with that society itself.” Whether or not Rockefeller philanthropy has indeed had such a large hand, as compared with, say, Rockefeller capitalism, Ettling seems more than a bit enchanted. His dramatic, many stranded narrative of the 1909–1914 Southern hookworm campaign reveals how a parade of lives are saved through scientific evangelism, ill gained boodle is well spent, good will accrues to the lords of Standard Oil and encouragement is given to public health professionalization. The South, long the nation’s sick and sinful section, takes its medicine, begins to throw off its wormy ways and is restored. No mere intestinal tract, Ettling’s analysis is mesmerizing. What then, can be said for the breaking of spells?

Reflecting upon the beginning of decades of international health projects which the Rockefeller Foundation has carried out in the twentieth century, a former staffer

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with the Foundation once told me, “Tropical medicine grew largely from concern with the diseases that white men found when they were making tropical countries into safe places to do business.” So does charity’s irony begin at home. For the hookworm, that prototypical Rockefeller parasite from which a global do-good was elaborated, was a creature of (at first unsuspected) tropical origin that attracted attention when it was discovered in Southern whites and thought to be their “germ of laziness.”

Having reached what Ettling aptly calls an “ecological detent” with its native African hosts, the hookworm was a stowaway on the ship of slavery. Brought to the American South, it found a barefooted welcome between the toes and, circuitously, a new home within the intestinal walls of farm folk living on the sandy Coastal Plain and on Appalachian hillsides. Heavy infections were devastating, especially among the malnourished victims of the cotton economy. The hookworm sapped the blood and took lives outright or left its hosts weakened and susceptible to death from other diseases. Sallow, puff-bellied and easily exhausted, hookworm victims knew nothing of their plight or of how they contaminated the privyless ground around their houses with the shit which carried the eggs and larvae to infect and re-infect.

Then, along came Dr. Charles W. Stiles, son and grandson of Yankee Methodist ministers, well-stooled student in German methods of helminthology, discoverer of the hookworm’s abundance in the South. Stiles’ specialized training and his obsession with this particular parasite (he called it Necator americanus, the American killer, before its African origins were discovered), allowed him to exaggerate its importance as an historical force. Between Stiles and a number of newspaper popularizers, the hookworm was made to explain everything from the loss of the Civil War, to the section’s backwardness and poor whiles’ alleged lack of energy. Stiles blamed the fatigue, paleness and small size of cotton mill workers not on their long hours, exploited circumstances and young age, but on the hookworm. He estimated, and Ettling accepts without sufficient evidence, the proposition that forty percent of the Southern population had hookworm infection in 1910 so severe as to keep the South from full incorporation within bustling, modern America.

Ettling interprets the hookworm campaign upon a theme of turn-of-the-century public health philanthropy as secularized missionary work. Parasites substitute for nineteenth century sin in an evangelical crusade carried into the bowels of the New South by John D. Rockefeller (the Father), his son–John Jr., Dr. Stiles (the Prophet) and a host of Northern and Southern preachers’ boys. Yet, although Ettling’s insight is valuable in explaining zeal and method, its over-emphasis in The Germ of Laziness deflects understanding away from a sufficient inquiry into the false gods served by the missionaries.

Central to the story is Frederick Gates, son of a New York Baptist minister and architect of the Rockefeller philanthropic bureaucracy. Like Dr. Stiles, Gates nurtured obsessions, but of a grander scale: the getting and spending of fortunes. Even while helping the elder Rockefeller systematize and deploy his charity, Gates also helped him corner the Mesabi ore region of Minnesota.

Under Gates, Rockefeller philanthropy, following from Rockefeller money making, had shifted from a baronial manner into the rationalized, deliberative mode of corporate modern. As Gates saw it, the largesse through which a Protestant God had signified Rockefeller’s spiritual election demanded as much manly stewardship and close accounting in its disbursal as in its acquisition. Philanthropy ought not prop up those whose obvious lack of will and work had caused their failure in life’s competitions. But one could give another chance to those whose weaknesses and debilities grew from causes beyond their control. “Disease,” offered Gates, “is the supreme ill of human life, and it is the main source of almost all other human ills, poverty, crime, ignorance, vice, inefficiency, hereditary taint, and many other evils.”

It was Walter Hines Page, who, while a member of Teddy Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life, had introduced Dr. Stiles to Gates. North Carolina’s Page was a New South publicist with a New York address, a cheerleader for the section’s reunion into an America which had set itself the World’s Work (the name of Page’s magazine) to do. So, in 1909, an eager alliance was struck between a parasitologist who held a hookworm determinist theory of history (and had been looking for a patron since 1902) and a philanthropy ordained by the laying-on of quite visible hands.

The high tone of the mobilization against the hookworm was set by Wickliffe Rose, chosen to be the South-wide administrator of the Sanitary Commission. Rose (Dean of George Peabody College and the University of Nashville, General Agent of the Peabody Fund, Executive Secretary of the Southern Education Board and member of the Slater Fund) had buried his origins as the son of a cotton farming fundamentalist Tennessee preacher under a meticulous persona, giving shape to one of the South’s first bureaucratic personalities. Ettling writes that Rose “stood out from his colleagues most noticeably for his deep-seated reluctance to stand out at all. Unlike many of the men with whom he worked, Rose seemed to take genuine satisfaction in anonymity.”

The gentlemanly Rose spun newspaper articles and a propaganda campaign, determined the spending of the million dollar budget, chose the physicians to direct each state’s organization and sought the alliances he felt were most necessary: with boards of education, public school teachers, women’s clubs, doctors’ associations. That public health work was needed in the South, there can be no doubt. That the South’s first major health campaign was dependent upon private capital and a remotely controlled chain of command had both immediate and ultimate consequences.

The hookworm campaign must also be seen, and this is an Ettling omission, in relation to the emerging bourgeois society of the Piedmont South in the 1890’s and 1900’s. Here, some oral history, courthouse research or a few afternoons in the local library reveal the particulars of the rise of town elites, shifting patterns of land ownership and mercantile wealth and the enmity between town and country or mill village folk. The builders of those fine Victorian houses which, even now, sit turreted and asymmetrical behind the oak-lined streets of most every city with a railroad to its name were a powerful and rising force in their country’s and region’s affairs.

These merchants, bankers, lawyers, editors, doctors

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and preachers were not only attuned to strictly local matters, but more and more they were involved with and imitative of national standards and market practices. If a mill owner sponsored community musicians, a uniformed Sousa band, not a hillbilly group, most likely won his nod. Campaigns such as those for hookworm eradication, privy budding, free white public schooling or even mandatory innoculations have to be seen not only as worthy causes of betterment, but as events through which elites influenced appetities, stirred needs, showed condescension, expressed control and re-arranged accustomed patterns of feeling. Such campaigns reflected, even as they attempted to foster and extend, the domains and contentions of social and economic powerholders. With the breaking of Populist resistance, with blacks as well as many poor white males disfranchised by recent state constitutional conventions and with Jim Crow established as the scapegoat for all seasons, New Southerners and their Northern allies could at last settle down to some serious profit taking. As they did, they elaborated only such necessary institutions of the modern state as their laissez faire attitudes begrudged or as an occasionally aroused citizenry could effectively demand. Often, the most persistent elements of this citizenry turned out to be wives or unmarried female kin of these same New South “men of affairs.”

When the Rockefeller hookworm crusaders called upon the forms of Southern ritual to shake out converts, the results are not clear to read. In several communities hookworm circuit riders organized camp meeting style gatherings with dinner on the ground, music, speechifying, an instructive sermon and the dispensing of doses of medicine. Yet it seems that much of this was show. Administrator Rose needed to record a large number of “cases treated” in order to please administrator Gates and Rockefellers. Ettling points out that Rose pitted “doctor against doctor in a kind of frenzied competition to roll up the numbers.” Dr. Stiles, sidelined by Rose for his lack of organizational diplomacy, estimated that more than half of the folk to whom the medicine was dispensed took it home and threw it away.

In the end, after four years of work, no Southern community could honestly claim that the Sanitary Commission had eliminated the hookworm from its bailiwick. Yet the Rockefellers decided that it was time to move their medicine show to a wider audience. When Gates ordered the tents struck and the stakes pulled, Rose grumbled a bit but complied. In May, 1913, the Rockefeller Foundation set out “to promote the wellbeing of mankind throughout the world.” Its first project, eased by the new British ambassador Walter Page, was to carry the hookworm campaign into the colonial territories of Great Britain.

As the Rockefeller Foundation’s Hookworm Commission departed the South, the section’s poverty remained. It, and not the hookworm, had been the real problem all along. Yet to have faced the origins of New South poverty required an introspection that the hookworm evangelists, busy with their attempts to chase the demons out of dispossessed poor whites, could not allow.

Figures of Speech–Dressed for the H Bomb

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 1-4

By any reasonable and fair-minded standard, our Southern members of Congress ought to have felt proud of the year they had as military procurers. Here was close to a billion dollars for Lockheed-Georgia’s beginning production of fifty C-5B Air Force transport airplanes, a project ultimately to cost eight billion. Here was the ensconcing of the Rapid Deployment Force at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and at the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina–a force soon to total nearly 500,000 soldiers. Here were a couple of nuclear powered aircraft carriers (at $3.4 billion each) headed for assembly at Newport News, Virginia; an attack submarine was being named after the city itself. And here and there throughout the South were the scattered small contracts and subcontracts, like that of a few million dollars to Pineville, North Carolina’s Aeronca, Incorporated, to supply titanium engine shrouds for the B-1 bomber.

Nor had the vigilance and resolve of these Southern statesmen gone uncommended. At a convention of mercenaries held late in the year at Charlotte, General William Westmoreland saluted the signs of a rebirth of American fortitude. “The odds of war are exceptionally high in the future,” said the former big gun, “but the route to peace lies in the ability to wage war.” His audience tossed their cannisters in delight.

Despite such achievements and such blessings, and a $230 billion military appropriations bill for 1983, the shrewder members of the Southern delegation felt a few shivers run through their early warning systems. Even before Christmas recess, these congressmen were seen nodding to each other. Nodding turned to huddling and then escalated into closeting.

Simply put, they had two problems: how to justify and

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secure their rightful share of the five year $1.6 trillion military build-up that President Reagan and Secretary of War Weinberger were pursuing, and how to deploy their counterforce to pin down and negate an increasingly bothersome disarmament movement.

When it comes to making military socks and raincoats and to quartering troops, Southern legislators and contractors have long done all right by each other and may well continue to do so (see “Shaping the South’s Pre-War Economy,” Southern Changes, August/September 1982). The South has its congressmen setting on ready in hardened silos of seniority on armed services and appropriations committees. In terms of total payroll for military personnel, six of the top seven states are Southern. The South supplies the War Department with textiles, tobacco, coal and food. Yet, most Southern states, compared with states in other regions of the U.S., sell little weaponry.

Under the Reagan-Weinberger rearmament campaign, an increasingly larger proportion of the total military budget will be spent for weapons. For historical reasons (the old story of Southern defeat and colonialism and their long legacies), the South lacks the highly technical, capital intensive industries which are essential to the new generation of hardware the Pentagon seeks. Economist Ray Marshall has projected, by US Census region, the increase in distribution of military dollars between now and 1986: a growth of thirty-seven percent for the Pacific states, sixteen percent for New England, fourteen percent for the East North Central, but only six percent for the East South Central and four percent for the West South Central states.

There are a few Southern congressmen, perhaps senators Pryor and Bumpers are the leading examples, whose residence in a state at the furthermost periphery of Pentagon contracting seems to have had a bit of a liberating effect. These men have grown more sceptical and more visible in their questioning of budgets. Betty Bumpers has organized a disarmament group–Peace Links (Southern Changes, November/December 1982). Most of the Southern congressional delegation, however, has been trying to find ways to put their fingers on weaponry money while they; maneuver to keep their regular military dependents happy: “We must not let our conventional forces erode,” they say.

Even by the mega-boodle standards of corporate-state war contracting, the hardware that lies within the horizon of the 1980’s is an enormity. By 1985, the Pentagon’s budget (measured in constant, 1972 dollars) will surpass that of both the Korean War and the Vietnam War at their peaks. In the eye of Creation, this is not to be spit at.

Not only does traditional pork barrel profit-taking make the weaponry of rearmament expensive, so does the increasing complexity of the products, and the extraordinary specialized resources–both human and natural–required for production.

In its military or non-military uses, technological change is directed by human values. For some time now, the arms race has been propelled and the world jeopardized by the values of white males with seemingly unlimited appetites for power and vast capacities for suspicion and mistrust. Sophisticated systems of weaponry become antiquated at a faster and faster pace. “Security” keeps sliding away.

The continued unwillingness of nuclear nations to negotiate disarmament has allowed military technicians to continue leaping the fences of invention. As we now stand, state-of-the-art war machinery is lodging itself ever deeper in the nervous system. For patrolling the hostile frontier of the microsecond, tongues and heartbeats have become intolerably slow triggers. B52’s hang on trees, clumsy plums of an outmoded husbandry. Instead, for example, we have hightech’s high refinement, Stealth, a bomber so alienated that radar can’t reach it.

Trends in the actual production of weapons have moved in tandem with the costs and the capabilities of the weapons themselves. Technological modernization (Tech Mod) by means of computer assisted design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) is putting the quietus on the forever flawed and fatigued human element. In the rare Southern locations where these young machines of promise have already elbowed their way, flesh and blood machinists have begun to feel like hand loom weavers in early nineteenth century England. “At Lockheed-Georgia,” observes the trade publication Iron Age (September 1,1981), “The skills of a thirty-year workforce are captured in a numerical control tape. It is relatively easy to train a new employee to load a tape and put material in a machine.” Military contracting dollars shape the speed and direction of capital intensive Tech Mod.

Tech Mod may be the shaper of things to come, but shell South has few manufacturers at the level of Lockheed.

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This circumstance, rather than gun-shyness, makes it a little easier to understand why several Southern congressmen seem to be moving slowly in giving their wholehearted support to portions of Reagan and Weinberger’s proposed new weapons systems. Take the MX missile for instance.

At a late November (1982) news conference in far away Wyoming, that state’s congressional delegation showed sheepish glee. “Senator Malcolm Wallop Brings Home the Big Bang,” read the headline. For a time, one hundred MX missiles, worth from $26 billion to fifty billion dollars, seemed headed West. “I think the MX is going to be great for Cheyenne,” said Mayor Bill Nation. “After all, the military has had a one hundred year relationship with the town, back to the days of the cavalry and old Fort Carlin. I think it’s great.” Blessed was the Peacekeeper.

The South, however, had little to gain from MX. The project’s prime contractors–Martin Marietta, Rockwell, Northrop, Morton Thiokol, Boeing, Aerojet–were located in places like Colorado, California, Massachusetts, Utah and Washington. Realizing their need for Southern friends in high places, these contractors gave their largest campaign contributions for the reelection of Florida Democrat and Appropriations Committee member Bill Chapell ($33,900) and Alabama Republican Bill Dickinson ($19,500), the ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee.

Despite the contractors’ and the Administration’s efforts, production of the weapon has been postponed. The Reaganites failed to strike sufficient terror or glamor into the hearts of members of Congress to give depressed Americans the Christmas gift of MX. Perhaps the contractors should have thrown a few meaty ribs towards Dixie. Was it coincidence that at the heart of the failure to get MX production underway was the opposition of two key Southern senators?

Coincidence or not, South Carolina’s Ernest Hollings and Georgia’s Sam Nunn leaped on the Administration’s marketing failure with MX, turning it into an opportunity to assume the leadership and vocabulary of the contingent of tough-minded friends of the Pentagon, the ones who do their homework and know the value of a dollar. Here, on the holy ground of American pragmatism, is where the battles for military procurement will be waged in the next few years.

By waving the spangled banner of industriousness, efficiency, accountability and productivity, Hollings and Nunn (and the like-minded from other regions such as Ohio’s John Glenn and at times, even Colorado’s Gary Hart) seem capable of rallying a consensus and shifting the weaponry debate into the reductive calculus of cost-benefit ratios and away from the fundamental questioning of increased armaments and nuclear war policy posed by the disarmament movement. With micro-chip wisdom, comparative casualty counts from this or that weapons system over a spectrum of video war scenarios can now be fleshed out on the head of a pin. At the arcade of nuclear gamesmanship, the hooked players look for a winning strategy and for high and stringent criteria for waging war. Such absurdity masquerades for realism in a world where thousands of warheads yearn for their night on the town.

“Most Americans,” says Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, “have begun to connect military spending not with strength, but with waste.” The ludicrous search for a secure MX basing mode has done much to help the public make the connection. This is where the punch card pragmatists log-on. Senator Hollings, who knows that the winds of this mood may well blow someone into the White House in 1984, recently abandoned his support of the B-1 bomber and led Senate opposition to the Dense Pack MX deployment. “Careful, pragmatic and thoughtful decision making is required,” says Hollings, “if we are to maintain a strong, credible defense posture. Our economy has no room for procurement of a Pentagon wish list.” His solution? Continue Pentagon spending at present levels plus three percent real growth per year.

Having gotten his multi-billion dollar C-5B airplane through Congress for Lockheed and the homefolks, Senator Nunn was also ready to assume the stance of scrutiny. Adapting his lines from the cliche of a television wine commercial, he helped to stymie the MX until such time as it can be properly seasoned. “I’ve never felt,” he patiently vouched, “like we should buy a missile until we know what we’re going to do with it.” Among his colleagues on the Armed Services Committee and on the Hill, the far-seeing Nunn’s opinions wield considerable throw weight. In order to “fight recession,” he is willing to “slash” defense spending by five or six billion dollars.

As an example of an imaginative proposal which Nunn says, “is simply dead in the present sober atmosphere,” he cites Georgia Congressman Larry McDonald’s attempt to ride the publicity plume thrown off by the completion and dedication of the Vietnam War Memorial on the Mall in Washington. McDonald had advanced a military jobs program to trench away at North Georgia’s Etowah Indian Mounds and produce a rubble and bone-filled crater as a monument to World War III. “It should be built now,” McDonald pleaded, “so speeches can justify it and so there will be living tourists to visit it.”

Nunn also disparaged Alabama Senator Jeremiah Denton’s “Project Interface-Off.” This would have posed an unblinking, laser killer satellite eyeball to eyeball in

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space with anything the Soviets chose to send up. Denton is gathering himself for another try.

More to Senator Nunn’s liking was Strom Thurmond’s promotion of a three billion dollar plutonium blender-reactor at South Carolina’s Savannah River Plant where three reactors already produce the weapons grade plutonium that goes into all US nuclear warheads and bombs. “I believe that this reactor will be important to our nation’s production of weapons material and an asset to the state of South Carolina,” says Thurmond, “provided that environmental concerns are properly addressed.” Happily, Thurmond’s cautionary quibble reveals no new found concern for ecology but comes as a theoretical salve to the embarrassingly unpatriotic disclosures of two Atlanta Constitution reporters that residents near the Savannah River Plant have a much higher than normal incidence of Polycythemia vera, a rare blood disease linked to radiation exposure.

Other Southern congressmen have also begun to float on the rising pragmatic tide. Senator J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana, a Democratic member of the Appropriations Committee, offers the Multiple Launch Rocket System, a mobile Army weapon that fires a dozen rockets a minute at targets eighteen miles away. He seeks as much of the four billion dollar system for his state as he can swing.

In Florida, St. Petersburg’s Republican Congressman Bill Young, noting that the bikini swimsuit was a spinoff of the atomic testing once done in the Pacific, has proposed that a five hundred square mile section of the Everglades National Wilderness be set aside as a testing range for the new generation of weapons. His eye, and the eyes of several Florida retailers, are fixed on the job-creating and commercial possibilities of the inevitable fashion aftershock. Already, designers are toying with prototypes of the “Everglaze,” a kind of permanent rain- and swimwear fused to the skin.

Even North Carolina Senators Helms and East are coming into phase with their call for authorization of Fayetteville and Fort Bragg’s annual August Heat and Death Festival as the official 1984 World’s Fair, or, in a compromising mood–as a kind of living, flaming monument of the sort Representative McDonald seeks at the Etowah Mounds.

“We like to close all our shows with a good sacred number.” So spoke the leader of minimalist rock band Po’ White Noise one recent night as it rolled through Atlanta from Japhet, Georgia, lingering in a local bar long enough to deliver the lyrics:

I’d rather die a red lizard’s death on a limb Than ascend in that hydrogen cloud. *

*”Lizard On A Limb,” in lieu of copyright, Square Root Music, 1982.

Luckily, Senator Nunn and our elected Southern leadership never heard this cheap shot of a song from this disaffected bunch of street jeremiahs. In the land of promise, a way was opening. Death was the growth industry of the 80’s and Megadeath the final index of productivity. The bacon would yet come home to roost.

Figures of Speech is an occasional feature of Southern Changes which grants the editor temporary license.

Figures of speech–High Tech Drifter

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 1-3

There is an unmistakable glint in Dirty Gary’s eye as he takes point blank aim at the man who holds the Democratic Party hostage. “Go ahead Mondale, make my day.”

“Dry up and blow away, Gary, ” snaps the bleary Fritz, his arm tightening around the neck of the Nomination as he backpedals toward San Francisco.

As the Live Eye opens, the hawk-faced Coloradan is taking questions.

“Senator, your rapid rise this primary season brings to this reporter’s mind the recent blockbuster movie ‘Sudden Impact.’ But just how long can you continue to build a presidential campaign out of Clint Eastwood scripts?”

“Just as long,” counters Dirty Gary, “as Eastwood continues to call himself an independent, Western, charismatic, Jeffersonian Democrat, not especially big on gun control.”

“But Eastwood’s not fresh,” argues a columnist. “He’s a dinosaur. Why don’t you get with the team?”

“It’s true,” says Dirty Gary, “Eastwood’s films have roots in the vigilante past, but they respond to the hidden agendas of the new idealism of self-interest. They are for youngsters of any age. They also happen to be the only scenarios which can beat the Death-Valley-warmed-over plot lines of Reagan in November. I offer a choice between the past and the future: government on horseback and by twenty-muleteam or the digital cowboy on the microwave range–the Western Sizzler.”

“Aren’t you getting a bit ahead of yourself? What about Mondale?”

“Mondale is mush. Until after New Hampshire all he did was retreat beyond understatement. He’s part of the complacent, back-scratching, bloated menagerie of Washington insiders who have the look of losers. Their butts have the shape of the chairs behind their desks.

“Eastwood,” continues Dirty Gary, “always has to move against the corrupt, bureacratic organization men–the bosses on the take–at the same time as he pinches

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off the heads of the low-life hoodlums who make life hard for young, urban professionals in parking garages and in the elevators of fitness centers.”

“How do you respond,” asks a savvy anchor, “to the often heard criticism that both you and Eastwood are steely, aloof loners with an Irish fatalistic sense of inevitability?”

“Look,” snaps Dirty Gary, “I put on my business suit like everybody else–one Lucchese boot at a time. I’m often called detached and laid back. That’s just the way I am.”

“Senator, what do you mean when you say, ‘People will know about me through what they read or what they see’?”

“I mean television spots, airport fly-ins and full page newspaper ads. As you know, our campaign has set the pace in making democracy safe for television. Iowa and the New England states were our test markets, but I’ve given up more than a year to learn how to appeal to the young and the restless–the voters who can decide the ’84 election.

“Mondale dared to be cautions for too long while we have taken the initiative in making caution look daring. Consider my defense proposals for instance. I call for an increase even beyond Reagan’s military budget and at the same time am able to appear both modern and pragmatic, and to lay claim to the high moral ground of the Nuclear Freeze.

“We’re patching up voter indifferences with a play to the young at heart. Computer graphics give us the look of the future in our video ads. We’ve benefited from my easily communicated maverick astringency and hatred of phoniness. We’ve also gained from Mondale’s own TV appearances with his crime boss’ wet look, banker’s suit and leaden eyelids. And, once the primary votes began to come in, Mondale–despite his fighting phrases–has not yet been able to wipe the chagrin off his face–even after Illinois.

“Then,” continues Dirty Gary, his words coming in an uncharacteristic rush, “you know the advertisement that the New York Times runs for itself? The one that goes, ‘Every message is at the mercy of its environment’? Well, we’ve made our media shots with that ad in mind. First, we’ve concentrated on the main entertainment shows of television–the local newscasts. You’ve seen how in a single hour at an airport I can appear live on the news shows of every station in a local market. Also, we buy commercial time as close to the newscasts as we can get. Our spots look and sound as technically flashy and as newsy as the news appears entertaining.

“Second, we choose key words, dramatic moods and poses in our ads to resemble those in commercials which are popular with the same audience that we are targeting. That way, successful products reinforce our message. Every time Chrysler touts the New Chrysler Technology, or ATT flashes up their futuristic hardware and logo while talking about A New Revolution from ATT Information Systems, we benefit. Think of what happens when Michael Jackson sings and dances for Pepsi: There’s A Whole New Generation Out There. My biggest mistake in the campaign so far is letting Mondale beat me to ‘Where’s the beef?’. It’s a real underdog’s slogan–hype that pays upon the consumer’s current distrust of hype.”

“I don’t understand,” confesses a reporter. “How can you expect to benefit from the New Chrylser when everyone has heard that you voted against the bail-out.”

“Never mind. That’s the past. My image of the new reminds you of other new images, they remind you of me and that generates the character of the emerging environment–which wouldn’t be complete without Michael Jackson and the New Chrysler Corporation and ATT and Gary Hart. Bunkmates with the future.

“We intend to make our place among a fast moving and exciting ensemble of leading-edge imagery,” says Dirty Gary through his rugged good looks. “Many citizens of the electronic village don’t want their lifestyles to get out of phase. We want to be as necessary to their poise and moods of desire as a Pepsi.”

“Senator, it seems more and more likely that the party’s nominee will not be chosen until this summer’s convention. How are you going to keep track of delegates, particularly the uncommitted?”

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“That’s simple enough,” answers Dirty Gary. “I’ll do what Eastwood–or, for that matter, what Jack or Buddy Kennedy would do–break down the delegates’ hotel room doors and see if they’re dressed like neo-liberals. If not, I’ll open fire. A final question?”

“Yes. What happens when the Great Communicator hears about this?”

“Reagan puts on his coat and tie just like I do,” Dirty Gary replies, “one shoulder holster at a time. I think it’s clear that the New is not new enough for both of us.”

Southern Hunger in the Eighties: Win this one for the Reaper

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 6-11, 13-16

“There’s no basis for this demagoguery that somehow we have punished, and are picking on, or trying to get our recovery on the backs of the needy. . . there is not one single fact or figure. “–President Reagan.

“It must be recognized that the needy are and always have been consumers, and they would have purchased cheese had it not been given to them.”–Robert F. Anderson, executive director of the National Cheese Institute.

Back in February of this weary year, after fifteen months, of field investigation, public hearings and data confirmed a fact of living in the Reagan Era. Hunger and malnutrition,

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on the decline in the United States since the early 1970s, were again on the rise. “We are shocked,” said Dr. Larry Brown, chair of the Commission, “at how widespread hunger and malnutrition are in New England. I think the thing that worries us most is the degree to which hunger is a relatively better economy and fairly extensive health care system, particularly in a state like Massachusetts.”

The Citizens’ Commission, composed of health and social service professionals, was called into being by the Harvard School of Public Health at the request of religious groups and emergency food providers in the six New England states. Food kitchens have strained (some have collapsed) in the effort of the last few years to provide for larger and larger numbers of people in need. The question was put: Why the increase in hunger?

“Perhaps the most shocking thing we have found,” the Commission members answered in their report, American Hunger Crisis, is that the return of hunger to America is the result of conscious policies of our federal government . . . Hunger returned as a result of governmental will and the weakening of the programs that once worked so well.”

For its part, the Reagan Administration has not only denied the existence of a hunger problem, it has initiated a war against the poor. “We’ve had considerable information,” said presidential counselor and attorney-general nominee Edwin Meese at the height of the recent recession, “that people go to soup kitchens because the food is free and that’s easier than paying for it.”

During its first four years, the Administration and its allies in Congress (including a critical number of Southerners) cut more than 4.6 million low-income Americans from federal food-assistance and dropped 3.2 million needy children from school lunch programs. During these same years the percentage of Americans living in poverty has grown to the highest level in twenty years and the number of poor people has increased by more than six million. About 35 million people are now officially poor ($10,178 annual income for a family of four). Another twelve million Americans live near enough to the poverty line to be eligible for food stamps. As Reagan’s second season begins, Meese, White House chief of staff James A. Baker, budget director David Stockman and a group of domestic advisors have prepared plans for another assault on food and nutrition assistance, health care services and the benefit levels of federal payment programs.

In a lapse into social Darwinism, poverty and hunger have once again become fashionable tools used by government and business to engineer conformity, resignation and despair. Instead of enforcing a commitment to all citizens’ right to a just and decent life, we see the executive power of the federal government employed to starve and strong-arm the poor.

“I think we don’t pay enough attention to the fact that when we’re talking about poor people in this country, we’re taking about children,” says Dr. C. Arden Miller, chairman of the University of North Carolina’s department of maternal and child health. “Children make up about fifty-one percent of the US poor. The public image is of the shiftless, lazy, able-bodied male who could be working if he was enterprising enough. That’s not the problem. Since the mid1970’s, an increased proportion of children live in poverty.”

In addition to children, many of the poor are elderly. Others are people in chronic bad health. May live in the rural South where there are few jobs to be had. Over thirty” six percent of female-headed households live in poverty. Among non-white, female-headed households, the rate is higher than seventy percent.

Many of the poor hold steady jobs and remain poor the “new poor,” the working poor in fast food restaurants, in janitorial, maintenance and service work, in non-union factories. The punitive nature of current federal policy toward the poor combined with the everyday workings of capitalist economics result in young black women locking their hungry children in unheated apartments while they piece together a schedule of part-time work that best suits the needs of the burger masters at the Golden Arches.

Among the poorest forty-percent of the US population, purchasing power has declined every year since 1980. At the other end of the spending and accumulation ladder, we see

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the rewards–as well as the widening gap between rich and poor. This spring’s Congressional Budget Office report shows that the Reagan budget cuts and tax-law changes which have been enacted so far have resulted in an annual loss of $390 for households with incomes of less than $10,000 a year, an annual gain of a thousand dollars for households making between $20,000 and $40,000, and an extra helping of $8,300 a year for households with annual incomes of $80,000.

Among the affluent and the pretenders to affluence (for consumer debt, like the Reagan budget, stands at record levels), the pursuit of private interest now justifies our detachment from the demands of a just society.

The current chasing after the signs and sighs of success is capitalized upon by merchandisers in roadside billboards that pitch such goods as “the most expensive beer around.” Media ads foreground particular items even as they pique desire for an ensemble of convivial accessories. “So worldly, so welcome!” “A man with a good car needs no justification.” As a critic notes about the current crop of favorite television shows, “On TV, everyone is rich.” In reality, unlike primetime, forty-three percent of the nation’s personal income goes to only one-fifth of US families; the poorest fifth receive five percept.

As the climate of Reaganism seeks to make both hay and example of the poor, our deeply irrational military spending binge provides a bounty for an intricate web of Pentagon and foreign forces, contractors, sub-contractors and research institutions. Monied strands of this web wrap themselves throughout every congressional district and municipality–perhaps making impossible the cutting of our ties of destructive dependency. Any discussion of hunger and poverty, of housing and health care, of the arts and education–in the South and the nation–must reflect upon the ransom we pay the Pentagon to hold ourselves hostage.

Let ‘Em Eat Anecdotes

Early in l984, prompted by the findings of the Citizens’ Commission on Hunger in New England, Dr. Larry Brown of Harvard’s School of Public Health helped to organize the Physician Task Force on Hunger in America. With support from the Field Foundation, the Task Force began to assess the extent of hunger in other sections of the country, including the South. Historically the nation’s most impoverished and malnourished section, the South of the 1980s finds eighteen percent of its people living in poverty. This compares with fourteen percent in the West and about thirteen percent for both Midwest and Northeast.

“Our nation has a serious problem to deal with,” Dr. Brown has said at press conferences wherever the Task Force has travelled during the past year. “We are reporting our findings along the way to the American public and to Congress. We will present a national report in February of 1985.”

In May and June a dozen members of the Task Force on Hunger began the Southern circuit of their tour with visits to Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi and North Carolina. Among the group were Rev. Kenneth Dean and Dr. Aaron Shirley, veterans of the Southern hunger surveys coordinated by Rev. Dean and Leslie Dunbar with the Southern Regional Council and the Field Foundation in 1967 and again in 1977.

In Mississippi, the Task Force on Hunger spent several days in Jackson and in the Delta–where poverty has increased from thirty percent in 1980 until it now includes over fifty percent of that area’s population. “The hunger and malnutrition I saw in Mississippi are the worst that I’ve come face to face with,” said Dr. Naomi Kistin, a veteran inner-city pediatrician from Chicago’s Cook County Hospital who travelled with the Task Force.

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About 800,000 Mississippians, a third of the state’s entire population, have incomes which make them eligible for food stamps. Only nineteen percent of the population is actually receiving federal food aid. This puts about 300,000 Mississippians at highest risk of hunger. The maximum monthly AFDC payment in the state is $120 for a family of four–the lowest amount in the nation.

Despite the well established fact that feeding programs for the elderly dramatically improve their health, and the fact that in Mississippi 118,563 elderly are officially poor, only 12,300 receive any federal food assistance.

Most elderly Southerners suffer from one or more chronic diseases which require special diets. The Task Force on Hunger heard many stories like that of Mississippian Laura Jane Allen, age seventy-six, who couldn’t afford the diet her doctor had prescribed: “They tell me what I should eat. I’m supposed to have fresh vegetables and fish and stay away from that pork, salt and cheese–but l just can’t buy the right food with the money I have.”

In Tutwiler, Mississippi, a social worker reported that of every hundred hospital in-patients she sees each month, about one-third are malnourished. A nurse in Greenwood said, “it’s a vicious cycle. Before you know it, they’re in the hospital because their blood sugar dropped too low or they had an insulin reaction from not being able to eat. We have patients eating the wrong things because those are the only things they can get and they wind up in the hospital with strokes.”

At a Task Force hearing in the Delta, four hundred people crowded a hall. “There were enough people present who wanted to testify,” says Joie Kammer of the Catholic St. Francis Center, “to have had the hearing go on indefinitely. and there were telephone calls from the elderly asking the doctors to come to their homes as they were unable to come to the hearing.”

Many of the hungry in the Delta are victims of the long-term unemployment which has accompanied the mechanization of Mississippi plantations.

Joyce Stancill, a home health nurse serving the elderly of Greenwood, told the Task Force, “Most of my clients have been maids or ‘yard-boys’ or field workers on a plantation, for white people, and a lot of them have never had social security payments. They’re not able to get social security now because the man worked them for forty or fifty years and never paid in a dime. It’s horrible to see what our old people have had to go through.”

Rising Infant Mortality

In Alabama the Physician Task Force split into two groups–one visiting Birmingham and several west Alabama counties–and the other travelling to Lowndes, Butler and Montgomery counties. They went into soup kitches, feeding programs and food pantries. They talked to officials. They collected state and local studies and reports. “Most importantly,” says Dr. Brown, “we went into dozens and dozens and dozens of homes.”

“Some of the counties we saw in Mississippi and South Alabama are on a par with the Third World. I have never seen so many empty refrigerators.”

At the kitchen of the Trinity Episcopal Church in the depressed steel city of Bessemer, Alabama, Rev. Dean observed that “entire families are showing up at these soup lines, something unheard of since the Depression.” Vestry members of Trinity Episcopal voted to begin the soup kitchen in 1982 at the urging of their minister, Rev. Peter Horn, who had watched a trickle of requests for food turn into a torrent within a few months.

The Physician Task Force on Hunger scorns the policies Of Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina and a dozen other states that refuse aid for families with dependent children to families in which both “able-bodied” parents–although unable to find a job–continue to live in the same household. This state policy promotes the break-up of homes: the father often moves out so that his family won’t be dropped from AFDC.

In Alabama, a maximum AFCD payment of $148 a month for a family of four requires living on the outskirts of possibility. With food stamps included, the maximum allotment for a mother and three children is $400 a month or $4,800 in annual income. The basic welfare grants are not adequate for “even the most frugal purchase of necessities.”

In Montgomery, Alabama Welfare Commissioner Leon Frazier told the group that cutbacks in federally supported daycare had left “literally thousands of low-income children and hundreds of handicapped adults in the state without the assurance of even one nourishing meal a day.”

In 1982, Alabama’s infant mortality rate increased for the first time in many years for both blacks and whites from 12.9% per thousand live births to 13.8%. Among black infants the rate increased sharply from eighteen to 20.1

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deaths per one thousand live births. Yet, as the Task Force on Hunger’s preliminary field investigation summary (October, 1984) notes, even these figures mask higher rates for areas that are most affected by poverty and hunger. Hale County, in western Alabama, has an infant mortality rate of thirty-one, almost three times the national rate and as high as many Third World countries. More than ten percent of babies born in Hale County have low birth weights–a major factor contributing to infants’ “failure to thrive,”–leaving them susceptible to many other health problems.

“We are all quite shaken at what we have seen,” Dr. Brown said at the end of the Task Force’s first foray into the South. “We did not see kwashiokor and marasmus*–which are signs of extreme malnutrition that you see in Third World countries, but we did see widespread hunger–and it was not hard to find. We saw malnutrition that was altogether too extensive. Children are failing to grow properly, some are dying.

“There were three tornadoes while we were in Alabama. The news media and the attention of the public was on those tornadoes, which killed seven people. Every week in Alabama twice that number of children die of infant mortality within the first year of life, due to nutrition related illnesses.

“Just this morning I held on my lap a six-year-old child who is the size of a three-year-old. She is not getting enough to eat. We walked across the street from this child’s daycare center and talked to a mother out in the yard. There were two more children there who were small, thin and anemic.

“In a Salvation Army soup kitchen in Montgomery, the director told us that the economy, if it is improving, is not improving the lives of the people that he sees. They were serving more people per month than they had served in the last twenty-seven months.

Take A Twinkie and Wait

Of the dozen or so recent studies of hunger in the United States, all–except for the report of President Reagan’s Task Force on Food Assistance (January, 1984)–show clearly that hunger exists in every state, in every city and town.

“Members of the Reagan Administration have referred hunger evidence as ‘anecdotal’ material,” says Dr. Brown. “I can tell you that our research has not been anecdotal. And I can tell you that looking in a refrigerator and finding three eggs and a piece of processed cheese and water–as I have seen–isn’t an anecdote for that family, whose child–a five-year-old boy, has had no milk for three weeks. He eats Cheerios and water for breakfast. His mother had tried to get emergency food stamps but was turned down.

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“It’s not hard to find hungry people in the United States. It’s not hard at all. First, you go to poor neighborhoods, in the cities, in the towns, in the country. You talk with the people who live there. Another way you can find out about hunger very quickly is to ask the teachers in daycare centers and the Head Start programs what kind of appetites the children have on Monday morning. What we’ve seen across the country leaves no doubt that hunger is a problem for millions of people in America.

“When you go into the neighborhoods that we went in and you walk down the street, you start talking with people, you go in their homes, you say, “Can we please see where you prepare your food?” And they take you in the kitchen and open an empty or nearly empty refrigerator…It might be the refrigerator of a women with two children, she’s pregnant. And she has three sticks of butter in there.

“Ironically, people mislead you if you ask them if they are hungry. But not like Mr. Meese said, as though people were out trying to get something for nothing. You ask them, ‘How are you doing for food? How are the kids doing?’

“Over and over again, with only a few exceptions, the response is ‘Oh, we’re getting by. We’re doing all right.’

“The lady I just told you about, I asked her that question and she said, ‘We’re making it. We’re doing okay.’ When I asked her to take us into her kitchen, we found the empty refrigerator.

“People answer that way because of pride. I have children and the last thing I would ever want to do would be to acknowledge to somebody that I couldn’t feed them.

“These instances, multiplied over and over again paint a picture in America which cannot be considered or dismissed as anecdotal and which doesn’t deserve to exist in our nation.

“What we see is a picture of deprivation, which, while it may not be as serious in degree as it was in the late 1960s, seems to be more pervasive. Poverty and the hunger which it generates are no longer limited to any particular subpopulation groups. Hunger cuts across the lines of race now, and to some extent it cuts across class lines. Hunger is reaching the “new poor”–people who have never been hungry before, people who have not been in poverty before. Those who have been poor for a long time are worse off now than they were. But the new poor have appeared as a result of Reagan policies and the economy.”

The face of Southern hunger looks different than it did twenty years ago. “We’re not seeing the kind of starvation that appears as thin people and stunted growth,” observes Task Force member Dr. Joyce Lashof, Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. “In their ragged form, the food assistance programs that America constructed in the 1960s and ’70s are keeping us from going back to where we were. The soup kitchens and the food stamps and similar programs are helping.

“What we often see,” continues Dr. Lashof, “are people who are actually overweight because they’re eating the wrong foods. They’re not getting the nutrients they need. They’re malnourished in terms of adequate proteins and vitamins.”

“President Reagan’s Task Force on Food Assistance,” Dr. Brown points out, “did not engage in an effort which permitted them to understand the dimensions of the hunger problem in the United States. The governor’s office in Mississippi came and testified before our Task Force on Hunger when we went toJackson. Mississippi state officials and private charities gave Reagan’s Task Force a document of testimony five inches thick. None of that was reflected in the President’s Task Force Report.”

Michael Raff, director of the state of Mississippi’s Office of Human Development, agrees that testimony of Mississippians to the President’s Task Force was “totally ignored.”

“I was asked by the executive director of the President’s Task Force,” Dr. Brown continues, “if we would cooperate with them–could they send people to go to our hearing up in New England? We agreed and they did. They also asked for, and we provided, the names of experts around the country in nutrition and food policy. Not one of those experts was ever contacted by the President’s Task Force.”

“The President’s Task Force didn’t even want to come to Chicago,” recalls Cook County (IL) pediatrician D.T. Kistin. “They chose to have their hearings in Rockford where it’s very hard for the large majority of people in our area who are hungry or who are active around these issues to even get to. They made a point of limiting the number of people that they would hear to very small numbers.”

“The Reagan Task Force” adds Dr. Brown, “ignored the evidence from its own federal agencies–including the Department of Agriculture–that show hunger to be a serious problem. They also failed to collect data and failed to go into the homes of the hungry.”

As its major recommendation, the report of the President’s Task Force proposed that states be allowed to drop out of the food stamp and other federal food aid programs and instead receive block grants to distribute as they saw fit. The proposed block grants, rejected by Congress, disguised one of the Administration’s steps to dismantle what remains of a national committment against hunger. Block grants would put an end to uniform eligibility and benefit standards and move the struggle for food assistance out of Washington–where a weakened, but still fiesty, welfare lobby is centered.

In the South particularly, the poor have few friends in governors’ mansions and state legislatures.

Senator No

The very Southern politicians who could best serve their

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constituents in need are often the most embittered and uncharitable. In his tenure as chairman of the US Senate Committee on Agriculture, North Carolina’s Jesse Helms has proved a staunch foe of poor and hungry people through his opposition to the WIC program (which provides prescribed foods to pregnant and nursing women and children under age five) and to the food stamp program. The Charlotte Observer editorialized that for all his talk of protecting the lives of the unborn, Helms has done little to support the lives of infants after birth.

The attention of Senator Helms fell upon Hunger Task Force director Brown shortly after the doctor had testified before the Senate Agriculture Committee in April of 1983. Brown told of malnutrition studies he had conducted at Boston City Hospital which found underweight babies and a “failure to thrive” at three times the expected rate.

Although Helms was absent during Dr. Brown’s testimony, he soon sent him a seven-page questionnaire.

“The questions basically were designed to discredit the methodology of the study,” Brown recalls. “He challenged me on the school breakfast and school lunch guidelines. He wanted to know how they were set. I said they were set by the federal government.”

Helms’ staff insisted that malnutrition was normal among the urban poor in Boston. Brown suggested that there should be nothing normal about infants failing to grow.

States of Fear

Throughout this summer and on into the fall, the Physician Task Force on Hunger continued to visit Southern states and to collect materials and testimony. Task Force members toured the lengths of North Carolina and Tennessee before going on to Texas and the Southwest. In October, the group released its uniformly grim preliminary field reports.

Poverty in Tennessee has risen from 16.5~o of the state’s population in 1980 to over twenty percent in 1984. Four-fifths of Tennessee’s poor consist of women, children and the elderly.

Like Alabama and Mississippi, Tennessee provides no AFDC for two-parent families who are unemployed. For those who do receive AFDC, Tennessee has the lowest standard of need in the US–a family of four must earn less than three-hundred dollars a month to be eligible (the federal poverty level is $825). The state has no school breakfast program. It has no relief program for jobless adults who are not receiving unemployment compensation. Tennessee’s state and local sales tax can range as high as 81/2%.

Southern state legislatures, searching for revenues for an array of needs (most recently, public education) and yet lacking the independence to tax business and the wealthy, have turned increasingly to sales taxes. The results fall hardest on these states’ most politically powerless people. In Mississippi and Alabama (where the sales tax rates are six and 6.7 percent respectively), as in Tennessee, sales tax applies to food and to food stamps and represents a regressive, direct tax on poor people.

With the unemployment rate in east Tennessee and western North Carolina running upwards of forty percent, the Task Force heard United Methodist Minister Jim Sessions of Knoxville report that in the past three years, Appalachia has lost one-and-a-half jobs for every one gained. “There is no recovery here,” observes Sessions.

“With purchasing power down and poverty up,” the Task Force writes in its October field investigation summary of the Southern states, “it seems unlikely that improvements in the economy which help the better-off will have any impact on those who are not. Those who are “recovering” were never hungry, and those who are hungry are not recovering.”

In North Carolina, Dr. Brown and local representatives of the Task Force tied hunger to the larger context of health and the Reagan Administration’s general persecution of the poor. Rev. Mac Legerton of the Robeson County Clergy and Laity Concerned noted that county food stamp recipients had little money left after paying monthly bills to pay for medical needs. In mountainous Buncombe County, Task Force member Dr. Agnes Lattimer saw broader problems: “There appears to be considerable unmet need here . . . there is greater incidence of iron deficiency and limited means of prenatal care.”

The percentage of North Carolina’s total population living in poverty rose by forty-two percent between 1981 and 1983, yet, enrollment in the state’s food stamp program during the same period fell by more than a third. In addition, according to the University of North Carolina’s Nutrition Institute, while some 94,000 women, infants and children are currently enrolled in the WIC supplemental food program, at least 145,000 others have household incomes

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which make them eligible. In North Carolina there are presently 415,000 poor children.

While acknowledging that “the desire for self-sufficiency Often makes people reluctant to seek help,” Dr. Brown and the Task Force are quick to point to deliberate patterns of obfuscation and intimidation being pursued by Reagan Administration welfare policy makers under the guise of “greater efficiency” and the pursuit of “welfare cheaters.” New monthly reporting requirements mean that many families must have their eligibility redetermined every month. This places extraordinary burdens on the needy, creates more processing errors and leads to eligible people being denied assistance. In one county, a sixty-four year-old paralyzed man was dropped from food stamps because he failed to come into the office for his recertification interview.

“The focus of the federal government is now based on the premise that hungry people are probably cheats,” says Dr. Brown.

In some locations, at the behest of federal officials, agents reportedly are sent out to sell food stamps on the street. The buyers are caught and the event is hailed as proof of widespread program fraud–even though no food stamp recipient was involved as buyer or seller.

Charges linking the food stamp program with fraud and with criminal prosecutions generate fear and embarrassment. Virginia Eldreth, food stamp administrator in Buncombe County (NC) notes this effect: “An elderly woman who had been hungry for weeks finally came in to apply for stamps. She ,was trembling as she filled out the forms. I asked her if she was all right. As it turned out, she was fearful she might make an error and be thrown in jail for fraud.”

Task Force members found some North Carolina food stamp offices decorated with posters announcing prosecution of persons incorrectly filling out their long and complicated applications.

As a food stamp administrator in Montgomery County, Alabama told the Task Force this summer, “The name of the game at the federal level is dollars and not people. We are under pressure about some elusive thieves that we are not finding. We are wasting money on administration that should be going to people.”

“Food stamp administrators,” Dr. Brown adds, “have told us they have had to divert workers from providing services and put them to work setting up thirteen and fourteen-member fraud units that pore over tremendous amounts of paper to see if people are getting overpaid three or four dollars a month. To do this paperwork, they have closed the food stamp outreach units which once tried to let hungry people know about the program. A lot of people who are in need are being missed.”

“There is a state of fear,” says Rev. Kenneth Dean, a Task Force member who once headed the Mississippi council On Human Relations, “among the people running federal programs because audit reviews have been used principally to harass the programs.”

“Over and over again,” adds Dr. Naomi Kistin, “we heard from people working on the food stamp program who said they had to spend all this money being careful not to have too high of an error rate. Finally we asked, “Is there any attention paid to the error rate in the other direction? How many people should be on those programs who aren’t? How big is your waiting list? How many people could benefit from this program if you could expand your services? Every place we went the waiting list held from a third to a hundred percent of the population being served.”

People who are persistent and lucky enough to get through the application forms, verifying documents, and bureaucratic intimidation are rewarded with an average food stamp benefit of forty-seven cents per meal. In addition,

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they soon learn that the food stamps they receive won’t carry them through the month. “The problem is not that people don’t know how to spend their stamps,” a Texas food stamp administrator told the Task Force, “it’s just that no one can live on that amount.” Most recipients run out of food stamps a week or more before the month ends.

“Nor,” says Dr. Brown, “is there any way that the millions of tons of food taken from hungry people through federal budget cutbacks over the last four years can be made up by business, the for-profit sector and the non-profit sector. Businesses are not set up to feed people. And the churches and social service agencies can’t do enough. We need to immediately expand the food stamp program and provide it with adequate resources to reach people who are needy.”

“Why should the richest country in the world, asks Helen Wright, director of Urban Ministries in Raleigh–one of many North Carolina church groups trying to feed the hungry–“put the eighteen percent of the people in this state who live below the poverty line in the position of begging for food?”

By the time that the Physician Task Force on Hunger completed its Texas visit this fall, the group had become convinced of the pervasiveness of need everywhere they had travelled. In Houston, emergency food demand in the city’s soup kitchens has increased this year by one-thousand percent over 1980. To the southesast of Houston, in Pasadena, the Task Force considered the “irony of a middle-class neighborhood with neatly kept lawns, where people don’t have enough to eat. We saw a lot of once-stable families now in shaky circumstances.”

In Texas, New Mexico and the Southwest–as throughout the South–the hunger problem is substantial, especially jeopardizing the health of the most vulnerable population groups among the poor: the elderly, pregnant women, infants and young children.

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Greed and the War Against the Poor

At a time when many Americans have settled into a steady diet of flag-eating, sword swallowing and credit card consumption, the notion that we all must share responsibility for the extent of hunger and poverty in our region, country and world does not go down easy. Unwilling to acknowledge the reality of a political and economic system which produces and is sustained by poverty and the fear of poverty, the fortunate blame the poor for their own plight. The apologists for greed–one thinks of the likes of William F. Buckley, George Will, Clarence Pendleton–encourage our blindness to social justice.

Toward the last week of each month, when the food stamps run out and the lines at the soup kitchesn grow longer, we begin to see the shape of America’s current hunger crisis. The immediate need–the one being addressed by the Physician Task Force on Hunger–is genuinely modest: to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in the US. Task Force members believe this need could be satisfied within six months, and for the total cost of one naval attack carrier. Given, however, the prevailing American spirit, the Physician Task Force’s aim appears unattainable for years to come. Instead, we will see the Reaganites attempt further cuts in assistance for the poor.

Outside the necessary focus of the Task Force on Hunger stand the implications of the draft of the recent Catholic bishops’ letter on the US economy judging the inequality of wealth within America and in the world as “morally unacceptable.” “The fulfillment of the basic needs of the poor,” write the bishops, “is of the highest priority. Personal decisions, social policies and power relationships must all be evaluated by their effects on those who lack the minimum necessities of nutrition, housing, education and health care.” The bishops argue for redress within a reformed capitalist structure.

That the bishops’ advocacies–which would essentially shore-up humanitarian features of the modern corporate welfare state–have provoked outraged cries of “meddlers” and “liberal lobbyists” suggests not only what may be in store for the Hunger Task Force, but just how far our present slide into laissez faire social Darwinism has carried us. Yet, there may be no better time than now, with liberalism in disarray, to reckon and sound the fundamental injustices of the white, men’s club that holds capitalism as its sacred faith. There may be no better time than now to put forward alternative futures to the corporate world vision. Discussions of a caring society, of economic democracy, of our bondage to militarism, of persisting racism, of the reasons that women-headed households make up the largest poverty group–all these discussions should simmer with the soup kitchens this winter, and in the coming months.

Guide to Published Sources

Kenneth A. Briggs. “Catholic Bishops Ask Vast Changes in Economy of U.S. New York Times, November 12,1984. Also in same issue, “Excerpts From Draft of Bishops’ Letter on the U.S. Economy.”

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. End Results: The Impact of Federal Policies Since 1980 on Low Income Americans. Washington. September, 1984. The Comined Effects of Major Changes in Federal Taxes and Spending Programs Since 1981. Washington. October 1984.

Citizens’ Commission on Hunger in New England. American Hunger Crisis. Boston. 1984.

Congressional Budget Office. The Combined Effects of Major Changes in federal Taxes and Spending Programs Since 1981. Washington. April, 1984.

Steve Curwood. “Through the Safety Net. Boston Globe, April 15, 1984.

Barbara Mahany. “Hunger in America” series. Chicago Tribune, Summer/Fall 1984.

Joan Oleck. “Doctors find evidence of malnutrition among some children in Eastern N.C.” Raleigh News and Observer, June 8, 1984.

John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill. The Reagan Record: An Assessment of America’s Changing Domestic Priorities. Washinton: The Urban Institute. August, 1984.

Physician Task Force on Hunger in America. Preliminary Field Investigation Summaries: “Hunger in Tennessee and North Carolina”; “Hunger in Mississippi and Alabama”; “Hunger in New Mexico and Texas”; “Hunger in Illinois and Missouri.” Boston. October, 1984.

Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward. The New Class War. New York: Pantheon. 1982.

U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census. Money Income and Poverty Status of Families and Persons in the United States: 1983. Washington. August, 1984.

Crackdown in the Black Belt

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 7, No. 1, 1985, pp. 1-5

In an apparent attempt to intimidate black voters in the rural South and push back electoral gains made since the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, federal prosecutors in Mobile, Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama are currently seeking and obtaining federal grand jury indictments–on charges of voting fraud–against leading civil rights activists in the Black Belt.

The first to be indicted are Albert Turner (a former chief aide to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.), his wife Evelyn, and co-worker Spencer Hogue, Jr., all from the town of Marion in Perry County. Essentially, the Turners and Hogue are charged with changing the absentee ballots of a number of black voters in the Democratic primary election of September 4,1984. They face a twenty-nine count indictment handed down on January 25,1985 by a federal grand jury in Mobile. Punishment upon conviction carries a maximum of 115 years in prison and $40,000 in fines. The trial for the Turners and Hogue will be held outside the Black Belt, in Mobile, and is scheduled to begin June 17.

Additional indictments of perhaps a dozen or more grassroots black leaders are expected soon in Greene Sumter, Lowndes and Wilcox counties. The list of likely defendants includes sheriff John Hulett of Lowndes, school board chairman Wendell Paris and county commission employee Adeline Webster of Sumter County, Eutaw city council member Spiver W. Gordon and retired schooteacher Rosie Carpenter in Greene County, and Rev. Thomas Threadgill and county commissioner Bobby Joe Johnson of Wilcox County.

Since the September 1984 primary, hundreds of persons who voted absentee have been interviewed by the FBI in Perry, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes and Wilcox counties. Voters were shown their ballots and asked if they voted for particular candidates. In October, the FBI raided the office of Booker T. Cooke, Jr., coordinator of election activities in Greene County, seizing all his office’s voting materials. Cooke is also on the list of expected indictees.

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On one occasion in the past several weeks FBI agents loaded more than two dozen subpoenaed black witnesses (many of whom are elderly citizens who remember all too well the era of segregation) onto buses, then carried them–with the automobile escort of Alabama State Troopers–to testify before the federal grand jury convened in Mobile’ In both Mobile and Birmingham, witnesses were photographed, fingerprinted and required to give handwriting samples.

Using provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act which allow for federal intervention in instances of alleged state and local election law violations, the offices of US Attorney for the Southern, Middle and Northern Districts of Alabama are preparing to prosecute many of the black community leaders who helped assure the Act’s original passage in Congress and its extension in 1982. “The intent of the Voting Rights Act has been turned on its head,” says Steve Suitts, executive director of the Southern Regional Council.

Civil rights and voting rights workers throughout the South see the impetus for the federal investigations and indictments as coming from old nemeses among the white power structure in the Black Belt who have glimpsed encouragement in the Reagan Administration’s Department of Justice. Community organizers in the five southwest Alabama counties where the investigations are going on also see the hand of Alabama’s Republican US Senator Jeremiah Denton.

“This whole FBI investigation of absentee voting and the: scheduled trials,” defendant Albert Turner argues, “were set up to stop the political progress of black people in the Alabama Black Belt. The power structure wants to turn back the hands of time in Perry County and throughout west Alabama. I would encourage black people not to let my indictment stop them or discourage them. We need to vote in even larger numbers because they are trying to take our right to vote away again.”

In moving first against Albert Turner, the Federal agents and attorneys have targeted one of the Black Belt’s toughest and most saavy black political leaders. An experienced and dedicated community organizer for nearly thirty years, Turner has worked in Perry and surrounding counties to help black Alabamians gain their rights as citizens. In the early 1960s, Albert and Evelyn Turner initiated the lawsuit which first brought federal registrars into Perry County to assist blacks in getting their names on the voting roles in significant numbers.

In 1965, as the Alabama Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Albert Turner assisted Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the major campaigns of the civil rights movement. “I was with Dr. King everywhere he went in the 1960s,” he recalls. “And I helped to lead the mule train which brought him to his final resting place.”

Turner remained as state SCLC director until 1972 when he headed a Perry County program to assist black students in coping with school integration. A small farmer and an insurance agent, he has worked with the Federation of Southern Cooperatives and has been the general manager of the Southwest Alabama Farmers Cooperatives Association (SWAFCA).

Through their community-based organization, the Perry County Civic League, the Turners and Spencer Hogue, Jr. have pursued the cause of fair legislative and municipal representation for black citizens in their home county and in the town of Marion. Over the course of many local elections, they have mobilized voters to overcome generations of white minority rule. With its growing success in assisting black candidates to win local and state offices, the Perry County Civic League–and other groups like it throughout the Black Belt–have put the old-guard white elite on the defensive.

Speaking to a demonstration of some 150 supporters on the steps of the federal courthouse in Mobile on January 31, the day that the Turners and Hogue pleaded innocent, Wendell Paris, chairman of the Sumter County School Board said, “The Alabama Black Belt has made more progress in the area of voter registration, voter education and electing black officials than most areas of the nation. This is why the efforts are being made to stop us. Local powers in Perry, Greene, Sumter and Lowndes counties have now gotten the support of US Senator Jeremiah Denton and the Reagan Justice Department in the fight to undermine the progress we have made in the twenty years since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.”

At present, the trail leading to Senator Denton remains circumstantial. His Washington office denies the Senator has had any involvement with the investigations, and demurs on further comment at the present time. Denton, a former Vietnam War POW, and Alabama’s only Republican US Senator in the twentieth century, won election in 1980 with solid white support and Ronald Reagan’s coattails. Denton’s extremely narrow margin of victory state-wide was 36,000 votes out of some 1 1/4 million cast. In the Black Belt, Denton lost handily to his Democratic opponent. As a

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sampler of black voter sentiment in the 1980 election, the nearly all-black voting beat of Boykin, in Wilcox County, supported Denton’s Democratic opponent by a margin of 233 to zero.

Since entering the Senate, Denton’s voting record and public pronouncements demonstrate that black Alabamians know who their friends aren’t. With his support for deep cuts in domestic spending and for large increases in military appropriations, the Senator has proven himself to be at odds with the aspirations of his home state’s poorest citizens–the residents of the Black Belt.

As he eyes his re-election prospects for 1986, Denton sees another strong Democratic challenge as inevitable. This time, however, there will be no Reagan windfall from a presidential campaign. Clearly, Denton stands to benefit almost as much as the local white politicos do from the intimidation of Alabama’s black voters that may result from the persecution-and prosecution-of black community organizers. Certainly too, the US Attorneys involved in the Black Belt investigations were appointed by the President upon the advice of the Republican US Senator from Alabama.

“We believe that with the re-election of Reagan, old line Black Belt politicians can go directly to Reagan’s Justice Department via Senator Denton,” says Wendell Paris. “The number of incidents and their timing lead us to believe that this effort at intimidation is being geared up from Washington itself.” How else, Paris wonders, can one explain the current circumstance in which three separate federal district attorneys are simultaneously investigating voter fraud in five Black Belt counties, all of which are predominantly black and all of which have substantial numbers of black elected officials?

Alabama State Senator Hank Sanders, whose Selma law firm–along with Oakland, California civil rights attorney Howard Moore–will represent the Perry County defendants, also points to the larger-than-local importance of the current pattern of federal investigations and indictments. “There are national implications in this and other investigations of black voting across the South and the nation,” says Sanders. “For the fifteen years, from 1965 until 1980, the federal government effectively enforced the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which protected the poor and minorities in this county. Now it is obvious that the government is abusing the provisions of the Act and is attacking us with sledgehammer blows, to try to kill the few hard-earned gains we have made.”

That attorney Hank Sanders now sits in the Alabama Senate comes as a result of years of grassroots efforts pursued by black community organizers such as the Turners and Hogue. A November, 1983 special election which enabled Sanders to take his place in the state legislature followed from a court-ordered redistricting plan that redressed the discriminatory reapportionment schemes which had helped white elites in the Black Belt maintain their governmental power. The federal court’s re-drawing of several Alabama senate and house districts allowed Sanders to run and win election from a new, black majority district. The boundaries of Sanders’ Alabama Senate District 23 includes three majority black state house seats, each of which is now filled by black state representatives.

Apparently, the white effort to involve the federal government’s investigative powers and the resulting focus upon absentee voting began in the aftermath of Sanders’ successful 1983 election campaign.

Absentee balloting emerged as a matter of serious concern to Black Belt white elites in the late 1960s, after the possibility of broad black registration began to become a reality. For at least a decade, white absentee landowners and former residents who have ties of kin and friends “down home,” but who now live anywhere from Birmingham to

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Chicago to New York have continued to vote in Black Belt contests at the request of local white officeholders and candidates. On election nights throughout the early 1970s, white officials found electoral deliverance inside dependable absentee voting boxes filled with lopsided margins. Federal and state authorties took little notice, and obtained no indictments, against any whites on charges of absentee voter fraud despite a series of complaints and lawsuits offered by resident blacks.

Black community organizers sought to counter white abuse of absentee balloting not only by registering complaints, but by registering a greater number of black absentee voters. They have worked to make the election process easier and more accessible for elderly blacks, for those attending college away from home, and for the many county residents who must commute to jobs across county lines.

Black Belt counties are the state’s poorest. To find jobs, many workers must travel out of their home county every day. Census data for 1980 shows that thirty-one percent of the working population in Perry County (home of the Turners and Hogue) work outside the county. In nearby Lowndes County, the number reaches almost fifty percent. To vote, these commuting workers must miss work or obtain absentee ballots.

In addition to being impoverished, the Black Belt contains a substantial elderly black population–fifteen percent of Perry County residents are sixty-five years of age or older Like those Perry Countians who work outside their county of residence, the elderly often have difficulty in registering to vote and in getting to the polls on election day.

Over the past twenty years, blacks in the ten southwest Alabama counties where the federal investigations are now underway have gradually won local elective offices. Prior to 1965, whites controlled all ten county commissions, eleven boards of education and thirty-four town governments. Since the Voting Rights Act, blacks have emerged to fill the majority of the seats on five county commissions and five school boards. Blacks now direct the municipal governments of nine towns, while whites still remain in control of five county governments and thirty-three of forty-two towns, including every county seat.

One major obstacle to further black electoral success can be found in the local boards of voter registrars, whose members are appointed by the governor of the state, George Wallace. Throughout the counties of the Black belt, the offices of voter registrars and their deputies remain in the hands of whites who are often hostile to black attempts to register. Typically, registrars’ offices here are open ten days out of each month. During these days, registration hours

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may extend only from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., minus an hour for lunch. Unlike the practices now found in such cities as Birmingham or Montgomery in which, for instance, League of Women Voters’ volunteers register prospective voters at shopping malls, the pathway to registration and voting remains filled with obstructions in much of southwest Alabama.

In 1981, the white legislators in the Black Belt convinced the Alabama legislature to enact a “reidentification” law. Over the strongest objections of black citizens, the Justice Department allowed existing voting roles to be wiped clean in several counties. Persons who wished to vote were required to appear, identify themselves and re-register. The predictable effect was the loss of a significant number of black voters who had registered during the voting drives of recent years.

When they began to lose control of the election machinery in the Black Belt, the white powers-that-be also turned for help to a justice system in which there are no black district attorneys or circuit judges. The current investigations and indictments remind many Alabamians of the 1981 conviction of Maggie Bozeman and Julia Wilder by an all-white jury in Pickens County on state charges of absentee voter fraud.

Although all but one of the black witnesses against Bozeman and Wilder recanted or changed their testimony, later indicating that they asked for the women’s assistance in voting, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld their convictions. After serving time in Tutwiler State Prison, Bozeman and Wilder’s conviction was overturned in federal court. Their case, however, seems to have left the lingering effect of reduced black voter participation in Pickens County.

Black absentee voting must be seen in light of present conditions, customary practices, and the historical context of white power in this majority black area. The hardships of contending with the Black Belt’s day-to-day political weather underscore the importance of the journeyman efforts of people such as the Turners and Spencer Hogue, Jr., and the significance of groups like the Perry County Civic League which seek to make the ballot accessible to black residents.

Like the Bozeman-Wilder trial, that of Albert and Evelyn Turner and Spencer Hogue, Jr.–as well as the other trials which now seem certain to follow–may come down to little more than swearing contests. Each side will offer witnesses to substantiate their claims as to whether absentee ballots were marked in accordance with, or at variance from, a particular voter’s preference, with or without his or her knowledge. Given the strong-arm methods which have been used to secure testimony, federal prosecutors may come to find their witnesses revising their accounts when intimidating circumstances become less frightening.

As in the current national political scene with its black neo-conservatives-and its Reagan apologists on the US Commission on Civil Rights–a few self-proclaimed community leaders will put their integrity in the employ of their community’s enemies. Yet, for those who know, and for those who care to learn about the Black Belt’s history, the alleged legal violations which suddenly-zealous FBI agents and US attorneys are using to form indictments must be understood in terms of the long revolution through which black citizens have engaged the pursuit of justice.