Southern Changes. Volume 5, Number 1, 1983 – Southern Changes

Figures of Speech–Dressed for the H Bomb

Allen Tullos — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:01 +0000

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.

Delta Politics and the Almost Possible

Rims Barber — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:02 +0000

Delta Politics and the Almost Possible

By Rims Barber

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 4-7

During the recent redistricting process, black leaders felt that it would be impossible for a black candidate to

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win Mississippi’s Second Congressional District as it ultimately came to be drawn. The narrow black population majority makes victory a very long shot for even the exceptional campaign conducted with careful consideration of racial relationships. Yet when Delta Congressman David Bowen chose not to seek re-election in the newly drawn district, black state representative Robert Clark ran and almost won.

Robert Clark was an ideal candidate for the campaign. In 1967 he became the first black elected to the Mississippi legislature since Reconstruction. He has served with distinction as Chairman of the House Education Committee. Clark has name recognition. He brought to the campaign political experience that had earned trust, solid relations with education and labor organizations and a claim on the white Democratic leadership that few could match. The closeness of the race (twelve hundred votes out of 145,000) was in large part attributable to the qualities of the candidate himself.

The District is 53.4% black in overall population. Black voting age population is forty-eight percent. Estimates of registered voters show black strength at forty-four percent. This means that it will take a solid black vote, at or near record proportions, and a high white crossover vote for a black Democratic candidate to win. In Mississippi, black candidates under most circumstances may expect to garner only two to three percent of the white vote. Clark received twelve to thirteen percent of the white vote.

Considering the closeness of the race, almost any shift of counties during reapportionment would have made a significant difference. Had the district not been gerrymandered to preserve the incumbency of First District Congressman Jamie Whitten, Tallahatchie County could have been traded for the two whitest counties (Choctaw and Webster) and Clark could have won. He lost these two small counties by more than the difference between himself and the winner, Republican Webb Franklin. In similar fashion, Franklin won Warren County by more than the final difference

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between the candidates. A split of Warren, similar to that made for state legislative districts would have shifted enough votes, as would a trade that put a small portion of northern Hinds into the Second District.

Victory in the spring, 1982, Democratic primary was crucial. Clark won without a runoff although he had little more than one thousand white votes. A runoff would have been disastrous: there would have been little time to mobilize additional black voters, white support that appeared in the general election would not have materialized for the runoff, and further racial polarization within the party would have occurred. There is a high probability that Clark would have lost a runoff and that blacks would have bolted the Democratic party.

The November general election attracted the second best black voter turnout ever; the highest occurred in the 1980 Presidential election. This time the vote was approximately ninety percent of that record turnout, with between 65,000 and 67,000 black voters. It was thirty percent higher than the turnout for the last off-year election, in which Charles Evers was the drawing card for the black electorate. Approximately forty-two percent of the voting age population of blacks turned out while in 1980 it was forty-five percent. Anything over sixty thousand is exceptional in this geographical area.

The black vote went overwhelmingly for Robert Clark by a margin of ninety-four percent, slightly less than the ninety-six percent bloc vote that Jimmy Carter received in 1980.

There were however, some areas of black weakness. Five counties, historically low in turnout, had less than forty percent of their black voting age population to vote: Coahoma, Sunflower, Tunica, Warren and Washington. Sunflower had the lowest at twenty-eight percent. These five counties contain about forty ‘percept of the black voting age population in the District. Clearly, there is need for voter registration work.

There was a strong white turnout, about ten thousand more voters than had been predicted. As a percentage of the white voting age population, the turnout was about forty-eight percent (compared with fifty-seven percent in the 1980 Presidential race). Approximately 81,000 whites voted (compared to 95,000 in 1980 and seventy thousand in 1978). Doubtless, racial overtones helped the white turnout.

Robert Clark received about twelve to thirteen percent of the white vote. This varied from over twenty percent in counties like Attala and Webster to five and six percent in Coahoma, Leflore and Tunica. In the Hill counties, it appears that Clark received a better white vote in rural areas than in the towns. In the Delta, Clark did better in towns than in rural areas. The work of education and labor groups and the Democratic party paid off with significant numbers of whites voting for the candidate regardless of race. This was a brave first step for several thousand white voters.

The white vote in the District, however, has become increasingly Republican over the past few years. This has been most pronounced when there has been a high white turnout; almost all of the added turnout has been Republican. Historically, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans among white voters has been one to two.

Over the last half dozen years, this has shifted to one Democrat for every three Republican whites. And in 1982, half of this diminished number of Democrats voted Republican.

A close contest is painful to lose and prompts a lot o. second guessing. But the challenge in the Second District of Mississippi is to build the coalition that can bring victory and adequate representation for the District’s people. Certainly, some factors would have made the difference in November’s outcome:

Had the District been constituted with a slightly higher percentage of black voters.
Had the black voter turnout matched the record of two years ago (and it might in 1984 if Reagan runs for reelection).
Had the black bloc vote been just two percentage points more consistent.
Had the white vote not been stirred by the opponent and voted in such strong numbers.
Had a greater number of whites been able to leap the racial barrier and vote their usual Democratic pattern.

Other factors, not so demonstrable, could also have made a difference: had there been a stronger Democratic party structure across the District; had the coalition across racial lines been built more solidly; had there been less fragmentation in the campaign; clearer lines of communication, less conflict over strategies; had there been more clear Democratic programmatic alternatives consistently put before the voter; had more effort been targeted at the weak black turnout areas.

The fact is that the election was so close that almost any favorable change in reapportionment, registration turnout or Democratic party loyalty could have altered. the results. Of particular importance, however, is a strengthened and deepened partnership with blacks and whites in the campaign. There are questions to answer about campaign strategies: How can white and black staff be better coordinated so that both races feel a participation and ownership in the cause? Can campaign appeals be made to one racial community without agitating the other–would a traditional black rally to increase voter turnout scare off potential white voters? How should time be budgeted to produce the best results–how much time ought to be spent on the ten to fifteen percent of the white vote that a black candidate might get?

Across the lines of race there is, at present, a growing sense of interdependence in Mississippi’s Second District. Both blacks and whites are understanding that the kind of education provided their children makes a difference to everybody; that health care, from Medicare to the building of hospitals, makes a difference to everybody; that economic development and the survival of farming make a difference to everybody.

Out of Holmes County in the Second District in 1982 came both the Eddie Garthan trial and congressional candidate Robert Clark. Carthan’s case stood for recent black attempts to gain local political power in the face of the long history of white supremacy (see “Black Political Participation and the Challenge of Conservatism,” in Southern Changes, August/September 1982). Clark’s. candidacy gave hope for a new future of inter-racial

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politics. For a while, past and future came together in Holmes County. In a room of the county courthouse, the Carthan case was suspended one day so the election could be conducted. As things turned out, Carthan was acquitted and Robert Clark lost by one percent of the total vote. Clark says he is “inclined to try again.”

Rims Barber is project director for the Childrens’ Defense Fund in Mississippi. He is a member of the Southern Regional Council and has been active in civil rights issue in Mississippi for eighteen years.

The 1982 Lillian Smith Book Awards

Staff — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:03 +0000

The 1982 Lillian Smith Book Awards

By Staff

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 7-10

The Southern Regional Council’s annual Lillian Smith Awards Luncheon was held in Atlanta in November as a part of the SRC’s annual meeting. The awards recognize the year’s best fiction and non-fiction books about the South. The 1982 winners were John Ehle for The Winter People (New York: Harper and Row) and Harry Ashmore for Hearts and Minds: A History of Racism from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: McGraw-Hill). Following are excerpts from remarks at the luncheon.

Mary Frances Deriner

Lillian Smith, Georgia thinker, activist, author and Southern Regional Council Life Member, died September 28, 1966, concluding a career of a Southerner who said that she never wanted to write about race, just about people. The Southern Regional Council created the Lillian Smith Awards shortly after Miss Smith’s death to honor her life, her work, and her commitment, and to recognize in her name those who, like her, have contributed to our understanding of or given us new insights into the Southern region, its people, its strengths, its problems and its weaknesses.

The Lillian Smith Awards are given annually. Five judges receive from fifty to seventy-five entries and judge them seeking a certain quality which is something like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography–you can’t define it, but you know it when you’ve seen it. The committee receives many good, even fine, works each year. This is a heartening sign to those of us interested in the Southern arts. But only a few of them every year have that undefinable quality which makes them Lillian Smith Award winners. Both of this year’s winners struck us immediately as having that quality, that relevance and humanity in abundance. This is a quality which brings to mind and keeps alive the life and work of Lillian Smith.

Lillian Smith’s fame came with her first novel, Strange Fruit, a small town story of a tragic black-white love affair. It sold three million copies and was translated into fifteen languages. It made her a spokesperson to the world on Southern sins of race. Her Killers of the Dream, a psychological analysis of the Southern system of separation became a classic of sectional understanding and a ringing demand for the liberation of Southerners, black and white, male and female, rich and poor from the bonds of segregation and sexism. Although Lillian Smith wrote many more books, I think that Killers of the Dream is her best, the one which spells out most specifically and clearly what I call Lillian Smith’s “whole ball of wax” theory: the theory that the Southern system, dominated as it is, and was when she was writing, by wealthy white males, invariably discriminates against those who are black or female or poor or a combination of the above. And the system, said Miss Smith, would work only so long as those wealthy white males could keep women and blacks and poor folks from joining forces with one another.

Tony Dunbar

John Ehle couldn’t be with us today. Last year’s Lillian Smith book award winner for fiction was Pat Conroy, who was out of the country. John Ehle, his publisher tells us, is in the country and it’s reassuring to know that there are still places in the South so far back that even someone as persistent as Mary Francis Derfner can’t dig them out.

Those of you from North Carolina may know the man. He has been a writer of merit for twenty-five years and a champion of the arts in a state best known for tobacco and its residue: the politics of Jesse Helms.

The book we’re honoring today is called The Winter People. It’s unquestionably his finest work. In a better world ruled less by literary fashions and megabucks, this book would be a popular classic. Maybe today we can help it along in that direction.

The Winter People is set in the North Carolina mountains during the Depression. It is a story of love and violence, two human capacities frequently associated with mountain life. But the book is something more than that. It shows us an Appalachia before there was coal, before there were social programs, before the world outside meant very much. The forces at work in Ehle’s mountains are Scottish and Irish clans who measure their power in the quantity of children and the number of timbered acres they possess. The pageantry of warlords in homespun clothes reminds us of tales from across the water like Lancelot, but these people in John Ehle’s work appear real to us, not mythical. Their devotion to family is overriding and it takes no great leap of imagination to see the body and soul of today’s mountain people in Ehle’s wonderful prose. In giving us this first glimpse, I think, in fiction, of the people who pioneered our Southern highlands, Ehle has given us the year’s most original work of Southern fiction.

Harry Ashmore

A few weeks ago I encountered one of your former executive directors, Leslie Dunbar, and was pleased to find that he had read Hearts and Minds–or at least

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had checked the index to see wherein he might be mentioned. Since no account of racism from Roosevelt to Reagan would be complete without numerous references to the Southern Regional Council and its battle-scarred principals, Les had come upon a passage in which I referred to him as a “certified idealist.” He was somewhat taken aback, he said, since he thought “certified” was applied only to lunatics and recidivist criminals. I reminded him that it also designated public accountants, but this did nothing to placate him since, like all budget-ridden foundation executives, he regards those who draw up balance sheets as natural enemies.

The chapter in which I certified Les begins with an anecdote I hope bears repeating here today. I tell of returning to Atlanta to address the chief state school officers of the old Confederacy twenty-five years after Harold Fleming, John Griffin and I had arranged a gathering of their predecessors to consider the findings we were about to publish in a book with the incendiary title, The Negro and the Schools. The Brown decision was then pending, and the learned gentlemen responded to the invitation of our sponsor, the Ford Foundation, only on condition that we hide out in the suburbs and not only keep the meeting secret but make it, as they say in diplomatic circles, deniable–that is, that in the event of a leak to the press we would claim that no such assemblage had ever taken place, and even if it had the dread possibility of school desegregation had never been mentioned. There were, as I recall, several apparent cardiac arrests when a rumor spread that young William Emerson of Newsweek had been seen skulking in the shrubbery.

Now, a quarter century later, I again faced the chief state school officers, but this time each was accompanied by a black deputy and the pepper-and-salt audience was assembled at the Atlanta Biltmore under the glare of television lights. It was, I noted, a far cry from the days when we were working with black colleagues on the school project and the closest we could get to the Biltmore at mealtime was the Southern Education Foundation a block away, where we pulled down the shades and shared catered barbecue sandwiches–which, I must say, did represent an improvement over the cuisine available in a hotel ballroom, then or now.

My citation of the transformation that had, in that brief span, made Atlanta perhaps the most thoroughly desegregated major city in the nation prompted a question from one of the black participants. He agreed that on the surface there were a great many changes–but, deep down, did I think anything was really different? Indeed I did. Twenty-five years ago, I pointed out, the great majority of Southerners, white and black, acted on the assumption that there was a real difference between the two races: “Now we know this is not so. And that’s the root of the problem–blacks have turned out to be just like us, and we’re no damned good.”

This back-handed assertion of common humanity did, in its ironic way, recognize the widespread disillusionment among those of both races who had been sustained by soaring hopes in the glory days of the civil rights movement. The idealists had believed–perhaps had had to believe–that the inspired gallantry of liberated blacks and their white supporters would usher in the beloved community of Martin Luther King’s dream. It was in this company that I placed Les Dunbar, quoting from his recent appraisal of The South and the Near Future in Clark College publication:

We did not pass from a segregated to an integrated society. Only in a relative sense have we come from an unjust to a more just society; most certainly we have not passed from a wandering in the desert by blacks and from moral squalor of whites into a ‘beloved community.’ We attained none of these. What was accomplished, however, is a vast enlargement of choice.

And that, of course, is so. As the cliche has it, those who measure progress against the ideal of a fully integrated society see the bottle as half-empty; the pragmatists who measure against the point of departure see it as half full.

The indomitable woman in whose name we are gathered today surely qualified for the certification I bestowed upon Les Dunbar. By 1943, when SRC was created out of the remains of the more timorous Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Lillian Smith had already rejected the prevailing arguments for gradual change; for her, segregation posed a moral choice between good and evil, life and death of the spirit. She publicly declared that SRC’s temporizing policy made t-he organization “potentially more harmful than beneficial.” And she was unimpressed when Guy Johnson, the first executive director, replied that it was unrealistic to adopt a policy that would restrict SRC’s membership to those who were willing to denounce segregation but were powerless to do anything about it.

If Miss Lillian did not prevail, neither did those she scorned as killers of the dream–the dream she shared with the dedicated young preacher who became her friend. Her adamant rejection of the demeaning social conventions of the day may have scared off some potential allies, but it also made one of our most pragmatic presidents the first to employ the full authority of his office in support of Southern blacks who had taken to the streets to protest denial of their civil rights.

One evening early in 1960 Miss Lillian had dinner with Coretta and Martin King, and afterward they drove her to Emory University hospital where she was undergoing treatment for cancer. As they passed through a corner of DeKalb County a patrolman noticed a white woman sitting beside a black man and automatically halted the car. When he discovered that the driver was the trouble-making preacher who had just moved in from Montgomery he concluded that his driver’s license was bound to be invalid. Martin was fined twenty-five dollars, given a six-months suspended sentence, and released on parole. Some months later, when he refused bond and went to jail in Atlanta to dramatize a student sit-in at Rich’s, the DeKalb court charged him with violating parole. On this second trip to the drumhead he was whisked off in the dead of night to Reidsville state prison.

In desperation Coretta King put in a call to the young Democratic candidate for president who was then heading into the home stretch. Jack Kennedy offered reassurance, Robert Kennedy got in touch with the

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DeKalb County judge, and Martin was returned to his father’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in a blaze of televised glory. Daddy King, who had been publicly supporting Richard Nixon on the ground that his Baptist faith would not permit him to vote for a Catholic, recanted and offered a ringing endorsement of the Democratic ticket. The resulting sweep of the black precincts in all the major cities provided Kennedy’s narrow margin of victory, and left him beholden to Martin Luther King, Jr. and the movement he led.

From the beginning, the civil rights movement depended upon political finagling as well as eloquent appeals to the conscience of the white majority. There was a splendid irony in the maneuvering that took place in the traditional gap between rhetoric and reality–which became even wider after the Citizens Councils unfurled the banner of massive resistance and accentuated the discrepancy between what leaders of both races said in public and what they were privately willing to do. When Jack Kennedy was told that Daddy King had to suspend his anti-Catholic bias in order to convert to the Democratic cause, he said, “Who would have thought that Martin Luther King’s father could be a bigot?” Then, reflecting upon the life and times of old Joe Kennedy, he added, “But, then, we all have fathers.”

So we do, and progress on the race front can be measured by the tempering of attitudes from one generation to the next. The fathers of my generation of white Southerners took their stand on what their preachers told them was biblically-sanctioned moral ground, reducing the region to poverty as they sacrificed self-interest on the altar of white supremacy. My contemporaries, with no more valid claim to probity; concluded that they had rather abandon Jim Crow than pay the price required to maintain segregation in the face of mounting black protest.

So it was that when Bull Connor unleashed police dogs and firehoses against black children in Birmingham, Jack Kennedy employed his cabinet’s corporate heavyweights to convince the Big Mules of the Alabama establishment that racial violence was bad for business. After the White Only signs came down the President told Martin and his aides: “I don’t think you should be totally harsh on Bull Connor. He’s done as much for civil rights as anybody since Abraham Lincoln.”

Those of you who labor in the vineyard of race relations are painfully aware of the circularity that has always characterized public discussion of the basic issue. In the old days the demonstrably inferior social condition of the black minority was cited to justify the caste discrimination that perpetuated the inferior condition–and so the dogma of white supremacy came to prevail everywhere in the nation when blacks began to migrate from the South in substantial numbers. That ghost, at least, has been laid by the enlargement of choice that is the not inconsiderable legacy of the civil rights movement.

When the federal courts struck down the barriers of institutional segregation a third of the black population promptly moved into the mainstream, visibly giving the

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lie to the myth of inherent racial inferiority. In terms of educational attainment, income level, and type of employment these blacks are certifiably middle-class, and are more or less being accepted as such by their white counterparts. The larger society–burdened as it is by the third of the black population still confined to a poverty-stricken underclass–is a long way from being free of the residue from the racist past. But the tempering of restrictive majority attitudes has been sufficient to change the dimensions of the American dilemma.

This shows up most significantly in politics. Those of us who were on the front line in the early days of the movement may be appalled by the resurrection of George Wallace in Alabama, but there is surely encouragement in the fact that he could re-enter the lists only by proclaiming himself a born-again integrationist, repentant of his race-baiting past and wholly committed to advancing the welfare of the blacks whose votes he sought and won. Then there is Ronald Reagan, whose political strategy writes off the black vote but who hotly denies that his reactionary policies are tinged with racism. “I want everyone to understand that I am heart and soul in favor of the things that have been done in the name of civil rights and desegregation,” he has proclaimed, and, if you accept his remarkably constricted view of contemporary society, there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.

But if the President has rejected the dogma of white supremacy he has fervently embraced the doctrine it produced–the old states rights federalism elaborated by our forefathers in defense of slavery and the second-class citizenship that succeeded it. The President’s so-called “new” federalism ignores not only the lessons of the bloodshot past, but the reality of contemporary demography, which reflects the transfer of the enduring race problem from the rural South to the center of the nation’s great cities, where it has produced what is rightly labeled an urban crisis. The black underclass is not trapped in northern slums by institutionalized race prejudice, but by a debilitating, self-perpetuating culture of poverty that cannot possibly yield to the kind of social Darwinism in which the President places his faith. We are long past the share-cropping days when blacks were kept in their place so they could be exploited as a source of cheap labor; along with the Hispanics and poor whites who share its misery, the black underclass has become surplus population, a non-productive burden increasingly seen as intolerable in a shrinking economy.

The secular theology called Reaganomics holds that this condition is of no concern to the federal government and can readily be disposed of by placing responsibility for its cure upon state and local authorities assisted by the benign working of the private sector. That delusion cannot endure, and when it is finally dispelled there will be much work to do–particularly for organizations like SRC which have always had to find their way in the void between rhetoric and reality.

I have never been blessed with a faith strong enough to take me to the mountaintop from which Martin Luther King caught sight of the promised land, and assured his people that, with or without him, they would get there one day. But I have never doubted that his vision of a beloved community represented the only goal that would, in the end, prove acceptable to Southerners. Miss Lillian believed that, too, and when, at the end of her life, she revised Killers of the Dream, she closed with these lines:

So we stand: tied to the past and clutching at the stars! Only by the agonizing pull of our dream can we wrench ourselves from such fixating stuff and climb into the unknown. But we have always done it and we can do it again. We have the means, the techniques, we have the knowledge and insight and courage. All have synchronized for the first time in history. Do we have the desire? This is a question that each of us must answer for himself.

Mary Frances Derfner is Vice-President of the Southern Regional Council and chairperson of the Smith Awards Committee. Other committee members for 1982 included Tony Dunbar, John Popham, Wilma Dykeman and Lottie Shackelford.

Myra Page: Daughter of the South, Worker for Change

Mary Frederickson — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:04 +0000

Myra Page: Daughter of the South, Worker for Change

By Mary Frederickson

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 10-12, 14-15

On a summer evening this past August, Myra Page sat surrounded by books, papers and manuscripts in her home of thirty-nine years in Yonkers, New York, telling the tale of her most recent demonstration. Her lively eyes belied the eighty-two years that her face and hands proclaimed. A week before, she had joined a group of thirty peace activists, mostly women, as they faced fifty uniformed American Legionnaires in front of Yonker’s World War I memorial.

The men insisted it was “sacriligious” for the demonstrators to gather at the memorial that steamy Sunday morning on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Tension mounted as members of both groups exchanged comments about nuclear weapons. Several legionnaires proudly recalled where they had been when the bombs exploded in 1946; some argued that their lives had been saved, others that it hastened the end of the war.

As Page stood near the commander of the group, he whispered that he didn’t want another war either, that he didn’t want his grandson to have to fight.

The legionnaires moved into formation three deep around the war memorial. The protesters took positions across the street. As Page crossed over with her comrades, the Commander spoke to her again. This time loudly. “Don’t worry lady, there’ll never be another war!”

In reporting this event, as she had the many demonstrations and protests in which she participated during six decades of work for labor, civil rights and human

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rights causes, Myra Page focused on the personal, highlighting the irony of a Legion commander disclosing private feelings about war to a peace activist. This personal perspective has been at the core of Page’s work, as a reformer and labor organizer in the 1920’s, as a reporter for the labor press in the 1930’s, and then as a writer of fiction. Her dual objectives have been to relate social conditions on a human scale and to place personal struggle within a framework of broader issues.

Sustained throughout a lifetime, Myra Page’s belief in the priority of human rights developed during her childhood in Virginia. Myra, born Dorothy Page Gary, and her younger brother learned their first lesson in Southern racial mores one summer on their grandfather’s farm in the Shenandoah Valley. Abruptly, they were forbidden to play together with a black friend. Told that the child would lose his job on the farm if they disobeyed, Myra and her brother wept with a “great unnamed misery.” She wrote later that “something big and ugly had descended upon us. Something which awoke in me a vast incoherent questioning and hate.”

Page’s father, the town physician in Newport News, Virginia, was a humanitarian who served as a volunteer on the staff of the local black hospital, and treated black and white, rich and poor in an era when a family doctor was “almost like a preacher.” Although opposed to his eldest daughter becoming a doctor, Page’s father took for granted that his four children, male and female, would go to college. He had seen enough destitute widows to want his three daughters to have the means to make their own living.

Page’s mother did not openly oppose the status quo. Regarding race, she “accepted the traditional pattern in the South,” while confiding to her children that she “thought it was a big mistake.” Page saw her mother and three aunts as leading limited lives marked by ignored talents and suppressed sadness. She felt that she “couldn’t follow the path that any one of them was following.” For her, “the woman question, without being very concrete, developed very early.” Pressured by her mother to conform to a preconceived pattern of “the way life should be,” Page rebelled against the traditional belief that daughters “owed everything to the family.”

Page lived in a home filled with “endless books” and with parents who argued about George Bernard Shawl As a child accompanying her father on rounds to see his patients, Page saw “both sides of town, and all that went on.” Like Mick Kelley in Carson McCuller’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Page roamed the town, went to the waterfront piers, met children from the nearby Irish shantytown, and watched the dockers load ships. In the years before World War I, Newport News was a bustling town dominated by the noise of a shipyard filled with crews which built ships twenty-four hours a day. As Page grew older she heard news stories of lynchings and rumors about the Klan. But she also attended the meetings of an integrated community group, the Newport News Joint Committee, established to deal with public works and educational facilities. Sitting separately, on opposite sides of the aisle, the black and white group worked to obtain sewers and a high school for the black section of town. In addition, black longshoremen in Newport News formed a union during this period, and then helped organize their white counterparts. Although in separate locals, the two groups worked together-and added a different chapter to the long history of craft unionism in the shipyard. Page’s father supported organized labor, many of his patients were union members, and with them he viewed labor’s platform as one antidote to the high rate of industrial accidents that plagued workers in Newport News.

Page grew close to Belle Franklin, the black woman who worked in her parent’s home; they sang hymns and folk songs in the kitchen and shared Myra’s school lessons. Myra was repeatedly told, by Belle, to be glad she wasn’t “born colored.” Their bond deepened when Myra discovered that her ambition to become a doctor was thwarted because she was born female. The black woman understood, when other adults did not, about “the injustices and the yearning for things you could not have.” Myra began to rebel against “this bad Southern tradition of women.”

When Page left home to attend Westhampton College in Richmond, she carried with her a complex legacy inherited from a society permeated by racial segregation, divided by fixed class lines, and steeped in a tradition of inflexible gender roles. At Westhampton, in the supportive atmosphere of a woman’s college, she found allies in her search for new ideas and ways to change Southern society. On Friday afternoons at tea in a liberal professor’s apartment, Page and a few close friends read The Nation and The New Republic, periodicals not allowed in the college library. “We were pacifists,” Page recalled over sixty years later, “and very much against the idea of going into the First World War.”

A small group of students, including Page, became active in the YWCA in order to give substance to New Testament concepts of brotherhood and peace. Page remembers:

It was in college that we first got a chance to know black students, girls mainly, at the summer YWCA conferences. Up there in the beautiful rarefied air of Blue Ridge, North Carolina, you know, so many things seemed possible. At Blue Ridge we were able to be friends, to ignore color lines and to have discussions.

Following one of the YWCA conferences, Page and a close friend decided to invite a black YWCA secretary they had met at Blue Ridge to speak at Westhampton. Over the opposition of “ill-prepared” classmates who “went by us in the hall as if we had some disease that was catching,” Page and her small group of friends organized and attended the first integrated meeting on their campus in 1917.

Through interracial work in the YWCA, by teaching music to young industrial workers in a Richmond settlement house, and by working with women at the state reform school, Page met people from many backgrounds during her years in Richmond. Gradually, she began to evaluate the regional effects of racism and industrialization, and to question her own place and function in the society which surrounded her. A dozen years went by, however, before Page wrote about the chaingangs she had

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seen as a student in Richmond (The Nation, 1931) and about her experiences with the forbidden black playmate, with Belle Franklin, and in the YWCA (The Crisis, 1931).

* * *

Page began to write about the South only after she left the region, a process which occurred in stages, over a period of several years. Her first step out of Virginia was to attend graduate school at Columbia University in New York City. Page studied sociology with Franklin Henry Giddings and anthropology with Franz Boas, sat in on John Dewey’s classes and attended lectures by Harry F. Ward and Harry Emerson Fosdick: “it was like a whole world opening up.”

In the North, Page continued to be plagued by questions about race. In her university dormitory the young black woman who cleaned the rooms talked with the students about literature, and offered to loan one of Page’s roommates her set of Victor Hugo’s writings. The students discovered that the woman had graduated from college with honors, but could not get a job, except cleaning floors.

A year later, convinced that “the future of the country would lie with the workers getting organized and making good sensible reform,” Page joined the YWCA Industrial Department. As part of what she viewed as “a real movement of women for democracy,” Page agreed to return home to work with women factory operatives. Still close to her family, Page wanted to return South, and the YWCA’s goals of interracial harmony and industrial reform meshed with her own agenda for social change in the region. Page came back to Virginia in 1920, “with a little sociology theory and Christian philosophy,” to a job as YWCA Industrial Secretary in Norfolk.

In this non-union town, Page began to organize groups of women workers and to plan educational programs designed to prepare them for union membership. There were problems from the beginning. Page had to seek permission from management to meet with workers during their lunch hour, and then enter factories to face women who were convinced that she represented the company. In addition, several YWCA board members from the business community accused Page of “talking unionism” and stressed that they would not continue to finance that kind of socialism through the YWCA. Progressives within the YWCA counseled Page to proceed gradually, to have patience and look ahead, but to Page, “suddenly the whole thing was a farce.” She wrote later:

We had been trained to believe that social relations would right themselves through Peace and Persuasion, through changing hearts one by one. Finally, for me there was no going on. The theory simply did not work. The system was stronger than individuals, and the solution depended on changing the system itself.

Page resigned from the YWCA in 1921. Feeling that little social change could be accomplished in the South, she decided to leave. Despite close family ties and over her parents’ objections, Page was determined “to break away” from a region totally dominated by a rigid system of caste and class.

Page left Norfolk for Philadelphia and St. Louis and~ worked as a wage-earner in department stores and factories. In Philadelphia she clerked at Wannamaker’s until the management discovered she had a college degree and suspected she might be an organizer. A stint in the hat trade, where organized male workers opposed the entry of women into the union, taught Page about occupational segregation by gender and demonstrated the consequences for the labor movement.

After several attempts to get work in the clothing trade, Page went to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America’s Philadelphia office. There she met Hilda Shapiro, a staunchly feminist clothing worker from the New York’s East Side. Page and Shapiro worked together for the next four years as rank and file organizers for the Amalgamated. The two women organized picket lines and entered open shop factories to get the workers to come out. In one shop Page remembered being “scared to death” when the boss came at them with a hot iron. Page found the whole set-up “like a jungle.”

But the “vicious” experiences she had in unorganized shops contrasted sharply with her work-life in union factories. For Page, the union shops were havens in which men and women of different nationalities and races could work together. She saw herself participating in “one great movement” of workers, and the answers she had been seeking in Norfolk began to appear. Through the labor movement, Page saw the goal of interracial industrial unionism, what she described later as “a freedom to be fought for and won, black and white alike,” as an attainable end.

After four years in Philadelphia and St. Louis, Page left the shops to return to school and train as a teacher in workers’ education. At the University of Minnesota, Page obtained a doctorate in sociology, taught a course in social movements, joined the teacher’s union, and became active in the Twin Cities labor movement. Appointed head of the Education Committee of the Minnesota State Federation of Labor, Page organized speakers and classes for union locals throughout the state.

As she taught the history of women in the trade union movement to women in St. Paul, spoke at cooperatives, and interviewed miners in the Iron Range, Page thought about her first organizing experiences in Norfolk. Soon, she formulated a plan to write about textile workers in the South. To document the “traditional Southern attitudes” she saw as hampering union organization, Page lived for several months in a mill community outside Columbia, South Carolina.

Two books resulted from Page’s PhD research on Southern Textiles. The first, Southern Cotton Mills and Labor (1929) appeared immediately after a wave of textile strikes had spread across the Piedmont. The second work, Page’s first novel, entitled Gathering Storm (1932) was a fictional account of the Gastonia Strike of 1929. In both manuscripts, she provided an analysis of textile workers which transcended traditional

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accounts. Page argued that although the culture of Southern textile workers (unlike that of miners) did not foster collective organization, neither did it preclude intense class consciousness and overt expressions of discontent. Taking the long view of textile unionism, she wrote:

Ever since the textile industry has been well established in the south, there have been intermittent union campaigns there. Usually these organizing efforts have been initiated by spontaneous strike movements among southern textile workers, with a national union then coming into’ the field. In consequence, union efforts have often been rather sporadic and poorly organized. Also company opposition has been ruthless. Nevertheless, in nearly one half of a century of struggles, this section of the American working class has shown itself capable of courage, sacrifice, leadership and endurance that speaks well for the determination of southern mill hands to conquer all difficulties and build their union movement.

Page held two basic criteria as crucial for the labor movement in the South: First, it was essential to “organize black and white workers on an equal footing in industrial unions and unite them in struggles for full economic, political and social rights.” Second, Page contended that only a “system of collective ownership and operation of mills” would provide the fundamental reorganization required to provide workers with a decent standard of living.

Page criticized AFL organizing efforts in Southern textiles, arguing that the United Textile Workers (UTW) repeatedly entered local strike situations too late and then withdrew active support prematurely. Moreover, Page continued, the UTW either ignored black workers entirely or segregated them into separate locals.

In 1929 Page felt that the momentum for major change had begun and that “nothing can stop the revolt of Dixie mill hands. now under way.” But the early 1930’s proved to be difficult years for organizing and for the realization of interracial unionism. Nonetheless, as she met with interracial groups of union men and women she argued that as Southerners “learned through their industrial struggles the common economic lot of white and black wage-earners, and the necessity of common action,” they would be freed of racial prejudices.

During the 1930’s Page’s work as a reporter for the labor press took her into Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Arkansas. But it was in Alabama that she began to see the promise of what the union organization of agricultural workers, miners and industrial workers could mean.

Page came to Alabama several times in the early 1930’s at the request of union men and women in “this land of steel, coal and cotton.” She traveled by train into a rural Alabama county to meet with members of the sharecropper’s union and there found “brave people who were taking so much into their stride.” Page had great confidence in this predominantly black group of men and women who were fighting to obtain basic control of their worklives in a county where they comprised eighty-five percent of the population. In Birmingham, Page met with miners, one-third of whom were out of work, who had “downed tools” and demanded the right to bargain collectively and to obtain equal rights for black and white miners on the job and in the union.

In 1932, Page wrote phrases which echo fifty years later:

The big steel mills of Morgan’s T.C.I. and Mellon’s Republic Steel Corporations which belch their crimson tongues of smoke and flame against the night, today are running around forty percent capacity. Nearly one-third of Alabama’s coal miners are without work. In Birmingham, unemployed are estimated at forty-five to fifty thousand, affecting one out of every three households.

As Page left Birmingham to return to her home in the Northeast, she predicted that “the outbreaks and struggles against Morgan and banking and landlord rule will become increasingly more violent and sweeping in character.” Threatened strikes among miners and steelworkers meant to Page that “the working masses in this steel and coal stronghold of the South are in motion, and as Birmingham goes, so goes the South.” The organizing activity of workers in Birmingham confirmed Page’s belief in interracial industrial unionism, and offered the promise of a time when the South “will be freed of its shadows; when its toiling people will march shoulder to shoulder, beyond the color line.”

The optimism of Page’s rhetoric in the early 1930’s reflected her belief that out of the ferment of the Great Depression “big changes were going to take place . . . that the working people were really going to get more control of their lives, and there would be much more democracy in the country.” Page recalls that in the 1930’s, “I could see that change was coming,” and in Birmingham and other parts of the South that vision was palpable. But there were also unrealized, perhaps unrealistic, dreams: the belief that black Southerners would demand and be given distinct regions, or a separate nation; that the violence against Morgan in Southern steel areas like Birmingham would spread to workers in other Southern industries, and that the Southern working-class would oust the economic imperialists who controlled the region’s natural and industrial resources; also unrealized was her firm hope that the organization of Southern workers was inevitable, and once accomplished would be the key to labor’s strength nationwide.

“We were young, enthusiastic, and thought things were going to happen faster,” Page remembers. Today Page remains hopeful–“that one of these days we will get a working-class party” in the United States; that racism

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will diminish as the South and the nation become thoroughly integrated; that the United States has learned and will never forget the hard lesson of Vietnam; that the “creativity and determination of the American people” will allow us to solve our problems.

During the late 1930’s Page took up her pen more frequently and struggled with questions about the South in her writing. As a member of the League of American Writers she was asked to come to Highlander Folk School in 1938 and 1939 to teach classes and workshops. While at Highlander, Page visited miners’ families in the Tennessee mountains. Later she met Dolly Hawkins Cooper, the woman whose story she tells in Daughter of the Hills (1978, first published in 1950 by Citadel Press as With Sun In Their Blood). Page’s friendship with Hawkins grew out of an intense admiration for the strength of the women whose fathers, husband’ end sons mined coal, and an appreciation of “a woman’s part in the coal miner’s struggle.”

During these years Page continued to report for the labor press and to write radio play scripts and short stories to supplement her income. She had married John Markey, a fellow graduate student from Minnesota and then college professor, and they had had a daughter and a son. Page still felt “a certain pull, a certain allegiance to the South.” But family visits to Virginia in the 1930’s were “painful,” and Page’s rejection of the social and political status quo was manifest in her unwillingness to rear her children in the South.

In the post-war period, Page traveled South each summer and, again at Highlander Folk School, shared in the expansion and development of the civil rights movement. “We had crucial sessions at Highlander,” Page recalls. “The Southern people working in the field were leading . . . I took a little part, but not very much, because I wasn’t living and working then in the South.” But it was the movement for which Page had worked since before World War I.

As Page participated in civil rights work in the 1950’s and 1960’s, she noticed many Southern white women who “connected with the movement.” To her, “it was noticeable that so many came north and worked.” Page argues that these were Southern women who saw parallels between their own limitations and lack of freedom and that of black people. She believes that many of these white women, as she had done in 1920, felt a special kinship to the black quest for civil rights and as a result either “they got out from down there, or if they did stay in the South, they worked with the movement.”

As the progressive gains of the 1960’s became apparent within the South, Page shifted her attention to include an even wider range of issues: expanding civil rights efforts, anti-war work against Vietnam, a growing woman’s movement, environmental concerns, and support for the United Mine Workers of America (to Page “the enduring backbone of the American labor movement”).

In June of 1980, Page returned to Newport News, Virginia, the town she had left sixty years earlier. Three months before her visit, the community’s 16,500 shipyard workers had won their first United Steel Workers of America (USWA) contract with Tenneco. Members of the union had invited Page to come South. She met with many of the shipyard workers (black and white, male and female) who had fought for three years and endured an eleven week strike to win company recognition of Local 8888 (see Southern Changes, June 1979). The union’s contract with substantial wage increases, a grievance procedure, a health and safety committee and better medical benefits and pensions, signaled to Page that “In Tidewater and the South, a new day has begun” (see Mountain Life and Work, November 1980). The union’s victory affirmed many of the principles that Page had believed in and fought for since she left Virginia to join the labor movement in 1920 (see Southern Exposure, Winter 1981).

Over the years Page had seen many of her political dreams and social ideals flounder; early textile organizing efforts in the South faltered, the dream of a worker controlled society has not been fulfilled, a classless social system has yet to be established. On the other hand, the civil rights movement transformed American society, and the women’s movement has realized many changes for which Page worked. The union victory in Newport News was both a substantive and symbolic triumph. Organization of the shipyard workers was a goal that Page had sought for years, and it validated her theory, considered too radical in the 1920’s and 1930’s, that Southern workers could organize effectively only when black and white joined forces. Symbolically, the victory held a special personal significance for Myra Page–Dorothy Markey–because it meant that in a sense she had been able to come full circle, and to come home.

Formerly a research fellow at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Mary Frederickson is now assistant professor of history at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. This article copyright, 1988, by Mary Frederickson.

From Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, 1929, by Myra Page

Myra Page — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:05 +0000

From Southern Cotton Mills and Labor, 1929, by Myra Page

By Myra Page

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, p. 13

The next afternoon I went to see my friend, Marg. Marg was always a tonic, especially after such an experience as last night. Marg knew her Bible–you had to or be an outcast in the village–but her religion didn’t bother her much. She thought and spoke for herself, and few gainsaid her, at least to her face. She belonged to the clan of Allen–feuders and government-fighters–and believed in Direct Action.

“Steps right in, honey,” Marg called from her place in the swing. She pulled her black-and-gray-checkered dress tighter over her bosom, shifted her powerful frame so as to make room beside her, and with the hem of her dress wiped away the little brown streams of tobacco juice which had dried in the corners of her mouth.

“As I wuz sayin’ th’ las’ time you was here, Hutchins mill ain’t so good for wages, but I’ve lived on worse hills. Hutchins is got a good char-ac-ter ‘n that means a lot. All mills ain’t. I wuz in one, once, soon after we come down from the mountains. My ole man hed ceasted, so it wuz jes’ me to care for th’ babies. Every day I locked ’em in th’ house afore I went to th’ mill, ‘n every night I run home scairt th’ house’d burned down. I tell you, them wuz hard days, before th’ hours wuz cut to tin.

“Well, that mill had a bad char-ac-ter, ‘n I wanted to git away. You know, us mill people ain’t got nuthin’ but our moral character, ‘n we wanna keep on to that. Now you may be a good ‘omen, but folks figger that if you live on a hill’s what’s got a bad name, you’re no better thin th’ res’ or you’d move. Well, I coulden move. N’th’ company’s house nex’ to mine wuz a bad house. Time’n agin, I tole th’ sheriff, ‘Jim, make that ‘omen leave town.’ But he woulden. ‘N I see with my own eyes, policymen goin’ in ‘n out. Sech drinkin”n carryin’ on, you navah heard. ‘N my gal gittin’ bigger’n bigger, ‘n me gone all day. So finally I made up my mind I’d take th’ law in my own hands. Our family’s used to that.

“So I gits down my gun, ‘n I starts off to th’ police office. It was a Sadday aftanoon, ‘n th’ room wuz full of officers-of-th’-law, but I walks right up to th’ desk, ‘n I slams my hand down, ‘n I says,’Jim,’I says, “I come to give warnin’. If you doan clean up that bad house before nex Sadday, I will. My gun’s ready. And what’s more,’ her mountain eyes glittered happily as she told this, ‘what’s more, every blue coat ‘n every brass button I see, them’s my target.’

“And that’s how I cleaned up Selby,” Marg concluded. “Come in, Miz Jones,” she called to a little old woman, gnarled like a mountain oak, who was hobbling up the walk. “You wan some of my herbs, honey. Jes’ help yourself. You know where they is. Brew ’em a little ‘n apply th’ warm juice to his rumitiz. It’ll help. You might tie a string around his waist ‘n middle left finger, too.”

“Honey,” Marg turned back to me, “I tell you what’s on my mind. It’s my boy, Tom. He wants to be an electrician, in th’ worse way. Ever since he wuz a littl’ boy, he’s hankered after machinery ‘n things like that. He’s buyed books’n fixin’s of all kinds. Well, his sis’n him ‘n me been savin’ fer seven year now, so’s he cud take th’ course. By corryspondence, they call it. It cost one hundred and fifty dollar, but seein’ as Tom was so anxious, they tole him he cud tek it for ninty-five. But we jes’ can’s seem to git that much ahead. Sickness, or th’ mill runnin’ slow, or somethin’, jes sets us back. Tom’s twenty-seven now, ‘n I doan know’s he ever will.”

“Couldn’t he take it up around here, at school, say?”

“Naw. They doan learn ’em no trade thar but mill work. I tell you, honey, these mill owners wans to keep us in th’ mills. I knows, I’ve a-watched ’em forty-five year now. My gal tells me I shud keep my mouth shut. But I knows.”

Marg peered through the green vines at another visitor coming up the walk.

“That you, Miz Rhoads?”

“Yes’m, it’s me. Kin I hev’n ear o’ core?”

“Help yourself. Only git ’em ripe. ‘N wean ye set a spell?”

Marg lowered her voice. “We live in common like, us six families here.” With her right thumb she indicated the houses fronting the little square of dirt before us. “Each one’s got a littl’ patch. Wages bein’ what they is, we coulden git along without. One raises beans ‘n peas, another, yellers’ ‘n tatters. ‘N me, I raises corn. Whin meal time comes, we jes’ go ‘n help ourselves.

“Now, th’ drought ‘n hot weather is kill in’ our crops, ‘n th’ mill’s only runnin’ part time. I tell you, they’re gettin’ us lower ‘n lower. They wan us on our knees, that’s what. We ain’t low enuf fer ’em, yit. Millionaires they are, Mr. Hutchins ‘n th’ res’. ‘N I remember him as a littl’ boy so poor he’d no breeches to cover him.

“They made their money out of us. I look at their fine houses whin I go to town, ‘n I thinks to myself, ‘You made that out ‘o us. If we waran so poor, you’d not be so rich.”N I rememba what th’ Good Book says about th’ rich ‘n th’ poor. They’ll git theirs when they die.”

“Hell?” I asked.

Marg spit a brown stream neatly between the rails.

“What else?” she answered.

“Well, that idea doan satisfy me,” I replied, and we were off on an argument.

Myra Page (Dorothy Markey) is currently completing an autobiographical novel about her early years in Newport News entitled Soundings. Under the pen name Myra Page she hats written three novels and published numerous articles, stories, and two radio plays in The Nation, New Masses, American Spectator, and New Directions. Articles about the miners’ strike in Pennsylvania in 1985 and an interview with President Cardenas of Mexico, 1987-88 appeared in New Masses. Her work as a writer was interrupted during the McCarthy era when Viking was to publish With Sun in Our Blood, but cancelled the contract; the book was subsequently published by New York’s Citadel Press.

Black Boss: Political Revolution in a Georgia County

Lawrence J. Hanks — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:06 +0000

Black Boss: Political Revolution in a Georgia County

By Lawrence J. Hanks

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 16-18

Black Boss: Political Revolution in a Georgia County. John Rozier. The University of Georgia Press, 1982.

John Rozier’s Black Boss is a narrative of John McCown of Hancock County, Georgia and the political revolution that most observers felt reached fruition in 1968, the year that blacks became the majority of members of the county commission. Rozier, a Hancock native, deserves to be commended for bringing the county to the attention of scholars as well as a general audience. It has been fourteen years since blacks ascended to political power, yet the political science journals have yet to publish any analysis of the political changes in Hancock. Thus, Black Boss breaks new ground.

On leave from his post as Public Information Services director at Emory University, Rozier manages to do a thorough job of research. He interviewed numerous black and white Hancock citizens; he combed through the newspapers that covered the stories; he searched the files of the Georgia Council on Human Relations; and he examined the transcripts from the pretrial hearings and other documents relating to the trials that were held. Rozier had sufficient information to give his readers a balanced story of John McCown and the political revolution in Hancock. The book’s strength is its wealth of material.

Unfortunately, there is a serious problem with Black Boss. The book has a blatant bias against McCown that permeates the work and inhibits the author’s ability to view the political, social, and economic dynamics. While Rozier concentrates solely on the character of McCown, the changes that McCown stirred to life are more important historically than the man himself.

Although Rozier acknowledges the “widely varying views” concerning McCown in his preface, he proceeds to use the negative appraisals of him as the central focus of the book. He never acknowledges, perhaps he does not realize, that he is telling one side of an extremely controversial story. McCown, with his charismatic, unorthodox, and noncompromising style, came to Hancock in 1966 as a seasoned civil rights activist. He led the first civil rights march in Colorado Springs, Colorado, protesting the injustices in the armed forces. He later worked with CORE, SNCC, and the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) in Savannah. While affiliated with SCLC in Atlanta, he saw the potential for black political empowerment in Hancock and decided to move himself and his family there. His childhood in Loris, South Carolina, and his adolescence in Harlem taught him that only the bold, aggressive, and self-assured survived. These qualities became an integral part of his personality.

Hancock County was fertile soil for McCown to test his theory of black self-help through political participation. A devout believer in democratic theory, he emphasized the accountability of elected officials to their constituents. Moreover, he felt that political power and economic power were flip sides of the same coin–one could not expect to make changes in either of these areas without simultaneously working in both arenas. He took this message to homes, bars, street corners, and churches. Armed with charisma and expertise in federal regulations, McCown won the confidence of many Hancock blacks by showing them that white county officials could be successfully challenged when they denied blacks benefits that they were entitled to receive. One person could make a difference. Moreover, that one person, when organized with others, could make substantial changes. This is the legacy of McCown which Rozier totally neglects.

McCown organized the Eastern Central Committee for Opportunity (ECCO), a community development corporation, in 1970. By 1974, after having received approximately 5.5 million in private and federal aid, ECCO had established itself as the center of economic development in Hancock County. Blacks held every elective or appointive position in the county except sheriff and tax commissioner. In their attempt to salvage whatever political power they could, segments of the white community appear to have participated in many activities that Rozier chose to ignore or treat lightly: “white flight” into Sparta and gerrymandering were two methods used to maintain white political dominance; the Klan demonstrated on the eve of the 1966 election; the broodstock at the ECCO fish farm was mysteriously poisoned; the concrete block plant was vandalized; there was a white boycott of ECCO fish farm products; death threats were directed towards McCown and other black elected officials; the harassment of ECCO employees by law enforcement officers was commonplace; the ECCO threatre was burned; and, IRS and FBI agents were illegally used to gather information for the federal grand jury. Moreover, the white communities in neighboring counties gave assistance in trying to thwart the movement: they supplied political contributions; black drivers from Hancock were routinely cited for violations while passing through; and on at least one occasion, a group of “night riders” entered the county to pay the ECCO headquarters a visit.

Much of this white reaction was due to the considerable amount of political and economic power that the black community was gaining. Until the school desegregation squabbles of 1969 and 1970, a small portion of the white community supported ECCO. After the attempts to desegregate the school however, even this support disappeared. The battle lines were drawn–the white community was determined to get rid of ECCO and McCown, while most blacks were determined to protect both. A good number of citizens, both black and white, carried guns at all times. For the remainder of the McCown Era, there would be at least two versions to practically everything that happened.

After almost four years of concerted effort to discredit ECCO and McCown, events began to favor those opposed to ECCO. The Atlanta Constitution ran a series of

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articles (June 30, 1974 – July 4, 1974) which seriously questioned the legitimacy of McCown and the ECCO enterprises; this series had been preceded by a similar series in the Macon Telegraph. These two series, combined with years of letter writing and public pressure for an external audit of ECCO, prompted the Washington office of OEO to conduct the long desired audit. On July 24, 1974 Senator Nunn’s office issued a press release stating that the General Accounting Office had briefed Senator Nunn telling him that “their initial report indicates that the OEO external audit will show substantial discrepancies.” As a result, a federal grand jury investigation of McCown and ECCO was initiated, contributions came to a halt, and after eighteen months of a federal grand jury investigation–five guilty pleas to fraudulent use of federal poverty funds ended the economic phase of the political movement in Hancock. The man that Hancock whites wanted to convict most, John McCown, was killed in a plane crash in January 1976. Thus, the “McCown Era” ended with both sides unsatisfied. The anti-McCown group had wanted McCown to stand trial while the pro-McCown group felt that they had no alternative to pleading guilty.

In Black Boss, Rozier has shaped his first two chapters, “Hancock County” and “John McCown,” in a manner which prejudices readers thinking about the political movement in Hancock. First Hancock is portrayed as an unlikely place for a political revolution: Hancock’s early leaders were Whigs and Unionists who opposed succession although they favored slavery; slaveholders treated their slaves well; the county had no record of lynchings; blacks could buy land more easily and they led the state in the number of black farm owners; and, “Hancock was noted for good race relations until the troubles of the 1960’s.” Then in chapter two, McCown is portrayed as a moral degenerate accused of a wide variety of acts: lying, stealing, “shacking up” with a German woman, having bad credit, contributing to the delinquency of minors, and rape. The picture has been painted clearly: an immoral degenerate comes to peaceful, idyllic, racially harmonious Hancock County and upsets the balance. In both instances, Rozier overstates the case.

Although race relations in Hancock were reputed to be relatively good, the credit for this state of affairs should not be contributed entirely to the good will of whites. With an overwhelming black population, blacks in Hancock have a history of assertion. Although the historical antecedent is obscure, present day blacks in Hancock recount many stories about blacks from slavery to the present who challenged the authority of whites, demanded respect, and fought in the defense of rights. Conditions were not as peaceful as Rozier would have us believe.

Rozier’s attempt to point out McCown’s alleged moral weaknesses point to a major weakness in the book–the trustworthiness of anonymous sources. Moreover, much of the nonflattering information about McCown, e.g., his speeding tickets, his “shacking up” are simply nongermane to his role in the movement towards black politcal and economic empowerment in Hancock. In his attempt to cast a negative shadow on McCown and the political revolution in Hancock, Rozier undermines the conclusions he reaches by his willingness to raise gossip to the status of fact. Although McCown was posthumously indicted, of course he was never tried–his case was never presented in court. Rozier writes as if McCown’s assumed guilt is a proven fact. His bias is most blatant when he has the opportunity to decide who is telling the truth between McCown and some other party. Illustrative of this is his treatment of the “arms race” incident and the burning of the Clinch House.

The “arms race” occurred in 1971 after several years of tension. After hearing frequent shooting in the night, Mayor Patterson of Sparta, the county seat of Hancock, decided that McCown and his followers were practicing for a battle with the white citizens of Sparta. He ordered ten machine guns for his two man police force. After McCown and the other county commissioners learned of the purchase, they felt that the black citizens of the county needed to be protected from the whites in the city. They immediately ordered thirty machine guns. The arms build-up continued until Governor Jimmy Carter intervened. He convinced them both to dispose of their weapons. Although Rozier offers no concrete evidence that McCown or his followers were actually the source of the shooting, he writes under the assumption that McCown started the “arms race.”

The Clinch House, an antebellum mansion, was burned while McCown was jailed during a disturbance in

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May of 1974. The house had been recently refurbished by the Hancock County Foundation for Historical Preservation; “the refurbished home was preserved as a reminder of the county’s past . . .” When the house went down in flames, the mayor accused ‘McCown’s followers of burning it. Since most of ECCO’s employees were guarding his jail cell, this was unlikely. In turn, McCown accused the mayor of “knowing something about the fire.” Once more, without offering a shred of concrete evidence, Rozier accepts the anti-McCown version as fact.

Rozier criticizes the Thames Production Company, a British film company, for bias in their film on the county; he also criticizes the New Republic for not being balanced in their March 6, 1971 article on the events of the county: “the point of view of the McCown faction was accepted without question.” It is ironic that he falls prey to his own criticism in reverse–he accepts without question the perspective of the anti-McCown faction.

The successful efforts for political empowerment in Hancock were the source of local as well as national pride. Between 1966 and 1976, theory progressed to reality as blacks won every county office except sheriff. The stage was now set to see whether or not political power could be transformed to economic power. The major accomplishments of black political empowerment were symbolic, social, and psychological until McCown became active. During the McCown era, the accomplishments of the county government were becoming more practical as ECCO was expanding to offer more jobs through the skillful gaining of foundation and federal funds. Black I economic independence was becoming a reality and political participation became less of a threat to the livelihood of black Hancock citizens. After his death and the demise of ECCO, the benefits of black empowerment were reduced to the symbolic, social, and psychological although blacks presently hold the same number of offices. Although it has not yet happened in Hancock, black constituents usually grow accustomed to these nontangible benefits and grow apathetic if the black elected officials cannot convince industries to locate in the county to provide jobs.

The veterans of the civil rights movement greatly overemphasized the power of the ballot to make changes. Although the Voting Rights Act freed blacks from legal barriers to voting, it did not remove the threat of economic intimidation. McCown realized that the black vote would never reach its full potential as long as blacks were subject to economic intimidation. Because McCown operated on this premise, Hancock, for a brief period, served as a national model for black political mobilization, especially in the Black-Belt South. Rozier’s failure to critically examine the merits of this philosophy seriously diminishes the value of Black Boss.

Lawrence J. Hanks is a graduate student in government at Harvard University. He is presently studying Hancock County as part of his dissertation on black political participation in the rural South since the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Elephants in the Cottonfields

Randall Williams — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:07 +0000

Elephants in the Cottonfields

By Randall Williams

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 19-20

Elephants in the Cottonfields: Ronald Reagan and the New Republican South. Wayne Greenhaw. Macmillan, 1982.

The growing strength of the Republican party in Dixie has taken many Democrats by both storm and surprise, but the G.O.P. muscle-building did not begin yesterday. Explaining this fact is only one of the services performed here by author Wayne Greenhaw, though if he had accomplished nothing else Elephants would still bee success.

In fact the book offers a great deal more. Greenhaw has assembled detailed profiles of the leading personalities behind the Republican surge; he manages to give us a picture of the situation in every Southern state, and his interviews with young voters reveal what the South’s political future might be if many Republican dreams–and Democratic nightmares–are realized.

In that sense, Greenhaw’s book is non-partisan political reportage; both Democrats and Republicans will come away from Elephants knowing much more about their respective parties.

There is plenty of history here that never gets taught in many Southern schools. Greenhaw starts at the beginning, with the Southern reaction to the formation of the Republican party. Then he moves ahead, through secession, through war, then Reconstruction, then the return to power in the South of white Democrats.

Of more immediate interest is the examination of how Goldwater fever hit the South in 1964. Here Ronald Reagan appeared for the first time, and Richard Nixon returned, and the groundwork was laid for the first real two-party politics in the South in one hundred years.

Greenhaw writes that this was no accident but an indicator of the polarization within the Democratic party over racial issues. Strom Thurmond was not the only Democrat converting to Republicanism out of a belief that the South was being forced by national Democrats into a Second Reconstruction.

But as white Southern Democrats abandoned their party, blacks moved into it. (The quotes by George Wallace–the ’64 model–on this development are intriguing.) More than ninety percent of blacks voted Democratic in 1964, signaling the extent to which Lincoln’s party and the Democrats had switched roles.

Elephants is a contemporary story from this point on, and begins to be peopled by familiar characters. Here for example is Jesse Helms, who began as “a soda jerk at the local drugstore, sweeping out the weekly Monroe Enquirer, and writing up the high school (athletic games),” and eventually became a newspaper, radio and television personality, which gave him the platform he needed to become a well-known conservative voice in the “tobacco valleys of eastern North Carolina.”

Thousands of words have been written about Helms, but few have as carefully explored his early career and the foundation of his astonishing political popularity built around a philosophy of negativism . . . “He has always against something, whether it was food stamps for the needy, sex education for the ignorant, or government-paid abortions for women who could not otherwise afford such drastic measures of birth control.” Meanwhile, adds Greenhaw, “federal support for tobacco farmers was a necessity as (Helms) viewed it. Besides, his wife had a tobacco allotment.”

Similarly profiled is Jeremiah Denton, the junior senator from Alabama who rode his reputation as a Vietnam war hero into the Capitol. Both Denton and Helms are important to any discussion of Republicans today, but they do not represent the entire party. In fact, the detail with which Elephants examines the extreme right, especially the religious right, reveals the serious differences which exist within the Republican party.

Representing another faction of the GOP is Tennessee’s Howard Baker, through whom Greenhaw illustrates the “new old Republican order.” Baker’s Senate seat adjoins those of both Helms and Denton, but his brand of Republicanism may as well be from another planet. While Helms was reading segregationist editorials over the air in North Carolina in the Sixties, Baker was studiously keeping to the middle of the road, voting against federal funds for busing but for all major civil rights legislation.

Greenhaw’s skill as a reporter has never been more evident than in the chapter he does on Lee Atwater, the South Carolina protege of Thurmond who ramrodded the Reagan campaign in the South and in his spare time managed the campaigns of six Republican congressional candidates (all six won).

Atwater is the master–and originator, he says–of the Negative Factor Theory of politics. This theory is put into practice through a simple technique: Never mind the issues, just raise lots of money, find dirt on the opponent, then publicize the hell out of it. If no dirt exists, invent some.

This chapter should be memorized by any Democrat planning to run for office in what used to be the Solid South. However, Greenhaw writes not just about Atwater’s strategies, but about the man himself. In fact, he peels Atwater like an onion, layer by layer, yet he does

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it in such a way that probably no one will enjoy that chapter more than Atwater himself.

Greenhaw makes no projections for the future success or failure of Atwater and his Republican colleagues. He acknowledges that although Republicans are growing in strength, Democrats generally still control the South but with a looser grip than before.

What will become of the young Republicans who call themselves progressives, or the New Right apostles who viewed Reagan’s election as a mandate for them? That remains to be seen, of course, but Greenhaw has given us a good look at the landscape.

Randall Williams, a writer and editor who lives in Montgomery, is a Yellow-dog Democrat.

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music

David E. Whisnant — Sat, 01 Jan 1983 05:00:08 +0000

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 20-24

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music, selected and annotated by Bill Malone (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981). Eight LP or cassette set, boxed, with 55 pp. illustrated brochure. $54.95.

Classic Country Music, prepared by Bill C. Malone for the Smithsonian Institution, takes one back to the clear headwaters: the first commercial hillbilly recording (Eck Robertson’s “Sally Gooden” for Victor in 1922); the first big sellers (Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Ole 97” of 1924, Carl T. Sprague’s “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” of 1925, Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting For a Train” of 1928); one of the earliest recorded examples of steel guitar playing (Derby and Tarlton’s “Birmingham Jail” of 1927); the first big hit by a woman performer (Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” of 1935); Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys performing the Jimmie Rodgers hit (and later bluegrass standard) “Muleskinner Blues” in October, 1940 (with Monroe on guitar); the first recorded example of mandolin cross-picking (Jim and Jesse’s “Are You Missing Me” of 1952), and so on. Altogether a hundred and forty-three tunes, from Fiddlin’ John Carson and the Stonemans to Tammy, Willie, Merle and Dolly. “Funny,” as Willie sings, “How Time Slips Away.”

So friends, don’t delay. This offer is good for a limited time only. Send your check or money order for $54.95 TODAY to “Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. 20560.” That’s S-M-I-T-H-S-O-N-I-A-N, Washington, D.C., two oh five, six oh. The first one hundred orders will receive, in addition to these eight fine records or cassettes packaged in a beautiful fold-out box you will be proud to display, an autographed eight by ten glossy photograph of your favorite country singer, suitable for framing. You’ll hear the inimitable Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” so beloved by many a parking lot picker; the Delmores’ “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” made famous later by Merle Travis, the Louvin Brothers, and Doc Watson; the original “Orange Blossom Special” by the Rouse Brothers; and the incomparable Roy scuff’s “Great Speckled Bird.” You’ll thrill to Cliff Carlisle’s wailing dobro, Lulu Belle and Scotty’s “Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming),” and many, many more. It’s an opportunity you can’t afford to miss. So send today. If you are not completely satisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded.

Well, I “sent away,” as they used to say in the days of boxtops, and I am indeed (almost) completely satisfied. Bill Malone has done, on the whole, an excellent job; it would be folly to expect that his (or anyone’s) 143 choices

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(from a few tens of thousands) could ever satisfy everyone. Someone could always ask why this tune and not that one? So the task here is not to quibble about individual tunes, but to ask how well the eight records reflect the complicated and dynamic history of country music.

One the whole, very well indeed. Malone’s strong and sensitive commentary, arising from his recollections of growing up with country music as a poor boy in east Texas, is written with the grace and depth and gentleness that come from knowing–as most country songs tell us–that life is both very hard and very beautiful. Malone divides the history of country music roughly into five periods: the birth of the industry in the 1920s (Dalhart, Uncle Dave, Gid Tanner and others); national dissemination and popularization in the 1930s (southeasterners such as the Delmores, Monroes, Bolicks, and Mainers; and southwesterners such as Bob Wills, Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers); the “honky tonk” period, ;94153 (Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Hank Williams); rockabilly and country pop, 1953-63 (Cash, Ray Price, Chet Atkins, Lefty Frizzell and others); and the current scene since 1960. An additional category–bluegrass and the urban folk revival–cuts across several of the latter chronological periods. Malone’s historical essay is supplemented by extensive discographical, historical and interpretative notes on each selection.

In his essay and notes, Malone surveys some of the major social, political and economic factors that have shaped the music: developments in the radio, recording and television industries; the Depression and World War II; the urban folk revival; the movement of country people to the city; the proliferation of small record companies in recent years; the fusion of southeastern and southwestern styles; the responses of individual performs to social pressure and dramatic social change. He also explicates some of the major internal dynamics of the music: the movement from personally modest solo performers and small permanent ensembles to high-priced, self-conscious stars “backed” by large aggregations of anonymous session musicians; the shift from simple to complex, virtuoso instrumental styles; the replacement of traditional, public domain tunes by copyrighted material; the gradual evolution from fiddle, banjo and guitar to drums, dobro, and pedal steel; and the technological drift from single takes on wax to twenty-four track taping, mixing, and overdubbing.

By selecting carefully from Malone’s 143 tunes, one can also assemble some interesting “sub-histories” of country music. One can follow to some extent the emergence of women performers, from the Coon Creek Girls through Patsy Montana and Molly O’Day to Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. One can observe the seemingly perennial ambivalence of the country music audience with respect to rough vs. smooth or cultivated vocal styles: Uncle Dave, Martha Carson, Molly O’Day and Wilma Lee Cooper on the one hand, and a rather surprising array of smooth singers on the other–Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Vernon Dalhart (a Texas-born light opera tenor who tried to sound rough again, but couldn’t), Jimmie Rodgers, Red Foley, Eddie Arnold, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and others. Or one can line up the brother duets (Callahans, Bolicks, Sheltons, Delmores, Monroes, Kershaws, Louvins, Everlys, Stanleys, MacReynoldses, Osbornes, Lillys) and wonder whether such duets were, developmentally, a way-station between the older family-based groups and the newer luxury bus-owning stars–the last remnant of the close rural family before its final atomization, the archetypal (Jacob and Esau) binary pair struggling for unity and harmony against the fragmenting forces of a culture.

A fine collection, then, and a fine job of selection and presentation, terms of both and order Malone brings to it, and the other interpretative orderings it invites. Still, there are some problems that go beyond quibbling about “significant” (read favorite) tunes excluded. Malone writes at length, for example, about rockabilly and country pop, but we get recorded examples of only the latter. There is no tune by Elvis, Carl Perkins, or Jerry Lee Lewis (a problem with permissions from Sun Records, perhaps?). And from my perspective, there are altogether too many bluegrass tunes (two complete sides; eighteen tunes; nearly thirteen percent of the total, including three by Bill Monroe; more than twice the number of gospel tunes–almost half in bluegrass versions). Could that have resulted from the Smithsonian’s exaggerated sensitivity to its local middle-class audience in Washington–rightly known as the bluegrass capital of the east coast? As for gospel itself, it seem rather seriously under-represented in view of its prominence among those people who gave birth to and sustained country music. Virtually every country music radio or television show ever broadcast, after all, included at least one gospel song.

One also wonders why there is not a single example of country blues, which admittedly was not featured on the major country music radio stations or barn dances, but which was every bit as important a part of the country music scene after 1920–both as separate idiom as influence on white performers–as were southern mountain string bands. Indeed, Malone himself treats these performers in his Southern Music American Music (1979).

But finally the larger questions beckon: why, toward what ends, and with what effect has the Smithsonian at long last ventured to dip its elite toe into the waters of commercial country music? The institution has been

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there since 1846, after all, and could well have documented at first hand most of the now long lost traditions from which country music draws its styles and idioms.

Why didn’t it? Partly because its directors have almost always been natural scientists with at best a limited interest in humanistic or artistic matters. The Smithsonian’s most significant foray into cultural work (prior to the 1960s, anyway) was the Bureau of Ethnology, formed by Major John Wesley Powell in 1879, and even that enterprise proceeded under the flag of scientific anthropology and archaeology. Nevertheless, for more than a half-century the BAE carried out extensive studies of American Indian history and life: language and literature; material culture; myth, ritual, and ceremonial life; music and dance. But the Bureau was never able to take what would appear to have been the logical step of moving from studying Indian life and culture to studying the rich and diverse culture of the country’s many immigrant and enclaved cultural groups.

That did not mean that such studies fared poorly within federal institutions supposedly concerned with culture. The Library of Congress established its Archive of Folk Song in 1928, but it was (and remains to this day) small and poorly funded, particularly in comparison with analogous European efforts. The cultural projects of the New Deal for the most part did not survive more than a decade. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, established in 1965, were initially oriented exclusively toward high culture, and more than a decade later had to be forced to begin to pay modest (rather grudging, as it turned out) attention to traditional, non-elite culture. The first major policy affirmation of federal commitment to the recognition of traditional culture (the American Folklife Preservation Act) was signed into law at the opening of the nation’s two hundredth year.

Meanwhile, since the mid-1960s, the Smithsonian has been inching toward a rather tentative involvement with non-elite culture. It staged its first Festival of American Folklife in 1967, and opened a neighborhood museum in the mostly black District of Columbia suburb of Anacostia in 1968. Those stirrings, hesitant as they were, came in response to both the social upheavals of the sixties (Resurrection City was set up virtually in the front yard of the Smithsonian) and the urgings of a few individuals who had become infatuated by traditional music during the “folk revival” of the preceding decade.

If one looks closely at the institution’s tentative gestures toward the culturally unwashed, however, they generally prove to have substantial ties to the old elitism. The Smithsonian’s first major phonograph record issuing project was its six-record Classic Jazz package of 1973, aimed at–and bought mainly by, I would guess–middle class whites, who form the bulk of the jazz listening audience. (The Smithsonian’s jazz recording series now totals about three dozen discs.) Not until country music–historically the music of lower and working class whites, primarily in the South–began to be accorded status by a growing national (and upscale) audience did the Smithsonian draw it within the institutional pale. Not, indeed, until country music became chic, and designer-jeaned and powder blue cowboy-hatted Junior Leaguers began to listen to bluegrass and pump quarters into mechanical broncos at scores of Gilley’s replicas all across the country.

Even at that, there are signs that the Smithsonian released Classic Country Music with some sense of peril. Consider, for example, the preface to the fifty-six page brochure, supplied by the Smithsonian’s Division of Performing Arts, which issued the set. It is the only official institutional statement in the entire package, and therefore presumably an index to the attitudes of at least some Smithsonian policy makers toward the project and its subject matter. In the main, the preface attempts to apply to country music concepts and analytical categories developed to analyze and interpret elite (“classical”) music. Thus we learn that most country songs are in “AABA form,” are “atrophic,” and have a “melodic sequence” that moves from tonic to subdominant and back to tonic. So far, so good. There certainly is a need to comprehend country music in terms more precise and analytically useful than those employed by disc jockeys and fans, most of whom couldn’t care less whether Freddie Fender’s “I’ll Be There (Before the Next Teardrop Falls)” is atrophic or not.

As in so many cases, however, the technical terminology quickly proves to be something of a mask for value judgments. The preface in fact uses musicological terminology partly to dignify music which someone et the Smithsonian apparently still judges to lack its own intrinsic dignity. Thus country songs, the preface continues, cannot be expected to display the “cultivated charm or sophisticated wit of the standard popular song.” The accompanying instruments are not played in a. “classical style,” but are “struck,” “twanged,” “scraped,” or “flailed,” and voices are “rough-edged,” without “artificial refinement.” Subject matter leans toward “cynicism and wish-fulfillment” (rather like Don Juan or Madame Butterfly, one supposes).

The most obvious problem with such evaluations is that they simply will not wash–unless one can reasonably describe Don Reno as “twanging,” Vassar Clements and Clark Kessinger as “scraping,” Jim Reeves’ voice as “rough-edged,” and Tom T. Hall’s songs as lacking wit. Any reasonably sympathetic hearing of the full range of country music would confirm that it is characterized by great breadth of subject, variety of form, and subtlety of theme. And for an untutored bunch of strikers, twangers, scrapers, and flailers, Eck Robertson, Lilly Mae Ledford, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Earl Scruggs, Vassar Clements and their like manage to achieve a rather dazzling level of instrumental virtuosity.

A more important matter, however, is that in modern society, public institutions such as the Smithsonian have considerable power to legitimize or de-legitimize certain cultural forms and expressions–to prescribe how and in what terms they shall be understood, and to define the very boundaries within which new legitimacy is to be conferred. In this set of records, it seems to me, the Smithsonian has sent the public a mixed message: country music is a “truly democratic” art form (as they tell us) which by now even the more timid an’ conventional amongst us can safely listen to in public, but

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it is withal a little scrape-y and twangy. And so we must distance ourselves from it, and confine our admiration of it to those aspects which can be described in language I (AABAs, subdominants, and vocal lines decorated with “melismatic effects”) whose very use reminds subliminally that we usually listen to and think about “better” music. At a certain level, the preface reads a bit like a letter one might write to a wealthy and sophisticated friend back home in Boston or Marin County after one’s elegant cruise ship has docked briefly at a funky cultural port. Oh, Millicent, the music of those people was simply so wonderfully primitive and wild!

In such a situation, those of us who can’t afford the cruise would do well to keep at least a couple of things straight. Historically, poor and working people in this country have kept hillbilly, country, Cajun, blues, and gospel music alive in the face of a consensus of condescension and disapproval by virtually every established public cultural institution from the local level on up. At this late date they hardly need any favors or assistance from the Smithsonian. One wonders, in fact, if Classic Country Music would ever have been issued primarily out of concern and respect for the audience which gave the music birth and sustained it. It took an avalanche of designer jeans to do that. The weather vane that tops one of the castellated towers at 1000 Jefferson Drive isn’t there for nothing.

That is one thing to remember. The other is this: country music has not only been nurtured and sustained by poor and working people with precious little assistance or approval from their own tax-supported public institutions, but it has also until recently been studied, archived, written about and reissued in much the same way. Like many a banjo picker or gospel singer, scholars Bill Malone, Bob Pinson, Judith McCulloh, Charles Wolfe, Archie Green, Norman Cohen and many others have kept their “day jobs.” They have done their writing about country music mostly at night and on weekends taken interview trips out of their own pockets, pasted record labels and stapled little newsletters and journals together on dining room tables, and run organizations from post office boxes. The spirit behind the enterprise–one might almost say the political posture that informs it–is a spirit (and posture) of love, of self-affirmation, of resistance, of advocacy, of defiant somebody too-ness. As such, it is invaluable and irreplaceable.

At length, then, it is less important that Classic Country Music was issued (re-issues are plentiful, after all) than that the Smithsonian commissioned Bill Malone to do it. The energy that Malone has poured into country music scholarship for twenty years–the very perspective he brings to it–comes ultimately from the physical, social, and cultural landscape of east Texas. That perspective both informed his choice of tunes and shaped his language:

When my brother came home on his last furlough before going overseas, he, my mother, another brother, and I sat around the Spring Street Bowling Alley watching the bowlers (pleasures were often simple and cheap for the poor) and waiting for the Trailways bus that would take him back to camp. I do not know

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what thoughts ran through his mind, but the possibility of not returning must have been one of them.

The brother keeps feeding nickels into the jukebox, listening over and over to the 1941 hit “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” which Malone calls “a song of parting and of hoped-for reconciliation.”

If the issuing of Classic Country Music betokens the beginning of a cultural reconciliation between the Smithsonian (indeed the whole federal cultural establishment)and the little people dropping quarters into jukeboxes in bus stations and bowling alleys all across the land, it is an event of not only musical but also profound social significance.

One of the worst sins a reviewer can commit is to judge a piece of work by irrelevant criteria, or to condemn it for not being what it does not pretend to be. Classic Country Music was not designed as a scholarly treatise. If one wants more extensive biographical, historical or discographical information on country music, there are places to get it–including Malone’s own other work. If one wants a fuller reissuing job done on the Carter family, the Blue Sky Boys, or the Sons of the Pioneers, one may turn to the fine albums produced by the tiny private John Edwards Memorial Foundation. If it is more intensive analysis one desires, that also is available.

The only fair question one may finally ask is whether Classic Country Music does what it may reasonably be expected to do to entertain and educate the rather select group who will even know it exists, and who can afford to lay down the fifty-five dollars. And beyond that, whether it is a reliable document to place in the thousands of community and school libraries that will probably acquire it.

My own answer–not in any way intended either to belittle Malone’s work or to underestimate the formidable task he faced–is a qualified yes. The qualification has less to do with any of the objections I raised earlier (too much bluegrass, too little gospel, no country blues) than with Malone’s having stopped short of raising some of the more embarrassing questions–as all of us partisans of country music are want to do upon occasion. Out of many possible examples, I mention two briefly: what about the “dark side” of country music, and what about its utility as a creative and correcting force in American life?

The dark side is almost impossible not to notice. To put it bluntly, a good deal of country music has been (and remains) maudlin, racist, sexist, and jingoistic. Much of bluegrass in particular accepts (even celebrates) demeaning images of women and puerile conceptions of relationships between men and women. (Grand opera does, too, but it is another matter.) The lyrics have been cleaned up a bit (or have disappeared altogether), but “rigger” songs (of minstrel and other origins) linger to this day in fiddle and string band repertoire. And our every domestic or military misadventure produces its musical apologia on the country charts.

If one were to condemn every form of creative expression for its lapses into bad taste, reactionary politics, or inhumane sentiment, no form would survive (not even grand opera). The point is not to condemn or to dismiss, but to understand the dialectic. Merle Haggard wrote both “Okie from Muskogee” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.” Johnny Cash has sung for Folsom inmates and for Billy Graham. Loretta Lynn’s coal miner’s daughter memories may live on “in a cabin in Butcher Holler,” but lately she has been doing commercials for Amax coal company. And Dolly doesn’t wear her coat of many colors anymore.

To understand country music, the agonizing dialectic must not only be faced as a feature of particular songs or individual careers; it must become the very foundation for analysis. Much of that task remains before us, and we who have grown up with the music must do it, or relinquish the task to those who know less about our values and perspectives than they need to to understand what happened between Eck Robertson and Willie Nelson.

David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).