Southerners and Central America. The Ideology of Domination

By Dow Kirkpatrick

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 1-3, 5-6

Southerners, of all US citizens, should be best equipped to understand the peoples’ rebellion in Central America. The forces which impoverished the South for a hundred years are the same which produce oppression in Latin America.

The primary issue is the ideology of domination versus dependency, not East versus West, capitalism versus communism. The application of the ideology of domination has produced dependency in Central America and the US South. Dependency results in the oppression of poverty.

Born a Yankee, Georgia is my home. Almost fifty years ago I made that choice. Native born Southerners have affirmed my decision by accepting me as something other than a carpetbagger. This personal history may give a perspective on the history of our region not seen so clearly by others.

Another factor sharpens my perceptions. I am a member of The Century Club, persons who have traveled in one hundred countries. I prefer to think of myself as at home in the world–not a Southerner, nor a Yankee, not even an American. I resent passports and visas. National boundaries are anachronisms in today’s world.

For nine years I have served The United Methodist Church as a missionary-in-reverse. Based on the conviction that God is speaking a special word today among the oppressed poor of the world–a word North Americans need

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to hear–have lived a substantial portion of each year somewhere in Latin America. During these periods of residence I have not preached to them, nor taught, nor been associated with a project which did something for them. Just the reverse, I have sought to live in Peru, Central America, Cuba and Brazil in a listening, learning mode.

The balance of each year is spent in the United States (my mission field) trying to preach and teach to North Americans. The implications for us of what Latin Americans know about religious faith–that we don’t seem to know–is my message.

From such experiences I expect Southerners to be aware of the parallels between their impoverishments and the plight of the Latin American poor.

In February 1982 I was invited to debate, in Atlanta, Lawrence Pezzullo, US Ambassador to Nicaragua during the end of the Somoza dictatorship. In preparation for this event I clarified my memory of one of the dramatic examples of this domination/dependency syndrome.

Former Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall has documented his role in helping to liberate the South from the disparity of freight rates kept in place by a conspiracy of northern railroads. “As a boy in Newnan I learned about the poverty of a great segment of our Georgia people. . .As I grew older. . . I realized that the south was merely a colonial appendage of the imperial domain called the north.”

Let me set next to Arnall’s image, “a colonial appendage of the imperial domain,” a conversation with the chief economist of the Sandinista Government of Nicaragua in November 1983.

Xabier Gorostiaga, Jesuit priest, Cambridge-trained economist, heads the Central American Institute for Economic and Social Research. The Institute has recently issued An Alternative Policy for Central America and the Caribbean (June 1983. Summary and Conclusions of a Policy Workshop held in The Hague), which includes the observation that “The United States’ commitment to preserving its hegemony in the region has given the struggle for social justice in Central America an anti-imperialist character.”

To return to former Governor Arnall: “The people of the south had reason to know that he who controls the means of production has a vehicle for tyranny.”

During his terms as Attorney General (1939-43) and Governor (1943-47) of the state of Georgia, Ellis Arnall carried the case of the South against “the imperial domain” to the US Supreme Court, won freedom from “the North’s stangle-hold,” and helped break the “shackles.” Until then it cost thirty-nine percent more to send a freight shipment from Atlanta to New York than the same shipment coming from north to south. This was only one of many repressive economic, social and political factors operating against the development of the South.

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Governor Arnall’s description of his homeland in the 1920s and ’30s sounds like El Salvador and Guatemala today:

I found that the only way the few textile mills in the South could stay in business competitively with their Northern counterparts was by paying low wages, requiring the workers to live in mill villages owned by the companies, requiring the workers to trade with the mill commissaries on credit terms which were much higher than offered by non-company stores, to use child labor and other devices which the mill owners did not want to employ but which were required for them to stay in business.

He continues with a description which accurately parallels what I have heard from economists in Nicaragua and Cuba concerning the state of the economies they inherited from US–supported Somoza and Batista domination:

The end of the Civil War intensified the North’s strangle hold, since the exhausted South was left entirely without capital with which to develop its own manufacturing. The North concentrated on the exploitation of the Southern natural resources which were so plentiful. The Northern owners of Southern plants confined their efforts to crude processing of these raw materials, shipping them north for final fabrication into usable articles….As each carload of raw materials moved north, that much less wealth was left in the South.

This should help us understand what Latin Americans mean when they say, capitalists decapitalize dependent nations.

The turning point in Governor Arnall’s struggle came in 1942 when he won a decision (Georgia vs. Evans) in which the US Supreme Court held that Georgia was a “person” and could sue as a person under the antitrust law.

Southerners with a strong streak of humanity should be expected to regard Central America as a “person.” This perspective would challenge the Reagan Administration’s insistence upon seeing the Central America revolution as a battleground between the forces of “communism” and those of “freedom.”

The only way to understand correctly the Sandinista Government and the rebellions in El Salvador and Guatemala is to know the revolutionary significance of regarding the people of those nations as “persons.” This is the definitive difference between US policy and the Central American Alternative:

The politics of counter-insurgency and containment adopted by the United States over a decade ago, but applied with renewed zeal under the Reagan administration, is essentially defensive. It proposes no alternative other than that of repressing popular demands.

I have added the emphasis, because that sentence clearly distinguishes the differences between US and Sandinista regard for persons.

What kind of alternative results from a commitment to people as persons?

The first proposition is that no Regional Alternative can be implemented successfully unless it conforms to what we have called the ‘logic of the majority’, that is to say, any solution must, above all, conform to the interests of the Region’s poor who constitute the vast majority of the population. If a Regional Alternative is to be genuinely democratic, its fundamental characteristic must be to give the common people not merely a voice, but the leading voice, in constructing their own society.

This contrasts with other models based on the logic of profit, capital and growth for growth’s sake.

Ordinary men and women have come to see themselves as agents of social change and have begun to recover their identity both as individuals and as citizens of a nation.

While US observers focus on our fetish for ‘elections’ as a sign of democracy, we easily overlook the democratic pluralism, more extensive than a two party electoral process, in the emergence of popular organizations. These grass roots organizations, pluralistic in their political positions and multi-class in composition, provide a more representative presence in the Council of State in Nicaragua than the Congress of the US.

I recently spent some time with the Council of State which is composed of elected representatives of thirty-six different organizations, only six or seven of which are political parties. The diversity there makes the Senate of the United States look like a collection of clones. Again, quoting from the Central American Institute’s Alternative Policy:

The formal political institutions of El Salvador and Guatemala have collapsed … Given this situation, popular struggles are opening up new space for a political alternative based on a mixed economy, non-alignment and new forms of participatory democracy.

A second fundamental of this Alternative is nonalignment. Xabier Gorostiaga defines what this means–diversifying the dependency. “We intend to build an economy,” he said in private conversation, “which rests on four equal legs: one-fourth with the US, one-fourth with Latin American countries, one-fourth with Europe, and one-fourth with Africa and the socialist countries, including Russia. In the past our national economy rested very unevenly on two legs–one very big one with the US and a much smaller one with the rest of the world. This is no way to stabilize a society. We must diversify our dependency.”

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As we approach the end of the twentieth century, it is clear that national sovereignty and self-respect cannot be attained by living in anyone’s ‘backyard.’ In failing to concede political and economic space for non-alignment, the United States, far from guaranteeing its security, jeopardizes it. This, above all, must be the message of all those, including friends of the United States in Western Europe, who wish to promote peace.

The third proposition is that any alternative must be regional in character. “For the many small (in some cases island) economies of the area, the only alternative to economic dependence on the United States is the construction of a regional market. . .”

This is the truth behind the falsehood which accuses Nicaragua of supplying the El Salvador revolution. “One must remember that the Region has a shared colonial history, and, today, an increasingly shared experience of oppression and violence against which so many common people of the Region are united in different forms of struggle.”

Governor Ellis Arnall rightly tried to lay Southern oppression on the consciences of Northern states as a national concern. The same lesson is being clearly spoken from Central America to the United States’ South, North and to the entire world.

In a 1943 address to the National Governors’ Conference in Columbus, Ohio, Arnall said:

We (in the South) have seen, for eighty years, our land despoiled and exploited in an effort to turn it into a colonial empire whose riches others might enjoy. We have seen our section isolated from the rest of America by economic barriers that impoverished our people. We have seen the leadership of other sections of America turn away from our urgent pleas for justice with blind eyes and deaf ears … We ask but one thing: Equality and full fellowship within that union which we helped to create. We ask no more. We will compromise for no less.

The same plea comes from Latin America to North America in this moment. We cannot talk of our affluence without including their poverty. They are poor because the poor subsidize the rich. We could not be what we are without making them what they are. As north and south must be seen as one unit in the US, so the south and north of the American hemisphere must be regarded as a single unit.

There is a more fundamental factor in Central America which explains the present social, economic and political ferment. It is an actuality with which Southerners should be easily ‘simpatico’–the religious factor.

Sidebar: II

Central America is engaged in a twentieth century biblical reformation. Failure to see this is to misread everything else going on there.

“The Bible Belt” is a characterization of the South meant to be derisive. The label could be appropriated positively, if allegiance to the Bible links us to a profound understanding of Central America revolution as biblical reformation.

A new Christian faith, born in struggle, lived biblically, is as radically different from the conventional religion practiced in US churches as Luther’s Reformation differed from the theology of Pope Leo X in the sixteenth century.

This is not just a “religious” phenomenon. Believer or not, the person who ignores the social, economic and political results of this biblical reformation flaws the entire analysis. The reading then is as shallow as a social, economic, and political history of the past four centuries would be with Luther omitted.

The modern day reformation covers all of Latin America. Central America is simply the place where, in this moment, it is most dramatically available to our understanding.

The Regional Alternative referred to above is the social, economic and political outcome of reading the Bible from the perspective of the oppressed poor. If the ‘good news’ is that God has taken an option for the poor (as Jesus says when annoucing his reason for coming), then the mission of the church must be to opt for the poor. When the church lives faithfully this option, a social, economic and political revolution, based on the logic of the majority, may be expected.

I’m tired of hearing Marx given all the credit for what Jesus initiated.

Who can estimate, for example, the impact on the future of this hemisphere of a hundred-thousand small organizations of the poor in the slums of Brazil–communities which fight political battles for justice and read the scriptures together in the light of their struggles?

The rich, who study the Bible and accept its call to conversion, discover the same truth, so obvious to the poor. Don Emilio Baltodano is the Comptroller General of Nicaragua. Before the revolution he was a wealthy coffee exporter. He asked his fourteen children and children-in-law what they wanted of his estate before he gave his wealth to the Sandinistas. They wanted nothing. Several of them are Ministers in the present government.

Let me report some observations made at a weekly Bible study I attended in Don Emilio’s home in November 1983. A young mother, who was described to me as from perhaps the richest family of anyone present that night, said, “Thank God I don’t have the security and isolation I previously had. Then we went to the beach as a family. Now all my children, except the five year old, are in the mountains. We go as a

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family to pick coffee. Then we had no understanding of our people. Now we don’t have privileges above others, but we are close to the people.”

Another responded to Luke 12:32. “According to the gospel the poor are giving the most, not the rich. They give everything. The gospel is demanding more of us. We have not given enough yet. We must change our idea of family. These crucified people are our family. They are our hope.”

The dean of the law faculty reminded the group that their social class were descendants of historical figures of the nation. “We have not only our own sins, but the historical injustices. Our past privileged position was a bad privilege. Now it is a good privilege to be a servant of the poor.”

Ricardo Chavarria, Vice-Minister of Energy, recalls the scripture of the evening’s study saying, of those who have much, much will be expected. “But historically much was demanded of the poor. To live in Nicaragua today is a privilege far greater than to be rich. The rest of Latin America will be expecting a testimony of Christians. If we fail, it will affect all of Latin America.”

Sidebar: III

Of all the conflicting interpretations, what can we believe about Central America? It is not oversimplification to summarize the truth in four points:

The revolution of the poor is happening.

It is a revolution we can’t stop. The only impact the US is having and seems intent on having is to make the victory of the oppressed more costly–for them and for ourselves.

It’s a revolution we shouldn’t want to stop. To be true to our own idealism we should be on the side of the people, instead of against them.

The Latin American revolution is a biblical reformation which will shape every aspect of the future of this hemisphere.

Dow Kirkpatrick is a missionary-in-reverse of The United Methodist Church, bringing the Christian Faith as believed and practiced in Latin America to North Americans. A substantial portion of each year is spent in residence somewhere in Latin America, listening and learning From January to June he holds Encuentros throughout the US. In these spiritual life retreats he helps persons re-examine their own faith in the light of Latin American realities. Most recently (fall of 1983) he travelled to Argentina, Brazil, Nicaragua and Cuba–his sixth visit to Nicaragua and seventh to Cuba.

The Kissinger Commission Report

By Dow Kirkpatrick

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, p. 2

The Kissinger Commission report (the President’s commission on Central America) fails to recommend an alternative for Central America. It calls for more of what has already failed.

This failure results from flawed premises. The first is that US national security overrides everything else. The second is the assumption that US security can best be assured by casting the problem as geopolitical. “The real enemy of the United States is not Russia, but the poverty of the people,” said a Central American to me recently.

The plight of the people is recognized by the Report, but the solution is to depend on the same old structures and dynamics which have been the cause of the impoverished of the region. As outlined in this article and the following interview, there is an Alternative, neither US capitalism nor Soviet socialism, which designs an economic system to bring full humanity to the majority of the people. If we really want a secure region close to our borders, then we should join the poor in reorganizing society to meet human needs.

Voting for the “Covert” War

By Staff

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, p. 4

On two occasions during the past year, most of the Southern representatives in the US House voted to endorse the Reagan Administration’s war on Nicaragua. In the voting records shown below, column #1 shows the vote on the Boland-Zablocki amendment to the 1983 Intelligence Authorization Act (7/28/83). Column #2 shows the vote on the Boland amendment to the 1984 intelligence authorization bill (10/20/83). A “+” signifies a vote to stop funds for covert operations in Nicaragua; a “-” signifies a vote not to stop these funds. An “A” signifies absence.

ALABAMA	1	2
Bevill (D)	–	–
Dickinson (R)	–	–
Edwards (R)	–	–
Erdreich (D)	–	–
Flippo (D)	–	–
Nichols (D)	–	–
Shelby (D)	–	–
ARKANSAS
Alexander (D)	+	+
Anthony (D)	+	+
Bethune (R)	–	–
Hammerschmidt (R)	–	–
FLORIDA
Bennett (D)	+	+
Bilirakis (R)	–	–
Chappell (D)	–	–
Fascell (D)	–	–
Fuqua (D)	–	–
Gibbons (D)	+	+
Hutto (D)	–	–
Ireland (D)	–	–
Lehman, W (D)	+	+
Lewis, T (R)	–	–
MacKay (D)	+	+
Mack (R)	–	–
McCollum (R)	–	–
Mica (D)	–	–
Nelson (D)	–	–
Pepper (D)	+	A
Shaw (R)	–	–
Smith, L (D)	+	+
Young, C (R)	–	–
GEORGIA
Barnard (D)	–	–
Fowler (D)	+	+
Gingrich (R)	–	–
Hatcher (D)	–	–
Jenkins (D)	–	–
Levitas (D)	–	–
McDonald (D)	–	–
Ray (D)	–	–
Rowland (D)	–	–
Thomas, L (D)	–	–
LOUISIANA
Boggs (D)	+	+
Breaux (D)	–	–
Huckaby (D)	–	–
Livingston (R)	–	–
Long, G (D)	+	+
Moore (R)	–	–
Roemer (D)	–	–
Tauzin (D)	–	–
MISSISSIPPI
Dowdy (D)	A	–
Franklin (R)	–	–
Lott (R)	–	–
Montgomery (D)	–	–
Whitten (D)	+	+
NORTH CAROLINA
Andrews (D)	+	+
Britt (D)	+	+
Broyhill (R)	–	–
Clarke (D)	+	+
Hefner (D)	+	+
Jones, W (D)	+	+
Martin, J (R)	–	–
Neal (D)	+	+
Rose (D)	+	+
Valentine (D)	+	+
Whitley (D)	+	+
SOUTH CAROLINA
Campbell (R)	–	–
Derrick (D)	+	+
Hartnett (R)	–	–
Spence (R)	–	–
Spratt (D)	+	+
Tallon (D)	–	–
TENNESSEE
Boner (D)	–	–
Cooper (R)	+	+
Duncan (D)	–	–
Ford (D)	+	+
Gore (D)	+	+
Jones, E (D)	–	–
Lloyd (D)	–	–
Quillen (R)	–	–
Sundquist (R)	–	–
TEXAS
Andrews (D)	+	+
Archer (R)	–	–
Bartlett (R)	–	–
Brooks (D)	+	+
Bryant (D)	+	+
Coleman (D)	+	+
de la Garza (D)	+	+
Fields (R)	–	–
Frost (D)	+	+
Gonzalez (D)	+	+
Gramm (R)	–	–
Hall, R (D)	–	–
Hall, S (D)	–	–
Hance (D)	–	–
Hightower (D)	–	A
Kazen (D)	–	–
Leath (D)	–	–
Leland (D)	+	+
Loeffler (R)	–	–
Ortiz (D)	+	–
Patman (D)	–	–
Paul (R)	–	A
Pickle (D)	+	+
Stenholm (D)	–	–
Vandergriff (D)	–	–
Wilson (D)	–	–
Wright (D)	+	+
VIRGINIA
Bateman (R)	–	–
Bliley (R)	–	–
Boucher (D)	+	+
Daniel (D)	–	–
Olin (D)	+	+
Parris (R)	–	–
Robinson (R)	–	–
Sisisky (D)	–	–
Whitehurst (R)	–	–
Wolf (R)	–	–

“The Logic of the Majority”

By Xabier Gorostiaga

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 6-10

Xabier Gorostiaga: I was born in the Basque country in the north of Spain. My family was very persecuted at that time, after the Civil War (1936-39). In the confrontation between General Franco and the Basques, my father was very involved in the Basque fighting. Then we went into exile. Exile and persecution are part of my vital experience.

Kirkpatrick: You were in a Catholic family. Was the Christian faith a vital force in your family?

Gorostiaga: Yes. Especially with my mother, later also with my father. My father was not a good Christian at the beginning, but was transformed by the religious thinking of an atheist, the Basque philospher Miguel de Unamuno. Then when the Vatican put Unamuno’s writing on the black list of forbidden books, my father had to rethink his own atheism and his own religious beliefs.

Kirkpatrick: The condemnation of the Vatican caused your father to re-think the Christian faith.

Gorostiaga: Yes, but in a very dialetical process. Because instead of saying, “Well, I won’t have anything to do with the church,” my father said, “This man is a real Christian. I don’t know why the church condemned this fellow.” It forced him to rethink. It was a starting process to get closer to an evangelical attitude toward life. And in the last years of his life he was a very committed Christian.

Kirkpatrick: So did you become a Jesuit early in life? And leave home?

Gorostiaga: I came to Latin America very young to do all my religious studies here. The novitiate we call it. Then I studied in Cuba, from 1958 to 1960, in El Caballo, a small town close to Havana. And the Cuban experience was an incredible experience for me. At that time I realized that the role of the Catholic Church in Cuba was a very traditional, very conservative role. The Cuban Church was very rich and had no contact with the poor in Cuba. We were not allowed at that time even to hear Fidel Castro on television. And even though some Christians took part in the revolution, the church was not considered part of the building of a new society. And that experience, in the negative sense, also was important for me.

Kirkpatrick: So you stayed in Latin America after that training?

Gorostiaga: Yes, all the time except my final years doing theology studies. I did my theology studies in a university in the Basque country in order to be close to my mother and father who were very old at that time, and in order that they would be present at my ordination as a priest.
You know the Jesuit province is organized with five 1` small nations in Central America, from Guatemala to Panama. I lived one year and a half in Guatemala, a year in Salvador. In 1961 I was naturalized in Nicaragua. I had a Nicaraguan passport until Somoza took it away. At that time I was an economic advisor of the Panamanian government working on the Panama Canal treaty negotiations so I took the nationality of Panama.
I maintain my Panamanian passport, but I consider myself a Central American citizen. I have been living in all these countries. I have been involved in reform in El Salvador, working with my Jesuit colleagues in Guatemala. For me, Central America is a nation.

Kirkpatrick: So your spiritual formation is very clear then. Has that resulted in an attitude toward the faith that differed from your childhood faith?

Gorostiaga: I was very traditional in my faith when I was a child and even when I became a Jesuit. But what moved me to become a Jesuit was my experience with shantytowns, immigrant towns in the Basque country. People from Andalusia, from Galicia, the poorest part of Spain came to these towns and were living in incredible conditions. Every Sunday for more than three or four years I went with two or three Jesuits to help build houses to teach these people. I think that was the experience that converted me to a real Christianity, the experience that induced me to be a Christian, and also to imitate two or three of these Jesuit priests that I saw working for so many years with these very, very poor, oppressed people.
Later my experience in Cuba, in Ecuador with the very poor Indians, and in Panama with the campesino movement in which Father Hector Gallego, a martyr, was killed in 1971. That experience changed my life. I realized that as Jesuits we had spent four hundred years teaching, assuming, that the rich people would be the creators, the builders of a new society. I realized that we were absolutely wrong. That these people will receive some training, some Christian feelings, but that they will not fight against a society that they are the builders of. I consider that only the oppressed can build a new society. The rich have no interest in a new society because they are the owners of the present society.
Then at the beginning of the 60s, before Medellin* and after, there was a generation breakthrough in the lives of many Jesuit priests, nuns and laymen in Latin America. We said what Monsignor Romero said’ “I was converted.” We found a new way of reading the gospel, a new way of praying, a new way of looking at the different values of society. That was a real conversion. We went to work with the poor, trying to convert the poor and the funny thing is that the poor converted us.
From 1969 to 1971 I did undergraduate studies, and later on post-graduate studies, at Cambridge University. It was a fascinating experience, but very hard because I had in my background in Latin America the sufferings of the people and here I was living in that incredible, marvelous town of Cambridge. I really had to convince myself every day that that was useful for the poor. And that was my full commitment. I was thirty years old and the only thing that forced me to carry on five years work in economics was my purpose to give a new tool, a new instrument, to the poor of this part of the world. And now I realize that they were five worthwhile years.

Kirkpatrick: Xabier, as an economist you have been the motivating force behind a research institute that is based here in Nicaragua but is for all Central America. At a workshop held in Holland, that group has recently (June of 1983) issued this Alternative Policy for Central America and the Caribbean. Could you talk about the main points in the Alternative.

Gorostiaga: The basic one is the logic of the majority. We realize that the logic of capital, the logic of transnational companies has created underdevelopment, exploitation, poverty, misery and nowadays, a social and political explosion. This logic doesn’t solve the problems of the majority in this part of the world. Everybody nowadays talks about the basic needs, but they don’t talk about a new logic. The basic needs can be accomplished through a very paternalistic way: “We the rich will provide some things.”

Kirkpatrick: Sounds like you’re talking about Reagan’s Caribbean Basin. . .

Gorostiaga: . . . Initiative. The key point of the logic of the majority is that we need a new historical subject to build a nation. And this historical subject will not be the rich, will not be the transnational companies, will not be the logic of capital, but will be the logic of the majority of people–illiterate, oppressed. Let’s put all the power, the resources, the land, the education, the health, in the service of the majority. I think that this is the key purpose of a social revolution. And I think the Sandinista Revolution has taken the logic of the majority as the basis of the new society. It is becoming a term of reference for many, many small poor countries of the Third World.
Our proposition is: Let’s satisfy basic needs. Let’s satisfy even artificial needs but with a logic of a new society, a much more egalitarian society. Instead of having a trickling down effect, let’s have a trickling up effect. Let’s start building an accumulation model, a growth model that is based on the needs of the population, the priorities of the majority. And we think that this is real democracy. Other-

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wise propaganda dominates the market, not the real needs of the population.

Non-alignment is another very important aspect in our Alternative. Our international relations have been linked to the United States in a sort of umbilical cord. Seventy to eighty percent of our technology, our production, our exports and imports were linked to the United States. Then the pattern of production and consumption, the model of United States’ society was transferred to the very poor, underdeveloped small countries.
When we are talking of non-alignment, we are talking of diversifying our dependence. We are very small, poor underdeveloped countries. We cannot be independent, but we can diversify our dependency and maintain one-quarter of our relations with the United States, one-quarter of our relationships with Europe, one-quarter of our relations with the rest of Latin American–especially with our big neighbors in Latin America such as Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia. And the quarter that is left is the non-aligned countries–the African and Asian countries (the South-South relation) and the socialist countries including Russia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria. Instead of walking with two legs–one big leg with the United States and one with the rest of the world–let’s have four legs and walk as a mature animal. This diversification of dependency is part of the non-alignment and it creates the basis for an international plurism and is the way in which we can break our dependency from the United States without breaking our friendly relations with it. We will treat the United states as we treat the rest of the world. We cannot be independent countries in the backyard of anybody.
I think there’s a possibility of having a much more friendly, efficient, productive relationship between these small countries of Central America and the US people. The problem is that you have your own oligarchy there that doesn’t agree with this model.

Kirkpatrick: Let’s talk about popular participation. What do you mean by democracy?

Gorostiaga: I don’t think there can be a human model, a Christian model, unless there’s a democratic model. What does democracy mean–in a very developed society such as the United States and in a very undeveloped society?
Democracy has an important component of economic participation. I don’t know why–and I asked David Rockefeller in our last meeting–in the Inter-American Dialogue–why democracy in the United States stops at the door of the factory. Because we think, in terms of the productive system, there is no democracy in the United States. We think that democracy has to start in the productive system. That is why in Nicaragua we have built 3,500 cooperatives. And the people decide what to produce, decide and discuss the cost of production, decide what will be the price. And there’s a tremendous fight between the ministry of planning and the cooperatives–that’s democracy.
The basis for democracy is literacy, the satisfaction of basic needs and a sort of national identity in order that elections will not legitimate oppression. In the last forty years in Central America we have had more elections than in any area of the world. Elections here have justified and legitimized oppression. Elections may be a tool of anything. When you have a terrorized country like El Salvador or Guatemala, elections will represent terror and fear.
Elections should be tools of democracy. First you have to build democracy in order that the elections can be a representation of democracy. In Nicaragua the constitution gives us six years (from 1979 to 1985) in which to hold elections. In the first year after the Revolution we began a literacy campaign. A year later we had decreased illiteracy from fifty-five percent to twelve percent. In our health campaign we have eradicted polio and almost eradicated yellow fever and malaria. We have been able to decrease infant mortality forty percent without doctors, without hospitals–only through popular mobilization. Literacy and malnutrition are not technical or financial problems, they are political problems.
For me it is a legitimate sign of the democracy of a country when the government provides 150,000 machine guns to defend the country, the people take the arms and there is no shooting, no killing in the streets. The people return the arms to the government after training. Can you imagine Pinochet distributing arms to the Chilean people? This is the only country in Latin America where the US Ambassador can walk at night without bodyguards.
At the moment I consider, without any doubt, that the main enemy of democracy in this country is the administration of Ronald Reagan. The war might make it impossible to create the basic conditions for elections. It is a very difficult problem to solve.
You ask me, “Is the Sandinista Revolution a Marxist revolution?” I will say, “No.” “Is it a Christian revolution?” I will say, “No.” “Is it a nationalist revolution?” I will say, “No.” Because it is a mixture of these three. This is a very nationalist revolution Sandino symbolized the nationalism of this revolution. Obviously, this is a Marxist revolution in the sense that a lot of Marxist thinking is going on, and not the European Marxist thinking of Cold War, a much more Creole Marxism–much more Latin American, with lot of indigenous roots in the culture and history of Latin America and with lot of Latin American thinking–philosophers, poets. This is a Marxism of poets. And this is also a Christian revolution.

Kirkpatrick: This is such a central fact that I am surprised that the press and the politicians of the US ignore it.

Gorostiaga: It is very good when thousands of Chris-

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tians from all over the world come to this country and they see the vitality and the originality of this church. The new ways in which the people pray, the new way in which the church is organized, the new role of women within the church, the new role of laymen within the church. Obviously, some people in the church, some members of the hierarchy, see all this as heresy. But I think that what is going on here is the maturity of these Christian people who are very poor and they are getting a new maturity in the Christianity. This revolution has been one of the most important spiritual experiences of my life. I think that the kingdom of God is not something that will happen in heaven, but something that we have to start building on this earth as the human beings that we are.

Kirkpatrick: In this report on an Alternative Proposal you state that “the United States commitment to preserving its hegemony in the region has given the struggle for social justice in Central America an anti-imperialist character.” What you’ve just described, will the United States agree to it?

Gorostiaga: I would say that the majority of the people in the United States will agree if they get knowledge of what we mean with that. These countries of Central America are the countries in the world that have suffered more intervention from the United States than from any other part of the world. Twenty-eight military interventions. In the case of Nicaragua we were occupied twenty-five years by US marines. Then, they left us the gift of Somoza.
The breakthrough in Central America is a historical breakthrough. The small countries in Central America are fighting for independence, for sovereignty, are trying to break down this model of banana republics. The problem is that this social revolution against the five percent rich people, the oligarchies in these countries, in order to create a much more equal and just society, at the same time it is a social revolution, it is a geopolitical revolution. Because this five percent, the oligarchies in these countries, the military are the natural allies of the US interests in the region.
We will not become part of any bloc. Not the Soviet Union, not any bloc.

Kirkpatrick: How can you avoid that?

Gorostiaga: That’s difficult. But this is our definition, our project. And I will say that the Soviet Union at the moment has been generous. Cuba has been generous with us. The pressures that these governments have created on Nicaragua is minimal, I will say nil, in relation to the pressure that has been created by the United States, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund.

Kirkpatrick: Xabier, if we go back to the years before 1979, I knew Nicaraguan people in exile and others who were studying the Bible. It was easy to find signs of hope for the struggle in those years because they could see in the biblical message that God is on the side of the oppressed. Then in 1979 the victory came here and in my several visits in the two or three years after that it was so easy to feel the joy and exuberance. The people seemed to feel that the victory gave vindication to their hope. Now, it’s a very different situation. We’re under the pressure of aggression from the United States. Would there be in the biblical message any sign of hope if the United States overthrew the revolution?

Gorostiaga: I recommend you do two things that helped me very much. The first would be to go to a militia training and see how the militia does the military exercises. Look at the eyes of these people. Do you see hate in the eyes of these people or happiness, confidence, hope. Do you see camaraderie? You see how the social relations change in militia training. And how the people in the middle of this very difficult situation, this US intervention, are happy, they don’t fear. They are confident that they can destroy an intervention in this country.
I don’t consider that this revolution can be destroyed at this moment. This revolution may be corrupted in some years. The US marines may come here. They may occupy Managua. The majority of the people will go to the mountains and a fight of three, four years will occur and after that a victory will occur. My fear is not US intervention. My fear is the problems of internal corruption. That this revolution will lose the originality, the freshness, the commitment to the people, the participatory democracy. I fear the US marines may produce a lot of suffering and destruction. But I feel that this revolution cannot be destroyed as a social revolution. Maybe, as it is happening nowadays, Reagan is consolidating this revolution, and unifying the people. Polarizing the people that are not happy with the revolution–the rich, some members of the Church hierarchy. But I will say that a substantial majority, from seventy-five to ninety percent, are behind this revolution.

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The problem of a revolution is that it is human. The problem of a revolution is internal, another story.

Kirkpatrick: So this is not the kingdom of God?

Gorostiaga: No. It may be part of the process to build the kingdom of God. And I believe in that. But the sin is within us. But it may be part of the process of building justice, and equality among us and with the rest of the world.

Kirkpatrick: What would you say to Christians within the United States?

Gorostiaga: That this is an incredible opportunity to establish Christian relations between your people and our people. I consider what is happening in Central America something very important for the United States. I consider that the Reagan Administration and some economic and political leaders in the United States are trying to cut the relations between this new phenomenon and the US people. Distorting this phenomenon. Presenting this revolution as totalitarian, as Marxism-Leninism in the worst sense of the phrase. Because I consider that maybe for the first time there is the possibility of having Christian relations between the churches here and the churches of the United States without paternalism. And more than that, maybe even a teaching position from our side with relation to the US church. Transforming the old relation of colonialism. I think the vitality of these churches, the conversion of these churches is essential for the United States. And also, I think this is biblical, as you have said, the poor, the rest of Israel is here. Maybe in twenty years you will have to come back to missionize, but at the moment I think we have a role to preach to the rest of the world, to Europe and the United States. I think that the genuine Christianity is here, more than in the very developed rich nations of the world.

Recommended Reading

Ministers of God, Ministers of the People: Testimonies of Faith from Nicaragua by Teofilo Cabestrero. Published by Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545. Interviews with Ernesto Cardenal, Fernando Cardenal and Miguel d’Escoto.

Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution by Margaret Randall. Published by New Star Books, Vancouver, Canada.

On his most recent visit to Nicaragua (November, 1983) Dow Kirkpatrick spoke with Xabier Gorostiaga, chief economist of the Sandinista Government, Jesuit priest and head of the Central American Institute for Economic and Social Research. In the following interview, Gorostiaga talks about the formative influences upon his commitment to Central America and about the Alternative Policy for Central America and the Caribbean, a report recently issued by the Institute as a result of an international policy workshop held in The Hague during the summer of 1983.

The Bomb Plant on Trial

By Sue Bowman

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 10-12

Fifty demonstrators who blockaded entrances to the Savannah River Plant last fall were found guilty of a traffic violation January 11, but the nuclear weapons facility which produces the plutonium for US weapons, sustained a direct hit to its reputation.

The two-day trial of the protesters, before Aiken, South Carolina, Magistrate Court Judge Max A. Meek, resulted from a demonstration October 24 hosted by the Natural Guard, a coalition of peace and environmental groups (see Southern Changes, December 1983). The blockade coincided with international demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

A three-man, three-woman jury deliberated over an hour before returning a guilty verdict for “failure to obey a police officer.” The defendants were sentenced to one-hundred dollar fines or eleven days in jail.

During the trial, blockaders explained that to prevent a “greater harm,” they were compelled to disobey police orders to leave the road in front of the plant. The thread running through expert testimony suggested that they had every reason to be concerned. A former Department of Energy “company man” confirmed allegations that SRP has withheld reports of widespread radioactive contamination; an authority on the medical effects of radioactive contamination warned that the plant endangers the lives of people living around it; a retired Navy admiral and Pentagon nuclear weapons strategist testified that increased production and deployment of nuclear weapons has greatly increased the threat of nuclear war and that the Bomb Plant would be a first target.

DuPont, contracted by DOE to run the plant, is guilty of a pattern of negligence and has suppressed information about radioactive contamination, according to DOE’s former head of nuclear waste management at SRP. William Lawless, nuclear waste project engineer for six years, said a 1981 report which outlined his criticisms of the waste program was reclassified as a “draft” report. He said DuPont objected to the contents of the report and that because of the reclassification, the document could be withheld from the public, even if requested through the Freedom of Information Act.

Lawless gave many examples of contamination reports withheld from the public and numbers-juggling by the company to make releases appear harmless.

One report deliberately withheld was a 1977 internal document which listed forty “monitoring wells” on SRP property which had been contaminated with radioactive tritium. Some of the wells contained levels of radiation 200,000 times that allowed for drinking water. (Out of court, Lawless said this discovery caused him to quit drinking plant water.) According to Lawless, the contaminated water, as much as 400,000 gallons from one well, was pumped out of the wells onto the ground to conceal high levels of radiation. This would result in temporarily lowered readings of contamination in those wells.

No records on types of hazardous and radioactive waste were kept at the “burial ground” at the plant. For twenty years, pipes in which tritium was manufactured were buried “uncapped” at the plant, contaminating the water.

There was extensive corrosion in twenty-seven high level waste tanks, even before they were fully constructed, and Lawless testified that reports of these conditions were deliberately suppressed.

Numbers were juggled and regulations rewritten to make releases of radioactive gases appear less significant. “In the real world, the gas is still there,” he said.

Robert Alvarez, Director of the Nuclear Weapons and Power Project for the Washington-based Environmental

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Policy Institute called Lawless’ testimony “startling and highly significant …. This is the most significant finding about SRP that’s been made public in years.”

SRP officials accuse Lawless of misinterpreting facts, and said the reports were available to anyone who asked for them–but each report must be requested by name.

Lawless’ testimony about mishandling of waste at SRP, and discrepancies between public and internal reports, magnified the testimony by Dr. Carl Johnson, former Director of Public Health, Jefferson County, Colorado. Johnson told-the jury how the releases and discrepancies translated into dangers to health.

Johnson told the packed courtroom that declassified SRP internal documents from 1954-1975 showed radioactive releases were much larger than those reported to the public. On March 15, 1955, an accidental release of radiation resulted in radiation levels four hundred times background level. “In my opinion it should have resulted in evacuation of this area.”

Johnson said that it is hazardous to live in Aiken or the surrounding area, that residents lives are in danger “to a medical certainty.” Johnson based his predictions that the area would show high cancer rates on data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on his own extensive studies of health effects around the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado. “There is no level of radiation without effect,” he said several times

Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque, retired after thirty-one years in the Navy, seven as Pentagon nuclear weapons strategist, brought the spectre of nuclear war into the courtroom. He spoke matter-of-factly about the vulnerability of facilities like SRP in a nuclear attack.

“Plutonium production facilities would be among the first targets,” he said. “If we hit a production facility (in the Soviet Union). . tit would spread radioactive material over a tremendous part of the country and be a devastating blow. . .It would be a natural first target. . .We would want to get their war-making capacity.”

“We need to assume that the whole Aiken area would be a prime target for a nuclear strike,” LaRocque said. If an attack hit right on the plant, due to wind shifts, “the radioactive materials would be impossible to control. . . We don’t have plans to deal with that sort of catastrophe.”

LaRocque said that with the offensive posture of US nuclear policy, we’ve actually decreased our national security. The military is geared to “fight to win. . we’re uncomfortable with deterrence.”

“We’re ready now in thirty minutes to destroy the Soviet Union. All the president has to do is say go.” he added.

LaRocque defended the blockaders’ tactic. “Civil disobedience is one of the many good ways to bring it to public attention. . .People should do something every day to prevent nuclear war.”

Framed in the context of expert testimony, defendants’ compelling reasons for blockading the road and being arrested made absolute sense. In the courtroom, a very diverse group of individuals told their stories.

Adele Kushner, a retired county employee and grandmother from Atlanta, said, “I have become concerned over what kind of world we are leaving for our grandchildren.” She said she had tried every other means to get her government’s attention before deciding to participate in the blockade.

Beth Ann Buitekant, a registered nurse from Atlanta, talked about the inadequacy of the health care system because of military expenditures. About weapons proliferation, she said, “I personally have no control over it, except to do exactly what I have been doing.”

Andy Summers, a Methodist minister and pastoral counselor from Savannah, downriver from the plant, said nuclear war would result in “destruction on such a massive basis that we hardly have the capability to think about it” and that this results in a “psychic numbing.” “We need to develop new, vivid symbols to come to grips with the worsening situation.”

Brett Bursey, program director of a social action organization in Columbia, South Carolina, noted, “Not only are they doing something against the wishes of the majority of the American people, but they’re lying about it.” He referred to Lou Harris polls indicating that three-fourths of the American people support a nuclear freeze.

Bursey expressed the importance of civil disobedience in American history, including the Boston Tea Party and civil rights movements. “There would not be black people on this jury if years ago black people didn’t refuse to go to the back of the bus,” he said, addressing the one black juror.

Ed Clark, 77, a church pianist from Greenville, said his participation in the blockade was “a way of bearing witness against the nuclear arms race. . .which could happen tomorrow. I felt it was an urgent matter–I had to take part.”

A former welder at SRP and other facilities, Butch Guisto, who grew up and still lives in Augusta, testified that his welds were never X-rayed, and that there was a “cavalier treatment about radioactive releases” at that plant. “I know for a fact that tritium releases occur,” relating that he had been present on several occasions. “I live in this area, and I’m just as responsible as anyone else,” he added.

Testimony in the trial deeply affected even the defendants, who are generally more educated about nuclear issues than the average citizen. Local farmer and blockader Steve McMillan had testified that he became concerned

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about the Bomb Plant over a period of time. “I began to suspect the people in our area weren’t getting the truth,” he told the jury. Walking out of the courtroom after the verdict, he slowly shook his white head–“It’s worse than we said it was.”

The jury chose to take the prosecutor’s way out and find the defendants guilty of the traffic violation. “They broke the law, plain and simple,” Assistant South Carolina Attorney General James Bogle told the jurors.’

Defendant Randy Tatel commented on the jury’s decision. “I empathized with the jurors in that they couldn’t have remained objective in reviewing the evidence. It would have meant overcoming the numbness, the years of acceptance of the Bomb Plant in their back yard–they were told pointblank that the plant was killing them and their children and contributing to the threat of nuclear holocaust.”

But the “convicts” were jubilant. Not one expressed more than a shrug of “well, it would have been nice to be acquitted,” instead, conversation went to the impact of the trial. As one defendant later expressed, “The more I think about it, the more I realize how big we won. We never really expected to be acquitted, but think of the local education that occurred! The policemen listening to Dr. Johnson, the judge, the jury, people who will talk to the jury about what they heard, the list goes on.”

He concluded, “Maybe next time we will be acquitted as well.”

Sue Bowman lives in Columbia, South Carolina and writes regularly about Southern disarmament activities.

Populist Revival in Mississippi?

By Brad Pigott

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 12-17

My opponent is not the man whose name will appear on the ballot. Instead, my opposition is a small group of very wealthy and very powerful men who are financing the campaign against me. These bigshots oppose me because they cannot tell me what to do.”

–Mississippi Congressman Wayne Dowdy, campaigning for Congress in 1982

“If we win this campaign, we will be sending a message that if a politician fights the big power companies, fights the powerful legislators, and makes these people mad, then the people of Mississippi will stand up for that politician.”

–Mississippi Governor Bill Allain, campaigning for Governor in 1983

A century devoted to the political subordination of black people in Mississippi almost silenced biracial aspirations for populist reform. But with the waning of official racial segregation, there is evidence that the next era of politics in the most Southern of Southern states might be distinguished not by the corporate pampering with which boosters have hailed the latest “New South,” but by a biracial assertion of common dignity through the populist checking of private power.

Populist aspirations have themselves been checked for so many generations in Mississippi by the tragic lessons of the turn-of-the-century Populist movement’s greatest but last hurrah in the state, the election of 1895. That year, populist gubernatorial nominee Frank Burkitt was bringing forth a relentless crusade against the “putrid, putrescent, putrifying political moribund carcass of bourbon democracy.” The Populists had gathered more than a third of the votes in the previous year’s congressional elections, and were on the rise. Burkitt took to the stump not just with the familiar Populist proposals for regulating and taxing economic privilege, but also with advocacy of free public education for both black and white children, and with attacks on the severe franchise restrictions locked into the state’s 1890 Constitution. (Burkitt as a constitutional convention delegate had refused to sign the Constitution on account of those voting restrictions.) The Populist political base in the relatively white, eastern hill country had been consolidated, and the conservative white Democratic establishment set about frantically to find some way to choke the Populist momentum.

They found their way in smothering the economic aspirations of have not whites with the rhetoric of white supremacy and solidarity. Their rallying cry was that a Populist government would tolerate black political power–portrayed as an appalling threat to every white. The racist barrage dislodged enough have-not whites from support of the Populists’ economic reform message to assure a solid defeat of Burkitt and his Populists, who never recovered politically from the stigma of the Bourbon attacks.

Twelve Per Cent Democracy

With biracial populist aspirations thus squelched, politics for the next four generations in Mississippi was the politics of privileged white men. By the turn of the century the ruling whites were so pleased with themselves that they saw fit to include, among “Mississippi Firsts” boasted of in the Official and Statistical Register of Mississippi for 1904, the following:

“Mississippi was the first state in the Union to solve the problem of white supremacy in the South by lawful means. The Constitution of 1890 disfranchises the ignorant and vicious of both races, and places control of the State in the hands of the virtuous, intelligent citizens.”

The ballot was regarded by Mississippi law as a prerogative of racial and economic privilege, to be reserved only for monied white men. Before the Populist movement had had a decent chance to organize itself in Mississippi, the 1890 voting bars managed to pull much of the Populist potential out from under the state’s people: By 1892, black registration had been cut to 5.4% of black adults, and enough white have-nots had been blocked from the ballot to cut white registration in half. As a result, during the seventy years following the 1890 disfranchisement, Mississippi’s governors were elected with votes from an average of only 12% of the

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state’s adult (twenty and over) population. No Mississippi governor during those seventy years ever received the consent of as much as one-fifth of the adult population of the state.

What competition there was for power was generally waged between the planter-lawyer-merchant class concentrated in the western Delta, and, when they were permitted to vote at all, the “redneck” farmers concentrated in the hills. Between the planters and the rednecks, there was never any dispute about whether the black community was to be suppressed. There was only dispute about whether to talk about it openly.

As if remembering what the “better element” of the Delta had done to Burkitt and the Populists, politicians who addressed the hill folk found it necessary to combine their modest spending and reform proposals with a constant rhetorical attack on the black race. The brutally racist ridicule offered from the stump first by James K. Vardaman and then by Theodore G. Bilbo served as a political cover for their programs of progressive taxation and expanded education for have-not whites and preempted any charge that they sought to lift blacks along with their programs to lift have-not whites.

With the hills’ advocates preempting the field of white supremacist rhetoric, the planters and their allies had little use for open talk about “the race problem” which they had done so much to create and sustain. Like their modern successors in the Republican Party, the planters regarded such public rhetoric as bad manners and as worse public relations.

Mississippi politics remained white politics until the decade of the civil rights movement.

The New Electorate

By 1970, a third force had arrived in Mississippi politics with the registration of black citizens in legendary numbers under the protection of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As recently as 1960, only 5.27% of Mississippi blacks of voting age had been permitted to register to vote. This pathetic figure had barely changed since the 1890 disfranchisement had shrivelled black registration to 5.4% by 1892. But a remarkable 66% of voting age blacks became registered voters by 1970, and made up 29% of the Mississippi electorate. The election of over four hundred black officials to legislative and municipal offices has kept alive the notion in the black community that voting can make a difference, and the increasingly intense competition for such offices among politically talented blacks is likely to sustain the level of black voter turnout. The first major party nomination in this century of a black candidate for federal or statewide office came in 1982.

“But it is the populist appeal,” says Mississippi civil rights organizer Rev. Ed King, “which alone has been able to bring into the voting electorate thousands of more fundamentally alienated black Mississippians. Populism expresses their alienation not just from privileged whites, but from politically established black leaders as well. When this extra black electorate has been activated at all in recent years, which has not been often, it has been through an informal network which lacks a current name, but which is in fact the remnant of the old Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” says King, who was the MFDP’s national committeeman.

To win a two person, statewide political race in Mississippi without significant black support would now require over 70% of the votes of whites. The state’s recent political history is a witness to the political impossibility of such a requirement. Since black Mississippians became virtually a third of the state’s electorate around 1970, no candidacy has been able to survive mobilization of so high a portion of the state’s electorate against it through open indulgence in the slogans of racial supremacy and segregation.

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The New Bourbon Boosters

Meanwhile, during the very years of black enfranchisement, the loyalties of the Delta state of mind have been enticed, updated, and organized by the newly active forces of the Republican Party. To the usual pretensions of elitist bourbonism, the “New South” Republicans have added the boosterism of the “new money” metropolitan suburbs. Like the Delta Boubons of old, the Mississippi Republicans center their political world around their longing for a social world that is, above all else, quiet. They are drawn to a political message which promises for them the quietness within which to pursue the central mission of their daily lives, their own comfort.

This “upwardly mobile” world of shopping centers, franchise strips, and country clubs has claimed 35% to 40% of the active Mississippi electorate: A 1979 statewide political poll found 39% of likely Mississippi voters classifying themselves as either Republican (10%) or Independent (29%). The total in a 1980 statewide poll was 38% (21% Republican; 17% Independent). A 1981 poll found 33.7% of the electorate to be made up of either strong Republicans (8.4%), weak Republicans (11.3%), or Independent Republicans (14%). (Probing by pollsters of self-classified “independents” in Mississippi has revealed that, though party realignment toward a Republican identity has not been completed for this segment of the electorate, their views are such that they tend predominantly to vote Republican.)

But a party or a state of mind cannot win elections with 35 to 40 percent of the vote, and indeed no Mississippi Republican has won a majority of the votes in any statewide election in this century. Republican Thad Cochran slipped into a US Senate seat in 1978 with a 45% plurality victory over a Democratic constituency split between an undirected white nominee and a strong black independent candidacy. Though the Republican nominee for governor in 1975 had gathered 46% of the general election vote, the same Republican candidate slipped to 39% in 1979. A different, more conservative Republican nominee received the same 39% in the 1983 race for governor. 1981 saw the Republicans lose Mississippi’s fourth congressional district seat, based around the Jackson metropolitan area and the lower Mississippi river counties, which they had held since 1972. The predictable Republican share of the statewide vote in Mississippi seems, at least for now, to have peaked.

Like their planter-merchant predecessors from the segregation years, the new Republicans are rendered uneasy by the sound of outright public and explicit racial combat. Their uneasiness lies not in any preference for racial justice, but in the fact that the tensions and embarrassments surrounding open talk about race tend to disturb the quietness of what has become the Republican state of mind. Thus Mississippi Republicans are attracted to both elements in any call to “put race behind us” and to get on about the business of nourishing and preserving a “good business climate” suitable for the quiet pursuit of comfort. Outright mention of race risks an extraordinary intrusion into this state of mind, for the Republican strongholds of comfort in the metropolitan areas of Jackson and the Gulf Coast are easily the most racially segregated zones of Mississippi life.

Yet the Mississippi Republican Party, in further imitation of its Delta-Bourbon heritage, has proven itself quick to exploit racial prejudice through indirection and innuendo where necessary to thwart the prospect of a biracial coalition against it. Republican Cochran won his 1978 plurality Senate victory in part with the charge that Aaron Henry, the veteran NAACP state President who had endorsed! the white Democratic nominee against Cochran, would have “a rope around [the Democrat’s] neck” if the latter were to go to Washington as Senator. Republican Webb Franklin in 1982 narrowly won the Delta’s congressional district seat from black Democratic nominee Robert Clark with the Republican campaign slogan, “A Congressman for Us.” Though the Republican congressional nominee in the fourth district had learned by 1982 not to boost black voter turnout by repeated reference to his opposition to the Voting Rights Act, his campaign did see fit to saturate the district with half-page newpaper advertisements centered around a distorted drawing of his white Democratic opponent’s face, complete with noticeably African features. The white Democratic opponent, Congressman Wayne Dowdy, had voted the previous year not only for extension of the Voting Rights Act but also against every amendment aimed at weakening the Act’s effectiveness. Dowdy went on to win reelection in 1982 despite official Republican Party placement at predominantly black precincts of hired white “guards” and posters featuring multiple references to the word “jail” as the promised punishment for noncompliance with registration technicalities.

The Transformed Political World of Have-Not Whites

The Republican innuendo of white solidarity reflects the virtual desperation of the state’s privileged whites in the face of a subtle transformation by the most complex force in Mississippi politics, the white have-nots. Those whites who perceive themselves as on the outside of the circle of power and comfort in Mississippi life now in fact hold the balance of electoral power as the swing group in the state’s politics.

There are, for one thing, more have-not whites participating in the electorate than could ever have participated during disfranchisement. In silent vindication of the old Populists’ 1890 warning that official disfranchisement was aimed at have-not whites as well as at blacks, whites in Mississippi have been able to double the total number of whites registered to vote since enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

But the real transformation is taking place within the minds of have-not whites. The choices they have begun to make do not include outright abandonment of racial bigotry; Mississippi life is still too richly tragic to allow for that. The question is instead whether the salience of racial polarization has submerged enough in their lives to permit the emergence now of economic consciousness as the central focus of their political choices.

Some powerful evidence has emerged for the declining significance of racial polarization as the centerpiece of the political lives of have-not whites. By significant majorities, white Mississippians with annual family incomes of less than ten thousand dollars responded that white students “should go to the same schools” as black students, and that -whites have no “right to keep blacks from moving into their neighborhoods if they want to,” when a representative

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statewide sample was asked in a 1981 academic poll. Half of non-retired whites making annual incomes under $25,000. asserted in the course of a 1981 poll of Wayne Dowdy’s fourth congressional district that it would not “make any difference” in their voting decision if a congressional candidate were “strongly supported by local black leaders.” Only 36% responded that they would be “less inclined” to support such a candidate.

Within days following the mid-1981 special election in which Dowdy was first elected to Congress, a Republican Party pollster asked a representative sampling of the district’s voters to isolate an issue “of particular concern to you personally” in making their voting decisions. That Dowdy was the first major white candidate in Mississippi ever to endorse retention of a strong Voting Rights Act had been during the campaign the focus of repeated and highly visible attention by all sides and by the media. Yet the white respondents who had voted against Dowdy did not even mention his voting rights stand as a factor in their voting decision. The economic issues of social security and Reaganomics dominated the white voters’ responses, with the Voting Rights Act being mentioned only by black Dowdy supporters. In short, his decisive stand for the continuation of federal supervision of black voting rights added to, and did not detract from, Dowdy’s successful populist coalition. (Nor was Dowdy’s congressional voting record in fulfillment of his voting rights pledge an issue in his 1982 re-election campaign, which he won handily with the help of the populist slogan, “Don’t let the big shots call the shots.”)

The decline of racial polarization as an effective political weapon has brought a decline also in the political potency of what were once conventional verbal codes for a message of white unity. The ability of the code word “conservative” to galvanize whites, for instance, has apparently been dissolved with the withdrawal of explicit racial combat from the center stage of politics. Though the state’s journalists continue to churn out the conventional wisdom that Mississippi has a “conservative” electorate, a 1981 statewide academic survey finds a slightly lower proportion of the Mississippi electorate willing to accept the “conservative” label (27.8%) than was the case in the country as a whole (28.3%, from a 1980 national survey). A separate 1980 statewide poll found only 33% of likely Mississippi voters accepting the “conservative” label, while only 27% of Dowdy’s congressional district electorate was found to be made up of white “conservatives” in 1982. The old “conservative” catch-all code simply rings hollow now for a majority even of white Mississippi voters.

What can be seen as emerging to overshadow racial resentments in the political focus of have-not whites in Mississippi is a preoccupation with economic issues, which now dominate the responses to every survey question calling for “our most important public problem.” And what has every chance of shaping those economic issues for have” not whites is an old Southern peculiarity which is just now being let loose for full political expression: a sense of psychological distance from a privileged circle of absentee power-holders who are insulated both from the consequences of their own power and from the traditional reciprocities of folk values. This is the stuff of populism.

There is first the essential estrangement from the flow of affairs as run by the powerful. A representative, statewide sample of Mississippi voters was asked this question in a 1980 poll: “Generally speaking, do you feel things are going in the right direction in Mississippi today, or do you feel that they have gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track?” Among white non-retirees with family incomes under fifteen-thousand dollars, significantly more answered “wrong track” (44%) than answered “right direction” (36%). The responses of these less privileged whites were remarkably similar to the responses of black participants in the same survey, who responded “wrong track” (46%) more often than “right direction” (40%). But the responses of non-retiree whites making over $25,000. were fundamentally different from those of both blacks and less privileged whites, with only 28% responding “wrong track” and with fully 58% responding “right direction.” A 1982 poll asked of likely voters in Mississippi’s fourth congressional district an otherwise identical question aimed at “things in the nation” rather than in the state. Among blue collar whites, 49% saw the nation as having “gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track,” while only 35% saw a “right direction.” The responses among non-retired whites with incomes of at least $25,000. reflected the reverse of the blue collar white responses: 55% of these privileged whites saw a “right direction” in the nation while only 38% sensed a “wrong track.”

It is by now an item of conventional political wisdom that the growth of governmental bureaucracies, themselves oversized and stifling, has provided a new target for the old populist sentiment. But in fact an attack from the right on such governmental targets has little chance of attracting a political majority now in Mississippi, when compared with the biracial attraction to reforms aimed at private privilege. Any message of attack against the public bureaucracies would first forfeit the support of most black Mississippians, who know racial bigotry when they see it in the form of wholesale attacks upon the organizational vehicle for administering public policies of compassion. But any “rightwing populism” would also leave untouched some of the deeper populist values of many less privileged Mississippi whites. Among non-retired whites with family incomes

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below $25,000. who responded to a 1982 poll of Dowdy’s fourth congressional district, for instance, the most favored route to cutting the federal budget deficit was not “cuts in social programs.” It was, instead, “the elimination of tax cuts to business.” About half of those white respondents further indicated that if they understood a candidate to be “supported by big Jackson businessmen,” they would be inclined to vote against that candidate based on that one fact alone. The emerging language of populist candidacies in Mississippi has indeed been directed almost exclusively at the state’s own business elite, concentrated in Jackson.

Have-not Mississippi whites know that they are prepared to live their own lives by shared folk rules like frugality, humility, simplicity and informality. But they know also that the reward these days for abiding by these old rules is next to nothing. And they can increasingly sense that the bulky private institutions of the rich, in exempting themselves from and snubbing the old values, are rewarded immensely, regardless of their performance.

Early Rumblings of a Populist Resurgence?

It was by no coincidence that the first major Mississippi gubernatorial candidate in contemporary times to abandon the rhetoric of segregation was also the first such candidate to invoke the language of the populist heritage. Bill Waller was elected governor in 1971 on the force of his pledge to check the power of what he cited as “the Capitol Street Gang” of privileged private institutions centered around Jackson’s principal commercial street. Maverick Cliff Finch drew entirely on populist symbolism, with a lunchpail as his chosen campaign symbol, in winning the right to succeed Waller as governor in 1975. But these early rumblings of a biracial populist resurgence suffered some frustration at the hands of the purported champions of the revived populist heritage, Waller and Finch. For lack of ideological sincerity they were unwilling, and for lack of governing skills they were unable, to transform their symbolism into deeds of populist reform. (As one black political strategist has said of Finch in particular, “that lunchpail turned out to be empty.”)

William Winter as Governor sought to draw on a potent deed of populist reform with his 1982 legislative proposal to raise the oil and gas severance tax in order to finance a package of authentic reforms in the state’s otherwise dismal public education system. But for reasons of political style and personal demeanor Winter was unwilling to draw the symbolism of the populist heritage to the aid of his tax proposal, which proceeded to die under the pressure of state and national oil lobbyists and their friends at the top of the Mississippi Legislature. The painfully regressive sales tax, to which those legislators are prone to turn for their answer to every new revenue need, was once again hiked in order to finance the Winter education reforms. (Mississippi was already imposing, for instance, the highest sales tax on food, in the country.)

Only with the just-completed race to succeed Winter did there emerge in a major statewide candidacy, for the first time in this century, an apparent unity between the words and the deeds of biracial populist reform. His court victories in landmark cases against the rulers of the state’s utilities, utility regulatory commission, and even the Legislature, were at the center of Mississippi Attorney General Bill Allain’s successful campaign for the governorship in 1983. He protested the holding of closed-door official meetings by walking out of them, and personally boycotted the posh private clubs populated by the business elite which runs so much of the state from Jackson.

Allain even dared to file and to win a lawsuit insisting that the State’s standpat legislative rulers must abide by the state’s constitutional separation-of-powers provision, which prohibited the nevertheless pervasive membership of legislators on executive agency boards. He argued as attorney general before the Mississippi Supreme Court that if the state is to have a right to ask the average person to obey the Constitution, “then we must have the right to ask the richest person, the most powerful person in the state, to do no less.”

But Allain’s central focus has been as an unflappable critic, both in and out of court, of what was until recently a silent attack by the state’s electric utilities on the old values of frugality and lawfulness. Here is Allain on the blank-` check rate base traditionally accorded to Mississippi’s larger utilities: “I have seen their books. . .you are paying those $150,000 and $200,000-a-year salaries, you are paying their country club dues, and you are paying when they go up there in that twenty-story building and eat and drink all that imported wine.” As black activist and political scientist Leslie McLemore puts it, Allain’s call for checks on utility spending reflected “an issue that had an impact on pocketbooks. It transcended race and class, although it was strongest among people of poorer socio-economic backgrounds.”

Populist Prospects

The electoral possibilities of the revived populist heritage in Mississippi are dependent on the continuing emergence of a rare and resourceful breed of populist politician, and therein lies populism’s chief vulnerability. To bring and hold have-not whites and blacks together after so many generations of bitter hostility still requires extraordinarily subtle political leadership. It is the uncommon politician who brings to the task both the necessary political agility and the necessary psychic detachment for sustaining the wrath of the privileged which is certain to be released privately against any populist politician. For such a maverick figure to have access to the awesome amount of money required to run a modern political campaign is more uncommon still, and tends to require that the politician have personal wealth.

A still more painful hindrance to the emergence of

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biracial populist leadership is the prospect that white have-nots are not yet ready to be led by black populist advocates. As long as even the most talented black politicians are deprived of highly visible offices from which to act out roles as majoritarian decision-makers, calls by black politicians for economic fairness will too often be dismissed by have-not whites as calls limited to the black community alone. That black politicians are now relatively handicapped in bearing the banner of a populist movement aimed at biracial justice is but one more tragic reminder of the legacy of racism handicapping populism itself.

Even for the rare political figure able to survive such hurdles to be elected, the profound fragmentation of state governmental power offers an abundance of veto points from which privileged interests can and do quietly obstruct populist policies.

Yet there has also emerged a certain amount of institutional and cultural glue available to the uncommon politician who sets out through electoral politics to bring together the populist constituency in Mississippi. The formal Democratic Party organization in the state has just begun to generate for itself the money and technology with which to sustain a network of loyalities capable of biracial political organizing. And voter identity with the Democratic Party has itself stabilized as a potent for reconciliation: the portion of the Mississippi electorate volunteering identification with the Democractic Party in statewide polls has been 51% in 1979, 53% in 1980, and 55.3% in 1981.

The state’s relatively small organized labor movement, whose leadership stood firm with biracial backing of the civil rights movement in its toughtest days, has now found political vindication in its ability to offer populist candidates a ready-made network of black and white political organizers. Longtime Mississippi AFL-CIO President Claude Ramsay even says that “the labor movement provided the glue for Dowdy’s” congressional wins, which Ramsay sees as “a pay-off for work over many years” in holding together a biracial organized labor movement.

A hard-won astuteness among black voters about the necessities of coalition building is another source of glue capable of holding together biracial populist majorities. Black independent candidacies for Congress in 1982 and for governor in 1983 failed to win more than one-tenth of the votes of black Mississippians. Such failures have just now put the state’s Republican strategists on notice that an earlier Republican scheme of sponsoring black independent candidacies can no longer be counted on to split the Democratic vote and produce a Republican plurality. Mississippi’s white Democratic governor and congressmen made an overdue attempt at reciprocity in 1982 by publicly campaigning for the election of black Democratic primary winner Robert Clark in Mississippi’s new Delta congressional district. (Though the votes of about 13% of white voters and a lower-than-expected black turnout caused Clark a very narrow loss in 1982, he has announced his candidacy for the same seat in 1984 and has at least an even chance of becoming this year the first black Mississippi congressman in this century.)

Whenever the populist ingredients bubbling in Mississippi’s political culture can manage to come across just the right maverick advocate, populism will continue to have a decent chance of winning elections in the state for the foreseeable future. The old recalcitrance in the face of absentee power, having been drawn on and abused for so long by the segregationists’ clamor against “outsiders” and federal “intervention,” can now be turned against the pretensions of private powerholders whose isolation comes from exclusive devotion to their own comfort.”

In moving to check the prerogatives of private power, Mississippi populism has a chance to claim an anchoring of politics in a moral purpose: authentic racial reconciliation. Populism can direct the political attention of have-not white Mississippians away from the preoccupations with racial bigotry, bringing them instead under the same banner, in defense of the same values, as the state’s black community. And, through populism, black Mississippians can join in a majority coalition with whites without evading any of the central economic purposes on the black political agenda. Populism’s attempt at this historical reconciliation, so long feared by Mississippi’s inner circle of monied whites, need not concede any of the raw, redemptive power behind a movement rooted in the values of simple justice.

Brad Pigott is a native of McComb, Mississippi who now lives and practices law in Jackson. His political apprenticeship came in 1976 77 as issues director of the final gubernatorial campaign of Virginia populist Henry Howell. In 1982 he managed the reelection campaign of Congressman Wayne Dowdy.

“Covering History as it Broke”
John N. Popham
Harry Ashmore

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 17-19

In 1947, when he first stopped in at my office at the Charlotte News, John Popham was the only newspaper correspondent assigned to a beat that stretched from the Potomac to Eagle Pass. His one-man bureau in Chattanooga was the first the New York Times had ever established in the continental United States outside of Washington. To these unique distinctions he added two of his own that I am reasonably certain have not been duplicated by any of his talented young successors: for more than a decade he covered this vast territory without benefit of air transport or strong drink.

Sustained only by black coffee, he managed to more than hold his own in the convivial colloquies that mark any gathering of the working press–but then he often left early, dispatched by his desk in New York to some new outbreak of news in Miami, or Dallas, or Louisville, explaining that he ought to get started since he was driving. Moreover, he always said he avoided the through highways and kept to the back roads so he would have a chance to absorb the wisdom of the ordinary folk he encountered in crossroads stores, smalltown cafes and rustic pool halls.

His explanation for his abstemiousness was that his innards had been ravaged in the course of his wartime service with the Marines in the Pacific, but I found this dubious. To one who had been there, it seemed unlikely that a man with a delicate stomach could survive the cuisine in those backcountry establishments where the overpopulated

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flypaper curled down in strips from the ceiling and a prudent man would limit his order to a hardboiled egg and an orange, and insist on peeling both.

It was only after he had left the secondary roads for a more sedentary assignment as executive managing editor of the Times’ outpost in Chattanooga that Pop joined the rest of us at the bar. On the sad occasion of Ralph McGill’s funeral I first encountered him with a tall glass of bourbon in his hand, and in my astonishment exclaimed, “My God, Pop! It may make you garrulous!” But there was in fact no perceptible change in his delivery, which has been described–by Claude Sitton, I believe–as resembling sorghum fired from a Gatling gun. At his retirement party aboard the Wabash Cannonball in the railyard at Chattanooga the truth was finally divined by Bill Emerson of Newsweek, who had trailed Pop across the South in the years of the Troubles: “The sneaky little devil has been saving up his liver for the golden years.”

Happily, both liver and larynx have remained in fine fettle, and the mellifluous voice of Popham is still heard in the land–on platforms wherever worthy causes command his attention, in seminars where awed academics sit at his feet,

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above all in free-flowing conversation with old friends and young admirers who know where to turn when they seek insight into this New/Old South that continues to baffle all too many of those who write about it.

When he settled in at Chattanooga in 1947 he brought to his new assignment the passion of the native returned from exile. His roots are deep in the Virginia tidewater, but his boyhood was spent trailing his peripatetic father, a distinguished officer in the U.S. Marine Corps. His college was Fordham, he apprenticed on a Brooklyn newspaper before graduating to the Times, and he got his first whiff of politics covering New York’s City Hall.

But when he came back from his own service as a Marine officer in World War II a new boss had taken over the newsroom at the Times, Turner Catledge of the Philadelphia, Mississippi, Catledges. Instinct told Catledge that the post-war South was going to be the next great domestic news arena, and he knew where to find the right man to interpret the impending socio-economic changes for the parochial readers of the nation’s leading newspaper.

So Pop began the odyssey that would make him a witness of the historic confrontations that marked the era of what Ralph McGill called “guerrilla fighting among the ruins of the segregated society.” He was one of the few who had innocent passage ‘across the lines–the trusted confidant of diehard segregationists and embattled black leaders, and, above all, a sympathetic audience for the ordinary citizens of both races who were trying to find somebody who understood what they were talking about.

Those were the days when politicians who professed to speak for the South finally abandoned the fiction that the region’s second-class citizens were a happy, contented lot, and began to talk in terms of the apocalypse. When the Brown decision came down in 1954 John Bartlow Martin toured the Southern statehouses and proclaimed in the Saturday Evening Post: “The South Says Never!” A swarm of hit-and run national correspondents descended upon the region and there would have been an even greater multiplication of the ubiquitous black and white Southern stereotypes had Pop not been available as an omnipresent oracle wherever there was an outbreak of violence.

To those who were willing to listen, and some who weren’t, Pop explained that the facts of Southern life were rarely what they seemed to be, and almost never what the spokesman for an agitated constituency said they were. There was, God knows, plenty of overt brutality, but there was also a reservoir of interracial goodwill that would make it possible to dismantle the old segregated institutions in reasonably orderly fashion.

There are still those who believe the great sea change which has made possible this audience in this hotel was bracketed by the Montgomery bus boycott and the triumphant march from Selma to the Alabama capitol, where Martin Luther King proclaimed, “We are on the move now–no wave of racism can stop us.”

Willie Morris, who once thought he could go north to home, is still bemused by the high drama of those stirring days now that he has again taken root in his native Mississippi. Writing of what he found there upon his return, he dated the recasting of race relations from the day the FBI dug the bodies of three slain civil rights workers out of an earthen dam down in Neshoba County:

“Gradually, almost imperceptibly in the years which followed, something would begin to stir in the soul of the town. A brooding introspection, a stricken pride, a complicated and nearly-indefinable self-irony … would emerge from its dreadful wounds. A long journey lay ahead, marked always by new aggrievements and retreats, yet this mysterious pilgrimage of the spirit would suggest much of the South and the America of our generation.”

Pop could have told him that the instrospection, the pride, and the self-irony have been around since the first slave ship, and the first Popham, landed in the Tidewater. There are the qualities that have marked his tour of duty below the Mason-Dixon Line–the qualities that left their imprint upon the blend of the Old and the New that is John Popham’s South.

And to these he added one more that he demonstrated in remarkable fashion when he was finally unbound from his desk at the Chattanooga Times. Once again he hit the road, this time as a commuter, first to Nashville, then to Atlanta, where he enrolled in law school. I submit that only an abiding commitment to justice could have motivated the seventy-three-year old applicant for admission to the Georgia Bar you welcome tonight as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council.

Remarks by Harry S. Ashmore upon the installation of John Popham as a Life Fellow of the Southern Regional Council; Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, November 12, 1983.

Popham: “Avoiding the Hit and Run Press”

By Eleanor Mccallie Cooper

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 19-22

“Just call it as you see it, John, anything that you can see in the South, the enormous changes that are about to take place. We don’t know, nobody knows how it’s going to be this time. We know it’s a different world, and we intend to report it in depth.”

The voice was that of Turner Catledge, the assistant managing editor of the New York Times and a Mississippian himself. The year was 1947. He was sending out a young reporter from the Times, John N. Popham, to be the first regional correspondent in the Southeast, to cover the South from DC to the Delta, fifteen states that made up what John later termed “a hundred Souths.”

Leaving behind New York’s multi cultural diversity, the young reporter found himself with a new beat of well over fifty-thousand miles a year, covering such divergent regions as the Mountain South, the Piedmont, the Delta, the Black Belt and the coasts. With Chattanooga as its headquarters, he made it home only five days a month for the next eleven years.

The reasoning behind this assignment, Popham explains, was that the New York Times was going to try to “stamp the country on a regional basis.” As the largest news

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enterprise in the nation, its managers decided to tap the news from across the land: “‘Let’s put a man in Boston who will take all the New England states; put a man in Detroit to take the heavy industry, automobile and steel; put two men in Chicago to take the great wheat world and mid-America; put a man in L.A. to take Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico, and a man in San Francisco to take Northern California, Oregon and Washington, because they go together.’ And then I got the whole South.”

The Southeast bureau was stationed in Chattanooga, because of the family connection between the Chattanooga Times and the New York Times. Adolph S. Ochs, a native of Tennessee, had owned and operated the Chattanooga Times twenty years prior to acquiring the New York Times in 1896. Because both papers had remained in the Ochs family, Chattanooga was the natural choice for Popham’s headquarters.

When Popham became managing editor of the Chattanooga Times in 1958, the Southeast bureau moved to Atlanta. But in those early days, Popham said, “It didn’t make any difference where it was. The South had not grown that much, and Atlanta wasn’t much different than Chattanooga at that particular time. No sir, not a whole lot different, just a couple of hotels downtown and the governor’s office.”

A Tidewater Virginian himself, John was no greenhorn to the South. The Popham family had been in Virginia since the colony was founded, and his father, like other military officers from Virginia, had bought a house in Fredericksburg, close to his native Culpepper. Young John grew up well rooted in the life of the small town South, the history of the area, and the heritage of his great-grandfather who was publisher and editor of the Richmond newspaper, the Southern Intelligencer, and later of tine’ Washington Intelligencer. His sense of history and his understanding of small town politics served as assets in his new assignment, as did his forever undimished Tidewater accent.

After finishing college at Fordham, he had landed in New York in 1930 as a reporter for the Brooklyn Standard Union, covering all the beats, the courts, the police, the criminal world: “Here I was with this family background and schooling from a small town in Virginia, and then suddenly, I end up in New York, thrown into the midst of the greatest multi-cultural city on the face of the earth. And it’s my job to report it, with all the cultures.”

He learned that world so well that when he returned from service in the Marine Corps at the end of World War II, he was asked by three successive New York mayors to be the director of public relations. Having spent the war in the Pacific, and many summers of his youth traveling with his father to Latin America and Asia, intercultural exchange was nothing new to young “Pop”: “I was in a position to make judgments, to see things as I would never have seen them if I had stayed in the South all of my life, or if I had come from the North only. I was able to bridge that gap a little better than the average person would have thought of.”

But he never accepted the offers of Mayors O’Dwyer, Walker or LaGuardia. Instead, he stayed in the old world of newspaper reporting where he accumulated no credits, few by-lines and not much salary to speak of.

Popham describes the state of the South as he found it in the late 1940’s:

In the face of efforts which were under way to broaden the scope of civil rights for blacks in this country, Southern political leaders were making their usual response: “We’ll handle that, “and “We have our way of life, “and “We will not adjust or change except on our terms. ” That had been the winning hand for generations and there wasn’t any reason for anybody in high office at that time to see that there would be anything different.

The thinking was that the South was going to be more industrial, that it had an opportunity to have a larger slice of the economic pie of the country. Air conditioning had come. It was pleasant and comfortable.

The war had brought literally millions of people into the South–military people and their families. Many stayed here; some married Southerners.

Our universities were getting larger; they were going from thirty-five hundred students in the state university to ten-thousand, and young people from the rest of the country were coming here to attend classes.

There was an excitement, a feeling that the South would overcome its poverty. It had lived right through the war as the poorest section of America. Now there was an excitement that the South could become a much more viable part of the country.”

In tapping the stories of fifteen states on the verge of economic and social upheaval, Johnny Popham was helped by his background, by his personal drive and by the enormous empathy which made him trust and be trusted. In conversations lasting long after an event had been covered and a story had been written, he came to know Southerner’s thoughts, feelings, fears and ambitions. He based his stories on these insights rather than on the latest opinion polls.

If, for instance, he were assigned to a conference in New Orleans, he would get the story then stay around to make contacts:

I would stay the whole week that it lasted, sitting up way into the nights talking to scores and scores of these people from the small towns and cities of the South. After that, I would go out of my way on an assignment, or stop at a town and look that person up and talk to them, recall that friendship, or maybe find there was a story in that town, what they were trying to do to make the community a better place to live. And I might do a little Sunday piece about some particular effort, get them some local and national attention for their efforts. I built up a large network like that, and consequently, I always had an opportunity to know where something was going to take place.

If it was evident from the way things were taking place that there was going to be a confrontation in a certain city, most of the newspaper men would respond like a bucket brigade–they’d come in when the trouble began to break. But I would always call someone, for example, the governor in that state, and say, “Well, Governor, this is Popham. Who’s a friend of yours in that town? Who do you know?” With politics it was going to be a feed merchant or a druggist or somebody down there that handled the patronage for the governor, and he’d say, “I’ll call him, Pop, and tell him you ‘re coming in. ” I’d go in two or three days in advance; this man would take me out to the country club for dinner or introduce me to people on the main street. Consequently, I always knew just about where to stand, where to be, what place to go to, and later when the press might be the target of bitterness and anger, I would be excused

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for several days. People would say, “Oh, that is Mr. Jones’ buddy, he’s all right–until they read the New York Times `and then decided that I had to go too. But it took them a long time to get the Times in there.

In a car with little, or no, air conditioning, over roads with little, or no, pavement, usually alone and often at night, Popham covered fifty, sixty, seventy thousand miles a year. His salvation was, as he said. “I don’t bore myself.” In fact, the long hours on the road served to his advantage in a way that jet age telecommunications do not allow:

If I had to come back to Chattanooga from New Orleans or from Jacksonville or Dallas, I’d drive three or four days, stopping off at different places. What I wanted to write would be filtering though my mind. I’d be pretty well prepared to sit down and knock out the Sunday piece or the interpretive piece that this event called for a few days later. I think that some of the success that I had in that period resulted from the fact that I could contemplate what I wanted to do and put it in a good frame. I didn’t think about that at the time, but as I look back, I think it helped a lot.

The first task for Popham was to find the sages, the vital and vibrant figures who had some wisdom about what was happening around them, the people who “could envision the future and worked behind the scenes to solve a great many problems.” Once he found them, he cultivated them, respected them, and took time to build trust.

These people were all over the South. He found them as governors, workers, newsmen, lawyers, sociologists and teachers. People such as Ralph McGill, Hodding Carter, Howard Odum, Rupert Vance, Charles Johnson. A. T. Walden, Gerald Johnson, George Mitchell, Harold Fleming, Virginius Dabney, and Alf Minders became his sources of knowledge and wisdom. But more than just the leaders, he found endless numbers of people throughout the South who cared and worked quietly:

They were all over the South. There were many wonderful people who had been silenced in many ways, and they accepted that, but they didn’t stop working! There was an enormous number of people that were doing good things in the South, but if you came from outside, they were not going to show their hand.

If you just came pouring in from out of the region and stuck a mike in somebody’s face and said, “Well, how do you feel about desegregation?” the first thing that was on his mind was his family and his job, and he’d say, “Well, I can ‘t see it. ” He was protecting himself. You might find if you sat down and talked to him about yourself that he felt there was a trustworthiness and he’s begin to open up too. But he was not about to disclose that world to an outsider who asked in a manner dangerous to him at that time.

This Southerner that Popham’s late night divulgences uncovered was not the Southerner publicized across the

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country. As Popham says, “We lived so long with our own myths. There were hundreds and hundreds of Southerners who didn’t think that way but who were trapped at the moment.” Later, they were able to “come out and declare themselves.” Today, Popham observes, “there’s no such thing as a serious candidate running for statewide office in the entire South on a racial ticket. It’s gone.”

The other Southerner that the “hit and run” press missed was the black leader, often quiet, also trapped by circumstances, but just as silently laying the foundations. Popham sought out these leaders and found them in the black universities and churches.

If a black university, for example, invited a speaker, the local press would arrive, cover the speech and leave. However, Popham stayed on, lingered around the punch bowl long after the microphones and cameras had left and learned a great deal more:

You’d have a story about what the man said; he had come to the South to bring a message and you’d write that story. And yet there were scores of things that were going to take place, and all of the leads were available that evening at the party; going to somebody’s house afterwards, a group of professors would come and maybe one or two bright students and sit and talk until midnight. By ten o’clock at night, he’d open up his heart about what he really thought and felt. That makes for better reporting. Then I’d go back to my motel. I could always call on him afterward.

In 1948, John married Frances Evans of Nashville who settled in Chattanooga and raised John IV and Hillary while John traveled in the family’s only car. After a decade on the road, John, in 1958, chose to stay closer to his family and accepted the position of managing editor of the Chattanooga Times. John’s third career in the newspaper world came to a close nineteen years later. Only in looking back over the entire spectrum could he see the preparation he had had and the role that he had played in the South.

You have to leave the South to see it. If you stay here, you think it is this way everywhere. I owe so much to those trips overseas with my father, to my years as a Marine–you can ‘t underestimate the influence of military experience upon the South–and to the multicultural experience of New York. Those were golden years of print, before television, when all of these critics went through the press. We were prepared to respond to eruptions, to converse with people and to cover many, many issues. Other people did it better than I in New York; I was a junior reporter. But it prepared me for my role in the South. Only later could I see what I had done.

Eleanor McCallie Cooper lives in Chattanooga, Tenn. Thanks to the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library for permission to excerpt the interview with John Popham conducted on August24, 1983, by Norman Bradley for the Chattanooga Oral History Project.

John Egerton. Generations: An American Family. University Press of Kentucky, 1983.

By Will D. Campbell

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 23-24

For too long we have cataloged, systematized and categorized the places and ways of learning. And too often we neglect, ignore or fail to see resources near at hand.

I sometimes spy on the Steeples by riding around in one city or another surveying what the outside billboards and electronic marquees are promoting. Aerobic dancing, weight watchers clubs, and Mother’s day out programs have been big the past few years. A few of them, the better ones I suppose, announce that the Koreans also worship there, though at a different time. (I saw one with the words: TEMPORARY WORSHIP CENTER. I guess I knew what it meant but it seemed sort of funny.) The other day I was riding from Fancy Gap, Virginia to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee and asked my friend and driver to get off the big highway and drive through one of the cities between Fancy Gap and Mt. Juliet so I could do my research on the billboards in church yards. “Marriage Enrichment Seminar” was the winner. Two were announcing a series of lectures on Human Sexuality, to be given by someone with several degrees behind his name, the most of which I didn’t recognize. I kept wondering where they got their material, who the experts in those fields are.

I have never been invited to conduct a seminar on marriage enrichment nor give a lecture on human sexuality. It is highly doubtful that I ever will. But if I should I would not begin by researching the materials listed in the latest cataloging of those subjects. I would begin by reading a passage from a book I have just finished. Generations: An American Family, by John Egerton, a man no more known for his expertise in those areas than I. His words I would read are of a passionate love scene. Two lovers are lying in bed, lying close together. It is a balmy Kentucky evening and the room is dark and quiet. Suddenly the woman speaks.

“Burnam, are you awake? I love you.
There was no answer. Addie spoke louder: “Burnam? I said I love you.”
“Huh? What’d you say?”
“You can’t hear thunder! I SAID I LOVE YOU! I never did love anyone but you.”
After a pause, Burnam replied, “I love you too, Addie. I must have loved you right from the first. You’re the only one I ever did ask to marry me.”

I would read those words because this marriage must have been enriched from the beginning or gained enrichment somewhere along the way for it had lasted seventy-nine years. The groom was 106 years old and the bride ninety-eight. And certainly it was not devoid of romance and sexuality. What could be more romantic than a wedding the day after the first flying machine was launched at Kitty Hawk? And by the time their thirteenth child was born one would begin to assume that a healthy and conjunctional sexuality was part of the union.

In the Seminar I would lead the participants back over the years as Egerton does, across peaceful Bluegrass landscapes and hostile mountains and rivers, out of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, over the Cumberland Gap and on into Cranks Creek in what is now Harlan County, Kentucky where the marriage began and never ended. For though the clinicians. finally declared one of the lovers dead it is not within their power to say the marriage is over. To Addie, Burnam is still “my husband.” Not “late” nor “departed.” Present Tense. These two knew what it meant to be “married.” John Egerton has written it down and I would use it in my seminar on Marriage Enrichment as genuine, unscientific reality.

Or “Death and Dying.” That’s big these days and appeared on one of the churchyard signs. Discussions groups gather. Theological schools offer courses on it and preachers preach on it.

“Everyone has told me how sick you’ve been, ” I said to him. “I’m glad you’re better. It’s a good sign that you’re able to sit up.”
He shook his head. “Uh-uhm. I’m not going to get well. It’s time for me to go home now, John. I ‘m ready to go. I feel like I’ve done all I can do in this world. I thank God for letting me keep my mind right up to the end, but I don’t want to stay any longer. I ‘m getting out of life now, before I get old and lose my mind.”

A 106-year-old man is grateful that he will never be old, knowing that the mind is the core and compass of age and life itself. John Egerton is not the detached and objective journalist. He has come to love these two as he loves his own flesh and blood. He tries to redirect his friend’s thoughts. They talk of other things, tell funny stories and look at the finished book John has brought him, a book two lives spent more than a century in writing. All that time Burnam has resisted death when it threatened, clinging tenaciously to life and living, missing none of it, winning out over diseases, pestilence, tragedy and misfortune of many kinds. Now a nurse comes into the room, smiling, humoring, trying gently to win his acceptance of the pills she has brought him, pills gladly accepted in other years and times.

“No more medicine! he exclaimed. “I won’t take any more! No more pills! I’m done with pills! They’ve been a curse to me! I’m trying to die and go home! You tell that doctor not to send me any more medicine.”

His tone is neither hostile nor maudlin. But emphatic, final and convincing. He continues to talk to his friend and scribe when the nurse is gone.

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“I said to her, ‘Addie, I’m ready to go home, ready to die. Are you ready to go with me?’ She said she wasn’t. So I asked her, ‘If I go on ahead and then call you to join me, will you come?’ And she told me she would. That put my mind at ease. I feel a lot better now, just knowing that she would come if I sent for her.”

That was almost a year ago and Burnam has not yet sell for his beloved Addie. But we know that it won’t be long.

“Death and Dying.” A course offered by Burnam and Addie Ledford. I’m glad I signed up for it Genuine, unscientific reality.

Despite all that, to suggest that Generations is a book about Marriage Enrichment, Human Sexuality or Death and Dying would be to deceive you. It is not. Yet if we have ears to hear and eyes to see all those things are there.

And a lot more. Egerton started out to write a simple story of a little known American family. He has left us with a complex, detailed and compelling history of the nation. While about it he learned that the history of America is not the story of generals and admirals, famous battles in big and little wars, assassinated Presidents, Monroe Doctrines, Louisiana Purchases, invasions of Grenada. It is the stories of the Ledfords of the land.

But more than history. Sociology and Anthropology. Theology and Geography. Conflict Resolution and Inter-group Relations. Civics and Republican Politics. Philosophy and Folk Lore. None of those things show up in the table of contents or index. It is not the kind of book that needs an index. For it is a Romance.

Read it aloud to someone you love if you like to see her laugh. But don’t read it aloud to someone you love if it bothers you to see him cry. There is a lot of both in this good book.

Will D. Campbell live in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. He is the author of Brother to a Dragonfly and The Glad River.

Figures of speech–High Tech Drifter

By Allen Tullos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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