It’s Jesse Again

By Frye Gaillard

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

Relying on $14 million worth of accusation, racial invective and unrepentant lying, Sen. Jesse Helms has been reelected.

He defeated North Carolina’s popular governor, Jim Hunt, by fifty-one percent to forty-nine percent of the vote. Thus, a state once considered the South’s most progressive has offered–once again–a solid vote of confidence to one of the most radical spokesmen for the American rightwing.

For a time, it appeared the result would be different. Just over a year ago; Helms was trailing badly in most opinion polls. But like many a Southern politician with his back to the wall, he knew where to turn. Even in a state where the two largest cities have elected black mayors, and where one of them, Charlotte, has become a national model for successful school integration, the issue of race still cuts to the bone. So Helms seized upon the national debate over a holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King, and he began to sound the themes of thirty years ago.

“I think,” he declared on the floor of the Senate, “most Americans would feel that the participation of Marxists in the planning and direction of any movement taints that movement at the outset . . .

“The fact is that Dr. King’s program at least in part was conceived and aided by men and women who were not loyal to the United States. I refer specifically to members of the Communist Party of the United States, a revolutionary action organization funded and directed from Moscow. Although there is no record that Dr. King himself ever joined the Communist Party, he kept around him as his principal advisers and associates certain individuals who were taking their orders from a foreign power . . .

“King’s patterns of associations show that, at the least, he had no strong objection to communism, that he appears to have welcomed collaboration with Communists, and that

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he and his principal vehicle, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, were subject to manipulation by Communists. The conclusion must be that Martin Luther King Jr. was either an irresponsible individual, careless of his own reputation . . ., or that he knowingly cooperated and sympathized with subversive and totalitarian elements under the control of a hostile foreign power.”

Those kinds of guilt by association echoes of the late Joe McCarthy are vintage Jesse Helms. With heavy racial overtones, they have been his style since his days as a radio commentator in the 1950’s; and unlike Strom Thurmond, George Wallace and others in the South who have toned down their rhetoric in response to what they perceived as changing realities, Helms is convinced that the old ways work.

He may be right. Following his posthumous assault on King, Helms rushed from nearly twenty percentage points behind, to a point or two ahead, in the public opinion polls. And from then until the voting on November 6, the issue of race remained a conspicuous theme in his campaign literature and fund-raising appeals.

One letter sent out by Helm’s National Congressional Club contained the message: “Black Power Means Black Rule and Violent Social Revolution. VOTE HELMS.” And on the front page of a newsletter paid for by the Helms for Senate Committee, there was a photo of Jim Hunt and Jesse Jackson with a headline reading: “Hunt Urges More Minority Registration.”

All of that is part of a remarkably consistent ideology that has made Helms, in the words of one Republican strategist in North Carolina, the “ideological point man” of the American right.

Helms’s position on the arms race is that America should win it. He opposes any form of arms control negotiations, l and his rhetoric concerning the Soviet Union makes Ronald Reagan’s seem mild. When the Soviets shot down Korean Airlines Flight 007, Helms declared, “If that is not an act of war, it will do until another comes along.”

He criticized the State Department and the Reagan Administration for their support of El Salvador’s President Duarte, charging that Duarte is a “Socialist.” He compares Roberto D’Aubisson’s ARENA party to local Chambers of Commerce in North Carolina, and he declared at a June press conference in Charlotte:

“I met D’Aubisson down in Hot Springs, Virginia, last September, and he didn’t strike me as the kind of fella who would be connected with death squads. So I went to all the intelligence agencies in town and said, ‘Tell me about the death squads.’ They don’t have any evidence. There is no evidence. If the ARENA party were in North Carolina, it would include most, if not all, of the free enterprise folks in the city of Charlotte . . .”

The thing that sets Jesse Helms apart, however, is not only his willingness to say such things, but the way he delivers his lines. He has that impressive gift of timing, that rare politician’s ability to size up an audience, to tap into the darker moods of alienation and anger through a single word or phrase, delivered in most cases with a derisive little smile: “Ted Kennedy . . .” He will say. Or “Jesse Jackson . . .” That’s all it takes, and the sudden rumbles of laughter quickly grow into cheers, as Helms launches his assault on the standard set of enemies: big-spending liberals, domestic radicals, communist expansionists in every part of the world.

There is a sarcasm and pugnacity that plays well in the South, that appeals to bitter stirrings from thirty years ago, when the region began to bear the frontal assaults of change.

Kathryn Fulton, editor of the North Carolina Inde-

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pendent, argues that among the complicated ingredients in Jesse Helms’s appeal are his small town origins-a conception of himself and America shaped by his growing up in the town of Monroe, segregated, poor and pious, with the Depression and the triumph of World War II defining people’s thoughts on the way things should be. In that idealized world, which seems so threatened by the cataclysmic events of the last thirty years, there is no room for ambiguity or doubt, for troubling complexity or disturbing shades of gray.

Helms stands, in effect, as a beacon of certainty and a symbol of rage–lashing out at all the demons, the liberals, socialists, communists, feminists, atheists and integrationists, who have made our society such a disconcerting place.

And if on some level his supporters are troubled by the meanness and the Iying that are Helm’s standard fare, they are seduced nevertheless by the promise of victory: Total Victory over adversaries unambiguously threatening.

It is a powerful appeal.

Arrayed against it, however, was very potent candidacy of Governor Jim Hunt, who comes from the other side of Southern politics, from another whole strain in the psyche of his state. The strain is enbodied in a sporadic history of progressive politicians, of whom Frank Porter Graham in the 1940s and Terry Sanford in the 1960s were perhaps the most important. Both insisted on the moral necessity of change, and both appealed to the basic decency of North Carolinians.

Jim Hunt is a product of that tradition. He was raised on a farm in the eastern part of the state–109 acres of tobacco fields and rolling pastureland dotted with milk cows. His mother and father were ardent admirers of Franklin D. Roosevelt, as they battled their way through the vagaries of the Depression and learned to appreciate the helping hand of government. A federal conservation grant paid for the pond on their farm; their pine seedlings came from a federal project to combat soil erosion; and Rock Ridge High School, where Mrs. Hunt was a teacher, was rebuilt by the WPA after it burned to the ground.

The Hunts were staunch believers in the racial moderation of Frank Porter Graham, and they wept in 1950 when he lost a Senate race–defeated by the racist demagoguery of a Jesse Helms mentor, Willis Smith. Jim Hunt has never rebelled against the political legacy of his parents.

He is a politician who believes in the goodness of government, and he proved to be an effective and very popular governor.

He pushed for better roads and schools, the allocation of more money for social programs; and his most recent achievement was a $300-million educational package, including a fifteen percent pay raise for every teacher in North Carolina.

The difficulty for Governor Hunt (as for any North Carolinian of good conscience), lay in the degree to which Jesse Helms has been able to push the state’s politics to the right–setting the agenda and defining the issues. Add to this the fact that Jim Hunt has always been a cautious politician, sometimes cautious to excess.

For the last two years of his governorship Hunt became extremely protective of his right flank. He failed to speak and act as unequivocally as many of his supporters would have liked on social issues. He presided over two executions. And, as he began to address issues in the senate race, Hunt positioned himself as far to the right as he could–basically endorsing the Reagan Administration’s support for the contras in Nicaragua, and Administration’s plans to build the MX missile and the B-1 bomber.

Each of these moves by Hunt, while perhaps stategically defensible in terms of appealing to the broadest spectrum of North Carolina voters, helped to undermine the energy and enthusiasm of some of his once-ardent supporters. Many other voters began to lose their clear sense of just what Jim Hunt–and the best of the state’s historical Democratic legacy–stood for. With tragic irony, it was Hunt, not Helms, who began to appear as the less-principled politician.

All the caution worked to Hunt’s disadvantage. As things turned out, it hardly mattered what the Governor’s publicly stated advocacies were. Helms had $14 million to buy TV time to distort them.

Through an assault of television commercials, Helms managed to convince a majority of North Carolinians of something demonstrably untrue: that Hunt was a big-spending liberal–a Mondale clone who, if elected would raise their federal taxes by the remarkably specific sum of $157 a month.

In many of his commercials, Helms simply lied, putting a dollar figure that he knew was midleading on tax proposals that were not even Hunt’s. He also lied, flatly and with no hint of shame, about the details of his own record. “I haven’t proposed to do away with social security,” the senator said, though in fact, he had proposed replacing Social Security with a privately managed system. In a television debate, he accused Hunt of favoring elimination of tax deductions on home mortgage loans, which turned out to be a compound lie. Not only had Hunt never advocated such a plan, Helms had.

Later, Helms denied introducing anti-abortion legislation that would also have precluded certain forms of contraception, when in fact, that was precisely what he had done.

Astonishly enough, the lying prevailed and Helms was elected.

Frye Gaillard is an editorial page writer for the Charlotte Observer.

Plantation Portraits: Women of the Louisiana Cane Fields

By Tika Laudin

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 4-6

HELEN CASSIMERE

Jeanerette, formerly Kilgro and Hope Plantations.

I plant cane, cut grass, cut cane, hoe cane, pull grass out of cane, fertilize cane, spray cane, pull dirt to the cane for harvest for the following year. And I load cane onto the tractor and drive it out of the field. Anything the man can do, I do it.

I love the part where you just go ’round the rows, nobody lookin’ over your shoulder, out in the wide open fields, fresh air, doing your own work and seeing that it done right. After harvest is over, I enjoy looking forward to next year when it’s time to plant again.

I been working in the cane since I was sixteen years old. I’m forty-three now. I lived on Kilgro Plantation ’til ’59. It was way back in the country, out in the woods. Only thing I didn’t like, it was hard to get backwards and forwards to the nearest town. It was five miles away and we had to walk. (We didn’t have phones to call a taxi or anything.) Finally we made enough money that we could move to town.

My daddy likeded the cane work ’cause that’s all he knew. My mother likeded it ’cause it’s all she knew. They had twelve kids. When we got old enough, we persuaded them to better their situation in town.

Now I work at Hope plantation. They are very nice people to work for. Don’t give us any trouble. During grinding, that’s harvest time, they come to each person home, pick up their dinner, bring it out to the field.

I take work at 5:30 until 5:30 or six at night. Time pass by so fast. Seem like you hardly started and when you look up, the man on the headland be blinkin’ his light twice to let you know the tractors can stop.

I love field work. I really do. I rather field work than any other kind of work. It’s sloppy. It’s out in the weather. But I don’t mind getting dirty. I just love it. It’s all I know. It’s my way of workin’. I worked on other jobs–housekeeping, a cafe job, factory work. But the field is it.

I drive the tractor with three other ladies during spraying time, or by myself at other times. Cutting grass, cutting the headlands, it’s just me and the tractor. Drivin’ a tractor’s like driving a car or anything else with four wheels. Once you learn, it come natural. ‘Course its dangerous sometime. Sometime you give it too much gas, it’ll rear up on two wheels. It’s a matter of knowing when to give it gas, when to slow up, how to turn wide with the trailer part hauling two wagons.

When I first started, people, mostly mens, would say, that woman trying to take over a man’s world. When they first started putting women on tractors, most mens was dead set against it. But farmers would rather have women because they’re more confident, have more responsibility, handle equipment more carefully. I think womens are more dependable. When it’s cold and rainy and sloppy, mens would go back to bed, where a woman will get up and prepare herself and say, Lord, I got to work.

And I think womens really love having money. They really greedy, you know. Like to see big, writing on her paycheck. She’ll try if there’s any way in her power not to miss a day. She don’t

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want nobody to get a day ahead of her on the payroll.

I rather be workin’ any day than to be at home or any other place. Even on vacation.

It’s from small. It’s how my grandfather and greatgrandfather was. They used to say, nothin’ like workin’. They used to take us in the fields in a buggy drawn by mules, and we’d dig potatoes, break corn–that’s how we learned to work in the field. Papu say, we see which one gone be the best worker. He say to me, you’ll love the field work. And I did.

Specially when I’m by myself in the tractor, I think about how he’d talk.

I just like workin’ in the clay, in the dirt. It’s a beautiful thing to me. They brought me up that way. To me, I feel like a free spirit. It doesn’t make me feel tied down. Just free. Out in the open, in the fresh air. Just going along, doing my work.

I look back and see, here’s what these hands did, what I done all by myself.

LOUISE BUTLER

Jeanerette, formerly Yokely Plantation.

Now tell me this. Why they don’t try to help an old person like me who been scrappin’ cane all my life on a farm?

I lost my husband before Christmas last year. I get a little social security check, $347.80 a month, a widow’s check, that’s all. At that amount, payin’ my house note, utility bills, insurance bills, doctor bills, where my grocery money comin’ out? I don’t get food stamps. I still got his medical bills to pay. I went back to Yokely plantation where I used to live, over there in Franklin. I asked the bossman, would he allow me to plant cane enough to pay my bills. Bossman, he say, No, I done got too old.

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I guess he figured at my age I’d not be that healthy. I guess he didn’t want me to go out there and fall out, and they’d have to pay for me. ‘Cause the sun been real hot. It hurted me when he told me, ’cause I felt like, we stayed on his farm thirty some years. But the bossman don’t want me hangin’ ’round there.

I been workin’ in the cane fields since I was twelve years old. I cut standing up cane. After they started cutting with machines, I’d scrap cane. Now you leave the shucks on and they burn it. Them days, say this table leg is the cane, you cut high top, low bottom. That make clean cane. You had to cut the butt part down in the ground. No stubbles. Bossman would walk on your row to see if he found stubble. Might would fire you if you didn’t cut like he want it.

We used to windrow cane. That mean, you cut the cane, throw it in the middle of the row, . cover it with dirt. When they get ready to plant in the summer, they’d pull that windrowed cane out of the ground. The mule would pull it up and then we’d plant it.

June, July, we’d hoe cane, get the grass out of it. That was before they got all the tractors and sprays. They had more work for people and they get a better crop. They had one cane called 290, it was real good. And they had another big ole cane, big around as this glass, and striped like a candy cane.

Now they plant with a cane machine. It pile cane in one spot on the row. So you got to tow that cane and put it in the skip, the part of the ground that was skipped.

I used to plant cane from a wagon, that was fun. I could kick up my heels on the wagon. You did three rows at a time, one person on each row. You put three stalks of cane to each plant. You put it flat in the ground, and it has an eye at every joint. Like my finger, jointed here. All the way along, the canes got an eye. The plant grows out that eye.

Now what two mens used to do, they got one man. when I started, they was workin’ mules.

That’s why I don’t see why they don’t help old people, ’cause they done worked and they have come from a long way.

Bein’ on the farm was alright to me. I had me a gun-shoot house, a little long house just straight as a gun shoot. Only had two bedrooms and a kitchen, nothin’ else. I mean nothin’ else. No living room, bathroom. And I raised six children in that house, and three more before. It was a struggle, but we made it.

I liked it there. That’s why I went bouncin’ back to get some work.

Plantation Portraits is the name of an exhibit and a booklet which presents voices and photographs of black culture in plantation Louisiana. Conceived by Lorna Bourg of the Southern Mutual Help Association of Jeanerette, Louisiana, Plantation Portraits offers glimpses into the lives of seventeen women who work in the sugar cane industry of southern Louisiana. Interviewer Judith A. Gaines and photographer Tika Laudin gathered the stories and images which make up Plantation Portraits.

Residential, working plantations still survive in Louisiana’s sugar cane belt. The Southern Mutual Help Association is devoted to improving the li2.~e.s and conditions of cane workers and their families. Plantation Portraits suggests the strength, the oppression, the exuberance and the anger of plantation residents.

Below, Southern Changes offers two excerpts from Plantation Portraits. The complete booklet is available for five dollars from the Southern Mutual Help Association, P. O. Box 850, Jeanerette, Louisiana 70544.

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

By Allen Tullos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let ‘Em Eat Anecdotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rising Infant Mortality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take A Twinkie and Wait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senator No

The very Southern politicians who could best serve their

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

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

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

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

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

States of Fear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Greed and the War Against the Poor

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

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

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

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

Guide to Published Sources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Statement of Dr. Aaron Shirley before the House Select Committee on Hunger. Greenwood, Mississippi June 25, 1984

By Aaron Shirley

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, p. 12

My name is Aaron Shirley. I am a practicing pediatrician and the project director of the Jackson Hinds Comprehensive Health Center in Jackson, Mississippi. I also serve as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Mississippi Medical and Surgical Association, an affiliate of the National Medical Association. I appreciate this opportunity to come before you to share my views on the problems of hunger and malnutrition in our nation. I am sure you are familiar with the Field Foundations Survey of Hunger in the United States in 1967 with a follow-up study ten years later. I had the opportunity to participate in these surveys and was also part of a team which visited this area in April and May of this year. My first hand experience with nutritional problems of the poor is not limited to the few weeks spent during these studies however. Mine is an everyday experience as we provide a wide range of health and health related services to more than 26,000 poor in the City of Jackson and surrounding rural Hinds County, including WIC certification and nutritional counseling to five thousand poor pregnant women, infant and children.

In 1967 when we examined children in this very town and outlying rural communities we saw many children on the verge of actual starvation. They were stunted in their growth and development, dull and with very little vigor as you would expect of three, four and five year old children. Ten years later, and again in April and May of this year we found similar conditions but not to the extent to which they existed in 1967. It cannot be denied that the overriding factor contributing to the improvements which we did see has been due to the combined benefits of the various food assistance programs put into place during the past decade. This is not to say or to imply that poverty related hunger and malnutrition no longer exist. It does exist. It is still wide spread among the poor of our state, with children and the elderly being particularly affected.

With the absolute number of individuals in poverty growing, the problems are sure to deterioriate, and without appropriate intervention we may soon find ourselves back to the conditions of 1967 and the numbers adversely affected in this state would be high. For instance, there are 425,000 children participating in the school lunch program. Of these, 290,000 or sixty-eight percent receive the meals free or at reduced price, meaning they are from families in poverty. When we consider that poor children obtain one third or one half of their daily nutrients from school lunch we can readily see the potential negative impact on those who may no longer be able to afford these meals due to cut backs and changes in eligibility requirements.

Some might argue that the difference will be made up at home. This is just not the case. From our own first hand experience we find that seventy percent of the five thousand individuals, mostly children, which we certify annually for the WIC Program have home dietary histories deficient in vitamins A and C. Forty-five percent are deficient in iron and thirty percent deficient in protein. In those children three to five years of age, fifteen percent are deficient in calcium. And as we interviewed family after family recently and looked in their refrigerators and on their pantry shelves towards month’s end we could easily determined the reason, not enough food!

Over the past months there appears to have developed a controversy over this issue of hunger and malnutrition in our country. It is my understanding that even your being here trying to sift out the facts has provoked some degree of resentment and suspicion on the part of local officials. I can tell you over the years this has been a predictable reaction of those who have consistently ignored the problems of poor people and who have fought hard to retain a political and economic system which perpetuates poverty and all that living without an adequate income implies; poor housing, malnutrition, ill health and shortened life span. You will see some of this for yourself as you visit families in this area: I hope that you will keep in mind as you observe these families that the hunger that they speak of is not the occasional discomfort that you might experience on a busy day in which you might miss lunch or some other meal. The hunger which you see here is ongoing and leads to chronic malnutrition, and the consequences of this type of malnutrition takes it’s toll.

Gentlemen, in closing, I ask that you give serious consideration to immediately increasing the amount of funds for the various nutrition support programs–all of them; food stamps, WIC, school breakfast and school lunch. I say increase them all because it is obvious to many of us that one meal, or even a portion of a meal can make the difference between a child who is healthy, happy and capable of learning and developing into a productive citizen or one who is hungry and malnourished, apathetic and vulnerable to sickness and disease and possibly a shortened life span.

Of Hungry Children, 1967

By Raymond M. Wheeler, M.D.

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, p. 15

I am distressed and concerned that Senators Stennis and Eastland interpret my remarks this morning as libelous to the state of Mississippi.

I was born and reared and educated in the South. I love the region as much as they do. I reported what I saw because it is intolerable to me that this situation should exist in the region I love. I saw those children and their parents, and I told you what I saw and the message of despair and helplessness which they communicated to me.

For the past twenty years I have worked in the South, my birthplace and my home. During that time I have come to know in depth the white and the Negro–their problems, their sorrows, their joys.

Throughout these years, my heart has wept for the South as I have watched the southern black man and white man walk their separate ways distrusting each other, separated by false and ridiculous barriers–doomed to a way of life tragically less than they deserve–when by working together they could achieve a society finer and more successful than any which exists in this country today.

And through all of that dreadful pageant of ignorance and suspicion and mutual distrust, the most distressing figure of all has been the southern political leader who has exploited all of our human weaknesses for his own personal and selfish gain–refusing to grant us the dignity and the capability of responding to noble and courageous leadership–when all of us had nothing to lose but the misery and desolation which surrounds our lives.

The time has come when this must cease, for we are concerned with little children, whose one chance for a healthy and productive existence–into which they were born–is at stake.

I invite Senator Eastland and Senator Stennis to come with me into the vast farm lands of the Delta and I will show you the children of whom we have spoken. I will show you their bright eyes and innocent faces, their shriveled arms and swollen bellies, their sickness and pain and the fear and misery of their parents.

Their story must be believed–not only for their sakes–but for the sake of all America.

–From New South, Summer 1967

In July 1967 before hearings of the Senate Subcommittee on Manpower, Employment, and Poverty, a team of six physicians presented the results of a field trip into six Mississippi counties in which they surveyed the, health and living conditions of black children. Their report, published by the Southern Regional Council under the title HUNGRY CHILDREN, states in part: “In sum we saw children who are hungry and who are sick–children for whom hunger is a daily fact of life and sickness, in many forms, an inevitability. . . By the many thousands they live outside of every legal, medical and social advance our nation has made in this century. ” The report was filed by Dr. Joseph Brenner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Robert Coles of Harvard University Health Services; Dr. Alan Mermann of the Departmentof Pediatrics, Yale University; Dr. Milton J. E. Senn, Sterling Professor of Pediatrics, Yale University; Dr. Cyril Walwyn of Yazoo City, Mississippi; and Dr. Raymond M. Wheeler of Charlotte, N. C., chairman of the Executive Committee of the Southern Regional Council. Following the presentations of the physicians, Mississippi Senators James 0. Eastland and John Stennis challenged the doctors’ testimony as “a libel to the state of Mississippi. ” Dr. Wheeler then made the following reply.

Southern Banks Charge Ahead

By Jim Overton

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 18-20

A financial services revolution is underway and Southern banks are doing their damndest to make sure they get as large a slice of the pie as possible. In the process they are likely to wreak havoc on the access to banking services that people at the lower end of the income scale now have.

Several factors have combined to cause major shifts in banking. First (and for a number of reasons), banking revenues have dropped mightily in the last few years. Second, the partial deregulation of the financial services “industry” has created a new set of competitors for banks–even some K Marts have begun offering money market accounts to their customers. Third, the number of young professionals now cropping up all over the South has produced a demand for flexible financial services which can cater to the mobile and affluent.

Fourth, powerful regional sized industries are demanding broad ranging financial services that many banks can’t easily provide. And, the country’s megabanks–particularly expansion-hungry Citicorp–have announced their intention to become nationwide banking centers and, in doing so, to put the small fry of Southern banks, out of business.

Southern bankers, traditionally among the stodgiest corporate executives to be found anywhere, have leapt forward into their own revolution. The keystone of their strategy is the push for new legislation that will permit them to grow into regional banks that serve the entire Southeast rather than just one state or sub-state area.

Traditionally, both state and federal governments have carefully restricted banks’ service areas, largely because of fears of how powerful a national bank might become. Southern banks have established loan-making subsidiaries in neighboring states, but they have not been allowed to open full-service operations in other states. (With a few exceptions. For instance, North Carolina’s NCNB cleverly exploited a loophole to buy up a fleet of Florida banks). In fact, most states don’t even allow their banks to open branches all across the state, restricting them instead to a much narrower geographic region.

Recently, Southern bankers have started demanding the right to expand regionally–and found politicians quite receptive to that demand for interstate expansion. Proclaiming the need for a “Southern Common Market,” the Southern Governor’s Conference has pushed legislators to enable banks from other Southern states to open up shop within their borders. The message is taking effect: Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Kentucky have already passed such legislation, and others are considering it.

A look at North Carolina’s recently passed legislation indicates that in conjunction with other states’ legislation, it will virtually recreate the Confederacy economically: Effective Jan. 1, 1985, it will allow banks in all the old,` Confederate states, except Texas and add the District o’ Columbia, to provide full-service banking in North Carolina–as soon as those states allow North Carolina banks to invade their boundaries.

Naturally, the large Tar Heel banks–NCNB, Wachovia and First Union–were very eager to get this bill passed. Forecasters predict that regional banks will grow much more quickly than Citicorp-style megabanks over the next few years. And since North Carolina allows statewide banking, the NC Big Three felt confident that they would move to the top of the heap in the regional banking wars. First Union is so eager to get started that it has established a corporate goal of quadrupling its assets over the next four years.

But the bankers didn’t take passage for granted. The NC Bankers Association held eleven regional forums with legislators in March, contributed heavily in the primary campaigns and quieted dissenting voices among the smaller banks, who were less sure how much they wanted competition from outside banks.

The bankers issued a consistent message: We need to keep step with the competition. As NCNB chair Hugh McColl told his stockholders, “The state cannot afford to have its banks lose relative strength to companies in other states.”

With all this muscle behind it–including support from Governor Jim Hunt–the bill to permit regional interstate banking flew through the General Assembly. With Legal Services lobbyists out of the way thanks to new Reagan guidelines, there was no one to speak up against the bill. Aside from some sincere reservations by rural legislators, there were few roadblocks. In fact, the only real hurdle was the threat that the Democratic-controlled leadership would block the bill in retaliation for Hugh McColl’s public endorsement of Republican gubernatorial candidate Jim Martin several days before the bill hit the floor of the house and senate. After a few trying days, the threat fizzled, and the bill became law.

As with the legislation in other states, everyone involved seemed to forget that it might be important to assess the impact of interstate banking on one important set of actors in the financial services industry: the consumers. So it seems fitting to play a game of (almost) twenty questions on interstate banking and what it might mean for the average Southerner.

First, a few appropriate background items:

What’s happening to retail consumers in the banking revolution? The woeful economy of the last few years has prompted banks to seek increased revenues from retail customers. (In the past, almost all their income came from loan revenues.) Accordingly, service charges on checking and the like have skyrocketed.

In a study of the average service charges of North Carolina banks, Professor Nick Didow of the School of Business at UNC-Chapel Hill found that average bank service fees have risen thirty percent in each of the last two years. However, customers who keep minimum balances

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don’t have to pay these fees, throwing the burden on those least able to afford it. Concludes Didow: “When it comes to banking in this state, the poor pay more and there is no way to dispute that.”

What does this mean for the low-income consumer? One bank’s marketing study obtained by a US House member contains a chilling conclusion: Some banks are ready to lop as much as fifty percent of the populace from their service market. Tim O’Rourke, marketing director for North Carolina’s Central Bank, told the Durham Morning Herald: “As banks become deregulated, they will act more and more like non-regulated industries. If you can’t be everything for everyone, you want to choose your market.” Already some ten percent of the population doesn’t even use any bank services, and, says Didow, “We’re likely to see more households that can’t aford a bank.”

An example of the difference in banks’ new focus is found in Wachovia’s new banking card. Hooked into the national Relay and Cirrus networks, the card allows customers to withdraw money from several thousand places across the country. Such a service is highly useful to customers who travel frequently, but basically useless to a good percentage of Wachovia’s customers–who will still end up paying higher charges for the privilege of having such a card for their local needs.

Are bigger banks more expensive for the average consumer? Didow’s research points to one strong conclusion: “The bigger the bank, the higher the fee structure.” Fees for an average consumer range from $72 to $263 at North Carolina banks; most of the higher figures occur at the larger banks.

Given these trends, there are some fairly weighty questions yet to be answered about the impact of regional banking:

What information do we have on the impact of interstate banking on consumers? A North Carolina legislative study commission pondered the issue and produced the following conclusion: If the banks support regional banking, we’ll introduce it. (Can you imagine any legislature supporting food-tax repeal or lower utility rates just because a group of consumers wanted them passed?) Banks across the South have produced reams of data to explain why they need such legislation, but there is precious little information available about how interstate banking will affect the affordability or availability of financial services to the average consumer.

What will be the effect on consumers? Since there’s no research, there’s no conclusion–but there is reason to worry. Preliminary studies by the Federal Reserve indicate that transactions cost more per unit at bigger banks than at smaller ones. If this is true, then regional banking–which would spawn much larger banks–could result in higher costs for the basic consumer services banks provide.

Obviously, there are many consumers who need services like banking cards that can get them cash across the country. But most do not. Will banking services remain affordable and accessible to that large group of customers who do not need the frills banks are devoting more of their attention to?

What will regional banking do to the loan side of the banking business? Once again, there’s no hard evidence, but as Martin Mayer concludes in his new book, The Money Bazaars, “The basic business of the banks continues to be lending to businesses. And for the big banks, inescapably, the business has been one of lending to big businesses.” Several studies have shown that small banks remain the major capital suppliers for small businesses.

It’s not clear whether bigger regional banks will continue to supply small business needs if they gobble up lots of smaller institutions. Former NC senatorial candidate turned Washington banker Luther Hodges Jr. commented recently in American Banker: “Let me reiterate that interstate banking is not bigness for the sake of bigness; it is increased size for the capacity to serve the rapidly growing needs of regional industry (my emphasis).” That’s fine, Mr. Hodges, but what about the needs of small businesses?

In fact, numerous studies show how vital local small-business development remains to many Southern communities–despite the difficulty such businesses experience in locating capital. The Center of Community Self-Help in Durham has assisted a number of worker-owned businesses in getting started across the state. These businesses are providing vitally needed jobs for hard-pressed communities. Frustrated by their inability to get banks to invest in these enterprises, the Center spearheaded the formation of a Self-Help Credit Union, which provides vitally needed capital for these emerging businesses.

Unfortunately, it seems highly likely that interstate banking will only worsen the plight of small businesses; regional banks might serve the needs of regional industry, but will those banks be there to provide the funds communities need to keep developing? The prospects don’t seem optimistic.

If we don’t allow interstate banking now, what should we do instead? A word dear to the hearts to most bankers seems in order: caution. Professor Didow comments, “I don’t know all the answers, but I’d like to know the implications of regional banking for the retail side of banking for all the involved parties.” If larger banks do charge more for services, he notes, “I do not believe it is in the public’s interest to allow banks to expand.” It does seem that for something as crucial to people’s lives as financial services,

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the least we could do is study these issues soberly, especially states’ ability to regulate effectively.

Unfortunately, the legislation is already in place in all too many states, and the banks are lining up to gobble up their small competitors. However, even the most aggressive banks have to wait for the legislation to take effect–and for each state’s regulatory apparatus to approve the merger. T here might still be some methods by which concerned consumer groups could call for more study for the impacts of regional banking, put some brakes on the rush to merger, and get their legislators to reconsider the already passed legislation.

For a host of different reasons–the desire for a stable economy, the fears of another depression–we have allowed banks an economic security that most other enterprises don’t enjoy–especially the provision of federally insured deposits. In return, we’ve asked for little. The record of corporate responsibility rolled up by many Southern banks with regard to investing in the black community and providing services to low-income people is pretty abysmal. To adopt a favorite banker’s expression, it seems only prudent that we should slow down the interstate merger process and ask for some return guarantees before we allow the South’s banks to charge us with an uncertain future.

Jim Overton is the associate publisher of The North Carolina Independent.

The Bear. A film from Embassy Pictures, 1984. Larry G. Spangler, producer; Richard Sarafian, director; written by Michael Kane; starring Gary Busey as Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant.

Reviewed by Elliott J. Gorn

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 20, 22-23

I first moved to Tuscaloosa, carpetbag in hand, in 1981. I was enough of a football fan to know that the University of Alabama produced consistently strong teams and that Paul “Bear” Bryant was one of the most successful coaches in the country. Still, I was unprepared.

Football at Alabama is unlike any other sports phenomenon I have experienced. Lee Ballinger, a steel worker from Ohio and author of a fascinating book on contemporary sports, In Your Face, visited Alabama in the fall of 1982. He concluded that Ohioans love their OSU Buckeyes, but that he had never seen anything like the Crimson Tide mania.

Earlier this year, I brought a friend to the Penn State game, which Alabama won six to zero. My friend is from Connecticut, has been to Yankee Stadium when New York clinched American League pennants, but he claims that the noise level in Bryant-Denny Stadium that day surpassed anything in his recollection. When Alabama scored, he had to restrain himself from leaping from his seat, throwing up his arms and shouting “Orgasm!”

So it was as seeker of enlightenment that I put down my two dollars for a Saturday matinee screening of Larry Spangler’s film, The Bear. Unfortunately, I remain unenlightened.

The Bear is not a singularly bad film, but it’s not a good one either. Gary Busey portrays Bryant with tolerable believability; the filming is competent though certainly not distinguished; the writing is a bit flat but I’ve seen worse. All of the facts are there. The film opens with Bryant’s record setting win number 315, cuts to Fordyce, Arkansas where strapping young Paul fights a bear at a local carnival, moves to his student football days in Tuscaloosa, his courting of Mary Harmon, and his succession of coaching jobs at Kentucky, Texas A and M, and Alabama, and ends with his final game at the 1982 Liberty Bowl in Memphis. In documentary fashion we go from locker-room to locker-room, half-time speech to half-time speech, victory to victory. Along the way we are treated to one close up after another of Bryant/Busey’s face: Great man shows grit, determination, courage, anger, compassion, etc.

It is all too prosaic and predictable. I half-expected before seeing the film that it would dwell heavily on conventional pieties–Saint Paul, the devoted father and husband, telling the boys to write their mamas, say their prayers and make their daddy’s proud. The film does emphasize this side of Bryant, sometimes excessively. But producer Spangler’s coach also smokes, swears occasionally, and kicks a few

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deserving players. The Bear’s makers insisted on these elements of “authenticity” and for their pains were prevented from filming on the University of Alabama campus; Bryant’s heirs pressured the Wallace administration into keeping the film crews out-of-state. But even with the touches of the “real man” beneath the legend, the film remains hagiography. Toward the end, Bryant confesses to his black chauffeur that he feels guilty for ignoring his obligations toward the Almighty, but the coach is reassured (and we are reassured) that by helping the boys become good men, he was doing God’s work all along.

I do not mean to be cynical. Bryant was a remarkable man, and he deserves better than the cheap commercial hype, passing for devotion, which he has received. Perhaps the Coach is not an appropriate subject for a fine film, or good literature, or even first-rate journalism. No doubt many viewers are satisfied with an unartful invocation of Bryant’s achievements. A Tuscaloosa family sat behind me as I watched the film, and it was obvious that they enjoyed it. During the showing, I heard the father patiently explain to his wife and young children the precise dates of Bryant’s accomplishments, who played on which teams, and other details of the living past. I suspect that for this man, a truly fine film was not necessary. Merely recounting legendary events evoked layers of meaning, and his own vivid memories filled in what the movie missed. For such individuals, the film has a talismanic quality. Like a cross, or like Bryant’s houndstooth hat, the movie itself becomes a transcendent symbol of events whose significance are so implicitly understood that no explanation is needed.

Of course, an explanation is needed, maybe not for the converted, but certainly for the rest of us sinners who listened in slack-jawed silence as dewey-eyed fans assured us on the day of Bryant’s funeral that he was one of the greatest men who ever lived. Maybe, as my students tell me, Paul Bryant was a great man because he was a winner. But the story must be more complex.

The Coach’s personal history was well known, and it paralleled the region’s. Like so many of his contemporaries, Bryan t grew up a poor farm boy, the tenth of eleven children in an Arkansas family. But as a football coach, Bryant became intimately associated with that hallmark of corporate life, that seedbed of the bureaucratic and technological forces which transformed the South after World War II, the modern state University. Bryant, as the film indicates, was recruited to give the University of Alabama national visibility. Yet even as he succeeded, he remembered his roots, spoke the people’s language, mingled among average Alabamians, asked how they and their kin were doing. By maintaining this family feeling, Bryant allowed his fans to have their cake and eat their cornbread too. Alabama competed nationally, but did so with their own good ole boy at the helm. Moreover, the aura of the hometowner making it in the Big Game rubbed off on his teams. Bryant was a great motivator who got the most out of his players, the majority of whom were local boys, recruited out of small Alabama towns, the heroes of hundreds of communities who beat up on bigger, better fed opponents.

Despite the attempts to deify him, my impression has always been that Bryant’s flaws, in combination with his strengths, made him appealing. Everyone in Alabama knew that he muttered unintelligibly during his Sunday morning post-game television show because, like many of his fans, he toasted victory too frequently or drowned defeat too deeply the night before. Everyone knew about the revels of all-night poker games at the Stafford Inn in Tuscaloosa for influential alumni and Tide supporters. But again, these were the flaws which kept Bryant in touch with his fans, allowed them to identify with his spectacular success, because he too was human. The contradictions–Bryant’s pious devotion to mama, Mary Harmon and Southern womanhood, alongside his revelling in rough male camaraderie–was a double standard his fans understood.

Moreover, Bryant’s ascendancy came precisely when his region suffered from a damaged national image and an internal crisis of confidence. During the 1960s, when Northerners thought of Alabama, they envisaged police dogs, Bull Connor’s fire hoses, and bloodied freedom riders. But Bryant offered pride, unity, and a sense of accomplishment to the citizens of a state impoverished by a colonial economy and torn by racial tensions. Never mind that until the end of the decade his teams replicated the same pattern of institutional racism which embarrassed so many individual Alabamians. The point is that Bryant’s boys not only won they did so with dignity. They were truly proud representatives of a state still smarting from public humiliation.

The Bear fails to capture any of the context which made Bryant’s life meaningful, indeed, which makes all sports more than just fun and games. C.L.R. James, the Marxist historian and social critic, has written one of the finest works on sports I have ever read. I know nothing about, cricket and understand the game poorly. But by reading James’ autobiographical musings on the sport, I now have some grasp of the game’s social importance. James describes his own upbringing in Trinidad amidst accounts of fast bowlers, short legs and off breaks:

My father’s father was an emigrant from one of the smaller islands, and probably landed with nothing F5ut he made his way, and as a mature man worked as a pan-boiler on a sugar estate, a responsible job involving the critical transition of the boiling cane-juice from liquid into sugar. It was a post in those days usually held by white men. This meant that my grandfather had raised himself above the mass of poverty, dirt, ignorance and vice which in those far-off days surrounded the islands of black lower middle-class respectability like a sea ever threatening to engulf them . . . My grandfather went to church every Sunday morning at eleven o’clock wearing in the broiling sun a frock-coat, striped trousers and top-hat, with his walking stick in hand, surrounded by his family, the underwear of the women crackling with starch. Respectability was not an ideal, it was an armour. He fell greviously ill, the family fortunes declined and the children grew up in unending struggle not to sink below the level of the Sunday-morning top-hat and frock-coat.

Not a word about cricket, yet suddenly we understand the appeal of that restrained and genteel sport.*

It is this kind of description–placing cricket in the context of race, class and colonialism, placing it against the backdrop of James’ own family history and the social conditions of the Carribbean–which elevates his discussion

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of sport to art. Precisely this sort of context is missing from The Bear. The American South is no less complex nor less interesting than Trinidad. Bryant’s accomplishments, the tragedies of recent Southern history, and the glories of Southern football all deserve their own C.L.R. James, someone who can tell the story so others might understand.

Elliott J. Gorn is assistant professor American Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. He is completing study of the early history of prize fighting in America, to be entitled The Manly Art.

The Politics of Culture in an American Region

Reviewed by J.W. Williamson

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

All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region by David E. Whisnant. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 340 pp.

The first time I ever laid eyes on David Whisnant was at a big conference in the mountains called “Toward 1984: The Future of Appalachia,” and he was making like the Prophet Amos even then. That was in 1974. He stood up in the concluding plenary session, conducted by “the Goals and Objectives Committee” of the conference, and told all those industry and government and think-tank types what he thought of their agenda for Appalachia. He didn’d want nothing those guys had to offer, no way they could preach it or talk it. Well, he slowed them down, but he didn’t stop .hem. They went ahead and adopted their “Goals and Objectives” for Southern Appalachia, one of which read–

3. Educational institutions in Appalachia must relate more consciously to the mountain experience. They must include a concern for the rich historical and cultural heritage of the region, an awareness of the relationship between human beings and their land, and of the alternatives for the future and for the human values involved.

Nice liberal-sounding words. So what’s so wrong with pasting this humanistic veneer of culture-salvation on top of your run-of-the-mill three-day conference?

One of the things wrong with it was that the people writing this agenda for saving mountain culture were also simultaneously in the service of the coal industry, the power industry, the petroleum industry, the land-development industry, the railroading industry, the steel industry, and the-ahem–higher education industry–all in their way and in their time exploitive of the place and the people. This iron y is also at the core of Whisnant’s new book, All That Is Native and Fine. What happens when agents of the dominant American, mainstream, middle-class, industrial society get it in their heads that they ought to help mountain people? What happened at Hindman Settlement School from the 1890’s on? What happened at the White Top Folk Festival in Virginia during the 1930’s? What happened, even, when as intelligent and wise a woman as Olive Dame Campbell decided to start a folk school in the North Carolina mountains? All basically liberal, benevolent “interventions” for the sake of doing good. But Whisnant’s attitude toward them is the attitude the Prophet Amos toward hypocrites of his own day–“Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

In other words, All That Is Native and Fine is a tough book. It needles the reader with a profoundly disturbing vision of do-gooders doing mainly harm (or “young ladies with weak eyes and young men with weak chins. . . offering cocoa and sponge cakes as a sort of dessert to the factory system,” as one critic of settlement workers called them). Ironies and paradoxes breed in this book like mayflies on a humid night. For example. Olive Dame Campbell founded the John C. Campbell Folk School (named for her dead husband) on a rather naive and romantic notion that Appalachia in the early 1920’s was still an “isolated, preindustrial, premercantile society,” but Whisnant sets that notion against some sobering reality:

By 1925, however, even rural Cherokee and Clay counties were neither preindustrial nor premercantile. The local weekly newspaper regularly cataloged the arrival of mass culture in the late 1920’s: a traveling tent show was competing for an audience with “The

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Thief of Baghdad” (starring Douglas Fairbanks) at the Bonita Theater; an eight-story hotel was rising on Murphy’s main street; Parker’s Drug Store was installing a jukebox; private power companies were damming the Hiwasee River to run the electric refrigerators advertised alongside Fords, Whippets, and Hupmobiles. At the time the folk school opened, the other big news stories locally were the opening of the Appalachia Scenic High way from Atlanta to Asheville (via Murphy) and early plans for the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fly the spring of 1927 an automobile raced to Asheville in two hours, thirty-nine minutes–nearly fifty miles an hour. The annual Cherokee County Singing Convention, organized in 1894, was still drawing as many as fifteen hundred people in 1925, but the old ways were clearly dying

That paragraph alone is worth the price of the book.

Whisnant’s most concise statement of doctrine is this: intervention in a “culture” for whatever reasons is usually wrongheaded because “the ‘culture’ that is perceived by the intervenor (even before the act of intervention) is rarely congruent with the culture that is actually there. It is a selection, an arrangement, an accommodation to preconceptions–whether of mountaineers, or Indians, or Georgia blacks, or Scotch Highlanders. Thus the culture that is ‘preserved’ or ‘revived’ is a hybrid at best”–mountain people taught crafts and songs and dances that they ought to know and which they would have known if only they had had the good sense to be educated at, say, Vassar.

So what about the nice little ladies and the kindly gentlemen with big box cameras in their portmanteaus, all the ones who are unaware of the larger ironies of their undertakings–their interventions–in the mountains? Can’t we give them a break and say it’s all right what they did, so long as they thought they were doing good? Well, no. Whisnant is a stern judge; “Rescuing” or ‘preserving’ or ‘reviving’ a sanitized version of culture frequently makes for rather shallow liberal commitment: it allows a prepared consensus on the ‘value’ of preservation or revival, its affirmations lie comfortably within the bounds of conventional secular piety; it makes minimal demands upon financial (or other) resources; and it involves little risk of opposition from vested economic or political interests. It is, in a word, the cheapest and safest way to go.” Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!

Whisnant is careful not to offer comments on other culture-saving ventures of more recent vintage. On his three case studies, his research is exhaustive, and he doesn’t gallop beyond his research to phenomena like Foxfire, for example. But the message seems pretty clear if implicit: what they did then they’re still doing now, only their technology is better and sometimes their funding. People still come to the mountains and see what they want to see: cabins in the laurel and all that stuff. They don’t notice the plain truth–for instance, that the most ubiquitous feature on the Appalachian landscape right now is the satellite dish–and they certainly haven’t begun to deal with the reality of what that means. Whisnant says that the cultural objects, styles, and practices introduced by the little ladies and kindly gentlemen–the “intervenors”–have a nasty habit of taking on a life of their own, get imbedded in too many people’s minds as examples of what life in this region is all about, and then those false notions become the basis for public policy–governments at all levels deciding to do for and do to mountain people on the basis of a profoundly warped understanding of who those people are and what motivates them. That is the evil that comes from trying to save someone else’s “culture,” and those are the dangerous “politics” of Whisnant’s sub-title.

This is a sobering book. It needs study by a great host of “culture workers,” inside these mountains and out.

J.W. Williamson is editor of the Appalachian Journal.