The Two Faces of Southern Populism

By Dan T. Carter

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 1-3

With the strong showing of David Duke, the racism of the Jesse Helms and Guy Hunt campaigns and the nation’s general mood of political dyspepsia, George Wallace’s “populist” crusade of the 1960s and 1970s is back in the news. The resurgence of cruder forms of race-baiting, not to mention the more generic cry of “throw the bums out”–we are reminded–is not without precedent in our recent past.

Racism there is. Guy Hunt’s campaign in Alabama was a relatively soft-core version of the politics of race; David Duke and Jesse Helms practiced the old-time religion: “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!”

Helms has been crawling out of these sewers since 1950 when he joined Willis Smith’s race-baiting/red-baiting campaign against North Carolina’s Frank Porter Graham. With his appeals to hatred against homosexuals and blacks, his last campaign is a depressing reminder of his powerful mastery of the witchcraft of scapegoating.

In the long run, however, demagogues like David Duke may be even more dangerous than Helms. For Duke has understood that he is operating in an increasingly subliterate world of television in which each new day begins afresh, without past, without future. Thus he can nonchalantly dismiss his past history as a neo-Nazi/Klansman, concentrating instead on having his face made over by a first-rate plastic surgeon. As the nation’s political culture descends past Oprah Winfrey

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and Phil Donahue through Newt Gingrich’s lexicon of campaign slogans and downward toward the level of plants and minerals, appeals to glandular reflexes (“quotas,” “parasitic underclass,” “tax and speed”) are infinitely more accessible then complex discussions of budget deficits, income maldistribution or economic exploitation.

And all three men are the beneficiary of a Republican Party’s quarter-century flirtation with soft-core racism. George Bush may try to hang a leper’s bell on Duke, but it is difficult to take him seriously when he trucks off to North Carolina to embrace Helms, whose campaign has been as squalid as anything David Duke could have imagined. Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964; Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy; Ronald Reagan’s amiable harangues against [black] welfare queens; George Bush’s Willie Horton commercials and his politically inspired veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990; and now the campaigns of Hunt, Duke and Helms; it’s not a pretty sight.

But I am not at all certain that Duke or Helms or Hunt can be explained as reincarnations of George Wallace; nor do I believe they are the authentic voices of a resurgent wave of working class racism.

After Wallace became the high priest of racial segregation in the early 1960s he brought to his state a level of rhetorical vindictiveness that left wounds still unhealed. And in his presidential campaigns through the 1960s and 1970s Wallace gave voice to some of the darkest fears and hatreds in American society.

What is easy to forget, however, is that George Wallace began his career in 1946 as a down home social democrat with little enthusiasm for the race-baiting that often marked Southern political campaigns. And when the number of black voters in his state passed the 300,000 mark in the early 1970s, the Alabama governor reversed directions and welcomed black voters and politicians into the Wallace tent. Political opportunism is not an edifying spectacle; when compared with the unwavering racism of David Duke it has its charms.

George Wallace’s convoluted career should remind us that there are other, more humane populist traditions which come out of the Southern experience. Wallace himself learned his lessons from an altogether different kind of Populist, James E. (“Big Jim”) Folsom.

Through two terms as governor and forty years of campaigning, Folsom resumed again and again to four texts: the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and–most of all–Jesus’s

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Sermon the Mount. And from these familiar texts he evolved his political catechism:

That governmental laissez-faire inevitably allowed the powerful to prey upon the weak; that adequate welfare programs were the “fundamental obligation of a democracy to its people in order that the unfortunate may feast on more than crumbs and clothe themselves with more than rags;” that women were not chattel, but citizens who should be given the same rights as men; that the black citizens of Alabama were entitled to equal justice, equal opportunity and a “full share of democracy;” that there were no problems which could not be cured by a “good strong purgative of pure and unadulterated democracy.”

In the end Folsom’s personal failings (too much whiskey, too many women, too few honest friends) were as conspicuous as his six foot, eight inch frame and his size sixteen shoes. His challenge to Wallace collapsed in the 1962 governor’s race when Folsom appeared on statewide television, too drunk to recognize his own children. When he ran for governor against Wallace in 1974, he got less than five percent of the vote.

The racists he had fought, the “Big Mule” industrialists and the old reactionary planter class of the Black Belt seemed to have the final word.

And now as the economy falters and the bills for the Reagan fantasies come due, those voices are returning to join the David Dukes. The “liberal politics of victimization are over,” we are told. Now black Americans can once more take their historical place as the scapegoats of a troubled society.

Folsom had seen it all before. The Ku-Kluxers, the race-baiters, and “some of the selfish interest groups” would always be present, he warned in 1949, “spreading their filth, their lies, their old and ancient hatreds … trying to boil up hatred by the poor white people against the Negroes … trying to keep the poor white from progressing by keeping the Negro tied in shackles.”

Still I take heart from the only conversation I ever had with James Folsom. He was nearly blind and occasionally confused as we sat and talked in a truckstop diner outside Cullman, Ala. But he retained an almost child-like faith in the decency and ultimate judgment of the same voters who had rejected him. The working people of this country- “the farmer, the factory worker, the mill hand, the school teacher”-would eventually see through this “blasphemous smoke screen” of racial hatred, he had predicted. And they would understand that the promise of this nation lay in the challenge of guaranteeing equal justice, equal opportunity and equal freedom for every man, woman and child.”

That’s a far cry from the “populism” of Jesse Helms or David Duke.

Dan T. Carter is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of History at Emory University. He is writing a biography of George Wallace.

A Letter from Lillian Smith: “Old Seeds Bearing a Heavy Crop.” With an introduction by Rose Gladney

By Rose Gladney

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 4-5

As contemporary debates concerning the National Endowment for the Arts remind us that censorship, like patriotism (to paraphrase Samuel Johnson), too often becomes the last refuge of scoundrels, the words Lillian Smith prepared for the 1944 annual meeting of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union again raise timely end probing questions. What fears are aroused in those who would censor art? What in our culture continues to produce a Jesse Helms?

In the spring of 1944 Lillian Smith found her own work the subject of a censorship debate. Her novel Strange Fruit had been declared a “big best-seller” even before publication date, Feb. 29. Within a month, March 20, it was labeled obscene and banned by the Boston police. Two weeks later, with the advice of the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and the cooperation of the novel’s publishers, Reynal and Hitchcock, Harper’s Magazine columnist Bernard de Voto initiated a test case of the ban by purchasing a copy of the book from Abraham Isenstadt, owner of University Law Book Exchange in Cambridge. Joseph Welch, later made famous in U.S. Army v. McCarthy, defended Strange Fruit, but on April 26 District Court Judge Arthur P. Stone found the novel “obscene, tending to corrupt the morals of youth.” A subsequent appeal did not overturn his decision, and the novel remains, technically at least, banned in Boston.

Efforts to ban the book in Detroit were successfully defeated by combined efforts of the United Auto Workers and the Detroit Public Library. The other successful banning of Strange Fruit occurred in mid-May when the U.S. Post Office ordered newspapers and magazines not to advertise the novel. The ban lasted only three days, however, because publisher Curtice Hitchcock sought and obtained the intervention of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Because Lillian Smith sent a copy of the following statement with a note to Curtice Hitchcock, it was preserved with her correspondence in the files of her subsequent publishers, Harcourt, Brace, & Jovonavich. It is reproduced here with the permission of the Lillian Smith estate.

From: Lillian Smith
Clayton, Ga.
(May 26, 1944)

Statement to Civil Liberties Union of Mass.
For Annual Meeting

There are many people who can not bear to face a truth that hurts. There are some who have dosed doors so firmly on their own emotional past that they go into a panic of fear when a book revives old memories. There are others who, because of early childhood training, have learned to look upon all frankness–however serious, however necessary to mature understanding of human experience–as something unclean and contaminating.

These are our immature, emotionally undeveloped people; frozen on a level of infantile experience, completely cut off from the possibility of growth and change.

Our culture, our values, our family experiences, the Puritanic strains in our religion–all tend to produce such people in numbers larger than we care to admit.

These people fear a book like Strange Fruit with a profound dread; and will seize on any pretext, however silly, to keep others and themselves, from having access to it.

But there are many others who fear the effect of Strange Fruit on the racial status quo; and, I think, within this group we shall find Boston’s major reason for banning the book. These people believe it is to their political and economic advantage to keep the Negro and the Jew and labor where they are today. They fear all change. They know when racial segregation begins to weaken, that other forms of segregation and exploitation will crumble with it. They fear the book because it has the effect of stirring imagination and reawakening guilt feelings.

To these people, segregation in all its forms: racial, economic, religious, psychological, must be maintained at however great a cost to civil liberties and intellectual freedom.

It is only by realizing that the charge of obscenity is a clumsy attempt to destroy the book’s power and prestige,

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that we, who believe in civil rights, can defend these rights in terms of this book. One can argue until doomsday about good taste without arriving at a just and true decision. Good taste is innate kindness and sensitiveness, tactfully genuflecting to contemporary taboos–a subtle and delicate blend of social good-will and hypocrisy that is too delightfully elusive to be caught and thumb-printed. For instance, what was good taste in men’s bathing suits twenty years ago would not be worn today, for a fortune, by one of the Watch and Ward gentlemen. Although by their own inexorable logic they should be compelled to wear such a garment while they go about plucking strange fruit! Yet, however elusive it is, good taste plays a necessary role in the rituals of everyday life and social affairs and always will.

But a book is not a social situation. A book is a serious examination of life. Truth cannot be adjusted to this year’s drawing-room manners, as can our behavior at a tea party. It is completely irrelevant, therefore, to attempt to use taste as a criterion for artistic truth–just as it would be to offer it as a valid reason for refusing to operate on a sick man. Truth, science and human need have never conformed to Watch and Ward manners or to postal regulations, and never will.

To suggest anything else is so contrary to common sense and sanity that one is compelled to brush such excuses aside and look for the hidden reasons. Why is a serious book with one plain word in it being fought across the country by post-office and watch and ward socieities [sic] and police?

The answer to this question will lead us to the roots of our culture–roots we must be willing to look at closely. For there is rising rapidly, now, to the surface of our American life, forces of hate and fear end ruthlessness that do not often show themselves so plainly. These evils in our culture have been here for a long time. They are old seeds that are now bearing a strange and heavy crop of trouble. We, in fighting for the right of this book to be read, are not fighting a little battle over one small word but a war against a way of life that threatens to destroy all that we value in human goodness and freedom and intelligence.

The Lillian Smith Awards for 1990

By Staff

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 5

The Lillian Smith Awards are presented yearly to recognize and encourage outstanding writing about the American South. Smith long distinguished herself as one of the region’s foremost advocates of human rights and one of its most sensitive students. She wrote many works, both fiction and non-fiction. Hers is the rare type of topical literature that remains relevant year after year because it confronts deeply rooted social problems and promotes a recognition of their very human roots and dynamics. The Lillian Smith awards for fiction and non-fiction have been presented since 1968. The recipients do not have to be Southerners, but their honored work must be about the South.

Dori Sanders is the 1990 recipient of the Lillian Smith Award for fiction. Sanders is the author of the award winning novel Clover. Born in York County, South Carolina, Sanders attended York County Public Schools and later studied at community colleges in Prince George’s and Montgomery counties in Maryland. She divides her time between her writing, working on her family’s peach farm, an open air market, and as an associate banquet manager in Maryland. Besides being featured in numerous national magazines and newspapers, Clover is being translated for publication in Japanese, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and German and Walt Disney studio has acquired movie rights. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill is the publisher of this work.

Wayne Flynt is the 1990 recipient of the Lillian Smith Award for non-fiction. Flynt, a native of Alabama, is currently the Hollifield Professor of History at Auburn University and a Baptist minister. In the sixties Flynt was a civil rights activist within the Baptist church. After the Movement he established a distinguished career as teacher and author. In 1989 he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for Poor But Proud: Alabama’s Poor Whites, which utilized scholarly research and oral history to document the historical, economic, and socio-political implications of Southern poverty. His chronicle of how poor Euro-Americans struggled to retain their dignity and make sense of their world is one of the great dramas of the story of the American people. This work is published by the University of Alabama Press.

Restarting Savannah River?

By Tim Connor

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 6-7

The Department of Energy (DOE) plans to resume operations in the coming weeks at its three aging production reactors near the Georgia-South Carolina border. Brushing aside questions about the need for the nuclear weapons materials, which the facilities produce, the Department continues to downplay the environmental risks associated with the reactors’ restart.

The planned restart comes in the aftermath of a report in which the Energy Department concedes, for the first time, that people living near another major nuclear weapons plant at Hanford, Wash. were exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity.

In its recent report on Hanford, DOE acknowledges that the releases of radioactive iodine posed the greatest health threat. Scientists know radioactive iodine concentrates in the thyroid gland, causing thyroid cancer and other diseases. Milk from cows grazing on contaminated grass is the major source for radioactive iodine exposure to humans. As the Hanford study indicates, infants and children–in whose smaller thyroids the radioactivity is most densely concentrated–are most vulnerable.

Savannah River Deserves Scrutiny

The news from Hanford should be of special interest to Georgians and South Carolinians. The revelations at Hanford came about only after years of efforts by citizen groups and journalists to force DOL to release hundreds of environmental records that had been classified for over 30 years. While it’s not yet clear whether Savannah River’s closets contain the same skeletons, one thing is dear. We should be demanding a thorough, independent study of the history of radiation releases from Savannah River before nuclear materials production resumes at the plant.

Until now DOE, following in the footsteps of its predecessor–the Atomic Energy Commission–has invoked national security to thwart outside scrutiny of the environmental consequences of its operations. And since its inception, the agency charged with producing nuclear weapons has also exercised extraordinary control over the study of radiation and its effects on human health.

There is a growing consensus among scientists that low level radiation causes more harm than previously thought. And we know that people living downwind and downstream of weapons production and testing sites like the Savannah River Site (SRS) have been exposed to more radioactive materials than generally realized.

Tritium Poses Threat at Savannah River

Although the available records indicate smaller releases of radioactive iodine from Savannah River than from Hanford, a closer look is certainly needed. Among other things, current reports indicate that releases of iodine-129–which remains in the environment for millions of years–is a significant contributor to off-site radiation.

The highest releases from SRS are of tritium, a radioactive form of hydrogen. Tritium may be the most invasive of all radioactive substances, capable of entering the body by both inhalation and absorption through the skin.

As a production center for tritium, the facility has released hundreds of times more tritium than other nuclear plants–including Hanford.

Dr. Karl Z. Morgan, who for 20 years chaired the International Commission on Radiological Protection committee charged with setting limits for internal radiation exposure, notes that the current standards understate tritium’s toxicity by as much as five times.

Tritium levels in drinking water downstream from the Savannah River plant are seven to 25 times higher than that measured in other water supplies. Federal monitoring reports show high levels of tritium in rainfall well beyond the Savannah River plant boundary, with Columbia, S.C. having twice the average concentration of other southeastern cities. Surface water samples from South Carolina’s Edisto River suggest that tritium from the plant has contaminated that watershed as well.

Low-Level Radiation: New Studies, New Fears

Tests that have been performed suggest the risk from radioactive gases is much greater than generally thought. Former Savannah River plant waste manager Bill Lawless stated that a 1982 test of atmospheric dispersion failed to match the predictions of computer models. The radioactive cloud, instead of breaking up near the site, was still intact as it floated over Fayetteville, N.C.–200 miles away.

Studies also indicate high concentrations of other radioactive elements dose to the SRS. Milk samples from nearby farms in Georgia and South Carolina regularly contain radioactive strontium-20 at levels nearly double the national and regional average. Largemouth bass caught in the Savannah River near the plant contain concentrations

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of radioactive cesium-137 at levels many times that measured in bass from other river systems.

The accumulating evidence on low-level radiation continues to demolish previous, official assurances of safety. The more we learn, the more obvious it becomes that past practices and rhetoric were misguided and dangerous. Recently, Britain’s Radiological Protection Board has dramatically reduced the acceptable radiation exposure levels for workers in the U.K.

The lesson of Hanford ought to be dear to those living in the shadows of other nuclear weapons plants around the country. Especially at facilities like the SRS, where DOE plans to continue producing nuclear materials for years to come, an earnest effort involving citizen participation and independent oversight to examine past and present releases should be completed prior to making any decision on restart.

For more information about the Savannah River Plant and what you can do, contact Ellen Spears at (404) 584-9902 or Jan Somers at (404) 491-8064.

Tim Connor is an analyst for the Energy Research Foundation, a non-profit research and educational organization. He lives in Augusta, Ga.

The Inner Life of the Deadly Machine

By Helen Shortal

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 7-10

Building Bombs. Produced and directed by Mark Mori and Susan Robinson.

Building Bombs is making news. Both CNN and NBC News have broadcast footage from the one-hour documentary that examines the human cost of nuclear-weapons production at the Savannah River Plant in Aiken, S.C.

Even MTV has taken notice of the film, since Building Bombs has been promoted by rock musicians such as Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and Dave Wakeling of the now defunct General Public. When MTV learned that Wakeling would be on hand for the film’s premier in Washington, D.C., the network dispatched a video crew to the Biograph Theater in Georgetown. A segment featuring interviews with Wakeling and Atlanta-based filmmaker Mark Mori along with the music of R.E.M. was later shown on MTV.

The five-year effort to produce and distribute Building

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Bombs began in 1984 when Mori and two friends decided to film a peace demonstration near the mammoth weapons complex. The ad hoc film crew paid a visit to the antinuclear activists who were living at a peace encampment near the Savannah River Plant. “We just started shooting protesters,” says Mori. “But then we met Arthur Dexter and Bill Lawless.”

Both Dexter and Lawless had worked at “the bomb plant,” as it is known to local residents. And both men recounted highly personal tales of their disillusionment with the nuclear industry.

Lawless, a former Department of Energy investigator, was sent to the Savannah River Plant to assess the amount of radioactive waste buried in the South Carolina soil. He submitted a report that detailed the widespread contamination and serious hazards at the plant. And DuPont de Nemours Co., which managed the plant until last year, pressured him to retract his findings. Lawless became the first Department of Energy official to testify about the bomb plant’s hazardous conditions.

Of the many horror stories Lawless told, the one that received the most attention concerned the disposal of low-level radioactive materials at the plant; objects contaminated with radioactivity were place in cardboard boxes and buried in pits. The 192-acre burial ground at the plant contained everything from protective gloves to bulldozers. And the boxes were caving in, contaminating the soil and the groundwater with radioactivity.

Arthur Dexter was a former physicist at the plant. Ironically, he had gone to work at the bomb plant to avoid fighting in the Korean war; only DuPont had the power to exempt Dexter from the draft. His new job, testing the movement of gases through various materials, “seemed quite innocent at the time,” says Dexter in the film. “Only later did I realize I was working on weapons.”

As the years passed, Dexter became uncomfortable with the stockpiling he observed at the bomb plant, which housed enough plutonium and tritium to manufacture 30,000 bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki. “It seemed rather obscene,” he says. After Dexter quit working at the plant he became involved in the Aiken Peace Movement and with Warhead Watch, a group that tracks nuclear weapons transported on public highways.

As Mori interviewed the pair of Savannah River Plant insiders, he began to envision a different kind of protest film. Building Bombs would focus on life inside the bomb plant rather than rail against the hazards and abuses of the nuclear industry.

During 1985, Mori met his future partner, Susan Robinson, at Atlanta’s IMAGE Film/Video Center for independent film and video artists. A producer of interactive projects and corporate videos, Robinson had a background in instructional design–and a strong interest in environmental issues. She had attended her first demonstration at the Savannah River Plant when she was 16.

But neither Mori nor Robinson had produced a feature length film before. “We were first-time filmmakers, and everyone told us to just make a simple expose–the story of Dr. Lawless and those cardboard boxes,” says Robinson. “But we felt that personal responsibility, political ideology, and history all came together in this story, and we wanted to tell the whole thing. Becoming politically aware and active is a developmental process, and we believed that if we could tell the stories of these men and the changes they made in their lives, they would serve as role models.”

Robinson and Mori began compiling research materials, photographs, film footage, and interviews about a wide range of topics pertaining to the bomb plant. They unearthed archival footage of cardboard boxes labeled “Radioactive Waste” being tossed into pits in the burial ground. They filmed a pro-nuclear rally in 1984 where former Secretary of Energy James Edwards delivered a speech about the economic benefits of the nuclear industry. And they interviewed workers and family members about working conditions at the plant, the region’s mounting health problems and life in the company town.

“We tried to design the film for people who weren’t necessarily sensitive to these issues,” says Mori. “People expect Building Bombs to be a regular anti-nuclear film, but we wanted to make it more than that. We wanted to look at the lives of the human beings who work in the nuclear industry.”

Not that Building Bombs skimps on the Savannah River Plant or its role in the arms race. But its litany of mismanagement and impending doom is softened by the filmmakers’ empathy for the people whose lives have been affected by the bomb plant.

As the film begins narrator Jane Alexander describes the growth of the nuclear industry in South Carolina. In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission selected the region near rural Ellenton, S.C., as the ideal location for manufacturing plutonium and tritium. The U.S. government relocated more than 6,000 residents to dear a vast trace of land. Three towns were demolished to make room for the bomb plant, which encompasses some 300 square miles of land in three counties.

“But with the destruction came prosperity,” recounts Alexander. The Savannah River Plant was one of the largest construction projects in modern history. More than 200 miles of highway wind through the five-reactor complex, which currently employs about 15,000 workers.

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Building Bombs makes it clear that the nuclear industry bought its way into South Carolina with a promise of prosperity. “Over $30 billion has been brought into South Carolina as a result of the nuclear industry,” exhorts Edwards at the pro-nuclear rally. “That’s big money…. We talk about all the problems that nuclear brings, but $5 million has been spent just on monitoring this area.”

Nowadays, money buys silence from the people who operate the bomb plant–and live in its shadow. A housewife interviewed in Building Bombs says that Aiken residents won’t petition for a health study of the local population, even though “it seems like too much of a coincidence when you have four or five people in the same block dying of cancer.” She says people are afraid of losing their jobs or their pensions.

The filmmakers got a firsthand look at the business of building bombs when they received permission to shoot inside the enormous complex. Working under constant supervision, their volunteer crews filmed the remote controlled processes used to produce plutonium and tritium. When the crew moved outside to shoot the burial ground, they were given protective booties to wear. “The soil in the burial ground was radioactive,” says Mori. “All of our shots had to be hand-held. We couldn’t even put our tripod on the ground.”

Building Bombs mixes hard facts about the irresponsible dumping of radioactive chemicals with anecdotes that are no less thrilling. DuPont officials discovered that the turtles that swam in these “seepage basins” had become contaminated by radiation, so plant workers combed the surrounding streams and woodlands in an attempt to contain the turtle-powered migration of highly radioactive strontium-90.

“We’ve uncovered some things in this film that still haven’t gotten into the mainstream media,” says Robinson. A “deep throat” source at the plant informed the filmmakers that the concrete floors are disintegrating in the Canyon Buildings, where plutonium and tritium are extracted from fuel rods. Thirty-five years of bombardment by radiation is turning the floors into sponge. While Westinghouse, which currently manages the plant, has made no response to this allegation, Robinson believes that this silence constitutes assent. “We’ve shown the film in Aiken,” she says, “and none of the facts have been refuted.”

There’s a dark humor in Building Bombs that arises from pointing out the gap between rhetoric at the Savannah River Plant. When plant officials were warned that radioactive wastes might spread beyond the burial ground, for example, “DuPont stated that the radioactivity was so low that it would never outcrop,” recounts Alexander. “The first outcrop occurred in 1978, one year later.” At the Biograph screening of Building Bombs an explosion of laughter greeted a confession by a rake-happy Secretary of Energy Edwards that “I’m a sort of environmentalist myself.”

Robinson and Mori met with initial resistance when they tried to arrange a screening in Aiken. But when they did succeed in scheduling the film, the South Carolina premier of Building Bombs was the lead item in the local

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news for two days. A plant worker informed Greenpeace that Westinghouse issued a memo to advise its 15,000 employees that the film would be screened in Aiken. Mori believes the memo was intended to spur a show of company solidarity at the screenings.

More than 600 people attended screenings of Building Bombs in Aiken and nearby Augusta, Ga. Many of them were workers from the Savannah River Plant. “People were pretty hostile going into the screening,” says Mori. “But there were people in the film that they lived and worked with–people that spoke their language. It affected them. When they left the screening, a lot of people said they needed to think about what we’re doing at the Savannah River Plant.”

“The most difficult part of getting the film out was raising the money–convincing people that the film needed to be made,” says Mori. “We started working on Building Bombs before it was popular to criticize the nuclear industry. We were actually filming at the Savannah River Plant when Chernobyl happened. We’d been there getting a shot to show there was no containment dome [above the reactor]. We were driving home that night, and we heard over the radio that there’d been a big release of radiation.”

Not surprisingly, fundraising became easier after the April, 1986 accident at Chernobyl released 50-billion curies of radiation into the atmosphere. Now that Building Bombs is finished, Robinson and Mori are raising money to promote the film and court a distributor. During the past year the pair has raised about $20,000 to finance trips to film festivals, competitions and conventions where programs are marketed to broadcasters and distributors. Building Bombs was awarded a Silver Hugo in the social/political documentary category at the 1989 Chicago Film Festival.

“It’s always been difficult to be an independent filmmaker,” says Mori. “The U.S. is one of the worst places for independents. You can’t get funding and you can’t get your films shown.” Mori is on the steering committee of the national Coalition of Independent Producers, which successfully lobbied Congress to allocate $6 million per year for independent television productions.

Robinson and Mori are not the only filmmakers pointing their cameras at the nuclear industry. But they believe their film is uniquely successful in capturing the rhythm of Southern life. “There’s something very Southern about Building Bombs,” says Robinson. “It meanders; it takes its time. Gradually, it tells viewers that the situation is an emergency.”

Mori believes the slower pace of his hometown fostered his five-year dream of documenting life at the Savannah River Plant. “I couldn’t have made Building Bombs if I lived in LA or New York,” says Mori. “As first-time filmmakers, we probably would have been laughed out of town. The industry there is too overpowering.”

Helen Shortal is associate editor of In Motion magazine. This review first appeared in In These Times, and is reprinted here with permission. (For information on rental or purchase of Building Bombs, write to Box 5202, Station 13, Atlanta, GA 30307.)

What Toxic Waste Facilities Attract

By Staff

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 10

The plight of Sumter County, Ala., is a good example for those who may be considering a toxic waste facility in their community or state. Waste Management Inc. took over the dumpsite in Emelle in 1978. They promised that the facility would bring in much-needed industry and jobs to our economically depressed area. However, the facts reveal otherwise.

In 1978 Sumter County had an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent. This figure has risen drastically to 21.1 percent. These statistics from the Alabama Employment Service also show that Sumter County lost 2,000 from its work force from 1978 to 1986 and lost five industries.

Another problem with people leaving our county in search of work is that we have many homes being put on the market. Unfortunately, no one is anxious to move to a county that has no work to offer other than a job at a waste dump.

Along with property devaluation, we are experiencing a crisis in our healthcare. One hospital facility in Livingston has closed and the other hospital in York is in serious financial difficulty and may not survive. We have lost most of our physicians as well. Ambulance service has been cut considerably to rural areas.

One of the problems of living in a dying county is that there is not enough money to go around to all the agencies which need it. Taxes are the only recourse for additional funds. A proposed increase of the ad valorem tax is expected to be 11 mills which will bring the rate from 23.1 to 34.1.

Sumter is suffering and others can learn from its example. The only thing toxic waste facilities attract is more toxic waste.–KAY KIKER (Alabamians for a Clean Environment, P.O. Box 177, York, AL 36925; 205-392-7443)

Un-American Censorship.

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 11, 13

Advancing American Art by Taylor D. Littleton and Maltby Sykes. Introduction by Leon Litwack. (University of Alabama Press, 1989. 159 pages.).

A Romare Bearden for $6.25 anyone? How about a Jacob Lawrence for $13.93? Or a destined to be famous Ben Shahn for $60? A Georgia O’Keefe for $50?

Professor Littleton and Emeritus Professor Sykes of Auburn University recount how their campus obtained a collection of paintings, notable ones by artists of interest, for prices such as those. The story, a generally forgotten one, is fascinating and also an exemplary one, in these days of zealotry over the National Endowment for the Arts and what to do about alleged “obscene” art. The book is so unintentionally topical that I am puzzled by its neglect in the national press.

The short facts were these. In 1946 the State Department, in the enthusiasm of those post-War days for spreading American influence and values, decided to send art exhibits abroad. At a cost of $49,000 it selected 79 oils. Some were to go to Europe, some to Latin America. Perhaps unwisely they were first shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in October 1946. Criticism commenced at once. It was to increase, in the press-New York Journal-American, Look Magazine, others-radio-Fulton Lewis Jr.-and most impellingly, Congress. As the selection was mostly “modern” (but not inclusive of then emerging “abstract expressionism”), more conservative artists also were disparaging. The ruckus in Congress proved too embarrassing to an administration with larger concerns. President Truman called the paintings “merely the vaporings of halfbaked lazy people”; his opinion had, however, not been publicized before the time when Secretary of State George Marshall recalled all the paintings in June 1947 (they were then being shown in Prague and Port-au-Prince); a short time later he had them declared “surplus property” and transferred to the old War Assets Administration. The 79, plus 38 watercolors separately purchased, were auctioned to tax-supported institutions. Auburn got 36 of them (for $1,072). The University of Oklahoma got another 36. (The University of Georgia bought ten, and the remainder went to Texas A&M, Rutgers, and the University of Washington.) The total purchase price, for oils and watercolors, was $5,544.

Should public money–tax payer’s money–be used for art? The complaint in 1946-47 was less that it had been than that it had been for this art, which is the same as the complaint trumpeted and neighed by North Carolina’s Jesse Helms and allies, Republicans and Democrats, in 1990. There is a difference between then and now, an interesting one though I am not sure what it portends. The criticism in the 1940s was that the selected paintings somehow demeaned the United States, put it in a poor light, and were done by politically suspect (i.e. leftist) artists; in 1990, obscenity is the enemy. Like a lot of civic

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life, the direction is toward below the belt.

Yesterday’s liberals were much like today’s. They retreated; those who held office in government scampering away fast. The brouhaha was soon forgotten. Likely as not, so will be the one now led by Mr. Helms, when the 1990 Congressional races are over and done with. These political campaigners against art, then as now, knew, however, what they were about, which was–as now–providing red meat for the American electorate.

Liberals tend not so well to know what they are about. Littleton and Sykes report little evidence that liberals of the 1940s defended these pictures. They ought to have, I think, because some of them as reproduced in this book are stunningly beautiful. I don’t think the same can be said for the works which have uncorked the current uproar, but then what is it that has not deteriorated culturally in our, present decade? Liberals even as they bring charges of censorship are inclined today to leave the quality debate alone, as they concentrate on process. It is a losing tactic: substance wins every argument with process. The public, which is the final arbiter, wants art it can respect.

What though. of process? Is a democratic government required, by any political theory, to support art? Probably not. But if it decides to do so, may it fittingly choose among artists and their works?

It is an age-old issue. Plato wrote at length about it. Art he thought to be fundamental to a good political order, but he would have firmly controlled its forms and shaped their style. The modern democratic tradition is otherwise, both in public respect for art-which is reduced to an anarchy of taste-and government’s right and even duty to direct it. Respect art or not, American governments-federal, state, local-inevitably involve themselves in artistic decisions. The design of public buildings, the illustrations in children’s school books, the taxation of art collections, the awarding of scholarships-these and like matters all pave the way for more direct challenge, such as what art-the statues, the murals, the anthems- governments may commission and what artists’ careers it may financially aid. Who will decide what is to be favored?

One may well not like (I don’t) his or her tax dollars being spent on some of the forms of expression we have lately seen publicized. One may think (I do) our art community and art critics irresponsible in their aesthetic judgments. But if we are to have federal support of art at all, the worst conceivable judge of what is good and worthy is Congress.

This incapacity of Congress is true not only for art. I am not sure that the Constitution requires that there be publicly supported education. Certainly it does not require federal support. But the truth we have had to learn, sometimes painfully, is that though legislative bodies are indispensable for deciding whether to do or not to do, they are when they intrude in areas such as education and art bumbling at best and malign at worst, and the worst is frequent. Advancing American Art tells well what havoc Congressmen caused in 1946-47. We may see a repeat today. Littleton and Sykes let us see too how the uproar over these paintings was an overture for the Red scare which would seize the country and corrupt our law, morals, and political values during the ensuing decade.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s Congress has become a destructive institution. By its own complicity in the wastage of national treasure on arms and military might, neither it nor Presidents can seldom do anything-can move-against problems that matter to people’s welfare. All they can readily do, as long as foreign governments will lend or give us the money, is saber-rattling or saber-unsheathing abroad and-here at home-the flailing at “social issues”: art censorship flag burning, “family values,” and-yes–drug criminalizing. We tear ourselves apart over such issues, and it is Congress and Presidents who impel us to do so. It is self-willed destruction of the capacity for self-government. Issues-if one may call them that-like these are for this generation of Congressmen and other politicians the functional equivalent of “rigger” politics, of “waving the bloody shirt,” of antiCommunism for their predecessors. They are the kind of “issues” that allow Congress to turn away from the nation’s real problems, or to mask the roles they themselves play in service to financial interests.

Littleton and Sykes have done a great service in reminding us of an earlier bout of this democratic disease. They and Professor Litwack (whose Introduction really should have been an Afterword, inasmuch as it picks up the history where the book stops) place the 1946-47 episode within the context of the harsh nativism that is always present in American democracy and the anti-Communism that was emerging and which in the soon-to-be years of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover would form an evil era of American history.

It did, however, have at least two good outcomes. “All of the furore seemed hardly to have affected the careers of the exhibit’s artists unless they were enhanced by it.” That was one. A second was and is that Auburn University obtained a collection of fine paintings, worth one’s making a trip to Auburn.

Journey of Change.

Reviewed by Alex Poinsett

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 14-15

Delta Time: A Journey Through Mississippi, by Tony Dunbar. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990. 245 pages.).

An elderly Mississippi Delta plantation owner is found hanging in his bedroom. Had he committed suicide or had he been murdered? The dead man’s grandson is certain a murderer hides among his black sharecroppers. Unable to find him, he arbitrarily picks a family of three and ties them to stakes. Then, while he and other white men force the remaining blacks on his plantation to watch, he burns the helpless family alive.

That tragedy occurred more than 50 years ago. By 1968, when author Tony Dunbar secretly interviewed black tenant farmers and sharecroppers, Mississippi Delta blacks were no longer burned at stakes. Instead, they were only beaten with ax handles and clubs, teargassed, shotgunned, and blasted with dynamite. Or they were anchored in rivers and planted in shallow graves, often for trying to exercise their civil rights.

Prudently, Dunbar, at that time a 19-year-old Atlantan, hid during the day and ventured forth only at night to avoid reprisals from irate plantation owners. His first book, Our Land Too, related the troubled lives of Delta tenant farmers. His newest book chronicles the author’s findings 20 years later, as he with keen-eyed sensitivity retraces his earlier journey–less wary, less concerned about harm coming to himself or his interviewees. For Dunbar found that the Delta had changed markedly during the past two decades.

Racial atrocities no longer scar its collective consciousness. Catfish has replaced cotton as the region’s major cash

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crop. Black voters, once brutally suppressed, have elected more black candidates in Mississippi than in any other state be cause of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and federal lawsuits outlawing racial gerrymandering. The University of Mississippi, once a battleground for violent segregationist resistance to black student enrollment, now presents Distinguished Black Mississippian Awards.

In 1988, the honorees were the Delta’s Robert Clark, the state’s first black state legislator of modern times; the Most Reverend Joseph Howze of Mobile, the first black bishop to head a Catholic diocese in the United States; the Delta’s country music great Charlie Pride; and state Attorney General Robert Gibbs.

A posthumous award went to Fannie Lou Hamer, the former Delta sharecropper and gallant freedom fighter who once had lamented that she was “sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Far from suggesting that the Mississippi Delta is now a racial Utopia, Dunbar notes that poverty still abounds. Farm economics has shifted blacks from the plantations to low-paying jobs at fast food franchises or onto public welfare. Massive health problems plague the Delta’s 60percent-black residents. The public schools are almost totally black because white students still flock to private segregation academies.

Black elected officials have taken over many town halls and school systems, but have little to govern in the Delta’s dying small towns. While the 122-memberstate legislature includes 20 blacks, they are less than half the representatives that would be proportionate to the state’s 35 percent black population.

In 1987, Gov. Ray Mabus, a political moderate, was supported by 90 percent of black voters, Dunbar reports. The governor promptly disappointed them by backing a white Tupelo woman, Billie Thompson, to replace Ed Cole, the black chairman of the state Democratic Party. In spite of Mabus, Cole was elected by a Party vote of 56 to 41.

The governor thinks the civil rights struggle is essentially won, Dunbar writes angrily, and that the way is now cleared to address “real problems.” However, if such thinking is the best that Mississippi has to offer, then it–like the rest of America–has yet to trod a long journey before finally reconciling its races and achieving what Dun bar aptly calls “the final armistice of the Civil War”– 125 years after the last shots were fired.

Alex Poinsett, widely published free-lance writer, with long acquaintance of Mississippi, is a Contributing Editor of Ebony Magazine.

Movement Profiles.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16

The Long Haul, an Autobiography by Myles Horton, with Judith Kohl and Herbert Kohl. (Doubleday, 1990. xvi, 245 pages.). Whitney M. Young, Jr. and the Struggle for Civil Rights, by Nancy J. Weiss. (Princeton University Press, 1990. xv, 286 pages.).

Whitney Young and Myles Horton represented the breadth of and variety within the civil rights movement. One was black, one white. One held the confidence of corporate and political leaders, one was avowedly radical and worked almost exclusively among the poor and dissidents. One believed in the efficacy of political processes, the other cared but little for policies that did not arise from the understanding of the people. Horton with the help of the Kohls sat down his own story before his death this year and Princeton historian Weiss tells Young’s. I knew and had some working relationship with both men, though I was not close to either. People who knew them will find little in these books to change or deepen their opinions of them. All will find the books useful additions to their knowledge of American reforms, in Horton’s case from the 1930s to the present, in Young’s tragically shorter and intenser period from the mid-1950s to his drowning in 1971. The books are, moreover, interestingly written.

If you want democratic society, wrote Horton, you have to act democratically. “If you want love and brotherhood, you’ve got to incorporate them as you go along, because you can’t just expect them to occur in the future without experiencing them before you get there.” Whitney Young, as I knew him, would believe and act on that rule as consistently as Horton, though, as Professor Weiss writes, he “spent his life making the needs and interests of black Americans comprehensible and compelling to the whites who had the power to do something about them.”–L.W.D.

Of Genteel Hardness.

L. W. D.

Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, p. 16

Ely, An Autobiography, by Ely Green. Foreword by Bertram Wyatt Brown, Introduction by Lillian Smith, Afterword by Arthur Ben Chitty. (University of Georgia Press, 1990, xxiv, 246 pages.).

Here is a book that can be read for any number of reasons, beginning with simple pleasure. The present edition is a third incarnation. The first was published by Seabury Press in 1966, with Lillian Smith’s introduction. It was followed in 1970 from the University of Massachusetts Press by Ely, Too Black, Too White, edited and with a foreword by Elizabeth N. and Arthur Ben Chity (the latter having been the book’s discoverer and patron).

Unlike either the 1966 edition or this present one, that of 1970 was of Mr. Green’s whole autobiography. He had lived his first two decades in and around Sewanee, Tennessee. That time is the subject of this edition. In 1912, he fled in fear of his life to Texas. He lived there end elsewhere until 1968. Late in life, this semi-literate man began writing his memoirs. He wrote with a wonderful sense of composition, actions and feelings both tautly expressed. The post-Tennessee part is triple the length of this. I have not read it. Having now read Ely, An Autobiography, I am resolved to do so presently.

There may be no ocher place anywhere quite like Sewanee, and at the turn of the century when Ely Green was a boy and then a young man it was no less distinctive. Ely’s father was of the white elite–and most of the town seems to have known his identity; his mother was a black housemaid. Hence the title of the University of Massachusetts edition. Neither the place nor person is, therefore, typical, and so the reader becomes primarily absorbed in this remarkable man’s recollection of his growing up, of his realization of self within a society that gave him no identity, or none that he would accept. But because he did live within the black society, the book is also revelatory of the hardness of that, even in what may well have been the most genteel spot in the South.–L.W.D.