Recapturing the Language: The South and Right-Wing Tactics of Mystification

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 1-10

“God Almighty created women.” Mother Jones said, “and the “Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.” reminding us of who they are, what they are up to, and how they make up words to construct the realities they want us to believe we live in. Manipulating language has always been a central tactic of the best-dressed bands of thieves and liars, and as the years have passed and communications technology has improved. they have gotten better and better at it. and more and more shameless about doing it. Of late, in the semantic and semiotic twilight zone of the Reagan-Bush years, they have shown themselves to be limitlessly cynical manipulators of language, confident that if the war of words can be won, the rest will fall far more easily.

Nor is the twisting of language the only game they play. During the past quarter-century we have seen social service agencies gutted, scandal after financial scandal, public money and resources squandered, friendly dictators bought and sold, regulations ignored and regulators fired. We have been offered silly excuse after insulting explanation, convenient failure of memory

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after pile of shredded documents, and one patently incompetent but politically loyal nominee after another. We have been offered James Watt as environmentalist, Ollie North as patriot, Ed Meese as head of the Justice Department. Lynn Cheney as head humanist, John Sununu as an indispensable public official, and selectively forgetful Robert Gates as chief spook. No matter what strategies and tactics are employed, however, running though and tying it all together is the twisted thread of language.

Two things are critical for us at this juncture, it seems to me: one is to realize that these tactics are as old as politics itself, and that they are therefore not beyond comprehension and effective response. Twenty years ago, in the wake of the War on Poverty and in the midst of the Vietnam war, Murray Edelman published an elegant analysis of what he called “the systematic… dissemination of illusion and ambiguity through the language of government.” 1 Others have commented on the political manipulation of language in many other times and places.

The other critical point is that despite the ubiquity and essential predictability of the phenomenon, we must be clear about how and to what extent our particular historical circumstances give it a special character. We have to ask ourselves how the old tactics are being used in our epoch, our corner of the world.

While it is true that at least a comfortable voting majority of the entire population have been suckered into this high-stakes word game. I sometimes think we have been especially vulnerable to it here in the South. We have turned out to be a bit too much like the stuttering limousine-driver Sugar Boy in Robert Penn Warrens All the King’s Men, who serves the Southern-born and bred demagogue Willy Stark with such puppy-like affection because Willy talks so good.

But whether we have been especially vulnerable or not, the right-wing linguistic spin-doctors have found the South a field white unto harvest. The first step in the picking–begun long ago–was to mock and burlesque our language, and so to deny the realities it expressed. One early twentieth century commentator on the speech of coastal South Carolina blacks called it

Such judgments–and there have been innumerable ones–are by themselves more than sufficient warrant for us to take a long overdue close look at their language to see what it might have to do with where we find ourselves at present.

Where we are, I reluctantly observe, is in a dangerously quiescent state, enchanted and confused as if by the very sound of their words, being played like Fiddlin’ John Carson and Clayton McMichen played their fiddles: with consummate skill. The difference is that this time the effect is tragic rather than comic. We are dancing to an old and deadly tune from a devil’s box, and what we are dancing around are the ever more obvious results of their shabby political project: increasingly bought-off legislatures, starved and decaying schools and business-captured universities, crack babies and toxic waste dumps. a right-to-work, minimum-wage workforce, furloughed public employees, sorry health care and astronomical health-care costs, and all the rest of it.

So what is it they are doing to language, and how are they doing it? These questions are crucial, because what we are ultimately talking about is not merely the manipulation of language, but rather the formation of consciousness, and the relative usefulness of certain modes of consciousness for digging ourselves out of this historical and political mess.

Keywords

What words are they using? Where do they get them? And how are they using them to keep the right-wing roller-coaster on track? For the past while I have tried to listen carefully, to take note of how language is being used in the currently dominant political discourse. As I have listened, I have been making a little word list, and the longer my list gets, the clearer it becomes that there is something sinister going on here. These folks are talking about a world very different from the world I think I live in.

To start with, here are some words they use approvingly: bipartisan, bottom line, competitiveness, conservative, democracy, deregulation, economic growth, education, the family, founding fathers, free elections, free enterprise, freedom fighters, freedom-loving nations, free market, free world, individualism, liberation, law and order, market economy, morality, national security, new world order, patriotism, private sector, right to life, values, voluntarism, and (at every possible juncture) war.

And here are the names they assign to some things they profess not to like: bureaucracy, communism, crime, the “democrat” party, dictatorships, drugs, government, guerrillas, liberalism, political correctness, politics, quotas, red tape, regulation, revolution, socialism, special interest groups, taxes, terrorism, unions, welfare.

Since out of these and a few other terms could be constructed much of the dominant political discourse of at least the past couple of decades, it behooves us to try to comprehend the lexicon.

In the first place, my little right-wing dictionary suggests that their use of words is brazenly instrumental, almost completely ahistorical, and indeed very nearly scholastic. Why scholastic? Because so many of the words are used purely self-referentially within a closed discourse that bears little relation to the objective historical realities that most of us live in. Indeed since the privileged and protected elite who control the discourse have little interest in or grounded awareness of any realities at all except their own rarified ones, the lack of congruence between their words and the realities of the rest of us is of little import to them.

Perhaps more usefully than anything else, their education and life experience have taught them that to have or take the power to name things–to mark boundaries through language and style–gives one in turn the power to say who is inside and deserves to be, who isn’t and doesn’t, what is and isn’t worth considering or paying for.

Inventing, Stealing, and Twisting Words

One of my other favorite hell-raisers besides Mother Jones is Raymond Williams, who was wordier than she was but a kindred spirit nevertheless. “A distinctive… feature of any dominant social order,” Williams said, is its capacity to “[reach] into [our] whole range of practices and experiences in an attempt at incorporation.” To sucker us in and steal us blind, Mother Jones would have said, and to use what they steal to make themselves look good. Not surprisingly, it turns out that both of my lists of words–the ones they like and the ones they don’t–are made up of some they concocted themselves, but of many more they have stolen from more humane and honorable discourses and redefined to suit their purposes.

Among their “good” words, the implications for us of the ones they have invented are painful indeed. Among the most grotesque are of course those blandly Orwellian terms used to mask realities which if called by their proper names would provoke moral outrage. Such terms issue most prolifically from the Pentagon: “collateral casualties” or “carpet bombing” instead of dead babies and wanton destruction, for example. The less immediately offensive words are only too familiar: “economic growth” is used as if equitable distribution were not an issue, and as if trickle-down had ever been observed to work as they perennially assure us it will; “free market” means the

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freedom of publicly-subsidized and protected corporations to do as they please; “the bottom line” is the point at which profit takes precedence over all other considerations whatsoever; “freedom fighters” means Ollie North’s mercenaries who killed teachers and burned clinics; “right to life” means the right to be born, and then to shift for oneself as best one can; any constraint whatever on business as usual is “red tape”; “bureaucracy” means any governmental unit serving other than elite, corporate or military purposes; “political correctness” dismisses the political concerns of anyone whose politics they don’t share, while implying that they themselves are above politics; “new world order” means a new contraption wired together from the parts of the old world order that served them best, plus some others that they think might be even more to their advantage.

Thinking over the list, then, it appeals to me that although they make up some words to suit their purposes, their major tactic is to capture and contort, and thus to coopt the already established positive or negative resonances of words to serve ends opposite to those of the original discourse. So what about the words they have stolen? How have they redefined them to suit their purposes?

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A favorite a few months ago was “liberation.” But to them “liberation” means not the struggle of poor third world countries out from tinder the yoke of old or new colonialism, but rather deploying a half-million U.S. troops to reinstall the Kuwaiti patriarchs in their gold and marble bathrooms. Similarly with other words: “bipartisan” foreign policy means bipartisan agreement not to raise the issues that most need to be raised; “the family” means a small, alienated, patriarchal, hegemonically pacified consumer unit: “education” means training (preferably on the cheap) in corporate-designed, system-serving behavior; “free elections” means elections–rigged or not–that turn out the way they want them to; “free markets” are in fact markets they subsidize and control; and “democracy” therefore means (as Tony Bennett phrased it a decade ago) “a system of government by elites … in which the majority retain [s] the right to determine, periodically, which elite should govern.”3

Some of the worst wizardry, however, is performed on the words they steal from their political opponents and turn into categorical negatives. Thus “dictatorship” refers not to those friendly dictators upon whom we have lavished so much money, but the heads of governments who reject our ideology and refuse to do our bidding. Any concern for the commonweal, or commitment to humane government is dismissed as soft-headed, indulgent, impractical “liberalism.” “Socialism” of whatever variety is conflated with Evil Empire gulag communism. “Revolutions” are nothing more than diabolical insurgencies against “established order,” fomented by a “hard core” of deluded. self-seeking, “self-styled” “guerrillas” paid, armed and directed by the Evil Empire. “Government” is a temporary evil on the way to the new corporate world order. “Welfare” emphatically does not mean small public subsidies to the most needy and vulnerable, but “handouts” to the lazy and undeserving; it never refers to massive gifts of public funds to the corporate oligarchs. “Multi-culturalism” refers to any threat to their hermetically sealed monoculture. And they use “politics” to refer to any opposition to their own intensely political agenda.

Clearly some major contortions of meaning are occurring. But how do they do such contorting? How do they make it happen? One of the simplest tactics is to mystify by calling something by a name that connotes the exact opposite of what it is: calling U.S. puppet governments of El Salvador or Guatemala “democratic,” for example. Similarly effective is their habit of restricting to a preferred arena a term which otherwise would refer to a much larger class of phenomena whose existence must be denied. Thus violent opposition to our state-corporate interests is called terrorism; analogous behaviors engaged in by those corporations themselves, or by the state (as in Ludlow or Harlan County or Gastonia, in the Palmer raids, or against the Wobblies or the Black Panthers) is not terrorism.

Another tactic is to decontextualize a word, disassociating it from necessarily and complicating current issues and realities. Thus “taxes” refers to the simple, unjust and unjustified expropriation by a wasteful government of the purely private earnings of otherwise wholly (and happily) self-sufficient individuals. Such a semantic transformation also encourages those, individuals to view themselves not as interdependent and mutually responsible citizens, but as isolated, victimized and resentful “taxpayers.” Moreover, such “taxpayers” are far more likely to demand merely that there be “no new taxes,” rather than that tax policy be opened to thorough discussion, or that taxes be levied fairly and used equitably for humane purposes.

A similar abstracting proceeds from the habit of dehistoricizing key words. There was much talk during the Ollie North Iran-gate hearings, for example, about the United States’ commitment to “democracy” in Nicaragua, but not a word about our involvement there from 1849 onward, during which time we consistently demonstrated a virtually complete lack of concern for whether there was any democracy there or not. Similarly, there is no mention that one historical product of “competitiveness” was the robber barrons, or that the “founding fathers” wrote the founding women and mother’s out of the process.

What I’ve said so far has to do, however, with how they use the words they do use–wherever they come from, however they are invented, or however torturously they are twisted. Equally important is the complete exclusion of certain other words. It turns out, of course, that the ones excluded–such as class, gender, power, control, capitalism, systemic, or structural–are some of those most essential to clarifying, grounding and historicizing the discourse. Excluding the words denies the realities, and certain realities must be denied if currently dominant politics are to remain dominant.

Their Words and Our Realities

If these are at least some of the ways the discourse works, the danger could not be clearer: to use language as the current discourse demands that it be used, entails the tacit admission that the world is as we in fact know it not to be. But it is especially urgent that we admit no such thing, not only because it is untrue, but also because we face a special sort of historical paradox: the increasingly tense complexity of the national and international situation in turn increases the necessity for historically grounded, politically and ethically nuanced discourse, but it also increases the anxiety, anger, and sense of threat that most people feel most of the time. Such a state of mind

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decreases people’s tolerance for the grounded-nuanced discourse that is called for, however, and increases their demand for bumper-stickerable slogans (“Support Our Troops’; “Sportsmen for Helms”).

Public demand for simpleminded slogans in turn raises the electoral chances of reactionary ideologues, while lowering those of anyone capable of or willing to try to tell all of the complex, uncongenial, system-challenging truth. The nub of that truth, unfortunately, is that whatever way we as a nation ever did most of whatever it was we did (which by the way isn’t the way they’ve always told us It was done) wasn’t fair in the first place and in any case won’t work any more.

Thus unless we expose and challenge the currently dominant discourse, recapture the language and produce a new discourse, we have little chance of seeing our most urgent social and political problems addressed as they must be addressed. We have allowed ourselves to become mired to the axles in their linguistic muck, and until we figure out how to haul ourselves out of it, we ain’t got a prayer.

Our Words, Our History

What special character, if any, will this truly national task have here in the South? What history do we have with language, and how has it formed and predisposed us? Why do the current crop of linguistic spin-doctors find us such a particularly attractive mark?

Whatever else it may have to do with, it must be related to our formative history with words, with the rhetorical culture of the South. It must have some connection with long-distance resonances from those oleaginous planter-legislators who talked us into an unholy war with slogans like “states’ rights” and “peculiar institutions” and “our way of life” and “Southern womanhood.” It must have to do with the yankee ladies who fawned over what they fancied was the “Elizabethan” speech of mountain young ‘tins while the Peabody and Ford and Rockefeller agents fast-talked their daddies out of their coal land for nothing; with the Gastonia preachers who preached down unionizing textile workers while gun thugs gunned down Ella Mae Wiggins; with the boot-licking and bootstrap-pulling Clarence Thomases who have a genius for knowing which words will sound right to the powers that be; with the legion of snarling Faubuses, Wallaces, Helmses and Gingriches.

Having spent so many hours of my own young life squirming on a hard Baptist pew, I still have to remind myself not to be so swept away by a speaker’s metaphors, images, and rhythms that I forget to test what is actually being said against the realities I know most intimately. It has taken me a lifetime to learn how to read critically rather than simply to look for proof-texts like we used to do with our red-letter Bibles in Daily Vacation Bible School sword drills. How to move beyond aphorisms and to penetrate the nuances of metaphors. How to think in terms of nuanced continuums instead of Manichaean dualisms. What the difference is between a concrete historical reality and a social construct. I still too easily assume that if the words are there, the corresponding realities must be.

Fortunately, our rhetorical history here in the South is a mixed bag, full not only of bad news, but of some good news as well. Clearly we have rhetorical styles and traditions that have served us well and others that have served us badly. We’ve had not only Wallace but also Fulbright, not only Booker T. Washington but also Martin Luther King, not only David Duke but also Lillian Smith, not only the Klan but also the STFU. For every sleazy white TV evangelist, we’ve had a host of black preachers, for every Jim Walter homes salesman who lies for money a tall tale teller who knows that the only good reason to lie is for art, for the many Jimmy Swaggarts a few Will Campells, and for the all too numerous Tammy Wynettes standing by

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their good old boys, an occasional Hazel Dickens who knows when to call him what he is and throw him out.

Thus the task of turning the discourse around will have more to do with careful selection than with recovering some “Southern rhetorical tradition” wholesale. We have to figure out how to recover and revitalize the best language we have been able to generate–the language of those Southerners who have spoken most clearly–can be used to speak of our own realities, how it can guide us in a daunting project of linguistic correction and recovery. However we choose, the most serviceable Southern voices are likely to sound more like an Old Testament prophet than like an aspiring, double-talking Supreme Court justice, however black.

We need most especially to drop back historically and try to understand how the dominant rhetorical-cultural tradition in the South has primed us for exactly what we are experiencing now. A decade ago T. H. Breen told a remarkable story of how some of the setting up took place as early as the seventeenth century in the Virginia tidewater.4 In general the colonists hauled there by the Virginia Company were products of the English reformation–pious, hard-working, middle-class Puritans. Butthey were not. Breen reminds us, a random sample. Instead they were “a distinct sub-culture” lured by the promise of great (and easy) wealth–“extraordinarily individualistic, fiercely competitive and highly materialistic.” During the first ten years, those values proved disastrously dysfunctional, producing more factionalism and violence than anything else.

But then in 1617 the colonists shipped their first load of tobacco to England, and the race to strike it rich shoved every thing else into the background. Would-be entrepreneurs rushed up the James and York rivers to stake their claims to tobacco-growing land. Within two years, forty-four plantations were patented. Needful of hands to work, the Virginia Company concocted some flowery rhetoric to beguile more young people from England to join the enterprise. Far from encountering what Breen calls “small, self-contained communit[ies] held together by… shared, positive beliefs,” those who came found a strife- and inequality-ridden system overseen by profit-driven owners and run on the energies of indentured servants and slaves.

There were fabulous sums to be made, but those physically isolated plantation nuclei were also easy targets for Indian attack. In a coordinated, region-wide attack of 1622, 347 colonists were killed. Clearly, the logic of events called for a new cooperative policy of mutual protection, and for short time after the massacre, public ceremonies of commemoration and a rhetoric of caution suggested that such a policy might be forthcoming. But the planter-leaders of the colony–unwilling to deviate from their privatistic, profit-oriented agenda, and eager to return to business as usual–decided to turn over defense policy to hired mercenary troops organized by enterprising, eye-on-the-main-chance leaders such as the legendary Capt. John Smith.

Beginning what proved to be a long tradition, the hired military planners proceeded to demonstrate their greed and incompetence. One constructed an oyster-shell fort that was under water at high tide. Demanding up-front payments and cost-plus contracts, and forced to devise schemes to protect private plantations strung out for miles along rivers, the Virginia Company’s private-sector defense contractors produced virtually no reliable protection, and drained the public purse in the process.

Meanwhile, public policy consisted almost solely of stabilizing the inequitable social order upon which the fragile profit-extracting system rested. At the perilous moment when the Virginia Company lost its charter in 1624, concern that exploited servants and slaves would revolt led to the proclamation that

Working class colonists came to believe–usually rightly–that the authorities were using their offices for personal gain, and that there was therefore no point in ordinary citizens trying to work for the public good. In particular, public education went by the board.

All this no doubt sounds as eerily familiar to you as it does to me, sitting here in a southland dotted with military bases, mobile-home parking lots, the mansions of six-figure CEOs, and shabby schools.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that we are the very linear beneficiaries of the Virginia Company’s shaping of public policy and public consciousness. “Long after the 1620s,” Breen observes,

Those laws, those habitual acts, those traditions were passed on from generation to generation: “In the course of a century of cultural development,” Breen says, “Virginians transformed an extreme form of individualism, a value system suited to soldiers and adventurers, into a set

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of regional virtues, a love of independence, an insistence upon personal liberty, a cult of manhood, and an uncompromising loyalty to family.”

And in the next century, we know, that culture traveled tip the rivers, across the mountains, down the south-running valleys, across the deltas, and westward across the south and southwest until it collided with another culture in Mexico, defeated it, stole it blind, and pushed on to the Pacific.

And so here we sit in the historical and cultural backwash, trying to see what–so ungodly long after the fact–we can do with those laws, those habitual acts, those traditions, and with the language in which the whole has over the years been, and continues to be, encoded.

Myths, Metaphors and Mystification

Some of the highest-stakes codes are those that Stuart Hall has called “naturalized codes–those whose roots run so deep in the culture, whose use is so habitual and universal that they appear not to be codes at all.5 Their use, Hall cautions, has “the ideological effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present.” Whatever else the Reagan-Bush right understands, they understand what naturalized codes are, how they operate, and for what purposes they are useful.

Some of their most fully naturalized codes take the form of the metaphors and myths which again Edelman reminds us are a perennially central feature of political rhetoric. Their usefulness resides in their power to

What reactionary politicians in every age have known is that cultural formation is so powerful, so intractable, so reliable, and so enmeshed with language. We know that, too, but we need to bring it to consciousness in new, politicized ways. We must understand how language is being tised to set people against each other, make them as confused, anxious and angry as possible, and manipulate their anxiety through mystifying metaphors and myths that promise simple answers and a gratifying order to be benevolently administered by those currently in power.

What kind of metaphors are they using these days besides their phallic favorite, “standing tall”? Especially insidious are those one might call reductionist metaphors and organic metaphors of inevitability. One of their most preferred reductionist metaphors is that of a ball game, which they use to explicate every conceivable instance of political, social, economic and cultural competition or conflict. That metaphor encourages us to believe that we live in a binary, ball-game world of absolutely opposed teams, a single set of rules for everyone, a level field and identical equipment, disinterested and fair referees, absolute winners and losers, and tidy statistics that tell the whole story. I submit that here in the ball game-crazed Southland, littered with sports corruption and scandal, such a metaphor is far from politically benign.

Organic metaphors of inevitability such as “growth,” “development,” and “decay” (as of “the rust belt”) imply that whatever has happened, happened in a perfectly

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natural way, and could not have happened otherwise. Such metaphors imply that what happened had nothing to do with a policy decision on anyone’s part, with anyone’s power or interests, with anyone’s design for the future.

Words from Other Lives and Histories

The linguistic-cultural-political challenge we face is a painfully self-critical and meticulous process of selection, reconstruction, and deployment, fighting every step of the way. As we search, it is crucial that we not only survey our own history and experience, but also that we consider language and strategies available from other lives and histories. For example, it is true that from the beginning we Southerners have been burdened by reactionary religion, but the Wobblies knew how to take those old Moody-Sankey songs and turn them into hymns of liberation that reached across every line of race, gender and culture. “Would you be free from your burden of sin” became “Would you be free from wage slavery,” and “Take it to the Lord in prayer” found new life as “Dump the bosses off your backs.”

Southern blacks have long since understood and used their hymns in similar ways, but whites have grasped the possibilities only sporadically, such as in the labor songs Sarah Ogan Gunning and Aunt Molly Jackson built around hymn tunes in the eastern Kentucky coalfields in the 1930s. In any case, the doubly paradoxical lesson is that even the most hegemonic of forms have their counterhegemonic uses, and that as they are put to those new uses, they carry forward some of the moving resonances of their former lives.

One more potentially useful analogy, and I will rest my case. As you know, one of the most promising political-cultural developments in Latin America since the early 1960s has been the emergence of liberation theology out of a basically reactionary and authoritarian Catholic church historically allied with the oligarchies and the military. Drawing upon the deepest strands of Latin American culture, liberation theology has moved masses of people to reground their search for social and economic justice in the language, metaphors and parables of the Bible. For several years I have puzzled about whether such a thing could conceivably happen in the Bible Belt South, and recently I heard of an example.

Ivanhoe is a town of a thousand people on the banks of the New River, ten miles west of the I-77 / I-81 interchange in southwest Virginia.7 For a hundred years, its people have stoked iron furnaces, worked in the local lead and zinc mines, and filed in and out of the carbide plant that opened there at the close of World War I. But the last plant closed in 1983, leaving Ivanhoe nearly a ghost town. Desperate for jobs, people started casting around for somebody–anybody at all–who would open a plant or start a business.

Fortunately, the Glenmary order sent two imaginative and politically clear women to Ivanhoe to talk with people about a more local, community-based approach to the problem, and especially about the spiritual aspects of the community’s dilemma. Glenmary sister Mary Ann Hinsdale started Bible study sessions, and Highlander Center’s Helen Lewis organized some community-wide discussions about economic alternatives. True to local tradition, it was mostly women who went to the former, and men to the latter. But gradually the two groups and enterprises fused, their originally separate discussions merging, informing each other, and producing a Valley of Virginia version of liberation theology.8

Progress on the economic front was slow. Major foundations proved reluctant to give “economic development” money, because what was happening in Ivanhoe didn’t fit their notion of corporate-based development, but local people pushed ahead nevertheless. Out of their effort to understand local economic history came a two-volume history of the town. People organized the Ivanhoe Civic League and turned some abandoned Union Carbide land into Jubilee Park, now the site of local festivals that feature a parade of gigantic puppet figures celebrating local heroes such as a black midwife. The old company store has been turned into an educational center, and young people are starting a radio station.

But my point here is not to talk about economic development; it is to think about language. And in Ivanhoe, the regrounding of intimately familiar Biblical language in concrete, local realities provided a vital center for a self-critical, regenerative process of community change. A few of the preachers don’t like it, but it goes forward nevertheless. The community development group has become similar to the Christian base communities that have anchored the liberation theology movement in Latin America. Women especially are using Biblical language and parables to reassess their identities and roles. Not surprisingly, when some Nicaraguan women were brought for a visit to Ivanhoe, there was a shock of recognition on both sides.

What happened in Ivanhoe that has any suggestive use for us? To use some terms suggested by Raymond Williams, some old cultural and linguistic formations–the still-controlling residues of past circumstances–were opened for reflection and discussion, and some emergent ones were brought to light and given new names.9

I suggest that we could do worse than take Ivanhoe as an archetype of our present condition. In these waning years of the twentieth century and of industrial capitalism, we are all being Ivanhoed–bled dry and left to shift for ourselves west of the interstate. Worse yet, we are being

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encouraged to believe that what has happened is inevitable, and that henceforth what is left to us is to plaintively petit ion the captains of the new world order.

But if we are to do other than play our roles in their scripts, we have to look backward, like Ivanhoe, to the formative tidewaters of our individual and collective experience, and we have to write our own books in our own language. We have to look outward for analogies, but especially forward, imagining and re-imagining. We have to get clearer about what we want, about which costs are acceptable, and to whom. And most especially, we have to learn how to name a new world, because some of the realities that now present themselves to us we don’t yet have words for. In some cases, all we know is that the old words don’t correspond any more–neither ours nor the Reagan-Bush crowd’s, though for different reasons.

In the first lines of One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez begins to describe another little town–the magical-real village of Macondo,

“The world was so new,” the narrator says [el mundo era tan reciente], “that many things had no names” [que muchas cosas carecian de nombre]. In order to speak of those things, he says, “one had to point to them with a finger” [para mencionarlas había que señalarlas con el dedo].

I leave you with that image, which is a powerful reminder of how eternally new and fragile (like prehistoric eggs) the world appears to eyes that are clear, of the necessity to keep pointing to the objects, and of the enormously important political task of naming things and then keeping clear about the names. “West Virginia!” thundered Mother Jones, “When I get to heaven I will tell God Almighty about West Virginia!” I’m sure she did, and equally sure she didn’t use their words to do it.

NOTES

David Whisnant teaches cultural studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has both worked extensively with cultural programs and published widely on the politics of culture. This talk was given at the SRC Annual Meeting in Atlanta on November 9, 1991.

We Shall Overcome.

Reviewed by Tom Rankin

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 11-12

We Shall Overcome By Jim Brown, Ginger Brown, Harold Leventhal, and George Stoney. 58 min. 3/4″ and 1/2 video formats, color. (California Newsreel, 149 Ninth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103, (415) 621-6196).

“People tell me that you go anywhere in the world today and there’s somebody singing this song,” Julian Bond explains early in the hour-long video documentary We Shall Overcome. “There’s somebody in some movement singing this song…. They sing it in all kinds of lands and all kinds of languages. I wouldn’t be surprised when we colonize the moon that there’ll be these little green people up there joining their antennae together and they’ll be singing-or chirping-something. And it will be ‘We Shall Overcome.”‘

So begins a moving, tightly edited story of the birth and complex growth of a folksong, a song that originated in the African-American church in the Deep South, was later shaped and reshaped by blacks and whites in the labor movement and the Civil Rights Movement, and now is found throughout the world in a variety of social and political contexts. Appropriately the documentary employs the collective historical and personal perspectives of numerous songsters and social leaders-including Pete Seeger, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Andrew Young, Taj Mahal, Bernice Reagon, and Mary Travers, among many- telling the story of this song as it has grown to be the most important anthem of our time. Directed by Jim Brown, edited by Ken Levis, and narrated by Harry Belafonte, We Shall Overcome uses newsreel footage, still photographs, and extensive interviews to weave a compelling and artful story.

Pete Seeger explains that the popularity and influence of “We Shall Overcome” is due in part to simplicity. “There’s a genius to simplicity. Any damn fool can get complicated…. No wonder [the song] has gone around the world and into the hearts of tens of millions of people.” Reflecting on the emotional and spiritual dimension of “We Shall Overcome,” Bishop Tutu asserts that the song “touched a responsive chord in the human breast. It’s a song that speaks about how you’re not looking for the elimination of any enemy; you are looking; forward to winning a new friend.” Near the end of the film, Tutu emphasizes this assertion, saying that the song’s message is “something we long for with every fiber of our being.” He moves that most recalcitrant viewer with his quiet singing: “Black and white together/black and white together/black and white together today.”

Central to the story of the song is the presence, strength and power of “We Shall Overcome” as it moves from the rural church house to the county courthouse and then on to use in a variety of movements in America and around the world. With each move, singers find the song elastic enough to accommodate changes to the lyrics that fit the needs of new voices. If Julian Bond’s suggestion of moon inhabitants singing “We Shall Overcome” sounds preposterous, he offers his vision only because the song has already found its way to the many streets of this globe.

Few film or videotapes trace the life of a song, and through this documentary we see the migration and evolution of “We Shall Overcome.” As the places and singers change, the guiding symbolism remains the same. Most powerful and relevant to those interested in history and culture is the story of the song’s magnetism and utility, its elasticity and influence.

“We Shall Overcome” grew out of the traditional spiritual “I Will Overcome,” featured in the documentary in a stirring performance from Johns Island, South Carolina. “I’ll Be Alright,” another version of the earlier song, is performed on guitar by Taj Mahal who learned the song from his mother. Female tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina adapted the spiritual in 1945 to sing on the picket lines during the strike, changing the “I” to “We” and singing “We Will Overcome.” These same tobacco workers participated in a workshop organized by Zilphia and Myles Horton at the Highlander Center in Tennessee in 1945. Pete Seeger was at that workshop; he learned the song and later changed the “will” to “shall.” Seeger also changed the timing slightly and added some verses of his own. Explaining his version of the song’s lineage, Seeger contends, “What the song is now is a combination of a century or more of interaction between black and white people.” Martin Luther King, Jr. heard Seeger sing the song at Highlander’s 25th anniversary, and he too couldn’t get it out of his head. Later, the California musician and folksong collector Guy Carawan came to Highlander and began a program to spread such movement songs throughout the South.

Many of the film’s participants reflect on the power of this particular song to provide strength in times of trouble

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and adversity. For example, one evening at Highlander a number of local law enforcement “thugs” raided the school, cutting off the electricity. Fifty or so people sat in darkness while the raiders searched and intimidated. Sitting in the darkness, the integrated group began singing. Jamial Jones, in her teens at the time, remembers the evening in one of the documentary’s many magnetic scenes: “There was a lot of fear. As men walked around between us with their guns and billy clubs someone started singing ‘We Shall Overcome.”‘ Ms. Jones improvised the verse, “We are not afraid.” She said. It just seemed like nature came into that room. The water on the outside, even the trees just picked up. And we were just part of that nature, in tune with what was happening, so much so that it unnerved them and they began to back up.” We Shall Overcome is filled with such remembrances, such testimony, such performance.

What comes across in this video documentary more than anything else is the ultimate power of this song to provide strength and conviction to people in struggle. The singers in We Shall Overcome-the Freedom Singers, James Sherrod, and Willie Peacock, to name a few–articulate their feelings about the song through personal experience anecdotes and heart-felt performances. Dorothy Cotton contends that it is “a song that makes us feel connected.” Pete Seeger explains that for him the “we” is the most important ingredient in the song. “We’re either gonna make it together or we’re not gonna make it at all.” Seeger argues in one of the closing scenes.

James Sherrod may speak for a majority of the singers in We Shall Overcome when he says, “It’s there to sustain us. That’s the real meaning of “We Shall Overcome.” And, in a deeply thorough way, this video documentary demonstrates his point, sustaining the interest and emotion of viewers while it tells, shows, and sings a story and song of social struggle.

Tom Rankin chairs the Art Department at Delta State University and is photo editor of Southern Changes. This review first appeared in the Journal of American Folklore.

Memories of the Poll Tax Fight

By Virginia Foster Durr with William Honey

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 14-15

When I got to Washington in 1933 I began working with the Women’s Division of the Democratic Party. One of the things that we worked for was to get rid of the poll tax. Women gained the right to vote in 1917, but the poll tax and control of the election process by white men almost completely excluded women and blacks and poor whites in the South from voting.

In Virginia where I lived at the time I believe that less than thirteen percent of the eligible voting population was registered to vote. In Alabama it may have been slightly less.

When I tried to register in Virginia, I found that the registrar lived way up on the sidle of a mountain and did not have a telephone. When I finally found him, he said he could not find the poll book, and that he did not have a pen, and then he did not have any ink. He told me to come back some other time, but I knew I wouldn’t find him again, so we mixed ink from water and soot off the stove. Then when I went to vote, the polling officials said my poll tax receil)t was not any good because I had not paid interest on the back tax.

James Farley was chairman of the Democratic Party then, and he came and talked to the Women’s Division and said we had to drop the whole voting rights issue because the Southern Congressmen were very upset. So we had to drop it, at least through the Democratic Party.

Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune, a distinguished black woman from Florida, joined our group. Florida had rescinded the poll tax with the help of great liberal congressmen like Claude Pepper and LeRoy Collins.

She said we were not going to get anywhere in our efforts working alone as a group of white women and suggested we join with black groups who had been fighting the poll tax for years. Sowe got in touch with the NAACP and a very fine group of black men like Charley Houston, Dean of Howard Law School, and Judge William Hastie, and Thurgood Marshall, later Supreme Court justice.

Then we learned that the Southern Conference for Human Welfare had an active committee fighting the poll tax. So we joined with the Southern Conference to fight the poll tax.

That committee had some outstanding leaders. Claude Pepper was head of the committee, so was Estes Kefauver of Tennessee and Maurie Maverick of Texas. The committee was very unusual in that its membership included a tremendously broad group of both black and white people.

John L. Lewis was forming the CIO, and when he found that his union people in the South could not vote, he gave our committee lots of money, and later other unions took up the cause.

Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Bethune, and I became active members of the committee. It was an uphill struggle in those days because the WPA and NYA and all the alphabetical agencies established during the New Deal were paying the same wages to black and white workers in the South. The Southern senators and congressmen were furious about this.

I remember one summer day in 1939 I was sitting on the porch of the White House with several women from the committee, and we were trying to figure out who to ask to introduce the bill into Congress outlawing the poll tax. Mrs. Roosevelt said Franklin was in his study, and she would go ask him who we should ask.

She returned in about fifteen minutes, and I could see she was upset. Her face was flushed and her hands were shaking. “Franklin says we can’t ask anybody right now

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because he is getting ready for a war and he needs the Support of the Southern congressmen.”

Well, that was the end of that, but later we did get a bill through Congress that allowed servicemen during the Second World War to vote without paying the poll tax.

I started fighting the poll tax in 1933, but it wasn’t until thirty-two years later that Lyndon Johnson got the Voting Rights Act through Congress. I used to worry Lyndon about the poll tax all the time. He would put his arm around my shoulder and say, “Now Virginia when I get the votes, then I’ll do it, but I haven’t got the votes now.” Finally he got the votes, and he did what he promised to do all along.

That wasn’t the end of it of course.

Even after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, white voting registrars in the South still refused to enroll black voters. People like my friend Zecozy Williams who lived in Selma told me that black people sometimes waited days to try to register. She was instrumental in getting the federal voting registrars to come to Alabama. It was not until then that black people could register in numbers sufficient to make a difference.

Virginia Foster Durr, a frequent contributor to Southern Changes, took the third route for young Southern white women of her generation said Studs Terkel, not to “act the Southern Belle,” not to go crazy, but to rebel to “step outside the magic circle, abandon privilege, and challenge this way of life.” William Honey, lawyer, teacher and writer, lives in Montgomery, Alabama.

The 1991 Lillian Smith Awards

By Staff

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 18-20

The Smith Awards were founded in 1968 to recognize and encourage outstanding writing about the South. Named in honor of Lillian Smith, a Georgian who long distinguished herself as a advocate of human rights and one of the region’s most sensitive writers, the awards are sponsored annually by the Southern Regional Council. They are the oldest regional book awards honoring work about the South. The 1991 winners are J. L. Chestnut, Jr., and Julia Cass for Black in Selma for non-fiction and Mary Ward Brown for Tongues of Flame for fiction. The statements that follow are excerpted from remarks at the awards ceremony luncheon in Atlanta on November 8, 1991.

Cleophus Thomas is an Anniston, Ala., attorney and a member of the 1991 Lillian Smith Awards jury.

Reflections on Affirmative Action Angst
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, by Steven Carter (Basic Books, 1991).
Reviewed by Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 22-23

Students of race relations have watched with interest the elevation to media prominence of a small cadre of black male conservatives, academics who question the worth and wisdom of racial preference programs in place over the last twenty-five years.

Most often included in the group are Shelby Steele, an English teacher at California State University, Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford, and Glen Loury, an economist at Boston University.

Curiously, there is no comparative outpouring of objections to assistance from affirmative action’s greatest beneficiaries, women, both white and black. It may not be coincidental that, among beneficiaries, complaints about affirmative action seem limited, at present, to upwardly mobile black men. Economist Julianne Malveaux argues these men are “exercising their masculinist game-playing prerogatives by closing the door on affirmative action and other social programs.”

They may be engaging in a blackface version of the “Iron John” male-bonding rituals currently in vogue among some white men. In an attempt to reclaim their masculine selves in an increasingly feminine world where race makes qualifications suspect, these victims of affirmative action angst, hands joined in a circle, are pounding on symbolic drums, like the soulmate John Doggett did during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

With some slight deviations, these black male conservatives share a common list of objections against affirmative action and its proponents. And despite their shared complaint that deviance from established civil rights orthodoxy is dangerous, these intrepid warriors have found it rewarding instead. Joining that small circle is more than a passage to male bonding; for these drummers, it is the path out of the jungle to fame, fortune, television appearances, and publishing contracts.

Now comes Steven Carter in Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, to add his drumbeats, announcing he too suffers affirmative action angst. He shares with Steele, Sowell, and Loury an unease at preferences that make his appointment to Yale Law School faculty seem to some the result of his black skin color rather than his grey brain cells. With his colleagues around the circle’s fireside, he chides black leadership for holding on to policies white Americans oppose.

Like Steele’s, Carter’s approach is largely anecdotal. Like Steele, he offers little documentation or proof of his assertions, and like all his campus-bound counterparts demonstrates an ignorance of the prevalence of racism in America’s past and present that should deny any of them a position on a history faculty.

But Carter rejects the label “conservative;” as a self-described intellectual, he stands above political arguments.

Sadly for a law professor, he stands against the evidence as well. If only middle-class blacks benefit from affirmative action–and there is no evidence that only they do–why abandon it rather than expand it? If discrimination exists no more, what accounts for differences in black and white incomes, years of education completed, life expectancy? Are these indices of social decay the result of some malignancy unconnected to race? Do others subject to discrimination–women, Jews, Hispanics, gays and lesbians–believe they are targeted individually, or as members of a despised group? Do they react individually–as Carter urges blacks to do–or seek the power that comes from group action? Will whites cease being racists if affirmative action is abolished?

Common to all these victims of affirmative action angst is ignorance of ugly, deep-seated, white racism in America today.

The Center for Democratic Renewal reports that hate-crimes and hate-group membership are increasing. A survey conducted by the National Employment Lawyers Association reports that since a series of 1989 rulings

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by the Supreme Court which overturned eighteen years of civil rights law, minorities and women have greater difficulty obtaining lawyers to take discrimination cases; and when they do secure a lawyer, they have greater difficulty proving discrimination in court. Census data tell us that white men remain twice as likely as black men to hold sales, managerial, or professional positions, and two and a half times as likely to hold any job at all. A national poll released this year shows that a majority of whites believe racial minorities are lazier, less intelligent, more prone to violence, and less patriotic than whites.

A 1988 study by the National Research Council concluded that whites oppose equal treatment for blacks when it would result in “close, frequent, or prolonged social contact.” A 1989 University of Chicago study of residential segregation in ten American cities showed “racial segregation is deeper and more profound than previous attempts to study it had indicated.”

This evidence suggests that white Americans cannot be trusted to make discrimination-free judgments in hiring and university admissions, housings rentals, and sales. Affirmative action is the watchdog that tries to keep them honest.

If ignorance of daily proof of discrimination were not enough, common to each of the new complainants is a total failure to prescribe any cures for these continuing racial disparities beyond the foolish hope that if affirmative action is abandoned, previously bigoted whites will joyously embrace some unspecified programs to solve black joblessness, poverty, and poor education.

In fact, most affirmative action hires are in entry-level, factory-floor jobs, not in the rarer confines where Carter, Steele, Sowell, and Loury toil over their textbooks and word processors. To this observer, black complaints about the delegitimizing of credentials through affirmative action seem to come exclusively from blacks in white collars: lawyers, professors, accountants, and other managers crying and dispirited because their hard earned bona fides are being challenged. No assembly line or construction workers, firefighters, or nurses’ aides seem to worry that some white person thinks they got a job because they are black. Prejudiced whites have been claiming blacks lack qualifications since slavery; some of Carter’s Yale colleagues would question his right to be there absent affirmative action. But if the burden is as great as he and his fellows imagine it to be, one wonders why they don’t resign, and let some better qualified white men take their places?…

Julian Bond is a Visiting Professor at the American and Harvard Universities, and observes the South and the nation from Washington, D.C.

A Reporter’s Retrospective of the Movement

Reviewed by W. B. Ragsdale, Jr.

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 23-25

Free at Last, The Civil Rights Movement and the People Who Made It. Fred Powledge. (Little, Brown, 1991. xxiii, 711 pp.).

It has been more than two decades since the peak years of the Civil Rights Movement. The Movement is now almost legendary. Legends tend to give more credit to some actors in the drama, not enough to others, forget some entirely, and distort facts to make a better story.

Fred Powledge says that the thousands of people who

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put their lives on the line deserve to have the facts brought out as to what the Movement was, and was not.

“…the Movement in the South was self-generating, self-fueled, self-motivated and free-standing,” he says, adding:

A native of North Carolina, Powledge draws on his personal experiences in covering the Movement for the Atlanta Journal and the New York Times and on interviews with hundreds of those who actually took part in the events–on both sides.

The Movement, he says, was far from being all-black, or from involving all the black people in the South. It was, however, essentially black-directed with little help from elected officials anywhere, until Lyndon Johnson began to move legislation through Congress in the mid-sixties.

After the Supreme Court’s Brown decision in 1954, “At that time when national leadership was badly needed, one president (Eisenhower) was waffling and talking about how difficult it was to change people’s emotions, another (Kennedy) was appointing journeymen racists to be judges in the South.” The Kennedy Administration’s reluctance to antagonize white Democratic leaders in the South and the FBI’s outright antagonism toward the Movement have been glossed over by revisionist historians, Powledge says.

Even when the Kennedy Justice Department decided to aid the Movement, J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation did nothing at all to halt the violence against civil rights activists. In fact, Hoover, with the approval of Robert F. Kennedy, tapped Martin Luther King Jr’s telephones for several years. The excuse was that the Movement was part of some vague Communist plot.

Tapes of these conversations were distributed far beyond the White House. I remember a Republican Congressman from Alabama offering to let me listen to a recording of King having an alleged extra-marital affair in a motel.

Some now hail the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as the “creator, leader and embodiment of the movement.” This Powledge feels is unfair to other leaders, and especially to the thousands of foot soldiers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). “The heroism of a Martin Luther King was inspiring, but equally important were the heroic acts of thousands of other people who joined the Movement for a day, a year, five years, a lifetime.”

Powledge also objects to Jesse Jackson being labeled a leader in the Southern Movement, “a perception he rarely has denied, although he spent most of the Movement years in Chicago.” Jackson’s major claim to Movement fame

Powledge also shoots down the myth that Rosa Parks was merely an old Negro woman too tired to move back in the bus. Before that afternoon in 1955, Rosa Parks had been an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1943. The summer prior to her arrest she had attended the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, a center for education in the fields of labor organization and anti-discrimination work.

Powledge does a lot more than simply recount the events that characterized the movement in the fifties and sixties. After each episode, he interviews some of the participants, getting their perspective these many years later.

Some who were on the segregationist side have changed their minds. Others have not.

Although the Movement usually projected a united front to outsiders, those Powledge interviewed readily fill in the details of the squabbles over territory and tactics,

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the battle for power, the sometimes petty jealousies.

This is a book that belongs in the library of anyone seeking the full story of one of the crucial events in United States history. It does not attempt to tell the whole story, but fills in many gaps left by other accounts.

It is not, however, for those readers simply wanting to get a quick overall view of the movement, although Powledge does provide a chronology of significant events affecting the status of blacks from 1619, when the first slaves were brought to these shores to 1968 and the assassination of Martin Luther King.

One conclusion he reaches is that the success of the Movement fundamentally eliminated the terror by which the whites had kept blacks in inferior roles.

That terror was readily obvious, even to white reporters covering the story in the South. In those days, many reporters felt safer in the black community than in the white.

It was readily apparent to this reporter in 1956, covering a murder trial in Sumner, Mississippi, six months after the Till case, in the same courtroom. The circumstances were essentially the same, a white man killing a black man, only this time in broad daylight with witnesses.

One prospective juror and a young man outside the courtroom–after the white man had been acquitted–both expressed what seemed a general view:

“I don’t think you should ever convict a white man for killing a Nigger.”

The defendant, a close friend of one defendant in the Till case, expressed his own feelings this way:

“I wasn’t sure justice would be done. I should have knowed.”

That kind of thinking may exist still, but public officials, aware of the power of black voters in most of the South, are inclined to be a lot more zealous in upholding the law for blacks today than in 1956.

The Movement as it was in the fifties and sixties may be gone, but as evidenced in the 1991 governor’s election in Louisiana, the need for it has not died.

Warner Ragsdale, now retired and living in Durham, N. C., for over three decades reported for Associated Press and U.S. News and World Report, often from the South.

Are We Ready for a Vision of Justice?

Reviewed by Leslie Dunbar

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 25-28

Savage Inequalities. Jonathan Kozol. (Crown Publishers, 1991. ix, 262 pp.). The Promised Land. Nicholas Lemann. (Knopf, 1991. 410 pp.).

Explanations of the causes of poverty within capitalistic societies have tended to fall within three analytical frameworks. A first has held the society responsible. A second, the poor themselves. A third, while accepting that the original fault may have been society’s, holds that the poor have since become so deformed–some use the term “culture of poverty,” some other terms–as now to be self-perpetuating.

A fourth explanation is logically possible, and is implicit (and perhaps more than that) in the analysis of William Julius Wilson. It would hold that the original fault was society’s–deliberate or more likely impersonally systemic–and that it–society–has by now become incapable, without transformation, of doing anything decisively to end poverty.

Jonathan Kozol is firmly within the first persuasion. Society is to blame, and until and unless it takes its heavy hand off the poor there is neither practical nor moral grounds for judging them accountable for their plight.

Nicholas Lemann’s unsparing description of a contemporary big-city racial ghetto–his example is Chicago–and of governmental efforts since 1961 to change it could well lead him to the fourth persuasion, but he steps away from that, and briefly sketches a program a sensible government and its society might follow, to help an abandoned people out of their “culture of poverty.”

No citizens should stay unaware, if they in fact are, of what Kozol reports. He charges that we deliberately deny the children of our black and Hispanic poor an education, one comparable by any measure to that of white children. In 1959, the Southern Regional Council published a short study titled Georgia’s Divided Education. The “law of the land” had not yet reached Georgia, the “law” still required “separate but equal,” and so Georgia’s schools were then legally separate and illegally unequal.

Today, after Kozol’s study, we have to consider whether

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the nation has not worsened. The schools of our cities are once again legally separate (which is to say, they have weathered all the enforcement actions and are still racially set apart, desegregated if at all only by token members of the other races and–this time around–are now legally unequal (or will be such unless state-wide equity laws are established and obeyed). What once was illegal is now lawful; we have made inequality legal.

Kozol went to East St. Louis (Illinois), Chicago, New York, Camden and Paterson (New Jersey), Washington, San Antonio, to schools in their inner cities and to schools in their affluent, dominantly white, neighborhoods or suburbs. Some passages excerpted from his chapter on New York will suggest what he found.

Enough. The best I’ve omitted, the words of children and teachers and the word-pictures of schools they have their being in, both poor ones and the far different ones of affluent white districts. Two of the cliches of American speech-makers stand naked before Kozol’s portrayals: that education is the way to “progress”; and that other one, that our youth are our trusted hope for the future.

Nicholas Lemann’s book is similarly unnerving. It is an important and valuable book, though one has to surmount an over-supply of annoyances to say that, including the incessant use of the term “the left,” undefined; and the embarrassed feeling one gets when intimate details of other people’s lives are displayed. (I hope they got something for it; like cash.) A dumb jacket blurb by George Will calls it “even better in execution” than Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, as inapt a comparison as can be imagined.

And despite all the obvious research, doubts do arise: for example, did black “old folks” walk country roads of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s singing “the old folk song ‘We Shall Overcome’?” or, did the FBI send agents in the late 1940s to investigate a voting denial complaint and get four Mississippi blacks registered? or, do the

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several harsh anecdotal dissections of personalities, especially of Lyndon Johnson, add anything to the book’s argument, have any other than a crowd-pleasing purpose? or, did the criminal acts allegedly committed by the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM) against Mississippi Action for Progress (MAP) actually occur except in the files of a Washington office hostile to CDGM? 1

All that aside, The Promised Land is a genuine achievement. If it and Kozol’s Savage Inequalities do not penetrate this nation’s moral, and political, obtuseness and squalor, it is hard to have faith that any words will.

Lemann’s thesis is that black populations within the centers of our big cities have become ghettoized, their surrounding societies’ only true desire toward them being to keep them contained, the ghetto itself become a culture, largely lawless, within which its members’ once strong desire to escape has progressively withered, so that it has become self-perpetuating. He traces this awful condition to the black migration from the South, resulting from the displacement of black field workers by agricultural machinery and chemicals. Unlike Kozol, who is content to confront citizens simply with the injustice they tolerate and are responsible for continuing, Lemann is concerned also with impersonal, economic forces, and seems a bit less demanding of us as individual citizens.

He builds his book around two localities, Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Chicago, following migrants from Clarksdale to the metropolis. His principal (though not only) subject is Ruby Haynes, née Ruby Lee Hopkins,

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born 1916, moved to Chicago in 1946, moved back to Clarksdale in 1979, where presumably still is. Lemann tells of her marriages and liaisons, her many children and grandchildren and their fortunes, of life in the “projects” of Chicago, her better life in the “projects” of Clarksdale, the hideous reality of drug trade and gang violence, the disintegration of the hopes which a Southern folk took as they went north, the intent of Chicago’s rulers to “keep blacks in their place”–a different “place” than the white South had prescribed but the intent responsive to the same American tradition. Mrs. Haynes has now attained the best a woman or man of her position can realistically hope for: Social Security. She has made it. She has survived welfare.

The narrative moves back and forth between Clarksdale and Chicago. There is an entr’acte of a hundred pages focused on the Kennedy-Johnson-Nixon administrations’ attempts to pacify or to solve (one or the other, as political seasons changed) poverty. Nothing worked well enough. Lemann’s description of the government’s failure bogs down in a lot of tales of the interplay of personalities. The reader will get a better, clearer view of the shortcomings of those years and their policies from his brilliantly sharp reporting about the Chicago scene which follows the Washington chapter.

There were so many programs in those days, most now discarded like worn-out tires, the tread all gone. I recall thinking–I was working in New York at the time–that the Model Cities program made a lot of good sense, but I do not remember very well why I thought so, or whatever became of it, or just what it was. Lemann is right, that Head Start has been the “war on poverty’s” best result. Legal Services and the Job Corps have also endured meritoriously. None of these has ever been adequately sized and funded. Some of Lemann’s best pages are at the very end of his book where (despite a fanciful belief in the results of social science research about poverty) he makes common-sense suggestions for specific, targeted programs to reduce the pains of urban poverty. “The idea that the government can’t accomplish anything is a smokescreen.”

And, as Jonathan Kozol writes, with a reference to the Reagan/Bush leadership,

Kozol and Lemann should goad, if not inspire, us to find the courage. And the vision.

Whose, though, is the vision? The beckoning one for many, probably for the author of these two fine books, is symbolically King’s dream, or Lincoln’s “of, by, and for” the people. Do the young black separatists of today’s ghettos care about or believe in the possibility of either? Do the thieves of Wall Street and their lawyers? Do the 55 percent of white Louisianans who voted for Duke, the Congressional herd who invented more than half a hundred new causes permitting the state to kill its poor? Do the invaders of Grenada and Panama, the yellow-ribboned cheerers of the killing of the Iraqi soldiers and civilians -are these Americans, who seem to be most of us, ready for a vision of justice? There is so much social distance among us. I hope Kozol and Lemann will write again, examining ourselves. From Kozol especially, we have learned to expect much.

Now living in Durham, N. C., Leslie Dunbar is the book review editor of Southern Changes.

Arguments Over What the South Was, Is, and Will Be

Reviewed by Claude Sitton

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 28-30

The South Moves Into Its Future: studies in the analysis and prediction of social change. Edited by Joseph S. Haymows. (The University of Alabama Press. 322 pp.).

Historians and journalists have disputed for years over what the South was and is. Undaunted by this lack of consensus, Southern sociologists now have set out to predict what the region will be. What’s more, they think they can not only describe but also shape the South that will exist in 2050. That seems doubtful at first.

This bold venture in The South Moves Into Its Future comes a cropper at once on a question of definition. Joseph S. Haymows, the book’s editor, concedes in the

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preface that “the South” has several meanings. The reality is that there are–and always have been–not one but many Souths, Virginians and Texans having about as much in common as possums and armadillos. Further, there is the pertinent issue of whether the South still exists much beyond the confines of geography, history and fiction.

The fourteen authors infer the course of future Southern changes from changes now in process. Given the variables involved, the results are at best informed conjecture, conjecture that comes no closer to consensus than the historians and journalists. Further, the fact that few of the authors are likely to be around fifty years from now to answer for myopia lends a certain smugness to the undertaking.

Nevertheless, the book contains much informed debate about the social, economic and political directions of the South of today that makes it well worth the reading.

The studies referred to in the title were delivered at the 1986 meeting of the Southern Sociological Society in celebration of its fiftieth anniversary. They begin with an examination of the impacts of the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression and World War II, impacts the book says brought the “New South.”

In one significant chapter, Jeanne C. Biggar predicts that current trends of in-migration will swell the region’s population to one-third of the nation’s total within the next fifty years. That in-migration also will create a South that is both younger and older, slightly more feminine and perhaps less black. And it will exert pressure on the environment and public services ranging from utilities and transportation to education and health.

Biggar says that barring a radical change in the racial composition of in-migration during the next fifty years an increasing dominance of white population numbers can be expected. This in turn may exacerbate socioeconomic and racial segregation in Southern cities, with central cities being abandoned to black residents while suburbs grow more white.

John D. Kasarda, Holly L. Hughes, and Michael D. Irwin think that, contrary to Biggar’s projections, the black percentage of the South’s population will increase somewhat. They also predict that many of the region’s competitive economic advantages will continue, while cautioning that its labor-intensive industries will grow more vulnerable to offshore competition. Future economic growth depends largely on investment in quality education at all levels and development of an information-age public infrastructure that supports a larger service sector.

The political South of tomorrow looks like more of the same through Paul Luebke’s crystal ball. He discounts the possibility of a biracial liberal alliance, a hope once popularized by V. 0. Key. Southern Democratic parties show little sympathy for an ideology keyed to biracial economic justice. Instead, those whom he calls the economic modernizers will adopt liberal ideas needed to defeat the conservatives while refusing to share power with the liberals.

Switch the debate to New South vs. No South and John Shelton Reed opts for the enduring South, which he explored in a 1986 book of that name. He concedes that Southerners now look more like other Americans, but argues that there are some persisting differences in localism, attitudes toward some types of violence and in a number of religious and quasi-religious beliefs and behaviors. Other authors question just how much South is left to endure. And Gordon F. Streib says old Dixie’s hopes for cultural survival depend upon its elderly as bearers of tradition.

Patricia Yancey Martin, Kenneth R. Wilson and Caroline Matheny Dillman present one of the book’s most conflicted analyses. They cite authorities who indict

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white males for many of the region’s social ills. They then concede that data on white that matter, are scarce and that a distinctive Southern style of what they call “gendering” may not even exist.

John J. Moland Jr. takes a downbeat approach to black-white relations. He thinks Reagan-Bush conservatism will persist into the twenty-first century, shifting to a more liberal and equitable direction by its second quarter.

W. Parker Frisbie sounds a hopeful note about the prospects of Southern Hispanics. He foresees full assimilation for Cubans, rapid progress by Mexican-Americans and a much slower pace for Puerto Ricans.

In summary, Haymows paints a South of 2050 that is aging, politically conservative, more than four-fifths urban, moving toward cultural similarity with the nation and drawing its income more and more from manufacturing and high tech and service industries. With the changes will come problems, says the editor.

Urban concentration will exacerbate pollution of air, water and other resources. Demands for public services will continue to outrun the public funds to provide them. Problems of inter-group relations–ethnic, racial, age, gender, and class–will intensify. The national balance of trade, the national debt, foreign economic competition and high defense expenditures will aggravate or extend economic problems. Management of toxic waste will become more and more urgent.

These problems, says Abbott L. Ferris in the book’s last chapter, simply present opportunities for sociologists. He notes how far the South has come in the past half century, in part through the efforts of sociologists such as the late Howard W. Odum and two organizations they helped found–the Southern Regional Council and the Southern Regional Education Board.

Political trends suggest that the region must rely on its own resources in preparing for the South that will be. If sociologists show the way, they will have made a more worthwhile contribution than those who argue over what the South was and is.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Claude Sitton covered the South for the New York Times during the Civil Rights Movement, served as long-time editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, and has recently been teaching at Emory University.