by James Burkinshaw
The defeat of the Confederate forces at the end of the Civil War, far from destroying this Romantic self image, embedded it all the more deeply within the white South’s sense of its own identity. More so, in fact, than before the Civil War, a time in which many Southerners in general were far more clear-eyed about the limitations of a culture based on slave ownership. The essence of Confederate nostalgia after their loss in 1865 was a cult of romantic defeat, denial, self-pity and pride, with interesting parallels with other cultures that have suffered defeat (the Serbs, certain communities in Northern Ireland and some Arab cultures suggest themselves). What makes this Southern culture of defeat and resentment against Northern oppression, as exemplified by the Federal government, all the more remarkable is that it stands in direct contrast to the self image of the United States as a whole, which is one of success and optimism, rooted in a sense of exceptionalism. The Southern-born historian C. Vann Woodward, in his Irony of Southern History, noted the unique and eccentric position of the South in the nation, while noting that it is America that is unique among the peoples of the world in its experience of unbridled success and victory, a legend that is not shared by any other people of the civilized world, although his words rang more true in 1953 than today, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, The Iraq War and other blows to the American psyche. As Woodward noted, the South had undergone an experience (of defeat, submission and poverty) that it could share with no other part of America. Retreating into a dream world, Southerners insisted that others accept their antebellum cavalier fantasy as an accurate description of conditions in the South. However, at the same time, this nostalgia was entangled with an ironic and often bitter detachment from the optimism of American national culture.
Southern writers were not blind to Northern
hypocrisy and sanctimony, particularly the claim that its motivation had simply
been the liberation of the slaves, ignoring the complexities of the position of
Abraham Lincoln himself who saw the emancipation of the slaves as primarily an
economic measure to destroy the South rather than as a moral imperative. It can
be argued that issues such as protectionism versus free trade played a role as
significant in the Southern decision to secede as that of slavery and part of
the Southern resentment of the North after the war centred on its perceived
attempt to impose an unwanted industrial system upon the agrarian South.
However, because Northern criticism of the South, after the war, centred upon
slavery, the South’s self defence ultimately rallied around that same point, whereby
white Southern cultural identity became irredeemably identified with and
defined by slavery. As a result, loyalty to race, rather than region, became
embedded in Southern white culture, with disastrous effects both racially and
economically.
Southern whites experienced brutal levels of
poverty after the Civil War, the Southern economy having been devastated.
However, any attempt by certain populist leaders to unite the interests of poor
whites and blacks in the region foundered on the racist ideology that, if
anything, was intensified further by Southern defeat, and persuaded poor whites
that the cause of their problems was “uppity” blacks, freed from slavery and
now taking their jobs, or, even worse, taking their tax dollars through welfare
programmes. In 1919, The Shreveport Times, in Louisiana, wrote:
“We venture to say that fully ninety per cent of all the race troubles in
the South are the result of the Negro forgetting his place. If the black man
will stay where he belongs, act like a negro should act, work like a negro
should work, talk like a negro should talk, and study like a negro should
study, there will be very few riots, fights or clashes.
The newly-freed slaves and ensuing generations of
African Americans in the South, between the 1870s and the 1960s were subjected
to an increasingly punitive and vicious regime under the infamous “Jim Crow”
laws, which brought segregation into effect throughout the region---invariably
resulting in underfunded and inferior facilities for black Southerners, whether
schools, hospitals, toilets, housing, even public drinking fountains. Many of
the laws were not rescinded until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965, 100 years after the end of the Civil War. In addition,
voting restrictions left African Americans powerless, subject to arbitrary and
often brutal treatment by Southern whites of all classes. However, Southern
racist ideology, defined Southern whites as the victims and African Americans
(along with Northern politicians) as a threat---this meme was most brutally
effective in the imagery of rape of white women by black men, as portrayed in
DW Griffiths’ hugely influential 1915 film Birth of a Nation based on a bestselling novel, The Klansman, set
during and after the Civil War. The success of both film and book in the North, as well as the South, confirm the prevalence of intensely racist attitudes throughout white American society in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century, within the lifetimes of many Northerners who had fought for the Union ostensibly to end slavery.
"Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia clean and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh . . ."
(from 'Strange Fruit')
Something that almost any European visiting or observing America notes is America’s lack of a welfare state on the scale of those of most modern European democracies. This, again, is in large part a legacy of post-Civil War white Southern culture. Sociologist Nathan Glazer, who was long interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question: “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality.” Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, "Why Doesn't the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001), he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy not only goes back to the beginning of the republic in the late 1700s but that there is evidence that racial attitudes lie at the heart of such reluctance. The authors report, using the World Values Survey, that "opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. Whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view.... 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said ...poor people could work their way out of poverty. Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution.”
Johnson also identified the dilemma of offering true “equality of
opportunity”: Imagine a hundred yard dash in which one of the two runners has his
legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards while the unshackled runner
has gone fifty yards. At this point, the judges decide the race is unfair. How
do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the
race to proceed? Then they could say that equal opportunity now prevailed. But
one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not
be the better part of justice to allow the other runner to make up the forty
yard gap or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action
towards equality.
In 1984, at the age of 17, I spent a gap year at Troy State University, in
Alabama, in what is still called the Deep South, on something called the
Governor’s Scholarship. The name of Alabama’s then-governor, George Wallace,
emblazoned almost every building on the campus: dormitories, lunch hall,
lecture halls and administration buildings all seemed to be named after
him.
At that time, Wallace was in the middle of his final term as governor, during which he appointed a record number of African-Americans to government positions. However, only 15 years previously, he had run what Jimmy Carter (then Governor of neighbouring Georgia) described as “the most racist campaign in modern Southern history”, airing a TV ad with the slogan “Do you want the black block electing your governor” and another showing a white girl surrounded by seven black boys with the slogan “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama!”, tapping into the most atavistic Southern white paranoia. In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Wallace, as governor, had barred the entrance to campuses such as Troy State, refusing to admit black students to whites-only universities and declaring “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in defiance of the efforts of the Johnson administrations to enact civil rights and voting rights reforms.
At that time, Wallace was in the middle of his final term as governor, during which he appointed a record number of African-Americans to government positions. However, only 15 years previously, he had run what Jimmy Carter (then Governor of neighbouring Georgia) described as “the most racist campaign in modern Southern history”, airing a TV ad with the slogan “Do you want the black block electing your governor” and another showing a white girl surrounded by seven black boys with the slogan “Wake up Alabama! Blacks vow to take over Alabama!”, tapping into the most atavistic Southern white paranoia. In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Wallace, as governor, had barred the entrance to campuses such as Troy State, refusing to admit black students to whites-only universities and declaring “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” in defiance of the efforts of the Johnson administrations to enact civil rights and voting rights reforms.
 |
| Wallace campaigning for President, 1968. |
And it was on this segregationist platform that Wallace also ran for
President in 1968 (the first of four attempts) polling ten million votes
nationwide, winning five Southern states---enough to deny the Democrats a
victory and to allow Richard Nixon to win a crucial victory that would lay the
foundations of Republican dominance of American presidential politics for the
next four decades, until the election of Barack Obama exactly forty years
later. It is not without reason that George Wallace has been described as the
“most influential loser in 20th century American politics.”
One of the conditions of my scholarship was that, like all international
students at Troy State, I attend a class on Local and State Government by
an ex-Alabama governor, an avuncular teacher
called John Patterson. It was only later that I discovered that it was this
kindly old man who had heavily defeated George Wallace in the latter's first attempt at the governorship a quarter of a century before, in 1958; with the support of racist organisations such as the Ku Klux
Klan, Patterson had portrayed Wallace
as too “soft” on segregation. Wallace famously said afterwards: “You know I
tried to talk about good roads and good schools and all these things that have
been part of my career and nobody listened . . . He talked about (blacks) and
them white voters stomped the floor . . ." (As an interesting aside, John Patterson, who is still
alive and now in his late nineties, endorsed Barack Obama for President in 2008).
Another politics professor of mine, at the opposite end of the political
spectrum to Patterson, was a man called Bob Knott, who set me working with the
American Civil Liberties Union on the Voting Rights Project, investigating and
reporting legal ways in which state authorities still suppressed black voting,
20 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965---for example, placing ballot
boxes in whites-only churches, restricting staffing of polling stations in
black areas to create long waiting lines designed to discourage voting, even
printing leaflets with the wrong voting date. For all Wallace’s rhetoric of
racial harmony and public regret for his earlier segregationist rhetoric, his
state government continued to sanction methods designed to subvert the gains of
the Civil Rights Movement. It was my experiences working on the Voting Rights
Project that triggered my interest in American politics as a whole and
particularly the way in which the tangled and often poisonous history of the
American Southern continues to affect, and perhaps infect, the national body
politic nationally and, because of America’s superpower status,
internationally.
As a foreign student in Alabama, one of the first things I noticed was
the prevalence of references to the Civil War or as it was known in the South
The War for Southern Independence. Every other car seemed to have the bumper
sticker “The South will rise again”; people would still proudly refer to
themselves as “rebels”. People, young and old, would talk about the war itself
as if it had happened only yesterday. Many of my fellow students, with their
long hair and goatee beards consciously or unconsciously emulated the Cavaliers
who had been the role models for so many young Southern men from before the
Civil War. Mark Twain, himself born in the neighbouring state of Mississippi,
accused the Romantic Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott, several of whose
novels idealised medieval knights and seventeenth century English cavaliers, of
causing the Civil War: "It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the
South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was
he, also, that made those gentlemen value their bogus decorations . . . Sir Walter
had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war,
that he is in great measure responsible for the war."
 |
| Statue of Confederate General (and founder of Ku Klux Klan), Nathan Bedford Forrest |
The defeat of the Confederate forces at the end of the Civil War, far from destroying this Romantic self image, embedded it all the more deeply within the white South’s sense of its own identity. More so, in fact, than before the Civil War, a time in which many Southerners in general were far more clear-eyed about the limitations of a culture based on slave ownership. The essence of Confederate nostalgia after their loss in 1865 was a cult of romantic defeat, denial, self-pity and pride, with interesting parallels with other cultures that have suffered defeat (the Serbs, certain communities in Northern Ireland and some Arab cultures suggest themselves). What makes this Southern culture of defeat and resentment against Northern oppression, as exemplified by the Federal government, all the more remarkable is that it stands in direct contrast to the self image of the United States as a whole, which is one of success and optimism, rooted in a sense of exceptionalism. The Southern-born historian C. Vann Woodward, in his Irony of Southern History, noted the unique and eccentric position of the South in the nation, while noting that it is America that is unique among the peoples of the world in its experience of unbridled success and victory, a legend that is not shared by any other people of the civilized world, although his words rang more true in 1953 than today, in the wake of the Vietnam War, Watergate, 9/11, The Iraq War and other blows to the American psyche. As Woodward noted, the South had undergone an experience (of defeat, submission and poverty) that it could share with no other part of America. Retreating into a dream world, Southerners insisted that others accept their antebellum cavalier fantasy as an accurate description of conditions in the South. However, at the same time, this nostalgia was entangled with an ironic and often bitter detachment from the optimism of American national culture.
 |
| The first African-American members of the US Congress, c. 1870 |
 |
| Scene from Birth of a Nation - in which the Klan are presented as heroes and the lynching victim as villain |
A powerful corrective to the heroic image of lynching portrayed in the film is the searing poem, 'Strange Fruit', written by Abel Mereropol, a Jewish teacher from the
Bronx and an early civil rights campaigner. Describing in brutal terms the African-American victim of a lynching, the lyrics bitterly mock the Southern, white self-image of a pastoral
idyll populated by gallant cavaliers and their ladies, portrayed in novels and
in films such as Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind (released in 1939, the same year 'Strange
Fruit' was written). The poem was later set to music and is sung, here, by Nina Simone:
"Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The big bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia clean and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh . . ."
(from 'Strange Fruit')
Something that almost any European visiting or observing America notes is America’s lack of a welfare state on the scale of those of most modern European democracies. This, again, is in large part a legacy of post-Civil War white Southern culture. Sociologist Nathan Glazer, who was long interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question: “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality.” Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, "Why Doesn't the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?" (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001), he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy not only goes back to the beginning of the republic in the late 1700s but that there is evidence that racial attitudes lie at the heart of such reluctance. The authors report, using the World Values Survey, that "opinions and beliefs about the poor differ sharply between the United States and Europe. In Europe the poor are generally thought to be unfortunate, but not personally responsible for their own condition. Whereas 70 % of West Germans express the belief that people are poor because of imperfections in society, not their own laziness, 70 % of Americans hold the opposite view.... 71 % of Americans but only 40% of Europeans said ...poor people could work their way out of poverty. Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution.”
 |
| Cartoon perpetuating racist image of a 'Welfare Queen' - 2009 |
Glazer notes that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, various
immigrant support systems and a variety of religious institutions provided for
the poor: It was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a
fully developed welfare state were provided. However, the situation of
African-Americans was different, released from slavery in the 1860s but
equipped with no inherent support system, they were much more dependent, owing
to their limited economic opportunitiesThis kind of racial politics had been central to the Republican
political strategy since George Wallace’s insurgent, independent presidential
campaign of 1968 opened their eyes to the possibilities of tapping traditional
Southern resentments and enticing voters in the South away from the Democratic
Party that had dominated there since before the Civil War. The Republican Party
made huge gains in the South and in white enclaves in northern cities because
of reaction against the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965.
Frustration among African Americans following the failure of the Civil Rights
successes to translate into economic opportunity for black people led to riots
in the late 60s, which further terrified some whites, tapping into traditional
racial fears.
The kind of racial politics typified by the Willie Horton ad, harnessing
white and primarily Southern racial resentment and fear, enabled the Republican
party to take advantage of the very class inequalities that their laissez-faire
economic philosophy defended. It was poorer whites, traditionally Democrat
voters, who were most likely now to live in desegregated neighbourhood, to feel
economically insecure as the economy struggled in the 1970s and to feel
vulnerable as crime rose during the same period, searching for a scapegoat:
race, as in the past, trumped class. This was something that some Democrats
had understood, even as they passed Civil Rights legislation, President Lyndon
Johnson noting “I think we just delivered the South to the Republicans for a
long time to come.”
 |
| President Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, 1964, watched by Martin Luther King |
How does a society like America with such a complex class structure so
tied up with racial identity start the race fairly all over again without
exacerbating racial resentments and tensions further? Detailed studies showed
that white voters who shifted to the Republicans during this period were
preoccupied with a sense of unfairness, that they were being discriminated
against at the expense of African Americans. Affirmative action seemed to
suggest that white lower and middle class workers deserved to be stuck in their
lowly jobs while minority groups (code for “black people”) were undeservingly promoted
above them.
Someone who understood this sense of resentment well was Republican,
Richard Nixon, who won the 1968 election in large part because of George
Wallace eating into the white Democratic vote in the South. Nixon even echoed
Wallace’s language, but more subtly coded to appeal to racial fears without
appearing nakedly racist. Such phrases became known as “dog whistles”, designed
to be understood by specific listeners without offending mainstream voters as
explicitly racist. The potency of this strategy is undeniable. In his book
“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” Thomas Frank notes that it enables the
Republican Party to exploit people’s cultural and racial identity to distract
them from their economic self interest: "Repossess their homes
and today’s Kansans, next thing you know, will be protesting in front of abortion
clinics. Strip them of their job security, and they blame immigration and
affirmative action programmes, as they head out to join the Republican
Party."
The election of Barack Obama in November 2008, with victories in
Southern states that hadn’t voted Democratic for over thirty years, seemed to
exorcise the racial demons that had haunted America since its inception. White
voters as well as black, from every region of the country, including the Old
Confederacy, had overwhelmingly elected a black man president. However, within
months of Obama’s election, a new, almost exclusively white movement, naming
itself the Tea Party Movement, began not only to militate against the
President’s economic agenda, accusing him of communism, but called into
question his very right to be a citizen of the United States. A disturbing
number of Tea Party protestors clearly viewed these issues in racial terms,
sometimes using overtly racist language.
A survey of the Tea Party Movement in April 2010, by the University of
Washington concluded that 1% of its membership was African-American and a
further 1% were Asian-American. 92% of Tea Party members are white. Nearly 40%
of the membership are from the Deep South. While 74% see cutting welfare
programmes as a priority for the country, only 6% see reform of Wall Street as
a priority.
Whether the Tea Party Movement has long-term future remains to be seen,
but it seems to me that it is part of a long tradition of American political
organisations that tap into a long Southern-based tradition of resentment and
fear, subordinating economic self interest to cultural and racial identity. As
white Americans form a rapidly decreasing percentage of the overall American
population and as the US government reports a rapidly increasing membership of
nativist and white supremacist militia organisations, including a reviving Ku
Klux Klan, it seems that what Thomas Jefferson described as America’s “original
sin”, the institution of slavery and its poisonous legacy continues to infect
America politics.
This article is based on a talk presented by James Burkinshaw to PGS' Politics Society in 2010. Author's Note (February 2020): in the decade since this talk was originally presented, racial resentment and fear among sections of America's white population seem only to have deepened, despite the re-election of America's first African-American president, Barack Obama, in 2012. Obama's successor, Donald Trump, has proven himself willing, and eager, to go beyond the 'dog whistle' approach of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, to a more overtly racist politics actively predicated on fomenting racial and cultural divisions within American society. The Tea Party has 'evolved' seamlessly into the MAGA movement.
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