Mind of the South, Mind of America

The 1960s and the Unfinished Journey

 

by John L. Godwin

 

In the election of 1960, North Carolina citizens went to the polls and returned a majority vote for John F. Kennedy. Out of seventy million voters across the nation who cast ballots, the margin of victory that put the Massachusetts liberal in the White House stood at just a little more than 118,000. In North Carolina, the margin of victory was a reflection of the national consensus. North Carolina Democrats delivered the state for JFK in 1960 by 57,670 votes.

Forty-six years ago—the world was a different place. With more than ninety percent of eligible white voters registered, North Carolina also showed less intolerance toward the Black voter than was typical of much the South. With more than thirty-eight percent of eligible Black voters registered in 1960, as many as 210,450 North Carolina Black voters stood ready for the polls that November. Studies of the election have asserted that as many as ninety percent of Black voters in the South stuck with JFK and the Democratic Party in 1960. So, one could effectively conclude that North Carolina’s Black voters played a significant part in helping to put JFK in the White House.

Since that time, in a state that has become more than ever a bastion of conservatism, North Carolina has joined the region in support for such figures as Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, George W. Bush, or even North Carolina’s Senator Jesse Helms. So—what has happened in the Carolinas? Do we have the right to be optimistic about the future of our politics? And if so, where do we look for daylight?

Maybe an introspective turn from a Tar Heel native at this point would be helpful. I grew up in North Carolina in the era of civil rights protest, when state and local governments still institutionalized racial discrimination against the active opposition of African Americans. But by the time I reached boyhood the South was already experiencing the wrenching changes of the 1960s. My education was thorough enough that at least I understood that African Americans in the region had been denied equal treatment, and that Southern support for slavery, white supremacy and segregation had set the region apart. But did I understand the real cost? By the time I went off to college in the fall of 1971, I tended to share the outlook that was common among North Carolina youth. We were racially tolerant, if less than fully enlightened about the history and political economy of our state. The white protestant South tended to believe in its religious work ethic as a solution to almost every problem. And to scorn governmental solutions as the false idolatry of a communistic socialism—along with other such heresies that seemed to open up hell’s gates to the fiery torments.

Racism, we knew, by 1968, was somehow basically wrong, but we had not put our finger on its ultimate meaning. As I recall it, by the time of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., his voice, echoed in TV and newspaper coverage everywhere, seemed to grow shrill, as if strained in the face of an America that had learned to tune him out. In the fall of that year, ours was the first freshman high school class in New Hanover County to experience “total integration” through federally mandated Court ordered bussing. It seemed that we discovered at that time that so many of the young black students were like us—real people with black skins. But there were still too many whites who could not or would not see this.

The ranting of Alabama governor George Wallace, as most North Carolinians knew by this time, was not a solution; but the arrival of Black militancy in 1968 seemed actually to help reinforce the appeal of Wallace, Nixon and Jess Helms. Since the mid-1960s, Wallace remained the South’s leading figure in the civil rights opposition, who mesmerized audiences with his ultra patriot brand of conservatism. In 1968 Wallace somehow morphed into a figure with a national following. And while Wallace made headlines, the Vietnam War ran its course, along with bussing, Black school closings, and so on. Voters in the South were the last people to find out the truth about most of these issues—and many are still waiting.

Through these years, from 1968 through the mid-1970s, America’s worst nightmares seemed to crash into public awareness all at once. Political assassinations that deprived us of our leaders, riots in the cities, the failure of U.S. military efforts in Vietnam, a foreign trade deficit spiraling out of control, inflation that wore away at our economic prosperity, mounting increases in the cost of fuel that saw long lines at gas stations, a spirit of extremism, albeit fanaticism expressed in groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, the Rights of White People, Church of the Black Messiah, the American Nazi Party, and of course the most pathetic group of all, the ever outrageous Ku Klux Klan. As I recall it, about the time I arrived as a young college student at UNC Chapel Hill, vigorous protests against the war were visible on a daily basis along Franklin Street. These were not carried out by ignorant or embarrassingly stupid people—but by teachers, college students, and the like, many of them well educated and informed about the war.

When a condensed, paperback edition of the Pentagon Papers appeared during those years, it was debated furiously on our campus. Critics of the war insisted that it showed that the U.S. military approach was fundamentally unsound from the very beginning. The most powerful military establishment in the world had failed to subdue a small and relatively backward Third World regime because our military had in effect, never developed an effective strategy. All the talk of this seemed to provoke an almost incredible fury and indignation virtually everywhere. East Coast or West Coast, things seemed to be burning out of control, and the spirit of confrontation was everywhere. The Watergate controversy, in which North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin played a leading role, became a sensation in the mass media. Ervin’s investigative committee in the Senate exposed the arrogance of Nixon’s brand of conservatism and helped to resolve a constitutional crisis. The Senator became a popular hero in North Carolina and a folk hero for much of the country. But did North Carolina ever truly understand what had happened?

For the South, for America, and above all for a young college student caught up in an intense search for perspective on life and learning—it should have been a time of questioning, of re-examination of the assumptions and policies that had led the nation into crisis. But in the 1980 election, the state joined the nation in the most crucial political decision perhaps of its recent history. Critics of the Vietnam War and Sixties reformers were effectively put aside. The nation, and North Carolina, elected California governor Ronald Reagan as president, a hard line Cold War advocate whose solution to the nation’s problems was to reassert U.S. military leadership, clothe racial conservatism with a new and highly dubious sense of white indignation, while denying all responsibility for disaster in Vietnam. Reagan, to an extent that still strains credulity, successfully rejected government based affirmative action programs, blamed “big gub’ment” with a highly conspicuous Southern accent, while responding to civil rights advocates with the one-line retort, “They’re prejudiced against me!”

As president, Reagan voiced high-handed condemnation of the Soviet Union as “the evil empire”—as if the U.S. status as anointed leader of the free world were unquestioned. Reagan was not a moderate forced to take the conservative fringe away from Wallace. The Californian drew strong support from Southern Neobourbons defecting from the Democratic Party because he epitomized their racial conservatism. Bordering on Southern style demagoguery, Reagan’s scripted press conferences served up militarism, deregulation and privatization with the jovial wink of a Hollywood film star who somehow knew that it was all an elaborate screenplay. Lacking the fringe group fanaticism of the Wallace following and the scheming, gritty racism of Wallace, Reagan had a masterful stage presence and an uncanny knack for charming audiences and the press.

Had the mainstream press chosen to expose Reagan for his pandering to the far right, it might have been a worthy lesson for us all. But the nation took Reagan seriously.

Today, we pay an appalling price for this lapse in our sanity.

A college graduate in the midst of post-war disillusionment, stagflation, and economic recession, I bravely entered the job market in 1975 with a degree in English-Philosophy and a terrible sense of estrangement from the politics of the South and the nation. Wallace, Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan—none of them held much charm for me. For I had become so deeply disillusioned with American politics that I scarcely gave it much consideration. It had seemed through these years to become the province of mediocrity and madness. I turned to the study of literature, philosophy and music as a means to ponder life’s deeper riddles, without having realized an essential truth: that history happens to people like me.

Looking back today, as I ponder the workings of my education, it seems that my inner search turned toward American history mainly as a result of my travels. It was about that time that I first read W.J. Cash’s The Mind of the South. Although the larger point of Cash’s 1940s classic of cultural analysis, admittedly for me, must have been lost in the forest, I saw lots of trees there, and began to question many myths and assertions that Southern whites have held sacred over the years. Slavery in the Southern mind, had not been a curse but a blessing, one which bestowed on the region a superior social system that entrenched a noble ruling class, one whose virtue was not lessened by its aristocratic leanings. The Civil War, that Yankee war of aggression against the cotton kingdom, had been the region’s most heroic hour in defense of a civilization hallowed by the sacrifices of her martyred defenders. Contemptible Yankee carpetbaggers, Black Republicans who would assert equality in the face of a prostrate region, and scalawag turncoats who betrayed the South’s honor, had made the era of Reconstruction an unparalleled time of corruption when the very dregs of American society fancied itself equal to the task of leading the nation.

To the extent that my mind held congruent with these assumptions remains doubtful. On fully half of these storied pillars of Southern heritage, I had yet to fully comprehend the nature of the mischief. But to fully grasp the collective meaning of the history of the South, I certainly needed much more study. Though the absurdity of most of this was more or less self evident, it was not so much what was happening to the South as what was happening to the nation in the years from 1960 on, that seemed so important.

Did I understand yet how the U.S.A. had changed since JFK took office in 1961?

Most people will acknowledge that the truth comes to us in small doses, bringing with it momentary doubts or misgiving. Even those brief but spectacular epiphanies can leave us ultimately unchanged. To question our most basic assumptions may be easy enough, but to leave them behind is to launch into uncharted waters. For societies, it seems that social and economic changes often come with major upheavals. For individuals, change can be much more subtle, like the movement of a river that flows on, rounding the bend while bubbling ever onward. I seem to recall that the appearance of Michael Harrington on the UNC campus in the spring of 1975 for me was that kind of an event. He spoke in Memorial Auditorium, on the same stage where, just the year before, I’d heard Senator Sam Ervin speak at a UNC Law School graduation. I heard British Prime Minister Harold Wilson speak there also, and so many others.

Mindful of American soldiers who gave their lives in the war against Communism in Vietnam, I boldly stood up in the midst of a sea of expectant faces in Memorial Auditorium, asking Prime Minister Harold Wilson what he thought Socialism had done for Great Britain. His answer was measured, thoughtful, and deeply sincere when he spoke to assure all of us that the lives of British coal miners, city dwellers, British women, children and so many others had been improved under Socialist government.

But it was Michael Harrington who impressed me the most.

This was not because of any prior knowledge on my part of Harrington or his work. In fact I knew nothing more about Harrington than had been announced in the Daily Tar Heel, our student newspaper. My politics thus far in life had not progressed much farther than Ayn Rand’s Capitalism The Unknown Ideal, or K. Ross Tool’s An Angry Old Man Talks Up to Youth. I had read Galbraith’s New Industrial State, and Charles A. Reich’s The Greening of America, but remained cool to the Sixties’ critique of modern consumer society. At some point I’d actually read The Communist Manifesto, and even picked up a copy of Mao’s Quotations—though I remained strongly opposed to collectivism, in addition to Mao’s romantic addiction to armed struggle. On the subject of Black civil rights, I’d read more widely, and had been outspoken on campus in support of the Civil Rights Movement.

In retrospect, it seems now that the real nature of American government as it has existed through most of my lifetime has only been revealed in a negative outline, as much through its omissions as otherwise. It took scholars as much as a decade to dig out the truth about J. Edgar Hoover, the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and so many questions about the era that continue to haunt us. Like the subject of the Civil Rights Movement, it is by no means clear that the American public has heard the message, in spite of all the books and the media exposure. It seems that America’s reaction to the era—almost as storied and fanciful as that of the South in the years after Reconstruction, has in fact delivered the nation into the arms of the corporate state.

So, listening to Michael Harrington that day in Memorial Auditorium now seems like one of those bright, clear moments when a ray of sunlight breaks through. Having toured the U.S. and made appearances on hundreds of college campuses, Harrington was accustomed to large audiences of enthusiastic sophomores and admiring professors. His message that day was a litany of prose devoted to coal miners, shop clerks, and textile workers struggling to make a living in the shadow of Vietnam and the Nixon economy. Though I disagreed strongly with Harrington’s assumptions, maybe it was true, I thought. The ongoing war on capitalism waged by the Radical Left was wrong because it simply was not liberal. But wasn’t it true, after all, that American farmers, workers, and the unemployed needed assistance of the sort beyond the moral preachments of work, discipline, and self-sacrifice?

Harrington’s Social Democratic orientation had been a major influence in Sixties politics. His book, The Other America became a best seller in the years between 1962 and 1968 and drew lengthy commentary from the New Yorker and other American magazines. Having grasped the crucial fact of American affluence in the 1950s, Harrington demonstrated that so-called “pockets of poverty” left out of American prosperity were actually symptomatic of a wider failure to consider the basic contradictions within the social outlook in the United States. Persistent poverty in the U.S. had in fact been left over since the Great Depression, the reality of life for millions who remained at issue. They were the small farmers, African Americans both rural and urban, workers struggling against automation that deprived them of jobs, migrants from rural Appalachia who went north to the ghettos of Chicago, St. Louis, or Detroit. They were the alienated intellectuals and alcoholic dropouts who rejected the simplistic catch-phrases of consumer society, wandering north into the urban ghettos made up of Hillbilly Honkies, Motown Soul Folk, or Jazz Beatniks who stood on the fringes of the American mainstream.

Harrington’s revelation of poverty in the U.S.A. arrived at a crucial moment. While Third World developing nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the wake of two World Wars sought to throw off the chains of Western colonialism, much of the world was still caught up in the Cold War struggle between contrasting U.S. and Soviet visions of social progress and democracy. Harrington showed that Social Democrats in the U.S. could arrive on message with answers for those critics who pointed to the abuses of the Soviet totalitarian state, where popular dissent had been brutally crushed under Stalin. But for unwashed minds from the small world South, like me, Harrington could also provide vintage currency to lend proof that U.S. democracy was real, providing the representatives of a post-Stalinist New Left with the right to participate in a public discourse where civility and tolerance still offered a chance to be heard.

Harrington had every right to expect all of this and more. The Other America had been read by John F. Kennedy, who conceived a federal program to alleviate poverty prior to his assassination. Harrington had participated in the early phases of discussion in Washington that led to the creation of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, with its proclaimed “war on poverty.” And Harrington voiced support of the program and became much involved in the enthusiastic promotion of the Democratic Party among Blacks, workers and other groups. Eventually, however, Harrington came to believe that the “war on poverty” required a much broader commitment. It would never fulfill its objective without the abolition of capitalism itself.

As I look back on that day while I sat listening, I ponder what might have been that spring in ‘75. It might have meant that I was a part of a new generation of Southern whites ready to look forward and honestly to confront the issues of our time. The mind of the South, ready to meet the challenges of a new day, should have opened to Michael Harrington and others like him who sought to develop the socially enlightened wing of the Democratic Party and make it into a force for social and economic reforms much needed throughout the nation.

That day I was truly impressed with Harrington’s speech and followed the crowd of students that streamed toward the exits. On the way outside, I noticed that Harrington stood in the foyer with a small gathering of students. I made my way in that direction, and as the crowd melted away, found myself face to face with the Citizen Socialist. Having not read any of his books, it was not one of those apple-polishing exchanges between an anxious fan and a pedantic martinet. I did not ask him to sign an autograph, but managed to shake hands with him, while one of those ponderous pack house questions rolled off my tongue, which ordinarily would have been enough to stymie a locomotive on a downhill run. Harrington seemed actually amused with this and answered brilliantly without a moment’s hesitation.

Maybe it was true that American workers were better off. And maybe it was also true that under Soviet Communism, workers experienced a loss of freedom. And about the question of the American standard of living being the highest in world—well that was a matter of some question. Were American workers really so well off? Look at the problem of housing for minorities? What about the unemployed? And why should Big Oil companies receive government support while textile workers who suffered from brown lung disease struggled to pay huge medical bills that took away all of their income and deprived their children of the support that they needed?

As I walked away from him that day, it was for me a time of pure suspension—like drifting on a cloud that is neither driven by forceful winds, nor pulled down by an appeasing gravity, nor struck by heavy rains. I should admit that I yet had much in common with those more vocal and jocular celebrants of Blue Heaven, who soak up the summer sunshine and use it mainly and ultimately for pure enjoyment. I applauded myself, first, that I was willing to engage with and listen to this messenger of social dissent. Wasn’t it proof that American freedom gave everyone a chance?

Yet somewhere in the dim recesses it began to occur to me that the other America to which Harrington referred, was nevertheless, my America. The one made up of farmers struggling to make payments for tractors desperately needed, of Black workers still mired in the throes of a Jim Crow economy, of mothers nursing infants or birthing, of fathers facing the exorbitant costs of sending children to preschool, to summer camp, or college. In just a few weeks, I would myself become a college graduate. And where, after all, was I headed with my university degree? Maybe the total abolition capitalism was not the answer. But didn’t the laboring and working people of America deserve to have an answer?

I walked out of Memorial Auditorium and in a few weeks, rolled out of Chapel Hill with my degree. The man who once described America as “a stuffed ballot box dominated by the rich” seemed almost to vanish from the scene. And North Carolina voters have on the whole since those days been far less willing to cast their ballots along with African American voters in favor of liberal candidates. Yes—we had been tolerant and thoughtful in 1975, but the fact remains that America needed something more from us. America needed our wholehearted and impassioned support for the kind of enlightened social democracy that Harrington stood for. Alas, more than a few years of study and experience would be required before I would be ready for that. For the reality of America was far bleaker, the threat to democracy in America far greater, the danger that was posed by the spirit of reaction and the closed mind to the very substance of freedom itself far more pervasive than I could have imagined on that day.

For me the road ahead beckoned for the journey only just begun. My political coming of age could only begin as I confronted the reality of America in the 1960s and the social revolution that had occurred in my native region. Yet even as this thought occurred to me it was an experience that for our generation slipped quietly into the past. And who would there be to recover it? For now I could not have dreamed that democracy in America could have been so totally debauched. So, it was only some years later in my historical research that I discovered the darker truths about the 1960s, the Vietnam War, and the domestic intelligence state created by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI, and the entire apparatus of the national security state.

Carolina Civic Voice

                             Summer 2006  Vol.  6, No 2