Buried under the rapidly deteriorating soil and choked economically from the outside and inside since it lost the Civil War, somehow the South is rising. We have been robbed by cotton speculators, utilities, big-town and small-town money lenders. We have sent our "upper" classes off to Northern colleges and our poorer ones off to be burned up by machines in Eastern industrial cities, and we have thus been drained of our best energies. We have taken punishment long enough and we are sick of it.
There are signs of revolt. As yet it is only a vague rumbling restlessness, but it is growing and cannot be ignored. In this revolt look back to that figure that rose up in the eroded hills of Louisiana—Huey Long. In his bones and his blood was deep hatred born of the oppression, undernourishment, sorrow, misery, ignorance, and desperation of his people. Raging in his soul, he clattered on the scene and slashed and cut and cursed the gods of oil and sulphur—his first hates—and then all the other gods right across the national scene. He was like a violent Gargantua shouting his Rabelaisian song as he went. God rest his troubled soul in peace. There was much in him that was vicious but what he stirred up cannot be downed.
Drawn by this ferment but not part of it, except to get the little lickin's around the kettle of graft, have come lesser ones like Talmadge. Talmadge—little, mean, cheap, and common—with not a millionth of the brains and none of the endearing qualities of Huey—inheriting only what was dangerous in him. Others as well have rattlesnaked up and have for the time fooled and are fooling Southern people, who have been slugged so long that they are easy to deceive.
Against what are the Southerners rising? They are beginning to rise out of their slavish submission to an economy which has given them the sweet imaginary odor of the magnolia blossom—and also poverty, hunger, hopelessness. They are rising against the economic consequences of Appomattox; against what Charles W. Pipkin calls "selfish interest that have been able to screen themselves behind . . . Southern ideals, . . . traditions which they meant to exploit and degrade." They have had enough of that inferiority complex which takes the form of a reminiscent self-satisfaction born of the war gloriously lost. They are rising finally against political separatism which brings inequality and a system of business enterprise which has drained the South of its natural and human resources for three-quarters of a century.
An indication that the South is beginning to prepare for action is the recent formation in Washington of the Southern Policy Committee. Numbering among its members many Southern Congressmen and officials in the various administrative departments of the government, the committee represents a valid Southern movement of a genuinely progressive nature. The nation will be hearing from it before very long.
What are the facts and forces behind the present restlessness of the South? First of all King Cotton is dead, and the South knows he will never rise again. Cotton was king after the Civil War, but at no time was he a gentle-mannered George V. He was a blooming Hitler who ordered the Southerners to grow cotton and sell it for cash—or be purged by starvation. The results of cotton tyranny are inscribed on the death scroll of soil erosion. Mississippi has 63.7 per cent of its farm lands injured by sheet erosion and 47.1 per cent by gullying; Tennessee, where over half the land has been tendered valueless for farming, has the same proportion of sheet erosion and 80.7 per cent of gullying; Big-Mouthed Eugene's Georgia, 50 per cent washed out, is going fast. Sixty-one per cent of the nation's eroded land lies in the South. Five million more acres of fertile bottom land have been lost to cultivation through stream choking and floods, and twenty million tons a year of potash, nitrogen, and phosphates race to the ocean from the stark fields of the old cotton empire.
This relentless drainage creates a vicious circle in which the South is forced to grow cotton for sale in order to buy fertilizer (5,500,000 tons of it a year, compared with 2,500,000 tons for all the rest of the nation) with which to grow cotton for sale. Sacrificing all to cotton, the South has neglected its other agricultural opportunities and has been compelled to buy produce it could grow more economically itself. Christmas trees from the West Coast are sold in the Carolinas, land of evergreens; spinach and carrots from distant California are sold in the Southeast; Southern farmers buy winter rutabagas from Canada and cabbage from everywhere; hay, corn, and feed are sold by the West to the Southeast, and those that can afford it live to a large extent on canned goods bought from nearly anywhere but from the South. For the South to import these things, a group of Southern economists have recently stated, "results in everyday scarcity of what could abound without limits." Furthermore the goods the South buys must jump the prices jacked up by a high tariff wall; but the goods it sells must grovel and beg miserably under the protectionist spite-fence and compete against the whole wide world. This would be enough to explain the unenviable records of the South in American agriculture: the lowest per capita farm income, the lowest income per farm worker; the lowest return per horse-power unit; the lowest ratio of income from livestock; the lowest per capita amount of pure-bred livestock; the lowest production of milk and butter.
Worse still is the human drain on the South. Since the turn of the century it has had a net loss of three and a half million people. In the single decade of 1920-30, 380,000 Negroes emigrated to Northern cities. The charts of population movements prepared by the government show the people fleeing from the South as from the invasion of a foreign army, black and white alike, flooding north, west, and even down into Florida, from the devastated provinces of our dead king. Of those who are left behind, may live in areas where from half to nine-tenths of the children receive diets inadequate by any human standard, resulting in disease, feeble-mindedness, and social degeneration. A particularly bitter aspect of the emigration is that it empties the South of its best leaders and turns them into betrayers of their homeland. Education in the South may lag behind the national average but it has its high spots equal to any in the country. The University of North Carolina is outstanding as an intellectual center, Texas has perhaps the finest university library in America, while Rice, Duke, and others offer the same advantages to students as any of the old pre-revolutionary Eastern universities. Yet traditionally substantial numbers of the most intelligent—educated on the last resources of proud families—go North, there engaging in the exploitation of the land of their birth. By the contracts they learned to write in Eastern colleges, by ownership documents, mortgages, bonds, stocks, utilities, and rail franchises, they syphon out our salt, oil, sulphur, cattle, cotton, and natural resources, along with the brain and brawn that must inevitably follow.
This exodus has helped nobody. By draining off the population it has inflicted heavy loss on the South, and by flooding other parts of the country with millions of unorganized, uneducated, untrained day laborers it has lowered purchasing power and wage scales in those regions, thus causing economic loss to the nation as a whole.
It is easy for critics whose ignorance and prejudice are different only in kind from ours to say categorically just what is wrong with the South. The story, however, is deeper than they know. Some, with Abolitionist psychology, blame the planters. But planters and tenants are caught in the same trap. Landlordism is the curse of the South, but it is a stupid landlordism that denies profitable production and purchasing power to its serfs. It is the hateful landlordism of the anonymous—the banks, the insurance companies, the distant investors, the credit lines, the bankruptcy receiverships, all the dreary apparatus of financial exploitation by remote control. All this time most Southerners have thought, if they have taken time to think at all, that it was exploitation by the Northerners of which they were the victims. The same crowd of exploiters are doing in the North and West just what they are doing in the South. Exploitation knows no geographical divisions.
So the South has decided to muscle in at the national table. Southerners have come to realize that helped by their climate they can, by conservation and coordination, change their record of the lowest per capita farm income to the highest.
Who but a couple of damned Yankees should be the ones to have led the South to this realization? Senator George W. Norris and President Roosevelt, by setting up the TVA, have given the South the first real hope of revival it has known since the Civil War. They marched in, pitched camp and set to work, but unlike General Sherman, they came with an army of construction. Covering 40,000 square miles, enriching the lives of over two million people, TVA has become the great central dynamo for seven states. TVA has brought light, heat, and power to the destitute South. Its enemies, the utilities, backed by their Eastern friends and by Southern gentlemen who have stolen carpet-bags, still fight it bitterly. They profess to see in TVA a deliberate slap in their faces from the hand of Roosevelt. They picture the President sitting off in Washington, like a Count of Monte Cristo, throwing gold into pet schemes like TVA merely to gratify a personal hate for the private power groups. But they have not seen the truth, for TVA is a great deal more than just a negative gesture of spite. It is a break for, and in, the South and it is also the most successful enterprise of the New Deal. The great majority of the Southern people realize that Roosevelt is the only President who has given the South full support, full encouragement, full recognition since the Civil War. The allegiance and strict obedience of Southern Senators and Representatives is sincere and almost fanatical. Roosevelt, heart, liver, and lights, is our man.
Together he and Norris have set 16,000 men to work. They are unlocking the magic of electricity and farm technology in an area which was one of the most backward in the entire nation, releasing the energies of modern science with a dash and morale akin to that of war. A little army but a victorious one—victorious over local prejudice, victorious over utilities, partially victorious even over the Supreme Court.
What this peace army means for the South not even those who know the South can say. It means breaking with a past which took mournful pride in having been overpowered, not licked, by the Yankees, and which despised the only means by which the defeated Confederacy could convert defeat into victory. Yes, there is another Southern rebellion. But there is no nonsense or equivocation about the facts. There are no bugles, no faint smells of imaginary magnolias, no inferiority complexes. It is a rebellion in which Northerners—damned Yankees—lend assistance to the grandsons of the ragged troopers who starved and fought and died with Jackson and Lee. Both have found that they have a common enemy—and that enemy is to be seen not in terms of sectional cleavage but in terms of economic power.
Maury Maverick, The Nation, June 17, 1936
There are signs of revolt. As yet it is only a vague rumbling restlessness, but it is growing and cannot be ignored. In this revolt look back to that figure that rose up in the eroded hills of Louisiana—Huey Long. In his bones and his blood was deep hatred born of the oppression, undernourishment, sorrow, misery, ignorance, and desperation of his people. Raging in his soul, he clattered on the scene and slashed and cut and cursed the gods of oil and sulphur—his first hates—and then all the other gods right across the national scene. He was like a violent Gargantua shouting his Rabelaisian song as he went. God rest his troubled soul in peace. There was much in him that was vicious but what he stirred up cannot be downed.
Drawn by this ferment but not part of it, except to get the little lickin's around the kettle of graft, have come lesser ones like Talmadge. Talmadge—little, mean, cheap, and common—with not a millionth of the brains and none of the endearing qualities of Huey—inheriting only what was dangerous in him. Others as well have rattlesnaked up and have for the time fooled and are fooling Southern people, who have been slugged so long that they are easy to deceive.
Against what are the Southerners rising? They are beginning to rise out of their slavish submission to an economy which has given them the sweet imaginary odor of the magnolia blossom—and also poverty, hunger, hopelessness. They are rising against the economic consequences of Appomattox; against what Charles W. Pipkin calls "selfish interest that have been able to screen themselves behind . . . Southern ideals, . . . traditions which they meant to exploit and degrade." They have had enough of that inferiority complex which takes the form of a reminiscent self-satisfaction born of the war gloriously lost. They are rising finally against political separatism which brings inequality and a system of business enterprise which has drained the South of its natural and human resources for three-quarters of a century.
An indication that the South is beginning to prepare for action is the recent formation in Washington of the Southern Policy Committee. Numbering among its members many Southern Congressmen and officials in the various administrative departments of the government, the committee represents a valid Southern movement of a genuinely progressive nature. The nation will be hearing from it before very long.
What are the facts and forces behind the present restlessness of the South? First of all King Cotton is dead, and the South knows he will never rise again. Cotton was king after the Civil War, but at no time was he a gentle-mannered George V. He was a blooming Hitler who ordered the Southerners to grow cotton and sell it for cash—or be purged by starvation. The results of cotton tyranny are inscribed on the death scroll of soil erosion. Mississippi has 63.7 per cent of its farm lands injured by sheet erosion and 47.1 per cent by gullying; Tennessee, where over half the land has been tendered valueless for farming, has the same proportion of sheet erosion and 80.7 per cent of gullying; Big-Mouthed Eugene's Georgia, 50 per cent washed out, is going fast. Sixty-one per cent of the nation's eroded land lies in the South. Five million more acres of fertile bottom land have been lost to cultivation through stream choking and floods, and twenty million tons a year of potash, nitrogen, and phosphates race to the ocean from the stark fields of the old cotton empire.
This relentless drainage creates a vicious circle in which the South is forced to grow cotton for sale in order to buy fertilizer (5,500,000 tons of it a year, compared with 2,500,000 tons for all the rest of the nation) with which to grow cotton for sale. Sacrificing all to cotton, the South has neglected its other agricultural opportunities and has been compelled to buy produce it could grow more economically itself. Christmas trees from the West Coast are sold in the Carolinas, land of evergreens; spinach and carrots from distant California are sold in the Southeast; Southern farmers buy winter rutabagas from Canada and cabbage from everywhere; hay, corn, and feed are sold by the West to the Southeast, and those that can afford it live to a large extent on canned goods bought from nearly anywhere but from the South. For the South to import these things, a group of Southern economists have recently stated, "results in everyday scarcity of what could abound without limits." Furthermore the goods the South buys must jump the prices jacked up by a high tariff wall; but the goods it sells must grovel and beg miserably under the protectionist spite-fence and compete against the whole wide world. This would be enough to explain the unenviable records of the South in American agriculture: the lowest per capita farm income, the lowest income per farm worker; the lowest return per horse-power unit; the lowest ratio of income from livestock; the lowest per capita amount of pure-bred livestock; the lowest production of milk and butter.
Worse still is the human drain on the South. Since the turn of the century it has had a net loss of three and a half million people. In the single decade of 1920-30, 380,000 Negroes emigrated to Northern cities. The charts of population movements prepared by the government show the people fleeing from the South as from the invasion of a foreign army, black and white alike, flooding north, west, and even down into Florida, from the devastated provinces of our dead king. Of those who are left behind, may live in areas where from half to nine-tenths of the children receive diets inadequate by any human standard, resulting in disease, feeble-mindedness, and social degeneration. A particularly bitter aspect of the emigration is that it empties the South of its best leaders and turns them into betrayers of their homeland. Education in the South may lag behind the national average but it has its high spots equal to any in the country. The University of North Carolina is outstanding as an intellectual center, Texas has perhaps the finest university library in America, while Rice, Duke, and others offer the same advantages to students as any of the old pre-revolutionary Eastern universities. Yet traditionally substantial numbers of the most intelligent—educated on the last resources of proud families—go North, there engaging in the exploitation of the land of their birth. By the contracts they learned to write in Eastern colleges, by ownership documents, mortgages, bonds, stocks, utilities, and rail franchises, they syphon out our salt, oil, sulphur, cattle, cotton, and natural resources, along with the brain and brawn that must inevitably follow.
This exodus has helped nobody. By draining off the population it has inflicted heavy loss on the South, and by flooding other parts of the country with millions of unorganized, uneducated, untrained day laborers it has lowered purchasing power and wage scales in those regions, thus causing economic loss to the nation as a whole.
It is easy for critics whose ignorance and prejudice are different only in kind from ours to say categorically just what is wrong with the South. The story, however, is deeper than they know. Some, with Abolitionist psychology, blame the planters. But planters and tenants are caught in the same trap. Landlordism is the curse of the South, but it is a stupid landlordism that denies profitable production and purchasing power to its serfs. It is the hateful landlordism of the anonymous—the banks, the insurance companies, the distant investors, the credit lines, the bankruptcy receiverships, all the dreary apparatus of financial exploitation by remote control. All this time most Southerners have thought, if they have taken time to think at all, that it was exploitation by the Northerners of which they were the victims. The same crowd of exploiters are doing in the North and West just what they are doing in the South. Exploitation knows no geographical divisions.
So the South has decided to muscle in at the national table. Southerners have come to realize that helped by their climate they can, by conservation and coordination, change their record of the lowest per capita farm income to the highest.
Who but a couple of damned Yankees should be the ones to have led the South to this realization? Senator George W. Norris and President Roosevelt, by setting up the TVA, have given the South the first real hope of revival it has known since the Civil War. They marched in, pitched camp and set to work, but unlike General Sherman, they came with an army of construction. Covering 40,000 square miles, enriching the lives of over two million people, TVA has become the great central dynamo for seven states. TVA has brought light, heat, and power to the destitute South. Its enemies, the utilities, backed by their Eastern friends and by Southern gentlemen who have stolen carpet-bags, still fight it bitterly. They profess to see in TVA a deliberate slap in their faces from the hand of Roosevelt. They picture the President sitting off in Washington, like a Count of Monte Cristo, throwing gold into pet schemes like TVA merely to gratify a personal hate for the private power groups. But they have not seen the truth, for TVA is a great deal more than just a negative gesture of spite. It is a break for, and in, the South and it is also the most successful enterprise of the New Deal. The great majority of the Southern people realize that Roosevelt is the only President who has given the South full support, full encouragement, full recognition since the Civil War. The allegiance and strict obedience of Southern Senators and Representatives is sincere and almost fanatical. Roosevelt, heart, liver, and lights, is our man.
Together he and Norris have set 16,000 men to work. They are unlocking the magic of electricity and farm technology in an area which was one of the most backward in the entire nation, releasing the energies of modern science with a dash and morale akin to that of war. A little army but a victorious one—victorious over local prejudice, victorious over utilities, partially victorious even over the Supreme Court.
What this peace army means for the South not even those who know the South can say. It means breaking with a past which took mournful pride in having been overpowered, not licked, by the Yankees, and which despised the only means by which the defeated Confederacy could convert defeat into victory. Yes, there is another Southern rebellion. But there is no nonsense or equivocation about the facts. There are no bugles, no faint smells of imaginary magnolias, no inferiority complexes. It is a rebellion in which Northerners—damned Yankees—lend assistance to the grandsons of the ragged troopers who starved and fought and died with Jackson and Lee. Both have found that they have a common enemy—and that enemy is to be seen not in terms of sectional cleavage but in terms of economic power.
Maury Maverick, The Nation, June 17, 1936
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