White Trash
Page 33
By the forties, then, hillbilly was a stage act, and a kind of catchall name for country folk. Politicians took up the role too, offering a milder version of the theatrics of Mississippi’s “White Chief” James Vardaman and Louisiana’s Huey Long. A sharecropper’s son named Jimmy Davis became Louisiana’s governor in 1944. Though he gamely called himself “just a po’ country boy,” Davis was peculiarly able to straddle class divisions. He was country crooner, a Hollywood actor (in westerns, of course), and a history professor. As one newspaper observed, the “hillbilly in Long’s Chair” was a new political breed. He didn’t yell, or give long harangues, or wave his arms, or make empty promises. He was, concisely put, a hillbilly with a touch of style. Of course, he was not beyond Hollywood theatrics either, riding a horse up the steps of the state capitol.66
As distinctive as he was, Jimmy Davis was not the only one of his kind. In 1944, Idaho matched Louisiana by electing the “Singing Cowboy” Glen Taylor to the U.S. Senate. Even earlier, Texas voters were charmed by the hillbilly ballads and good ol’ radio platitudes of Wilbert Lee “Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour merchant whom they first sent to the governor’s mansion, then to the U.S. Senate. It was Lyndon Johnson, in fact, whom the Ohio-reared O’Daniel defeated in the 1941 Senate race. Missouri boasted the only Republican in the bunch, a candidate named Dewey Short. He did not sing, but still earned the affectionate nickname “Hillbilly Demosthenes.” As a philosophy professor, ordained preacher, and congressman, he wore several hats. His style did not borrow from the ancient Greek oratorical tradition, but relied instead on caustic, alliterative adjectives. He creatively called Congress a “supine, subservient, soporific, supercilious, pusillanimous body of nitwits,” and maligned FDR’s vaunted Brain Trust as “professional nincompoops.” Short’s constituency, described in the press as the cornpone crowd, kept reelecting him because he spiced up his prose with a fine assortment of sassy flourishes.67
Why this fascination with the hillbilly? In 1949, an Australian observer described this phenomenon best. Americans had a taste for what he called a “democracy of manners,” which was not the same as real democracy. He meant that voters accepted huge disparities in wealth but at the same time expected their elected leaders to “cultivate the appearance of being no different from the rest of us.”68
The positive mythology about hillbillies suited such appeals to authenticity. Beyond the image of feuding and wasting time fishing, hillbillies also tapped into a set of golden age beliefs: they were isolated, primitive, and rough on the outside yet practiced a kind of genuine democracy. They were once again William Goodell Frost’s rustic Americans of pure Anglo-Saxon blood. The fantasy underwent a revival during the 1940s and 1950s, in the form of stories of plain, honest mountain people with “no respect for money, nor fame, or caste.” But the vaudeville antics never lost their appeal either. Some hillbilly bands became glamorous, and a female performer named Dorothy Shay launched her career in 1950 by playing the “Park Avenue Hillbilly.” She dressed as a city sophisticate while singing “happy-go-lucky” tunes.69
The quintessential pop icon of the 1950s, Elvis Presley, was, some believed, part hillbilly. One of his earliest performances was billed as “The Hillbilly Jamboree,” and took place at Pontchartrain Beach near New Orleans in 1955, where the “Miss Hillbilly Dumplin’ Contest” was also held. He also toured with Andy Griffith. In the early years, Elvis’s musical style was seen as a mixture between hillbilly singing and rhythm and blues. In 1956, the music reviewer for the Times-Picayune was relieved to discover that the “self-confessed country boy” singing about his blue suede shoes lacked an “exaggerated hillbilly dialect.” That same year, Hedda Hopper, the Hollywood gossip columnist, was just as relieved to find that Elvis had not been offered the film part of Li’l Abner.70
The real Elvis was not a hillbilly at all. He was a poor white boy from Tupelo, Mississippi. He was the son of a sharecropper. He was born into poverty in a shotgun shack situated in the wrong part of town. Yet when he put a guitar in his hand and millions ogled at his frenzied (some thought violent) dance moves, he was at once seen as defying middle-class norms and behaving as a sort of hillbilly—well suited to his new home of Tennessee. A friend of his confirmed the hillbilly image when he remarked to a reporter in 1956 that all Elvis had to do was “jes’ show hisself and the gals git to thrashin’ round and pantin’ like mountain mules.”71
And so it was in 1956 that country music, pop culture, and class politics all came together on the national stage. That year, Tennessee’s governor, Frank Clement, became the Democratic Party’s golden (country) boy. He was chosen to give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an honor that placed him in the running for the vice presidential nomination. In anticipation of Clement’s big speech, a writer for the Nation called the thirty-five-year-old, six-foot-tall, dark-haired governor “one of the handsomest men in American politics.” He was known for stumping in the Tennessee mountains, and folks admired him for his “barefoot boy sincerity”—a clear allusion to the “honest hillbilly” myth. Even his store-bought suits projected allegiance to the common man: the “type of rig a successful mountain man would wear on a visit to Nashville.”72
His countrified eloquence covered the full range of registers: his voice boomed, then sank to a whisper, or, as one reporter claimed, he “sang like a mountain fiddle and died away.” He used brimstone threats and usually ended with a prayerful benediction. Like Dewey Short, he lit up with alliteration. To top it all off, he had the support of the grandest hillbilly governor, “Big Jim” Folsom of Alabama, who stood six foot eight and was known for taking his shoes off onstage and campaigning with his “strawberry-pickers,” as the Folsom band was called. In 1954, at a large Democratic primary gathering, he told Clement to use all his powers on the rostrum, saying he should “go out there guttin’, cuttin’, and struttin.” “Kissing Jim,” fond of whiskey and women, gave his blessing to the flamboyant Clement.73
John Steinbeck, the famed author of The Grapes of Wrath, wrote one of the most revealing appraisals of Clement’s keynote address. He adjudged that the governor had a future, whether it was in “statesmanship or musical comedy”; he saw the Democrat as part “old country boy” and part Elvis, with a dash of Billy Graham and Liberace as well. As Steinbeck put it, Clement’s voice had the “frayed piercing painfulness of a square dance fiddle,” and “in his most impassioned and rehearsed moments, . . . a refined bump and grind.” While the author thought Clement would shake up the party in a good way, at the same time he was suggesting that the “corn-shucker” style was a regional taste that might not be so easily cultivated elsewhere.74
Steinbeck identified the crux of the southern politician problem: was the governor merely a rabble-rousing entertainer, or could he truly speak for the whole nation? Reflecting on his bright moment from the perspective of 1964, Clement said he knew that people were cheering his speech, but he was just as sure that some in the audience were laughing at him. That year, the Texan Horace Busby, a special assistant to President Johnson, told Bill Moyers that LBJ, with his southern drawl, should in effect be the anti-Clement when he delivered his nomination acceptance speech. “Forensics should be modern, untinged with an old fashioned style,” Busby said. “Alliteration should be minimized.”75
The Tennessee governor with the Elvis-like movements did not win the vice presidential nomination in 1956. Second place on the ticket went instead to Senator Estes Kefauver, another Tennessean, but one who expressed a somewhat softer hillbilly persona—after all, he had earned a Yale degree. Back in 1948, Kefauver had worn a coonskin cap when he ran for office, after his opponent called him a sneaky “pet coon” who was flirting with communism. In 1956, Kefauver was meant to add to the presidential ticket what one reporter aptly referred to as the “calculated common touch”—the point being that there was nothing authentic about Kefauver’s pose. He was a “spurious hillbilly,” a cheap ploy to offse
t presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s lack of popular appeal. The Illinoisan was called an “egghead,” a bore. Stevenson and Kefauver lost, of course.76
Meanwhile, Clement hosted Elvis at the governor’s mansion, and in 1958 did the performer a good turn by speaking before a Senate Communications committee in defense of hillbilly music and rock and roll. Vance Packard, author of the bestselling Hidden Persuaders, was testifying before the committee, insisting that mountain music was polluting the national taste. An outraged Clement defended hillbillies as pure Elizabethans and their “nasal harmonies” as a genuine expression of the American dream. A tart Chicago reporter comically expressed his surprise that the governor “did not volunteer to fight a duel with accordions at ten paces.”77
Kefauver of Tennessee was a traditional liberal, Folsom of Alabama a populist, and Clement of Tennessee a moderate on race issues; yet they all had to play the showman to get ahead in political life. Clement had set his sights on higher national office, only to be shut down on the night of his keynote address. It was Lyndon Baines Johnson, the seasoned Texan, who—alone among the rural southern contingent that threw their hats into the vice presidential ring during the 1950s and 1960s—eventually captured the presidency on his own accord.
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As mastermind and deal maker in the Senate, Majority Leader Johnson was considered the second most powerful man in the nation after the president. He was an admirer of Henry Clay of Kentucky, the “great compromiser.” (As president, he would hang Clay’s portrait in the Oval Office.) Cultivating an at times paternalistic role among Senate Democrats, Johnson kept close watch on his colleagues’ tastes and interests. “A man who can’t smell the mood of the Senate,” he professed, “has no business being leader.” He seemed a cross between a schoolteacher (which he had been) and a sheriff, a tougher, more fearsome version of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry character. What he had in common with the television sheriff was the rustic art of personal persuasion. His repertoire involved storytelling, verbal cudgeling, and physical contact, and he profited from an intimate knowledge of the psychology and personal quirks of every senator with whom he did business. The Senate was that “small town” over which Lyndon Johnson held sway as its modern-day lawman.78
When he accepted the largely thankless position of vice president in 1960, Johnson became Kennedy’s dutiful lieutenant. Only his unexpected elevation to the presidency on November 22, 1963, altered the public’s reception to his earthy southern persona. For a time, he acquired the kind of sympathy he had never enjoyed previously among the liberal intellectuals of his party. He was neither cool nor sophisticated like JFK, whose outward style reflected the jaunty confidence of his privileged upbringing. While some in the press continued to disparage his down-home ways, his close associates countered by insisting that he was “not some cornball rural hick.” Nevertheless, like the southern politician of the hillbilly school, LBJ loved to be flamboyant. On the campaign trail, he used his Texas vernacular to forge an intimate bond with the crowds. One columnist praised him for “digging down deeply into the basic urges of ordinary people.” Country-boy traits treated as liabilities before 1963 suddenly became an asset as the nation grieved the loss of its young president.79
In 1963, LBJ’s tour in Kentucky included photographs of the president conversing with poor Appalachian families.
#215-23-64, Inez Kentucky, LBJ Library Photograph by Cecil Stoughton, Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
Johnson’s signature set of programs known as the Great Society attached to a different, and positive, variant of his southern identity. Upon passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the president flew to Stonewall, Texas, to sign the bill at the one-room schoolhouse where he had taught during the Great Depression. While there, he referred to himself the “son of a sharecropper.” His willingness to tackle poverty could be traced to his embrace of a modern South. In 1960, when he first ran for president, he echoed Howard Odum’s creed: his goal was to prevent a “waste of resources, waste of lives, or waste of opportunity.” By the time he launched the Great Society, the legislation he promoted focused on two distinct classes: the poor urban black population and the mountain folk of Appalachia. Seeing the Great Society as the new New Deal, Johnson connected his reform to the work of Eleanor Roosevelt, invoking her sentimental appeal to hillbillies. Lady Bird Johnson went to the Kentucky hills, where she distributed lunches and dedicated a new school gym; her husband sat himself down and talked with families.80
As they followed him on his five-state tour, cameramen captured images of the president on the porches of run-down shacks, affectionately listening to the mountain people—it was nothing if not a James Agee/Walker Evans flashback to the thirties. The problems facing Appalachia were acute: a high rate of joblessness compared to the rest of the country (in some places three or four times the national average); deteriorating housing; an uneducated workforce; and a ravaged environment wrought by strip mining. Mountain farm families had been stripped of the legal right to their property when coal-mining companies, aided by state courts, were given the prerogative to ruin fields, destroy forests, build roads wherever they chose, and pollute the water supply. In the end, the Johnson administration secured passage of the Appalachian Regional Development Act, providing infrastructure, schools, and hospitals. The president subsequently stated that seeing the poverty there firsthand had convinced him of the necessity of the Medicare Act. And so fighting rural poverty remained a central plank in Johnson’s overall “War on Poverty.” But even these bold policies proved inadequate to manage the massive devastation that the blighted regional economy had already experienced.81
Lyndon Johnson was aware of every detail as he went about fashioning his public image. The hat he wore was not a ten-gallon cowboy, but a modified five-gallon version with a narrower brim. This was LBJ: a modified, modernized southerner. When he sought aid for Appalachia, he imagined himself as a kindly benefactor, making the “cold indifferent” government newly responsive to the “little fella.” He offered homespun logic in defense of basic human decency: “No American family should settle for anything less than three warm meals a day, a warm house, a good education for their children . . . and sometimes simply to plain enjoy life.” This was the Johnsonian translation of FDR’s 1944 exhortation on behalf of a second Bill of Rights that included “the right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation,” “the right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation,” “the right of every family to a decent home,” and “the right to a good education.”82
In private, though, Johnson was not always kind to poor rural whites. He had this to say about white trash on driving through Tennessee and seeing a group of “homely” women holding up racist signs: “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Like the Nobel Prize–winning writer William Faulkner, LBJ knew about the debilitating nature of false poor white pride. As president, he never lost sight of how central class and race were to the fractured culture of the South.83
Johnson’s promises did not convince his critics on either the left or the right. Malcolm X called him the “head of the Cracker Party.” In 1964, Barry Goldwater’s campaign staff put together a fear-filled movie that showcased disturbing scenes of urban violence, pornography, topless girls, and striptease joints. Johnson’s name was never mentioned, but in the middle of the thirty-minute harangue on “American Decay,” a Lincoln Continental comes speeding across the dusty countryside as beer cans are jettisoned from the half-open window. It was a less-than-subtle caricature of LBJ on an aimless escapade along the perimeter of his Texas ranch, thereby reducing the tall Texan to a common redneck. (Jimmy Carter’s ne’er-do-well brother Bill
y would later say that a redneck threw his beer cans out the window, while a good ol’ boy did not.) Goldwater’s campaign revived the eugenic theme of moral degeneracy, as it turned the sitting president into a symbol of white trash. LBJ’s Lincoln said something. The larger-than-life president plainly indulged a defiant impulse when he drove around his ranch at high speeds while consuming beer from a paper cup. For one Time photographer, he posed behind the wheel and held up a squealing piglet for view. Taunting reporters was an exhibition of his country humor.84
The car one was seen in registered class in a very special way in the fifties and sixties and defined transgression as well as belonging. Elvis owned several Cadillacs, a Lincoln, and a Rolls-Royce. But when driven by the wrong class of people, the luxury car only exaggerated the underlying discomfort Americans felt about upward mobility. Nothing better captured this anxiety than the specially built padded seat in Elvis’s favorite Cadillac that was reserved for his pet chimpanzee Scatter. The owners of beautiful vehicles were supposed to display breeding that matched the glossy magazine advertisements readers flipped through. A lower-class man did not look right exploiting the fantasy of freedom by leaving the restraints of an imposed class identity in the rearview mirror. That was Elvis and his chimp. That was LBJ too, at least for those stodgy critics who insisted on seeing him as a Texas country bumpkin and not a Washingtonian.85