Born Fighting

by James Webb

  This phenomenal success was not predictable eighty years ago. And when it did come, it would contrast, as always, with the serious side of the Scots-Irish culture, the straitlaced fire and brimstone of its religious leadership that over the generations gave birth to America’s deeply conservative Bible Belt.

  In the post-Reconstruction years, as the South became more isolated and even less educated, many of its religious leaders took Calvinist doctrine into the realm of an extreme, literal fundamentalism. Parishioners were taught, and warned, that every word of the Bible, despite its centuries of varying linguistic interpretations and its frequent internal contradictions, was “the Gospel truth.” The theological rigidity of many Protestant fundamentalists sometimes dovetailed with the equally strong intolerance of the Democratic Party’s political hegemony, reinforcing the regional taboo against dissent of any kind and galvanizing mistrust against outsiders. This combination of forces, which still exists in muted form in many areas of the South, came to a spectacular and rather embarrassing head in July 1925 at the Rhea County courthouse in the eastern Tennessee mountain town of Dayton. For it was in this remote county halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga, from which my grandmother Mary Smith’s family had migrated to Missouri a generation or two before, that the Scopes “Monkey” trial—also known as the Trial of the Century—was held.

  Biblical fundamentalism had been threatened and frequently ridiculed since the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which argued that mankind had grown from lifeless matter over millions of years, cell by cell, animal by animal, through a natural biological evolution. Such theories were anathema to fundamentalist “creationists” who believed that humans had been directly designed by the hand of God within the past ten thousand years. This confrontation between religious and scientific theories is still unsettled even today, as creationists rationally argue that the living world could not have been fashioned without an “intelligent designer,” and that the theory of evolution as presented by the Darwinists still rests on scientific speculation that has yet to be proven.22

  However, the political debate over the impact of Darwinian theory went well beyond religious views, again pitting the touchstones of Southern culture against what many viewed to be an assault from the outside. As the debate over Darwinism intensified, it became to many “a drama in which science could be pitted against religion, city against rural, and North against South.”23 In short, as Duke University professor Grant Wacker observes, “Evolutionary teaching undermined the authority of the Bible in general. . . . Fundamentalists took note, for example, of the social location where Darwinism arose: among agnostic intellectuals in Britain. . . . Fundamentalists also noticed that evolutionary assumptions flourished among upper-class academic elites, especially in the urban Northeast and Midwest. . . . One thing remained clear for such conservatives: the battle for the schools would serve as a battle for the historically Christian character of American civilization itself. . . . Between 1923 and 1925 four Southern states (Oklahoma, Florida, North Carolina and Texas) tried, with mixed success, to stop the teaching of evolution in the public schools. In the spring of 1925 Tennessee joined the fray by passing the Butler Act . . . [which] made it illegal to ‘teach any theory that denies the Story of Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.”24

  And so here it was yet again, the core leaders of the Scots-Irish culture attempting to face down theories tossed at them by English intellectuals and New England elites. But this time they had stumbled into ridicule. After twenty-four-year-old science teacher John Scopes was arrested for violating the Butler Act by rather reluctantly agreeing to teach such a class, the American Civil Liberties Union descended on tiny Dayton, followed by more than a hundred newspapermen from around the world. The trial was on, and despite its remote location, its dimensions were huge: modernity against antiquity, science versus superstition, sophistication against backwoods crudity. Famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow represented the increasingly uneasy Scopes. The government’s case was argued by the aging William Jennings Bryan, a Midwestern Baptist and three-time Democratic nominee for president who died of a heart attack only five days after the trial’s completion. The trial would be further memorialized by the 1960 film Inherit the Wind. Darrow lost the case, although the Tennessee Supreme Court threw out Scopes’s conviction two years later on a legal technicality. But the damage done to Bryan as well as the clownish image of the people of rural Tennessee that resulted from the intense press coverage far transcended the issues of the trial itself.

  Most famous among the observers was the irascible and brilliant essayist H. L. Mencken, whose caustic coverage for the Baltimore Sun caused an uproar in the South. Mencken began his reporting from Dayton with a typically acidic observation “that the Tennessee anti-evolution law, whatever its wisdom, was at least constitutional—that the yahoos of the State had a clear right to have their progeny taught whatever they chose, and kept secure from whatever knowledge violated their superstitions.”25 But rather than covering the issues of the trial itself, Mencken found himself fascinated instead by the culture that had spawned the law. The Baltimorean who loved to deride the typical American as a “Boobus Americanus” had discovered a whole new crop of people to laugh at. And he also found powerful symbolism in the curious motivations of the aging Bryan’s decision to defend this narrow application of the fundamentalist cause at such a late point in his life.

  As the trial began, Mencken fired a shot right into the bull’s-eye that marked the eternal contradiction of the Scots-Irish culture. “Exactly twelve minutes after I reached the village I was taken in tow by a Christian man and introduced to the favorite tipple of the Cumberland Range: half corn liquor and half Coca-Cola. It seemed a dreadful dose to me, but I found that the Dayton illuminati got it down with gusto, rubbing their tummies and rolling their eyes. . . . They were all hot for [the Old Testament Book of] Genesis, but their faces were far too florid to belong to teetotalers, and when a pretty girl came tripping down the main street, which was often, they reached for the places where their neckties should have been with all the amorous enterprise of movie actors.”26 After filing this dispatch to the Baltimore Sun, replete with a tongue-in-cheek description of a spooky, nighttime revival meeting in the nearby mountains, Mencken narrowly escaped being run out of town on a rail.

  Mencken’s comments on William Jennings Bryan were similarly wicked but at the same time filled with an implicit pity. During the trial, Bryan had even taken the witness stand as an expert on the Bible, where he was thoroughly humiliated by the more intellectually adept Clarence Darrow, at one point being manipulated into arguing against the notion that man was a mammal. “I am glad I heard it,” wrote Mencken, “for otherwise I’d never believe it. There stood the man who had been thrice a candidate for the Presidency of the Republic—there he stood in the glare of the world, uttering stuff that a boy of eight would laugh at. . . . Upon that hook, in truth, Bryan committed suicide, as a legend as well as in the body.”27

  Mencken’s final conclusion about Bryan could have served as an observation of the entire political structure that had attempted to decree by law that such a simple and easily debatable theory as Darwinism should be kept from the minds of an entire generation of students while at the same time mandating that the Bible should be taught as science. Although writing about Bryan, Mencken could also have been commenting on the leadership of the South some sixty years after Appomattox. “What moved him, at bottom, was simply hatred of the city men who had laughed at him so long, and brought him at last to so tatterdemalion an estate. He lusted for revenge upon them. He yearned to lead the anthropoid rabble against them, to punish them for their execution upon him by attacking the very vitals of their civilization. He went far beyond the bounds of any merely religious frenzy, however inordinate.”28

  Bryan had his downfall (and his physical demise). The people of Tennessee, a
nd by implication the rest of the South as well, had their ridicule. And much of America grew accustomed to a stylized version of this stubbornly proud but increasingly poverty-stricken people. The barefoot, turnip-devouring creatures of Erskine Caldwell’s popular novels such as Tobacco Road were only one click away from true reality, but that click moved them in many minds from sympathy to ridicule. The hooded, cross-burning rallies of the Ku Klux Klan, many of whose members were motivated not by illusions of white supremacy so much as by bitterness at being dominated, came to symbolize the mores of an entire region. The gaunt and poverty-stricken emigrants from the South to other regions symbolized to many not the hardships that the people had faced, but an inbred “white trash” cultural inadequacy. Too many Americans could not look past the laughable caricatures to comprehend the brutal and often hopeless state in which the average Southerner, both white and black, existed. And in many parts of America, particularly among the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood, they still do not today.

  3

  Poor but Proud—

  and Stubborn as Hell

  AS THE NATION spiraled into the Great Depression following the stock market crash of October 1929, the South did not regress as far as other regions for the perverse reason that it had already been in economic crisis for more than two generations. This did not mean that the region was freer from trouble than the rest of the country; in fact, the reverse was true. The years since 1865 had brought such deep and enduring fault lines that the entire South had become the North American equivalent of a banana republic, replete with colonialism from the outside and abuse by a thin patrician class from within. This disparity became ever clearer during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency, and as the innovative Democrat reached the midpoint of his second term, he asked the National Emergency Council to report to him on the economic conditions of the South. In his letter of transmission, Roosevelt stated his conviction that “the South presents right now the Nation’s No. 1 economic problem—the Nation’s problem, not merely the South’s,” and wrote bluntly of “the long and ironic history of the despoiling of this truly American section of the country’s population.”29

  On July 25, 1938, the National Emergency Council reported its findings to the president. The document issued by the council is one of the most telling—and damning—pieces of evidence ever assembled in illustrating the impact of the long decades of rapacious abuse of the region following the Civil War. Chapter by chapter, issue by issue, the report to the president unmasked the long-term damage caused by the policies of exploitation and retribution that had begun during Reconstruction coupled with the failure of the South’s old aristocracy to adapt to modern ways. But the heaviest blame clearly lay with the outside forces that had bought up and effectively colonized the region during the turbulent years after the war.

  The report’s factual conclusions, while stunning, were no surprise to any thinking Southerner and in some measure validated much of the resentment expressed toward the Yankee and his minions. On the evidence, the South had clearly become an owned place. As the report mentioned, “The public utilities in the South are almost completely controlled by outside interests. All the major railroad systems are owned and controlled elsewhere. Most of the great electric holding company systems . . . are directed, managed and owned by outside interests. Likewise, the transmission and distribution of natural gas, one of the South’s great assets, is almost completely in the hands of remote financial institutions. The richest deposits of the iron ore, coal, and limestone . . . are owned or controlled outside the region. . . . Most of the rich deposits of bauxite, from which aluminum is made, are owned or controlled outside the region. Practically all important deposits of zinc ore in the South are owned elsewhere. . . . Over 99 percent of the sulphur produced in the United States comes from Texas and Louisiana. Two extraction companies control the entire output. Both are owned and controlled outside the South.”

  And there was more. “For mining its mineral wealth and shipping it away . . . the South frequently receives nothing but the low wages of unskilled and semiskilled labor. . . . On the one hand, it is possible for a monopolistic corporation in another region of the country to purchase and leave unused resources in the South which otherwise might be developed in competition with the monopoly. On the other hand, the large absentee ownership of the South’s natural resources and the South’s industry makes it possible to influence greatly the manner in which the South is developed and to subordinate that development to other interests outside the South.”30

  Additionally, in policies reminiscent of issues that John C. Calhoun had so vigorously debated a century before, both tariff rates and domestic charges for the use of railroad freight blatantly discriminated against the South, impeding its ability to grow and compete. The rates charged for shipping goods along the nation’s railways had for decades been rigged to protect Northern markets from Southern goods. As the report indicated, “The southeastern manufacturer sending goods across the boundary into [the Northeast] is at a relative disadvantage of approximately 39 percent in the charges which he has to pay as compared with the rates for similar shipments entirely within the eastern rate territory. The southwestern manufacturer, with a 75 percent relative disadvantage, is even worse off. . . . The southern producer, attempting to build up a large-scale production on the decreasing cost principle, finds his goods barred from the wider markets in the Nation’s most populous area. . . . On the one hand, the freight rates have hampered its industry; on the other hand, our high tariff has subsidized industry in other sections of the country at the expense of the South.”31

  In short, as John C. Calhoun had warned during the debate over tariffs in 1832—a prediction that was lost in the larger debate over slavery—the South had become an economic colony of the North. Further, the years since the Civil War had in many ways legitimized this colonization, tinting it with an odd morality that flowed from the Republican Party’s “rescue” of the region from slavery. As historian Arthur M. Schlesinger pointed out, “The technique of ‘waving the bloody shirt’—that is, of freeing the slaves again every fourth year—enabled the Republicans long to submerge the fact that they were becoming the party of monopoly and wealth.”32 The South’s resources were being plundered and shipped north. Its citizens were reduced to the status of wage laborers. The profits from these enterprises accrued to Northern corporations, where the infrastructure continued to improve both through the direct advantages of individual wealth that went into such things as luxury spending and bank deposits, and indirectly through the larger tax base that allowed better roads, schools, libraries, and social services.

  How bad was this drain?

  In 1937 the thirteen Southern states had 36 million people, of whom 97.8 percent were native-born—an important statistic, meaning both that the Scots-Irish culture remained predominant among average whites and that none of the South’s economic deficiencies were due to assimilating new immigrants from poorer nations. With 28 percent of the country’s population, it had, in the words of the report, “only 16 percent of the tangible assets, including factories, machines, and the tools with which people make a living. With more than half the country’s farmers, the South has less than a fifth of the farm implements. . . . In 1930 there were nearly twice as many southern farms less than 20 acres in size as in 1880.”

  Of vital importance, the educational base of the South had been decimated. Illiteracy in the South was almost five times as high as in the North-Central states and more than double the rate in New England and the Middle Atlantic states, despite the recent European immigration into those areas. In addition—and tellingly—“The total endowments of [all] the colleges and universities of the South are less than the combined endowments of Harvard and Yale [alone]. . . . The South must educate one-third of the Nation’s children with one-sixth of the Nation’s school revenues. . . . In 1936 the Southern States spent an average of $25.11 per child in schools, or about half the average for the
country as a whole. . . . At the same time the average school child enrolled in New York State had $141.43 spent on his education.”33

  If there was little money for public education, there was none for much else beyond subsistence, either, and in some cases money had actually disappeared as a medium of exchange. The richest state in the South ranked lower in per capita income than the poorest state outside the region. In 1937 the average annual income in the South was only $314, while the rest of the country averaged $604, nearly twice as much, even in the middle of a depression. An actual majority of the farmers in the South did not own their own land, instead having to operate as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Tenant farmers averaged $73 for a year’s work; sharecroppers varied from $38—a dime a day—to $87, depending on the state. While few black families were on the high end of the economic scale, it would be wrong to assume, as so many social scientists of today immediately do, that they alone dominated the low end. As the report mentioned, “Whites and Negroes have suffered alike. Of the 1,831,000 tenant families in the region, about 66 percent are white [the South’s population at this time was 71 percent white]. Approximately half of the sharecroppers are white, living under conditions almost identical with those of Negro sharecroppers.”34