by James Webb
Tenant farming and sharecropping had evolved from two post–Civil War realities. The first was that many large plantation owners were left with “plenty of land but no capital or labor to work it. Hundreds of thousands of former slaves and impoverished whites were willing to work but had no land. The result was the crop-sharing system, under which the land was worked by men who paid for the privilege with a share of their harvest.”35 The second was the prevalence throughout the South of large tracts of land owned by absentee landlords, some of them from wealthier families that had moved away and others owned by speculators from outside the region. Farmers who lacked the capital to buy their own land “leased” these properties, again usually paying with a percentage of their harvest.
These practices fell even harder on tenant farmers and sharecroppers due to the fragility of the Southern banking system. As the report indicated, “Lacking capital of its own the South has been forced to borrow from outside financiers, who have reaped a rich harvest in the form of interest and dividends. At the same time it has had to hand over the control of much of its business and industry to investors from wealthier sections. . . . Although the region contains 28 percent of the country’s population, in July 1937, its banks held less than 11 percent of the Nation’s bank deposits. . . . As a result, the majority of Southern tenant farmers must depend for credit on their landlords or the ‘furnish merchant’ who supplies seed, food, and fertilizer. Their advances have largely replaced currency for a considerable part of the rural population. For security the landlord or merchant takes a lien on the entire crop, which is turned over to him immediately after harvest in settlement of the debt. Usually he keeps the books and fixes the interest rate. Even if he is fair and does not charge excessive interest, the tenants often find themselves in debt at the end of the year.”36
“Even if he is fair” was a very delicate phrase to be put into a report to the president of the United States. And those words were no doubt carefully chosen, for fairness was not a hallmark of this system.
In a nutshell, over the decades the national policies of the Republicans had raped the region while the actions of many state and local Democrats too often were designed to preserve the assets of a select few at the expense of just about everyone else. Thus, tenant farmers and sharecroppers, white and black alike—and this means the majority of the farmers in the South at that time—found themselves to be manipulated and powerless, living under a form of “double colonialism.” First, the entire region had been colonized from the outside, impoverishing basic infrastructure such as schools and roads while the banking system and corporate ownership sent revenues from Southern labor to the communities of the North. And second, in many local areas they and their fellow farmers had become little better than serfs, laboring without hard cash inside a myriad of petty fiefdoms where the local banker or general store owner would supply “seed, food, and fertilizer” so that they could grow a crop, harvest it, and turn it over to the man who had given them seed and food, in order to live in debt for yet another year.
In White County, Arkansas, my mother grew up inside this system, and it would not be a stretch to say that my grandfather died because of it.
I have seen only two pictures of my grandfather, Birch Hays Hodges, the Kentucky-born son of Civil War soldier Asa William Hodges. The first, taken in his teens during the 1890s, is a tintype showing him with four or five other young students upon his graduation from a teaching “college” in Hartford, Kentucky. He is wearing a suit and tie. His hair is neatly combed above a pair of soft, dark eyes. He is carrying himself, if not with massive self-confidence, certainly with a degree of pride. The second picture was taken in 1936, in front of an unpainted house in Kensett, Arkansas, where, in a few months, after coming in from the fields to take a noontime nap on a corn shuck mattress, he would lie down and die of a stroke. A cloth hat is pulled low over his ears, its brim bent up in front. His worn bib overalls are tucked inside a pair of boots that rise up to his knees. A few chickens peck in the dust at his feet. His gaunt face is baked Indian-brown from the sun. His once-soft eyes have sunk into deep shadows. And he is giving the camera a hard, bitter look that could crack a rock.
My grandfather has always been a mythical figure to me, his tragic, mulelike stubbornness passed on through tales told by my grandmother, mother, and aunts from the time I was old enough to listen to bedtime stories. For although B. H. Hodges died penniless in a shack that lacked electricity, toilets, or running water, if there had ever been an Olympic event called “never give an inch,” he would have been world champion. In fact, Georgia-born Tom Petty could have been singing about old B. H. in one of his most popular songs: “No, I know what’s right. I got just one light. In a world that keeps on pushing me around, gonna stand my ground. And I won’t back down.”
B. H. Hodges came to Arkansas with a dream. After leaving Kentucky, he had worked for a while in the coal mines near Carbondale, Illinois, then heard that there were diamonds in Arkansas and set out to find them. But Arkansas was hardly South Africa, and in all his years there he never saw a diamond mine. Instead he met my grandmother, Georgia “Frankie” Doyle, fathered eight children, three of whom would die in childhood, argued his way from a chance at teaching school into a migrant’s life of picking strawberries and cotton, and finally into a small patch of sharecropped farm. And instead of diamonds, B. H. Hodges found himself a world of trouble.
His problems began when he stood up to a man named A. P. Mills, a local baron who owned both the bank and the general store in Kensett. A. P. had done alright during the hard times, even finding a way to send his son Wilbur to Harvard. Upon his return Wilbur became a local judge, and then a rather famous congressman, both for his expertise in tax law and for his antics with a South American stripper named Fanne Foxe. A. P. Mills was a cheerful man, a true “good old boy” who still would remember my mother by name when she returned to Kensett with her children more than a decade after she had moved away. But he was also very much a creature of his time and place, and my grandfather was not.
As my grandmother, great-aunt, and aunt all told it, my grandfather’s sin was to explain to the black folk of Kensett that they were being charged higher interest rates than whites at A. P. Mills’s store, thus keeping them in an even worse spiral of debt—and also to suggest to A. P. Mills that this was not a particularly Christian thing to do. My grandfather was pointedly warned that he was causing trouble. By all accounts, my grandfather then told A. P. Mills to go to hell. And A. P. Mills, along with some others who controlled the admittedly sparse purse strings of White County, showed my grandfather that there could be such a thing as hell on earth.
Within a few weeks my grandfather could not get a regular job in White County. He moved back up to the Carbondale coal mines for a while but my grandmother, one of twelve children, got homesick, so he brought the family back to White County. They began following the crops around the region, picking strawberries when they were in season, picking and chopping other people’s cotton, and truck farming. School for my mother and her brother and sisters became intermittent and at times impossible as they picked and chopped alongside the adults.
My grandfather, shunned by the local powers-that-were, never backed down from his beliefs. He had broken a hip badly in a farm accident, and an apparent bone infection eventually caused his skin to permanently split open in that area (I write “apparent” because no doctor treated him), bringing a steady ooze from the joint. My grandmother kept two sets of bandages for the hip, boiling one every day while he wore the other. But this did not keep B. H. from walking six miles round-trip to Searcy several days a week in order to debate others who gathered in the town square to discuss politics. He argued the rights of the black and the poor, and the unfairness of local leaders. And in these spirited debates he was usually, as a wise man once put it, in either a minority or a majority of one.
It was probably the blood infection that killed him. My mother was ten when B. H. Hodges walked insid
e the house and died. One of her strongest memories of that time was of my grandmother having to steal a few ears of feed corn from a nearby field, silently stripping the kernels off the ears with a knife, and then mixing them with lard in a frying pan to make a dinner. And of brushing her teeth with twigs broken off nearby trees. And of her next-youngest sister dying before her eyes of typhoid fever after the two of them had shared the same drink of stagnant water from a barrel in an old black man’s backyard. And of working all night in the woods of absentee farms with two of my great-aunts, secretly cutting and ricking wood on land that belonged to a different class of people in Memphis or maybe New York, hauling it away in a borrowed truck, and delivering it by dawn to fuel the ovens and woodstoves of homes in Searcy and Kensett.
Years of this kind of labor gave my mother arms and shoulders like a weight lifter. When she met my father in Texas at the age of seventeen, his strongest initial reaction was not of her dark-haired, violet-eyed beauty, but that her hands felt as rough as the bark off a tree. And as I myself grew into manhood and progressed through a variety of academic and professional challenges, my mother and grandmother both would seize my hands whenever I first walked into their homes, massaging the palms and feeling their thickness. Whatever else I did in life, it was important to both of them that I never lose my “workingman’s hands.”
When I became assistant secretary of defense in 1984, the deputy secretary of defense was a protégé of Caspar Weinberger’s named William Howard Taft IV. Taft, who had graduated from Yale in 1966 and Harvard Law School in 1969, is the great-grandson of former president and Supreme Court justice William Howard Taft, also of Yale, and the great-great-grandson of one of the founding members of Yale’s famous secret society, Skull and Bones. Will Taft and I may as well have grown up on different planets. He had gone to Andover, Yale, and Harvard Law, heading to Nader’s Raiders after law school. I had attended seven different public schools in four different states between the sixth and twelfth grades alone as my father moved from one military base to another, then headed off to the Marine Corps and Vietnam after the Naval Academy. But I found Taft likable and proficient despite a certain patrician aloofness. And he did not know it, but he had also inspired me.
During my initial “courtesy call” in Will Taft’s office, I noticed that he kept a huge painting of President Taft just behind his desk. And so when I returned to my own office, I called my aunt in Arkansas and asked her to send me the old snapshot of B. H. Hodges standing in his boots and overalls, staring hard back at the world that had tried to stomp him. I had the small photo enlarged as far as technology would allow, which resulted in a four-by-seven-inch black-and-white copy. Then I framed the picture with barn wood. And from that time forward, old B. H. has looked down on whatever desk I happen to be occupying, urging me on but also standing watch over my humility.
Some people have their Skull and Bones. And some people keep their pride, then die of untreated broken bones.
After B. H. Hodges died, my mother’s family scattered to the winds, most pouring out of Arkansas into Michigan, Kentucky, Texas, and California, and a few places in between. But it was not simply her father’s death that drove them. It was also a war, the innovative policies of a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the inevitable further migration of a people who were finally deciding to join the exodus into mainstream America. In addition to the 3 million people born in the South who were living in other areas of the country in 1920, another 1.7 million from the states “south of the Potomac and Ohio Rivers and east of the Mississippi” had migrated out of the region during the 1920s, about half of whom were between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five.37 The 1930s and particularly the 1940s and 1950s would see an even greater escalation of this pace, and also for the first time would see a substantial in-migration initiated primarily by the large number of federal programs and military bases that were either opened up or expanded in the region during the nation’s mobilization for World War II.
After World War II the South would begin to resurrect and reshape itself. And those who had left the South and the other areas of the Scots-Irish heartland were also helping to reshape America—not surprisingly, from the bottom up.
4
Hillbilly Highways
THERE ARE A lot of people who do not remember the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a great deal of fondness. Strong evidence supports the traditional conservative viewpoint that his domestic policies were focused too heavily on centralizing the power of the federal government and creating a quasi-socialist state. It is also undeniable that in foreign affairs Roosevelt persistently maneuvered the nation into World War II, and then threw a monkey wrench into the hard-earned peace by conceding Eastern Europe to Joseph Stalin at the Yalta Conference just before the war ended. Further, this longest-serving president was overtly and unapologetically aristocratic, his attitude toward the poor more the result of a patrician paternalism than an empathetic populism. Roosevelt hardly wanted to eliminate the elites from the American political formula; to the contrary, he was a product of the superwealthy upper class and thrived on their system of transparent privilege. As one small example, it would boggle the minds of today’s media if a mere assistant secretary of the navy, not to mention a president, decided to have a battleship carry him from Washington to his summer vacation home in the very north of Maine, as Roosevelt rather nonchalantly did while holding that lower office.38 And others argue with some merit that it was mobilization for the war rather than Roosevelt’s policies that finally brought the nation out of the grave economic crisis of the 1930s.
But for those Southerners whose families had been trapped inside the generations of unending poverty that long preceded the Great Depression, Roosevelt was a godsend. At last they had found a president who, when it came to their dilemma, was not afraid to lead and who was willing to address key issues rather than simply paper them over with rhetoric. What mattered paternalism when the modern-day descendants of the old Great Captains had remained so powerless against outside economic forces, and yet also continued to completely dominate opportunities within the region? The South had been an economic basket case for generations. The entire nation was now in crisis. And Roosevelt had tossed aside the too-familiar pattern of proposing vague economic policies that would immediately benefit the wealthy and might—perhaps later, if things went right—“trickle down” to those in need or “float everybody’s boat” with the rising tide of prosperity. Nor had he decided simply to throw welfare money at those who would not or could not work. Instead, he chose to institute concrete, government-funded programs that actually put people to work.
Many of Roosevelt’s vaunted New Deal programs had a profound impact in the South. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was especially busy in the region, even though its activities spanned forty-seven states. Eventually its ranks swelled to 275,000 young men who were paid the princely sum of thirty dollars a month (as much as some sharecroppers made in a year) to work in American forests and to landscape a growing federal highway system.39 And the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), created in 1933 to manage the Tennessee River, grew over time into perhaps the most important and successful federal project in history. For the people of the Appalachian Mountain region, the TVA meant more than jobs; it brought electricity, and thus the first stages of modernity into the rugged hollows and backcountry. Even today the TVA is America’s biggest public power company, bringing in $6.8 billion a year and supplying electricity to more than 8 million people in a seven-state region that comprises much of the principal area of Scots-Irish settlement and influence.40
And whether or not the mobilization of the nation’s industries and military that began after September 1939 was the true catalyst for turning around a moribund economy, it did bring jobs to the people of the backlands, the kind of cash-paying employment that previously had not been available to those who wanted desperately to work. Further, most Southerners knew that these were the kinds of jobs that easily
could have gone elsewhere. They were not wrong to credit Roosevelt’s personal sensitivities, as well as the power in the Congress of the Solid South’s vaunted seniority in key leadership positions, for this resurgence.
Once mobilization began, factories and military bases sprang up all over the South as well as in states such as Michigan, Illinois, and California, where many Southerners had recently migrated. Importantly, the military bases inside the South brought with them a large influx of people from other regions, for the first time in several generations exposing the curious folkways that had evolved after Civil War Reconstruction to close scrutiny from outsiders. Although some Southern military bases had been used during the 1917 buildup to World War I combat, that mobilization had been brief—a matter of months—and most of the military bases had either been deactivated or reduced to cantonment size after 1918. By contrast, the World War II buildup began in the spring of 1940, when the army’s War Plans Division initiated a training program designed to immediately raise an army of 4 million men and that involved a steady influx of soldiers from across the country for the next five years. Actually, construction at some bases, such as Fort Benning, Georgia, had begun as early as 1935, using public works funding from New Deal programs.
Rather than 4 million men, some 16 million Americans would eventually serve during World War II. Along with California, the South held the highest density of these soldiers, a strong percentage of them either coming from the South or spending part of their military years training there. Large-scale training bases became a staple in the recovering economies of virtually every Southern state. Fort Benning, on the Alabama–Georgia border, was home to 100,000 soldiers at any given time. Fort Bragg, North Carolina, had a wartime population of 159,000 soldiers. Fort Polk, Louisiana, was activated as a large training base in 1941. Fort Stewart, Georgia’s 280,000 acres were activated in 1940 in an area that had been completely devastated in the final days of the Civil War by the infamous Union general William Tecumseh Sherman and had yet to recover. More than 500,000 soldiers were trained during the war at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, a post named for Andrew Jackson that had been reactivated in 1939 as an infantry training center. Fort Campbell, Kentucky, built in 1942, became home to three armored divisions and an infantry division. Fort A. P. Hill, Virginia, activated in 1940, became a maneuver area for the II Army Corps and three National Guard divisions, and in 1942 was headquarters for the task force that Gen. George S. Patton was preparing to lead into the North Africa campaign. Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, was activated as a large training base in 1940. Forts Hood and Bliss were activated for similar purposes in Texas, as was Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, all in either 1940 or 1941.41