Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  In Richmond, thirty-one-year-old Virginius Dabney worked late but enthusiastically on his Times-Dispatch editorial trumpeting the Roosevelt victory. In Shelby, North Carolina, thirty-two-year-old W. J. Cash was just beginning a ten-year exploration of the enigmatic Southern psyche. In Birmingham, Virginia Foster Durr, twenty-nine, and other members of her family were celebrating not only the triumph of FDR but the reelection of her brother-in-law, Hugo L. Black, to the U.S. Senate. In Nashville, the literary clique of traditionalists at Vanderbilt University who called themselves Agrarians was momentarily heartened by Roosevelt’s interest in subsistence farms. At nearby Fisk University, sociologist Charles S. Johnson, thirty-nine, was cautiously optimistic that the new administration would enlist social scientists as allies in a broad attack on the nation’s domestic problems. Another young Nashvillian, twenty-eight-year-old Howard A. Kester, was a Socialist Party candidate for Congress that day. (He ended up with only 677 votes—but even so, he ran ahead of his party’s presidential candidate, Norman Thomas, in the district.)

  Thurgood Marshall of Baltimore was a twenty-four-year-old senior at the Howard University law school in Washington that fall; one of the first jolts in his political awakening was his startled discovery that the District of Columbia code barred all of its citizens from voting. In New York, a younger (twenty-two) but more politically conscious black student named Pauli Murray, Maryland-born and North Carolina–raised, cast her first presidential vote for the Socialist Thomas.

  Erskine Caldwell, a native Georgian, had just been catapulted to fame and notoriety as the author of a grotesquely comic novel, Tobacco Road. James Agee of Knoxville was writing for the magazines of Henry Luce in New York, and John N. Popham, a young Virginian, was a fledgling reporter for the New York Times. Walking past the Paramount Theater at Broadway and Forty-third Street on his way to work, Popham sometimes exchanged greetings with a tall, gangly doorman who spoke with a thick Southern drawl. They would meet again in 1947 when the reporter interviewed six-foot-seven James Elisha Folsom, the newly elected governor of Alabama.

  The Roosevelt victory would also make a lasting impression on the very young. Far to the south of Manhattan, on a dusty country road in Amite County, Mississippi, light-years distant from the glitter of Broadway, eight-year-old Will Davis Campbell climbed onto the school truck the morning after the election and heard his uncle, Luther Campbell, the driver, exclaim, “Roosevelt won! The depression’s over!” The youngster was puzzled. What was the depression, he wondered, and what did Uncle Luther mean by saying it was over?

  2. The State of the South

  Uncle Luther was wrong, of course; it wasn’t over, not by a long shot. The South at that moment resembled nothing so much as a bleak and ravaged wasteland, a depleted colonial territory mired in isolation, helplessness, ignorance, and utter despair. Only in the eyes of little children did it look “normal”—and only to them because they had nothing but more desolation to compare it to.

  This is a hard point to get across. The entire country was in desperate straits, not just the South, and the pervasiveness of deprivation made it seem more ordinary and natural than it was. (People who remember those times can acknowledge now how little they had, but often say, “I never thought of us as being poor.”) Disparities of race and social class were so much a part of the culture that it was rare to hear them challenged. And, when you consider the region’s ameliorating qualities—the strengths of character and personality, the sheltering arms of church and family, the warmth of many personal relationships, the fertility of the fields, the yield of woods and waters, the healing warmth of winter, and all the rest—it’s not surprising that some Southerners remember the thirties and forties with nostalgic fondness. But hardship there was, and plenty of it, from top to bottom—and the closer you were to the bottom of the economic and social ladder, the worse it got.

  There is no way to convey now an explicit sense of the look, smell, sound, and feel of the South in that somber autumn of 1932, but in its practical effect, if not literally and historically, this was a feudal land, an Americanized version of a European society in the Middle Ages. It was rural, agricultural, isolated. It had its ruling nobles, its lords of the plantation manor—and its peasants, its vassals. Its values were rooted in the land, in stability and permanence, in hierarchy and status, in caste and class and race. The highest virtues were honor and duty, loyalty and obedience. Every member of the society—man and woman, white and black—knew his or her place, and it was an unusual (not to say foolhardy) person who showed a flagrant disregard for the assigned boundaries and conventions.

  There were almost thirty million people living in the eleven states of the old Confederacy, a vast area generally separated from the rest of the country by an imaginary line stretching eighteen hundred miles from the eastern shore of Virginia to the tip of west Texas at El Paso. (There is a much larger South, in the eyes of many people, variously defined as embracing, in addition, part or all of Oklahoma, Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia—and, as we will see subsequently, some ways of defining the region take in even more territory—but for the moment, the boundary of the Confederate states serves our purposes.) Almost all of the nine million blacks and a substantial majority of the twenty-one million whites in this sweeping expanse were so lacking in resources and creature comforts—by our modern-day standards, at least—that it seems elementally fair and honest to call them dirt-poor. Many of them didn’t like that phrase, and still don’t, but it fits.

  And yet, it wouldn’t be right to leave the impression that everyone was in the same boat. There was definitely a pecking order, a vertical framework—the “economic pyramid,” as FDR called it—with all the nonwhites on the bottom and the poorest of the poor whites just above them. If you were white and had some status in politics or agriculture or business or education or the church, you were better off than the struggling majority of resident Southerners. To be more specific, if you held elective office you were in a position to get more than your share of privileges, or if you were a big planter you had a distinct advantage over the yeoman farmers of the land; a mill owner’s life was conspicuously easier than the lives of his workers, and a college graduate had a lot more going for him than an adult whose formal schooling had ended after the fourth grade; an Episcopalian generally was better fixed than a “holy roller” or even a regular Baptist. To be sure, there was such a thing as better and worse—but the bigger truth was that the whole country was in pain, and the South, by almost any measure you could apply, was suffering much more than the rest of the United States (which, for the sake of brevity, if not literal accuracy, I’ll label as the North).

  More than three-fourths of all Southerners had a standard of living in the fall of 1932 that would certainly qualify them as paupers, as we would define that term today. Two-thirds of them lived on farms or in small villages, and close to two-thirds of the farmers were sharecroppers or tenants. The average gross income of farm families didn’t reach $1,000 a year in nine Southern states, casting them to the bottom of the agriculture heap—but lest you think those were the poorest of the poor, keep in mind that they at least were employed and had a bare minimum of food and clothing and shelter to sustain them; millions of others were vagabonds with no resources at all.

  City life may have offered some advantages to poor Southerners, but in truth, the cities were little more than oversized country towns where the problems of employment, health, education, and safety were often just as acute as in the rural areas. The largest city in the South in 1930 was New Orleans, with 459,000 people; half a dozen others had between 200,000 and 300,000, and a mere ten more topped the 100,000 mark.

  Malnutrition was rampant—and often worse, ironically, in the urban areas, simply because it was not possible to live off the land there. But the farms were not much better, for what they grew—mainly cotton and tobacco—you couldn’t eat. The same was true in the mountainous coalfields, where almo
st everyone was severely undernourished.

  To be a sharecropper or a tenant farmer in the South in 1932 was to be caught up in an existence that often was nothing more than peonage or forced labor—just one step removed from slavery. You rented the land from its owner, and made the crop for him with his furnish of seed and fertilizer and mules and tools; he sold you food and other necessities on credit at high interest in his commissary; he kept the books, handled the sales, and divided with you at harvest time. You were lucky if you broke even; some went in the hole, and not one in ten actually came away with a few dollars in profit. So when I say the average farm income was between, say, $500 and $1,000 a year, that means the landlords got a little something and the sharecroppers got next to nothing.

  Rural housing for all but the fortunate few was primitive—no running water or electricity, no appliances, no telephone, no insulation, no window screens (maybe not even windows), no paint, no privacy. Clothing was anything but adequate; shoes were a luxury, coats and hats an absolute extravagance. Food was a monotonous repetition of what little there was available: salt pork, lard, sorghum molasses, corn pone, biscuits, grits, white gravy, and a narrow selection of boiled vegetables—field peas, cabbage, sweet potatoes, greens. Supplies were so limited that a family was considered fortunate if it had enough for two meager meals a day.

  In such severely limited circumstances, poor health was inevitable, and doctors to combat it were few and far between. Mothers and babies were twice as likely to die during childbirth in Alabama or Louisiana as in Connecticut or Nebraska or Washington State. Those who survived childhood were still very much at risk; people got sick, stayed sick, and died with grimly predictable frequency. They suffered from diseases of the environment, diseases brought on by poor diet, exposure, overwork, stress. Even their few channels to simple pleasure—tobacco, whiskey, sex—were often deadly, giving them lung cancer, alcoholism, venereal disease. The more abstemious among them were not spared, either; like everyone else, they were vulnerable to pellagra, hookworm, malaria, tuberculosis, and a dozen other crippling or killing diseases. An image of this Southern peasant emerged and persisted, and finally became a grotesque caricature more to be scorned than pitied: a ragged, dirty figure, slow-footed, dim-witted, lazy, illiterate, toothless, crippled in mind and body. The distorted image provided both Northerners and the better-off white Southerners with a handy scapegoat for the South’s ills: lazy niggers, dumb hillbillies, black scum, white trash.

  Almost nobody had money. The South could count a quarter of the nation’s population but only a tenth of its wealth. No more than five hundred people in the entire region had incomes of $100,000 or more in 1929, and three years later that list was reduced to a tiny handful; probably no more than a hundred or so people per state earned even $10,000 in 1932. The ones with the lowest earned income of all were those who actually did the hardest work. Cotton pickers were paid twenty cents for a hundred pounds—so little that even the strongest and swiftest of them had less than a dollar to show for a backbreaking day’s work. Coal miners got thirty cents a ton and could make as much as two dollars a day for a twelve-hour shift with a pick and shovel, but it was part-time work. In the textile mills, women and children worked seventy-two hours a week for fifteen to twenty-five cents an hour. And, no matter how much or how little the faceless thousands of workers ended up with, the company store quickly relieved them of it.

  The desperation of unorganized miners and textile workers and the imperious manner of the mine and mill owners, most of whom had their headquarters in the North, sparked some violent clashes in the late twenties and early thirties. The coal-mine wars attracted national attention; so did the textile strikes, particularly a major one in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929. These were ideological as well as economic struggles, pitting not just liberals and progressives but more radical leftists—Socialists, Communists—against the robber barons of capitalism. Blood was spilled, people died—and, since most of the mine and mill workers and all of their bosses were white, the conflicts gained added visibility in the white press. Workers were no less exploited in the cotton fields, but most of them were black—as were about half of the sharecroppers and tenant farmers—and their landlords lived close by and kept tight control of them, so there was not as much open conflict on the farms, and when there was, outsiders didn’t pay much attention.

  Cotton was more than just the primary source of employment in the South—it was a symbol of all that the region represented, the best and the worst. Cotton was king, or had been; it built the fortunes, the sprawling plantations, the white-pillared mansions, the romantic myths. Before the depression, cotton was planted over a staggering forty-five million acres of the South, and in the bumper-crop years, almost everyone got at least a taste of the trickle-down milk and honey. But there was another side, a darker reality. Cotton used up people and land, consumed and then discarded them. The big planters were like gamblers, betting their soil and their seed and their field hands against the weather, the weevils, the market, the foreign competition. Historically, through the slavery era and beyond, the planters had won more often than not, and won big—but times were changing, and the signs were everywhere that they were headed for a fall.

  In 1919, a golden year of postwar prosperity, cotton soared to thirty-five cents a pound on a big crop of about fifteen million bales; the following year, plummeting demand and a huge stockpiled surplus sent prices crashing to fourteen cents and triggered a major agricultural depression nine years before the Big One. The bottom dropped out of the tobacco market, too, and the price of prime cultivated land fell to ten dollars an acre or less. All through the twenties, cotton careened up and down the scale, driven by one uncontrollable force after another. The mind-set of the planters was to keep gambling. Oblivious to the warning signs—the loss of foreign markets, the rise of synthetics, the massive surplus, the insect scourge, the vagaries of flood and drought and tornadoes, the depletion of the soil, the pain and anguish of a captive labor force—they blindly rolled the dice again and again, risking everything for one more strike, one more bumper crop.

  A reckless, greedy, all-or-nothing approach to economic activity seemed to characterize the American mood in the Roaring Twenties, and the South was especially susceptible to it—not just the cotton barons, but others as well. The last of the region’s magnificent stands of virgin timber were almost exhausted by 1930; historian Thomas D. Clark, a native Mississippian, writing of this mindless tragedy years later, said the timber companies “did more economic harm to the South than Grant, Sherman, and the carpetbaggers put together.” The railroads, having finally reached the coalfields, were hauling black gold away as fast as they could mine it, and the same take-the-money-and-run attitude prevailed around the oil and gas wells in Texas and Oklahoma, where big strikes had the ironic effect of flooding the market and imposing a giveaway price of two or three cents a barrel. The Florida land boom of the 1920s was a greed-driven mirage that evaporated almost as quickly as it had blossomed. Manufacturing was still in its infancy in much of the South, but the makers of textiles and steel and other products were already operating with an arrogant disregard for their workers, the environment, and the jurisdictions in which they were located.

  The big owners of industries, utilities, natural resources, and agricultural lands felt they had a perfect right to maximize their profits by whatever means necessary—to extract, exploit, use up, and throw away at will. There were no government regulators to stop them, no investigative reporters, no powerful labor unions, and even a suggestion of such intrusions was denounced as nothing less than Bolshevism. Most but not all of the men who controlled the Southern economy were absentee owners with no real interest in the region except its quick-profit potential. Among the homegrown exceptions were the planters—of course, and a few of the textile manufacturers and railroad owners, but they were, in the main, even more hostile to prying outsiders, would-be regulators, and union organizers than were their Northern counterpa
rts.

  And so, with utter disdain for the consequences, the captains of commerce applied their exploitative philosophy to the South. As they saw it, the natural resources were there to be used, not preserved and protected; the South wasn’t a homeland or an integral part of the nation so much as it was a colony, a resource to be exhausted. It needed little in the way of schools and other institutions to strengthen it, because it had no long-term future—and besides, the children of the wealthy could be sent away to school much more cheaply, and be better served in the process. The native people were seen as either racially or culturally inferior, or both, and their only value was as a plentiful labor source. With the same language slave traders had once used to describe chattel (“docile, obedient, abundant, cheap”), the boosters of industry and agriculture characterized the Southern workforce in the 1930s.

  It was this way of thinking that produced the South of the Great Depression, the South that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Southern-dominated, majority-Democratic Congress took over from the Republicans after the 1932 election: a ravaged land, its timber stripped, its hills eroded, its worn-out fields barren and dusty, its rivers filling with topsoil and trash and raw sewage, its air thick with a pall of soot and coal smoke, and tens of thousands of its people in flight, driven north in a desperate search for a better life.

  Between 1900 and 1930, nearly three and a half million more people moved out of the South than into it. Slightly more of them were white than black. Two kinds of people led the exodus—those from the bottom and those from the top. Farmworkers, day laborers, the unskilled and unemployed and uneducated masses, white and black, left in droves. Countless thousands of competitive, creative, gifted young people of both races also fled in search of greater opportunities. (Look through any dictionary of twentieth-century American biographies and you will be startled to see how many journalists, authors, broadcasters, artists, musicians, entertainers, athletes, and other professionals were born in the South but made their mark elsewhere.)