by John Egerton
Atlanta had grown big enough to have a significant impact on postwar life in the region; with a half-million people in its metropolitan area, it would soon rank (along with New Orleans, Houston, and Dallas) among the South’s first real cities on a national scale. Moreover, it was acquiring a progressive image as a prosperous and enlightened place, or so its leaders liked to think. A turn-of-the-century historian had credited Atlanta with “a spirit of pluck and push,” and that tag still seemed apt. (You may recall that it was Henry Grady, a forerunner of McGill at the Constitution, who popularized New South boosterism in the 1880s.) As its visionaries and dreamers saw it, postwar Atlanta was an oasis, a beachhead, a base camp for building the competitive, productive, tolerant New South that generations had heralded in vain.
Ralph McGill was a vital factor in the realization of such hopes and expectations as these—indeed, it was he who regularly put the idealism of Tomorrow’s South into words for his readers. Encountering his column day in and day out, all sorts of people were drawn to a sober but positive consideration of what the future promised. McGill himself could not have imagined just how transforming and revolutionary some changes would be: air-conditioning in stores, buses, churches, factories, homes, cars; jet engines that would bring Atlanta hours closer by air to the rest of the country, and freeways that would shrink driving time; television as a fact of daily life in practically every home; the miracle of penicillin; the virtual eradication of tuberculosis, polio, and other once-dreaded diseases; the massive influx of veterans to colleges and universities under the GI Bill, giving birth to the notion of universal higher education; a consumer-driven economy that would put more cash in people’s pockets and more conveniences in their homes than any other society had ever come close to having.
And those marvels would only be a beginning, the first fruits of a long and bountiful harvest. McGill also recognized the obstacles, of course, and wrote about them honestly—but on the eve of Tomorrow he saw only the green light, and he told his readers, and they saw it too.
A boy of ten doesn’t think much about such things, especially in a town without any traffic lights. In those golden days of postwar glory, Cadiz, Kentucky (population 1,228), had all the markings—as I saw it then, and as I look back on it now—of a great place to be a kid. Small and isolated though it was, Cadiz left little to be wished for by prepubescent boys like me. It was safe. Summer mornings, you could leave home on your bike after breakfast and stay gone all day without alarming your mother. Everybody seemed to keep up with everybody else; a familiar query I still remember was “Does your mama know where you’re at?” No one thought anything at all of young boys hitchhiking to Hopkinsville, twenty miles away, or swimming in the murky depths of Little River, or spending long hours in the poolroom up on Main Street—the nearest thing Cadiz had to a YMCA or a community center.
In those days, when television was still a pipe dream, porch talk was a favorite medium of exchange on warm evenings. Children grew up around adults for whom talk was one of the few available forms of entertainment, and youngsters soaked up stories and gossip and debates as if by osmosis. Talk was something you just took without thinking, like sweet milk and Sunday school and the Pledge of Allegiance. The richly varied voices of Southerners still resonate deep within me—languid, lyrical, melodious voices, soft and slow, with inflections and intonations that shift subtly from place to place, person to person, story to story. Little did I realize then how much I gained from all those Southern voices, and from the many other benevolent manifestations of local, rural, regional culture—family, food, music, religion, history. It had its negative and destructive aspects too, of course, but somehow the good side of Southern life in the forties is what I remember best. It was a culture on the threshold of rapid modernization, and it is now so transformed from that simpler time a half-century ago as to be almost beyond recognition.
I went into the fifth grade that fall after the war ended. Some of my friends and classmates were hard up, to use a then-familiar term, but I don’t recall that poverty, by itself, was a dividing force among us, and almost no one that I knew of, regardless of need, grew up with a debilitating sense of being poor. Nobody called attention to the fact that we all lived in a poor town of a poor county of one of the poorest states of the impoverished and disadvantaged South, and that our education, our health, our employment opportunities, and the general state of our lives suffered in comparison with more affluent Americans elsewhere. What mattered most to us was none of the above; it was how good a ballplayer you were, whether or not you shot a decent game of pool, what you thought of girls, and how you handled yourself in a fight.
I didn’t know much about what was going on in the world—only that the war was over, Roosevelt was dead, and Truman was the new President. But closer to home, I was beginning to notice a few things. With the return of our fighting men from the war came some strangers, like the wonderfully exotic Johnny DeName, an Italian-American Catholic from Brooklyn who married a local girl and dazzled us all with his accent, his jitterbugging, and the authentic zoot suit he wore to the Methodist church every Sunday. Camp Campbell, the army base that had taken a twenty-thousand-acre chunk out of Trigg County, brought many more newcomers to us, and some of them stayed, and together they enriched the local population. The base became a permanent fort, and thus a major employer of civilians in our county.
In the opposite direction, forty miles northwest of Cadiz, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s huge hydroelectric dam at Gilbertsville was completed after the war (President Truman himself came to dedicate it in October 1945), and more commuter jobs were created around that facility. Federal projects would eventually take more than a third of our county’s land area and become, at least indirectly, the primary source of its non-agricultural income. Historically Democratic Trigg County showed its appreciation by handing Roosevelt four straight landslide victories, and it would do even better for Truman and his running mate, Kentucky Senator Alben Barkley, in 1948, giving them three times as many votes as the Republican Thomas Dewey, the Progressive Henry Wallace, and the Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond combined.
In those uncomplicated days of my budding adolescence, I lived in blissful ignorance of all but the most immediate concerns—family, school, church. Wide-eyed, I saw and heard for the first time such new-age wonders as television sets, gas-powered lawnmowers, window air-conditioning units, clothes dryers, food blenders, and car radios. I read the sports pages of the Louisville Courier-Journal, listened to radio broadcasts of St. Louis Cardinals baseball games, played Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams honky-tonk songs on the poolroom jukebox, and discovered the sublime enigma of the opposite sex. In my innocence, cigarettes and beer were just about the only habit-forming substances I ever heard of, let alone tried, and my introduction to both was blessedly harmless and untraumatic.
One more sign of ignorance stands out starkly in retrospect. Kentucky was a border state with a black population of well under ten percent, and it was in most ways less obsessed with white supremacy than were its Deep South neighbors. Its politicians didn’t talk much about race, and blacks were not locked out of the voting booth or the jury box. But segregation was ingrained in the culture, and everybody, white and black, abided by its laws and customs unquestioningly, and their obedience gave a false presumption of logic to the inequitable rules. About one-fifth of Trigg County’s total of nine thousand or so residents were black. They held no political offices, owned few businesses, and had no professional class other than teachers and preachers. They were not welcome in the Main Street churches, the public swimming pool (built with New Deal dollars), the movie theater (except in a tiny balcony area), or the poolroom. The county school system offered them only marginal instruction through the eighth grade; parents who wanted more than that had to send their children to board with family or friends in Hopkinsville so they could attend Crispus Attucks High School (an institution with such noted alumni as New York journalist Ted Poston).
I knew
a good many black people by name and personal association. In my remembrance of them and of the times, I can recall nothing but friendliness and warmth between us. But if that was so, it stood against the fact that segregation and discrimination and inequality held us all, regardless of race, in a social and cultural straitjacket from which escape seemed not only impossible but unthinkable. My mother taught me, on threat of painful punishment, not to say “nigger” or to assume superiority over others less advantaged than I, but I never heard anyone—at home, at church, in school—utter a straightforward declaration that colored people, as they were then commonly called in polite company, deserved the same privileges and freedoms that all whites claimed as a birthright. It would be a long time before I ever thought about that at all, and even longer before I accepted it as a fundamental truth.
My adolescent hiatus in Cadiz lasted from the war-ending summer of 1945 until the fall of 1953, when I went away to college. The nation was then caught up in a mood of near-hysteria over communism, and we were once again at war, this time in Korea. Eight months later the U.S. Supreme Court would issue its historic school desegregation decision. By then I would be three months away from the beginning of my own bittersweet experience as a soldier, and from my first real introduction to multicultural diversity and equality.
The same traffic signal that showed the green light to Ralph McGill and hid itself completely from my view was blinking yellow for most Southerners in the summer of 1945—and for the ruling oligarchy, it not only glowed red but flashed a U-turn arrow pointing back to the past. Those who saw the green were not in perfect political and philosophical harmony by any means, but in general they subscribed to a progressive line of reasoning: The New Deal had brought relief to the South, and the war had generated an economic boom that furthered the region’s recovery; the next logical step should be to effect reforms that would give the South full and equal status in the nation. Those who saw the red—a more numerous and powerful group—were first in favor of relief, then wary of the Rooseveltian methods of recovery, and finally downright hostile to what they characterized as radical notions of reform. The majority of Southerners followed neither the green nor the red; they waited at the caution light for more guidance and leadership.
This silent majority was enormous and pervasive. There is no way to tote up its numbers, obviously, but I’ll risk a distorting oversimplification and guess that about seventy-five or eighty percent of the South’s population fell into this broad category. Though they were people of wide-ranging doubts, fears, beliefs, and convictions, they were, by inclination and temperament, followers—not leaders, not scouts—and they looked to more vocal and articulate others to speak for them and lead them in one direction or another. By race, sex, religion, occupation, and economic status, they more or less matched the regional profile; what they had in common was nothing so much as the fact of their silence, whatever the reasons for it.
Here were the masses of Southern poor, black and white—tenant farmers and sharecroppers, migrant workers, transients, the unemployed, urban slum dwellers. Here were Mexican immigrants in Texas, refugees from Latin America and the West Indies in Florida, and a number of isolated and impoverished American Indian communities—the Cherokees in North Carolina, the Seminoles in Florida, the Choctaws in Mississippi.
There was silence above the poverty line, too: Here were Protestants and Catholics and Jews who deferred to their generally cautious ministers, priests, and rabbis; here were inarticulate young people just awakening to questions of social choice, and upwardly mobile strivers eager for a taste of middle-class life, and elders for whom big changes, even beneficial ones, were unsettling. Having survived the long ordeal of depression and war, the silent majority’s needs and hopes were not grandiose but simple, basic, primary. There is some evidence in the record to indicate that race, by itself, was not always a matter of overriding concern to them. I am led to wonder, in fact, if the multitude of white, black, brown, and red Southerners would have chosen to fight among themselves over a matter as irrelevant as skin color if their conservative leaders had not been so obsessed with perpetuating Jim Crow segregation and discrimination and white supremacy.
Above and to the right of this huge segment of the South’s population were the established political and economic leaders who looked to the distant past for their model of an ideal society. What the South had—in 1945 almost as solidly as in 1845—was a ruling class, a powerful elite defined by money or property or position, or all of these, plus rock-ribbed conservatism. They were all white, of course, and overwhelmingly male, and middle-aged or older. They completely controlled politics and business, and exercised great influence in the church, the press, the university. They disdained democracy, opting instead for one-party rule, handpicked candidates, and the smallest possible electorate (for example, less than ten percent of South Carolina’s voting-age population and fifteen percent of Mississippi’s and Alabama’s took part in the presidential election of 1944).
The planters, bankers, lawyers, mill owners, and others who sat atop the feudal empires of the South saw themselves as the deserving rich, and they ruled as if by divine right. Unchallenged for over half a century (since the Republicans and Yankees capitulated, the Populists were subdued, and the African-Americans were disenfranchised), this ruling elite had come to dominate Congress and the Southern statehouses and courthouses by a simple combination of longevity and solidarity. With few exceptions in the first half of the twentieth century, the states of the Old Confederacy had anointed leaders who stood shoulder to shoulder for men over women, whites over blacks, old over young, business over labor, conservatives over liberals, rural areas over cities, and politicians over everybody. Ever faithful to the tiny cliques that kept them in power, the lawmakers vigilantly defended low taxes, low wages, high profits, and balanced budgets; states’ rights, limited government, and selective federal aid without interference from Washington; a cheap, plentiful labor force without unions; and always, unfailingly, an abiding devotion to segregation and white supremacy.
To lump all of the South’s senators and congressmen and governors together in this sweeping indictment would be patently unfair; several of them were New Deal stalwarts in the first and second Roosevelt administrations, and a few remained loyal to the President and the party through thick and thin. But if you pay close attention to the postwar rhetoric of Southern Democrats, you will hear the same tone of militant defiance that prevailed when FDR and the Southerners came to loggerheads in the late 1930s—a tone borrowed then from generations past. The dominant, guiding voices in the Dixie pantheon of twentieth-century rulers defended a way of life based on nineteenth-century principles: hierarchical control, Victorian order and rigidity, conformity of thought, massive denial of faults, hostility to all criticism, avoidance of reality, and a patriotic nationalism more Southern than American. At bottom, it was a way of life that required legions of underlings to do the scut work. Once slavery had supplied the drones; now drones were plentiful because of the segregated and inferior status of all blacks and a steeply vertical informal class structure among whites.
Opposite the small but powerful and dominant bloc of Southern barons stood the even smaller liberal remnant. This sprinkling of white progressives and black antisegregationists tried to point the South to the future, but no individual among them could reach far enough to embrace their collective views on social change; no one had arms that wide. It would be impossible to say in a few words what set them apart from the reactionary rulers of the South in 1945 (though a decade later, the dividing line would be sharp and clear: for or against desegregation). Here were left-of-center radicals, liberals, moderates, and conservatives; avowed integrationists and separate-but-equal segregationists; activists motivated by religious beliefs, economic theory, political considerations, and enlightened self-interest. Here were some—but not necessarily all—of the leaders of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, the National Association for the Advancement of Col
ored People, the Southern Regional Council, the National Urban League, the Truman administration, the National Democratic Party, the American Veterans Committee, the labor movement, the church, the universities, the press, and numerous other alliances, great and small.
For a little more than five years after the war, these two minority factions of Southerners—those who saw the red light, and those who saw the green—struggled for the heart and soul of their region, and for the allegiance (or subjugation) of the majority, who waited at the yellow caution light for someone to tell them which way to turn. Looking back on those years from a vantage point in the 1990s, it seems to me that a combination of favorable circumstances had opened a narrow window of opportunity through which the South might have reached both internal social reform and external parity with the rest of the nation.
At times it appeared that the underdog advocates of reform were gaining ground. Many ex-GIs wanted to clean out corrupt courthouses and statehouses; black critics of Jim Crow segregation grew ever more numerous and vocal; some young political activists managed to get themselves elected; President Truman proved to be more liberal on the race issue than FDR had been; a lengthening string of federal court decisions forecast a more inclusive application of democratic principles and ideals. When the renegade States’ Rights Party—the Dixiecrats—failed to seize the South from the Democrats in 1948, some liberals and moderates thought for a moment that their idealistic “renaissance of good intentions” might succeed.