Liberalism in the South
Calhoun, Arthur W.
"Liberalism" in the South An Educator Says That Area Has Been Maligned By Arthur W. Calhoun MeRE liberalism is a tainted asset, utVsiqce tha editor ia interested in tha question ef southern...
...Indeed the most impressive general willingness to be confronted with challenging facts and opinions on momentous issues that I have found anywhere was among the bourgeoisie of a southern industrial city in one of the allegedly'' most backward of southern states...
...Some of them reported, also, that a professor that had gone to the University of Louisiana wrote back that teaching there seemed just like teaching at the University of Wisconsin...
...For that matter, my southern students offered no objection to the idea that • so-called race question is just a disguis...
...Of course," said the president...
...They found their own lives enlarged, and sometimes they manifested real enthusiasm...
...In one state his team-mate in a rally was a Negro professor in a conservative chinch college...
...Moreover when I used to do a little public lecturing in southern eitiea I found .hat by passing to the reporter a carbon copy of what I intended to say, I could get as much as a column into the most conservative of papers without the change o. s syllable...
...Ernest A. I loot on...
...Negro students, men and women, were received on a basis of equality, addressed as - matter of course as "Mr...
...He is the anther alto of The Serial (V adverse and several ether books...
...After the meeting in the church parlors, they served refreshments and the women of the two churches ate and iliank together like sisters in Christ...
...On at least one occasion a social "time was had," with refreshment It would have been easy for the press to create a firstclass scandal, hut no attention was paid to the matter...
...but so they are everywhere else...
...Indeed I myself used it as a text in one southern summer school and saw no sign whatever of any unwillingness to face the facts and their implication...
...so as I go around through the South I am building up sentiment to insist that there be no color line at the convention...
...There is also a deep current of liberalism present in the most unlikely of southern small towns, a willingness to show friendliness to teachers unJer Are for irregularities of opinion, even though the kindly citizens do not understand the issue and wo ild not sympathize, perhaps, with the issue itself if they did understand it- Small town churches will listen without intolerance to sweeping presentations of social issues on a local or a world scale...
...Instead, as cesses only, of gents...
...CaUsoun is now Dean at Sterling College in Kansas...
...N What profits it to contemplate What might have been our present state Had women run the world's affaire And shouldered all its tscsl cares...
...The episode was one aa if made to order for the usual rabble-rousing gang, hut the local Hearst paper passed it up...
...At the present moment, Aubrey Williams, the son of an Alabama blacksmith, is covering the South for the organization work of the Farmers' Union...
...Things in the South are desperately bad...
...The only state where a man was elected to the United States Senate after a campaign in which he used the slogan "Wilson in Atlanta prison and Debs in the White House" was a poll-tax state—Georgia, where Tom Watson was elected in precisely that mood...
...About the same time, on a bus ride through the South, I encountered one of my former students, a South Carolina girl, who was working up delegations for the Student Volunteer convei.tion in Indianapolis...
...But let us begin with a hot spot—poll-tax restriction on suffrage—which has been a supposed incubus from away back...
...Twenty-five years ago, when I published my Social Hittory of th« American Family, which deals ruthlessly with the southern tradition and exposes relentlessly she racial involvements, I supposed that the hook would be bitterly attacked in the South...
...That very summer, in a small rural village in South Carolina, the ladies of the principal white church had entertained the women from a Negro church...
...In one of these, I tried to shunt the course in southern history to another instructor on the ground that it was hardly appropriate for a northerner to teach that course, but the dean was peremptory, "You will teach it...
...Southern liberals themselves are chagrined at the dearth of liberalism ia their area, and when a person that knows other sections tells them that liberalism ia no more abundant elsewhere they do not believe him, any more than does a New York liberal when told that the southern situation is basically aa sound as the situation anywhere else...
...White college students were definitely stimulated...
...His ffertsf Matty ml the Ameericmm Massif* is s classic ia American Sociology...
...I am reminded, also, of an interview thai occurred between * southern college professor and his president, who was somewhat disturbed over possible radicalism of the teacher...
...If, however, it is a matter of the things that other people have to use in order to live, we have a quite different question...
...or "Miss," elected to office, designated to report hack from group meetings...
...When they get to know who each other are, things will begin to hum, and observant folks will realize that the habit of blazoning to the world all the nasty phases of southern life is just psrt ef the •discrimination the South has suffered for the last hundred years...
...I myself opened up the matter with the appropriate official in Columbia, S.C., a southern lady of the traditional type externally, but very enthusiastic over the idee of this samartututy for Negroes and very sun that we mast Aad the best candidates for the chance...
...I may even say that during the thirties, when I used to go year by year from South Carolina to teach in the School for Workers at the University of Wisconsin, I told the good people in Madison that I felt no difference between South Carolina and Wisconsin...
...EvEN on the race question, the situation is much better than most northern critics realize...
...IhIRTY-FIVE YEARS ago I began teaching American history in the South, and off and on I taught it in one high school, two state colleges, and two church colleges...
...asked the president...
...But thia yon must admit is true: They mostly run the men who do —Jtichord Armotir...
...And the interview was over, though the institution was rated as one of the most conservative in the South...
...What difference to you and me With women ruling land aad sea...
...Moreover, when ouring the school a matter same to the fore that might easily have Jisruptec the whole program, no Atlanta paper gave more than aa Inch...
...I mu:;t not write a book, but I assert without mental reservation that there is no better place in the country for an up-to-date sociologist to work than in the Lower South...
...The state that has recently hit the hardest blow at political tradition is the "worst" poll-tax state—South Carolina, which has just replaced Cotton Ed by Olin Johnson, who, whatever his limitations, showed what a real labor governor can do in the way of using the power of a state to the advantage of striking unionists, even appointing the president of the State Federation of Labor to the office of State Commissioner of Labor...
...When the Farmers' Union has brought its work to a head, there is going to be a new situation in the rural South, and the same will be true in industrial centers under the CIO...
...Liberalism" in the South An Educator Says That Area Has Been Maligned By Arthur W. Calhoun MeRE liberalism is a tainted asset, utVsiqce tha editor ia interested in tha question ef southern liberalism (if any) I am moved to remark that after upwards of thirty Ave yean in the teaching profession, about half the time in the South, I am aa sure as I am of anything that the South does not differ significantly from the rest of the country in the proportion of liberalism, whatever that may be worth...
...Any forthright teacher will strike snags in any section, but there haa been nothing peculiar about my southern experiences...
...In South Carolina^ in the thirties, the student Interracial Conference abolished the color line, holding sessions in leading white churches, with no segregation whatever...
...MESS If women had ran the affairs of the world for the past few thousands of years, they could hardly have made a worse moss of it than men have.— Dr...
...I am unable to do justice to the question of liberal journalism, but I shotftd like to remark most emphatically that in the thirties the State, published in Columbia, g. C, was the best liberal daily in the United States, absolutely fair on such questions aa Ruasia, and open to the most challenging articles on the most ticklish questions then plaguing the American mind...
...Harvard anthropologist, quoted in a news item...
...For instance, during the depression, when unemployed Negro teachers were to be sent to summer school to lesrn how to conduct workers' classes, there was full co-operation from the relief administrations of all the southern states, even though it meant paying Negro teachers just as whites were paid, including their travel expenses...
...1 am preparidjBPfsHert, indeed, that all told 1 have found as much academic freedom in the South as in the rest of the country...
...Now of course it is not a mark of liberalism to restrict the suffrage, nevertheless:— The only state where the Socialist Party ever ran second in a presidential election was a poll-taut state, Florida, where in 1912 Debs ran ahead of both Taft and Roosevelt...
...Moreover when the president of one denominational college was asked whether they would he hosts to the next meeting, with no color line even in eating, he replied, "The college has ne objection, but I think this community is not ready yet...
...That depends," was the answer...
...The world, I think, would he a mess About the same, aa mora nor less...
...It was not long, however, before •one southern state college had worn out a set of the volumes and was on its second set, and never have I heard from any quarter in the South a breath of objection to' the work or its conclusions...
...Moreover neither on sectional issues nor on race issues did I ever experience any appreciable difficulty in the South, though I did have trouble in certain other matters just as in other sections of the country...
...Do you think it is necessary to abolish private property...
...Personally I have more feeling of getting something across when I teach there than I do in New England, or the Middle Atlantic States, or in he Middle West Moreover the work of Lillian Smith is showing liberal Southerners that they are numerous and competent Pretty soon they won't be afraid to open up lest someone squelch them...
...The state that for the longest period kept a strong labor representative in Congress was a poll-tax state— Alabama, from which George Huddleston went continuously to Congress for a whole generation—a man of such temper as to declare on the floor of the house in the conscription debate in World War I, "If we have to have a war, why not let the people that own the United States fight for it...
...With lady kings aad presidents...
...I suppose any of us would be amazed to go into a building trade local in Mississippi with mixed membership and find a Negro in the chair...
...Even AFL unions in the South are sometimes sounder on race relations than northerners can imagine...
...In thinking of the whole question of academic freedom, J always revert to three summer quarters that I taught in the Alabama State College for Women, where I found the best academic spirit and atmosphere with the utmost of candor and integrity and freedom, certainly in no wise inferior to what I found at, say, Clark University or the University of Wisconsin...
...for the desire to exploit somebody...
...After teaching at many colleges and universities, including Hroohwood Labor College, Prof...
...Now you know," she said, "that Indianapolis is bad on the race question...
...Probably the only states where the highest Socialist candidates for state office got thirty per cent or more of the total vote were two poll-tax states, Florida and Mississippi in 1910 and 1911...
...And neither in that school or in any other did I ever And southern students unwilling to face up to the real significance of "The War Between the States" or to the actual forces at work...
...If it is a question of those things that a person needs to lead bia own life, the amount of private property ought to be greatly increased...
...Arthur W. Cslasan is a ifctls»rol«*cd educator and sociologist...
...He was honest, and his attitude was not unreasonable...
...For women may not run the place Ofacially, hi every ease...
Vol. 27 • November 1944 • No. 47
