The White Worker in the South

...If the Little Man is grateful to anyone for what he has, it is to God...

...From them he has inherited insecurity, caution, and a sharp suspicion of change...

...The abandoned farm shacks that dot Southern fields hearken back to the days when a man worked for himself, and personally guarded his land from real and imagined enemies—days now forever gone...

...You just live and die, seems like...

...In an encounter of disciplined forces, the ranks of Southern laborers have a potential advantage over the mass of the harried individuals that American citizens largely have become...

...One of the Southerner's most painful concerns is his distance from his kids...

...With such developments come more status and greater self-consciousness...

...He has traded his Klan membership for a country-club card...

...This power is real, though the history of its exercise is a tale of much confusion, occasional heroism, and rare success...

...It is likely that his childhood was full of dreams of becoming even a "mere" clerk—for a clerk didn't work with his hands, have to sweat or get old before his years...

...They cheer with instant recognition when country singer Merle Haggard (a man who's done prison time and knows their depths), swings into his Working Man Blues...

...That faith, for which those who are more sophisticated tend to pity him, is the basis of his class consciousness...

...His work is financially rewarding as never before...

...I reckon I'll go down [into the mines] a mite sooner than I reckoned," the boy said...

...About onefifth of our original area of tillable land has been ruined for further cultivation, and twothirds of what remains is badly damaged, and one reason is that much of the land has been in the hands of inept cultivators...

...Perhaps nothing more significant can be said...

...His own children will attend college, come hell or famine...

...Yet the advice and experience of his elders are not lost on him...

...Out-of-use because of a new self-consciousness, the one-liners are losing shock value and credibility...

...And if the Southern worker is merely tolerating the acceptance of blacks into white schools, white trades and white apprenticeJOHN FILIATREAU ships, it is upon his children that the real educational changes are being worked...

...If the new Southerners' ambitions are as commercial as those of their fathers, and their insecurities as deep, their philosophy is perceptably less cruel...

...At present, it is fighting its battles close to home, while the national labor establishment concerns itself with comparatively far-flung liberal causes, ranging from the defeats of reactionary Supreme Court judges to the battle over National Health Insurance...

...The spirit of fierce Southern independence (mythical or not), together with the suspicion of Northern labor models, created a work force not inclined to organize...

...News stories about minor ghetto uprisings are no longer given page-one spreads...

...Balzac wrote that "insignificant folk cannot be crushed...

...For the Little Man's God is real, is there, sustaining him, privy to his women problems, his whiskey problems, his work problems, his fears for his family...

...Any Northern jackal who smirks at the sticker's sentiment is missing out on a good thing...

...The younger Southerner, bombarded from the cradle with the racial conflict's complexities, is more pragmatic than his elders, if no happier: "Well, it's coming and there's nothing we can do but put up with it...

...I done come home," he said, surrounded by a ghost town of corrugated-iron shacks...

...Boys from Tennessee, the "Volunteer State," enlist in the services in disproportionate numbers...

...His parents probably nodded approval when Mississippi's Governor Ross Barnett said, "If we start out with the self-evident proposition that the whites and colored are different, we will not experience any difficulty in reaching the conclusion that they are not and never can be equal...

...And the Depression's demands on his father's creativity have seen to it that he can repair his own automobile, put up his own gutters, install his own furnace...

...The South marshaled to the defense of Lt...

...For all his long struggle to subdue a vast and unkind continent, he has become a better and happier man...

...It is hardly surprising, then, that for most of the present century the worker of the South has remained in a bygone time, jailed in a regional mythology so potent that he continues to believe in it...

...The identification of organized labor with the Left was another retarding factor...

...He may have earned more in his short working life than his father did in half a lifetime...

...He travels more than any Southerner in the past, and consequently has a less virulent scorn for "Northern ways...

...We don't smoke marijuana in Muskogee/We don't get our kicks from LSD/We still wave Old Glory down at the courthouse...

...The fabled workingman of the American South—the "little man" flattered and courted by politicians, the "loyal American" who dreams of becoming, by the sweat of his brow and God's good will, "almost as good as anybody else"—owes more of his identity than any other American to what A. M. Schlesinger, Sr., has called the myth of "long tutelage to the soil...

...In working in Kentucky as a journalist, I have noticed at least one significant change in the racial atmosphere...

...Ain't much else to do, considering I ain't got enough education to get a city job...

...His pride in his half-acre tract rivals his father's in a healthy corn crop...

...Perhaps he has heard something like the words of my grandfather: "Life's a pretty poor game for people like your father and me...

...Southerners insist that the Vietnam war is more theirs than anybody else's...

...Ain't nothing much in it...

...that the miners held out as long as they did was a tribute to their determination...

...The most dramatic difference between the Southern worker and his counterparts elsewhere is his determination to cling to his roots, his loyalties...

...Historically, the economic systems of the South have been ridiculously disbalanced...

...Southern labor must come to grips with a new industrial society—and it has a ready working model for organization in the history of civil rights struggles...

...He is the 19th-century man whose devotion to his land magically results in courage, creativity, and resourcefulness— a man who can repair a tractor with a rubber band and a piece of baling twine...

...He has more leisure than his predecessors, and he can relax better than they could when away from work...

...The whole business just takes a little getting used to...

...And I guess I'll get killed down there too, 'less I'm lucky enough to get my back broke or something, and collect disability...

...Sometimes he can afford a suburban home, a new or almost-new automobile...

...The free fighters are passing...

...He is grateful for employment, cautious in his dealings with bosses, and inclined to be loyal even when it does not serve his interests...

...Workers with the greatest need to organize—miners and farm laborers— were often so completely at the mercy of their employers that organization had for them the visceral appeal of suicide...

...God, "the original segregationist," had willed it so...

...History is often confused with such cherished sentimental images...

...The new Southern worker is a product of his parents' experiences...

...But if you ever do get anything, you hold onto it—because somebody'll sure as hell be after it...

...Their attempts to adapt to a new affluence are somewhat blocked by the hypnotizing factor such affluence brings with it...

...He watches uncomprehendingly as the stock quotations in the Sunday paper go up and down, vaguely suspicious that the figures could spell doom around the next corner...

...they remain, for the most part, a mass of private consumers...

...the workers of the South are leaving their country roots behind and moving to urban centers...

...The great civil rights "mess," which made his parents grow livid with indignation, has made him merely tired of all the uproar...

...The proverbs that used to make up the Segregationist Gospel have been muted...

...That is good, and to be expected...

...Of one thing we can be confident: its direction will THE WHITE WORKER IN THE SOUTH depend on its perception of its economic advantage...

...As his level of education and economic freedom grow, the simplistic tradition and mythology that now largely motivate him will fade, to be replaced by complexities with which he has never before been forced to deal...

...But in the South, the rights of laborers to organize and strike are still in question...

...He has been profoundly influenced by the Great Depression, as recounted thousands of times by those who experienced it firsthand...

...From such fully developed myths as the one about the imaginary "black buck" who lusts after one's lily-white daughter, to the one about the black unwed mother who continues having children in order to get rich on child-support, to such automatic expressions as "sweating like a nigger on election day"— all are used less often, less comfortably...

...Southern labor has no history of effective organization...

...A man is not inclined to struggle against his bosses when the odds are so weighted against him— in a savage system where his food and lodging are predicated on the good will of an allpowerful planter, mine operator, or petty industrialist...

...and when he is no longer so sure where he is going, he may be plagued by the same paralysis that is familiar to our American society at large...

...The struggle for life has changed from a free fight to an encounter of disciplined forces, and the free fighters that are left are ground to pieces...

...The Southern laborer's greatest problem is that his "class-consciousness," founded on mythology and a simplistic appreciation of the economic world, is extremely manipulable...

...Southerners contribute a sizable part of the moral support for the "war effort," unaware or uncaring that they are being whipsawed on every hand by "down home" politicians who bring to their minds visions of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson...

...the monied upper caste has managed political domination...

...William Dean Howells The irony of the situation is well symbolized in the case of an elderly man and wife whom I discovered in an eastern Kentucky mining camp that had been completely abandoned for 25 years...

...And their cheers are no less enthusiastic about the flagwaving Okie from Muskogee...

...It is a further irony that the Southern "rustics," unified to a great degree by a common experience with the soil, now comprise what may become the only discrete class of industrial workers in America...

...Still they've never had it so good...

...The Southerner is rightly resentful of such movies as Joe and Easy Rider, which are nastily biased in viewpoint and given stellar notices by persons unfamiliar with the realities...

...Southern labor still has a '30s flavor, yet must deal with '70s complexities— for example, the necessity that plants locating in the South assume responsibilities relating to the environment...

...He rightly cringes under the pens of Northern writers who tour the South for 10 days and return home to write "definitive" books on its cruelties...

...just so long as they don't start moving into this neighborhood...

...He'd be sympathetic to the situation of a 15-year-old mountain boy, whose father was buried under a mountain in a Hyden, Kentucky, coal-mine explosion...

...The man explained that he had fled the miner's life some 40 years before, to work in an industrial city far North, but had returned to the camp after his retirement because he belonged there...

...Whether such economic gain will be converted into political action and whether such political action will bear any relation to that of the labor establishment—who knows...

...The most important factor in the Southern workers' failures to organize has been their lack of an economic power base...

...And he is better educated and informed than his father...

...He may still be a bit uncomfortable in the presence of even a lowly white-collar worker who makes half his salary...

...She pondered the proposition for a moment, then added doubtfully, "Much as we need the money...

...He values education above all else, and is trained to react to the words "college graduate" in the same way as to "man of means...

...The remarkable thing is not that the insignificant folk of the South have survived, but that we have survived them...

...He would THE WHITE WORKER IN THE SOUTH therefore understand the situation of a Louisville mother of ten, who was shopping for a home for her family after moving from Alabama...

...And when this infant development grows up to join in a balanced relationship with its older counterparts in other parts of the nation, American workers may get their first significant political shot in the arm in the last two generations...

...The unsuccessful strikes of Southern coal miners during the 1930s were hopeless from the beginning...

...Yet he has a "time lag" of some 40 years to work within, the history of American labor to consult—and a growing economic power base that promises to become firm enough to make certain that his political concerns will not be ignored...

...The racial attitudes of the new Southerner are not so different from those of his parents as an outsider might assume...

...Their migration, together with industry's eagerness to locate plants in Southern cities, is perhaps the most dramatic change taking place in today's labor world...

...To those who do not share this mythology, the Southerner's devotion to the land seems hopelessly anachronistic, especially when the South is regearing for an industrialized way of life...

...Nashville, Charleston, Houston, Huntsville, Louisville, and other Southern cities are enjoying boom-time commercial growth...

...Economic and political history meet in sheriffs and judges bought and sold like sacks of flour...

...The kinds of work Southerners traditionally engaged in—farming and small business—were not appropriate for organization...

...He is well-trained in the South's traditional fatalism...

...we can sure use the money...

...While as insecure as any American about the future, he is buoyed by a strong faith in the past...

...He will repeat his parents' tired old saws, but his emotional attachment to them is not as strong...

...Home is not what it used to be...

...it make significant political action possible for him and his fellows...

...they lie too flat beneath the foot...

...By trading his overalls for a blue collar, the Southern worker is buying into a new security...

...As they are quick to say, "We sure can use the money...

...He possesses a fierce independence, homely ingenuity, and an ability to work long hours in the sun's heat...

...Yet they are unified by a common past, a history of hardship, and a determination to preserve what they have attained...

...The new Grand 01' Opry House in Nashville (in $25 million Opryland) will be a monument to the Little Man, his faith and hard work...

...The direction in which Southern labor will move is a matter of mere speculation...

...His low- to moderate-priced home in a treeless suburb is, indeed, his mansion...

...These facile constructions, for years among the most successful modes of persuasion in the South, are losing their power...

...The urbanized Southerner doesn't fail to appreciate the material comforts available to him now...

...He grew up in a society that tends to equate advanced age with wisdom, and to demand reverence from its young...

...It is an American war, and Southerners draw on a long military tradition in saying, "Whether we like it or not, we're over there, and we've got to get the job done...

...His fear of financial disaster has probably made him into a model pragmatist...

...He bears a heavy burden of gratitude toward his elders, for having come through the lean years with such style...

...William Calley with all the fervor that might have been anticipated, and more—helping to move President Nixon to interfere in the Army's judicial process...

...On the bumper of his car is the sticker: "Our God Is Not Dead: Sorry About Yours...

...Many of the stubbornly anachronistic and defensive features of Southern culture are enforced by Northern pressures...

...Well it's a big job just getting by with nine kids and a wife/ But I've been a working man damn near all my life/And I'll keep working, long as my two hands are fit to use...

...Long, bitter (and successful) strikes by nonwhite workers in Memphis, Charleston, and Atlanta foretell the establishment of a new tradition of freedom for all workers in the South...

...We have paid a heavy price for our comfortable pastoral mythology...

...She told me, "I guess we've had more children than we could afford, but I wouldn't take a million dollars for any one of them...