STALKING THE SOUTHERN WORKING CLASS

...A longtime champion of conservation measures, a racial liberal during the days of "massive resistance," an intelligent foe of the oil and gas industry in a state where such a stance is often labeled traitorous, Eckhardt obtained 87 percent of the black vote in his 1960 Democratic primary race...

...As W. J. Cash put it in The Mind of the South, Long was "the first Southern demagogue largely to leave aside nigger baiting and address himself mainly to the irritations bred in the common white by his economic and social status...

...nature of Wallace's support, too, requires closer scrutiny than it is usually given...

...At least some blacks, however, are chary of alliances with whites, because they have too often brought minimal payoffs for blacks...

...This meant that a considerably smaller percentage of the white ballots went to Boggs, yet he received majority support in some of the most impoverished white precincts...

...In others, especially in the Deep South, these conflicts manifest themselves occasionally, though more often they remain latent as a result of the Bourbons' successful efforts to obscure class differences with racial ones...

...But he knows that the party of the Kennedys, of Johnson and Humphrey has in a faltering manner helped to bring about the racial changes he sees going on around him...

...Consider for example their partial support for Barbara Jordan, now a black state senator whose victory this spring in the Democratic primary virtually assures her a seat in Congress...

...Not only conservatives of Dixiecrat antecedents, but also populist poor whites, are likely to take such a course...

...These differences can be traced to the small percentage of voters among the less affluent people, who evidently feel much less compelled to cast their vote than does the rest of the population...

...In all three cities, the combination of lower-class whites and a strongly unified black vote was sometimes sufficient to elect a racial liberal, as in Hale Boggs's 1964 congressional race...

...The case of Bob Eckhardt, now a U.S...

...Even then, lower-income whites were less likely than upper-income whites to support the liberal in only one race out of five...

...But as Gordon Allport has pointed out in his comprehensive study of prejudice, not all hostility toward outgroups can be traced to deep-lying, irrational attitudes that are invulnerable to change.° Yet a popular portrait of the ordinary Southern white depicts him as the omnibigot: opposed to anything humane or decent, he is an "aginner," a one-gallus nincompoop with Snopesian sentiments who in another age would have rallied to a native Hitler and who does, in fact, support George Wallace, the nearest thing in our secular left-wing politics to the Antichrist...

...Are race Bourbon Democrats would defect to a mi-or class issues crucial to working-class nority right-wing party whose strength would whites...

...These two groups differ in almost every politically important respect—whether size, racial and class composition, or policy preferences...

...In all likelihood, the sophistication and energy of the black electorate throughout the South will soon enable progressive candidates of both races to win office in many electoral units even if they do not have the support of the majority of the white voters...

...former class enemies...

...598 CHANDLER DAVIDSON zens Councils, turned out to be supported primarily by the business and professional classes...

...What is he to do...

...Interpretations of this develop-the affluent whites who are the Republican ment, however different in other respects, de-mainstays outside the South, but also the pend upon a familiar stereotype of the white, middle- and lower-class whites who dislike lower-income Southerner...

...Many of the attitude studies on which it relied used faulty instruments...

...Wealthy economic conservatives region's major cities raises doubts about this would thus become the bedfellows of their stereotype...

...If economic issues are to overshadow racial ones, genuine radical alternatives must be offered by the Left...

...ANOTHER OFTEN IGNORED FACT is that many of those whites whose economic position makes them potential converts to racially progressive politics are not taking part in the electorate at all...

...According to the conventional interpretation of Southern politics in the 1960s, relying heavily upon the idea of working-class prejudice, racial reform in the old Confederacy was frustrated by the masses of lowerincome whites...

...Ralph Yarborough's pattern of support in Houston is even more clear-cut...

...Purged of eco-Both strategies are based on the view that nomic conservatives, the new Democratic the less affluent Southern white is the agoparty of the South, still a majority, would nized victim of cross pressures...

...Yarborough, the state's leading liberal politician in the 1960s, voted for every civil rights measure in the Senate during his tenure from 1957 to 1971...

...By generalizing from precinct figures to individual behavior one runs the risk of committing what sociologists call the "ecological fallacy...

...In a word, he is depraved, which is another way of saying he is a "redneck...

...The 7 Richard Hamilton, Class and Politics in the United States (New York: John Wiley & Sons, forthcoming...

...At best, it would simply bring the South into the post-New Deal era, from whose woes the rest of the country has long been trying to escape...

...T. Harry Williams, Long's biographer, places him within the tradition of egalitarian reform, and credits his "share the wealth" movement with forcing Roosevelt's New Deal to the Left...

...It should advocate the dismantling of the tax laws that fall so inequitably upon the low- and middle-income brackets...

...They gave him a sizable vote in this area in the November election, which was won by William Waller, white Democrat...

...In some recent Texas elections, as little as 15 percent of the adult population has provided an electoral majority for a gubernatorial candidate in the Democratic primaries...

...By 1936, the yearafter his assassination, when the struggle for succession was underway, the white turnout had risen to about 65 percent...

...Hamilton found that if nonvoters in the five Deep South states had gone to the polls in 1964 and voted their expressed preferences, Johnson rather than Goldwater would have carried their popular vote...

...representative, is also instructive...

...Successful coalitions therefore must attempt to achieve aims in the realm of housing, taxation, jobs, and education far bolder and more imaginative than were even dreamed of in the 1960s...

...But given the conservative cast of the present Southern electorate, it is unlikely that even a strongly progressive economic platform would insure success to many candidates...

...The moral of Louisiana," wrote Key, "may be that when leaders raise issues that concern the mass of people, the turnout will rise...

...Put succinctly, it should be the mirror opposite of the strategy of Nixon...

...The disfranchising laws and practices, some of which are still in effect today, account in part for the fact that in the 20th century the turnout of Southern voters in no presidential election has involved even half the adult population—in contrast to the latter half of the 19th century, when the turnout ranged between 50 and 75 percent of all qualified males...

...Sartre's insight into the prejudiced personality was brilliant...

...As a racist, the Southern common white cannot according to Sartre's dictum be a good husband or father...

...He has urgent economic needs, and he is aware of the national Democrats' somewhat more accommodating attitude toward him...

...Eckhardt is one of the most liberal members of Congress both on economic and racial matters, which is consistent with his earlier record in state politics...

...New York Times, January 2, 1972...

...The South is up for grabs in the 1970s...

...In all the New Orleans and Houston contests we analyzed in which economic and racial liberalism were espoused by the same candidate, lower-class whites gave more support to the racial liberal than did upper-class whites...

...In 1964, she got about 30 percent of the vote in the poorest white precincts, as opposed to only 18 percent in the wealthiest ones...

...The numerous studies of the "fascist mentality" and the "authoritarian personality" pointed to the marginal classes as the repository of all sorts of unhealthy psychological syndromes and spiritual maladies...

...4 An example of this kind of analysis is found in James Q. Wilson's "The Negro in Politics," inTalcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark, eds., The Negro American (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp...

...In the Democratic primaries of some of the Southern states there is a tradition of factional cleavages along class lines descending from Populism via the New Deal...

...2 In very few instances racially liberal or black candidates have succeeded in capturing a majority of the white votes, though they often did not need it in order to win...

...In a more optimistic era, progressives believed, on the contrary, that economic liberalism would carry the day...

...Both V. O. Key and more recently Richard Hamilton, in analyzing opinion survey data, have demonstrated that the 17-state Census South is as liberal on economic issues as the rest of the nation...

...Yarborough carried 89 percent of the black voters in Houston...

...The answer is implicit in what has already been written...

...It should demand strong, all-encompassing minimum wage laws, better working conditions, and decent-paying jobs for all who are willing to work...

...My analysis of 40 elections in these cities reveals that the pattern of support given to racially liberal or black candidates by various white economic classes has differed significantly in the various types of elections...

...3 Here Lipset argued that the allegedly greater prejudice of the working class and the poor significantly affected their political behavior...

...What difference will a realignment of either sort make, whether on racial grounds, as the Republicans and Wallaceites hope, or on economic grounds, as the Democrats envisage, if both parties continue to function primarily as bastions of privilege...

...It should stress the common economic interests of the majority of all Southerners...

...STALKING THE SOUTHERN WORKING CLASS Turn-of-the-century Bourbons must have understood this trend when they enacted the laws that discouraged not only blacks but also lower-income whites from voting...

...to The Dixiecrat movement, like Goldwater, received its strongest support from the South ern Bourbons...

...423-47...

...12 Yet, because a lower proportion of the less affluent people cast their votes, the Southern electorate as an aggregate is not only racially conservative, but also far more economically conservative than the Southern population as a whole...

...Those who are skeptical are invited to correspond with the author...

...In his recent lengthy review of the theory, Richard Hamilton has probably dealt it a fatal blow,7 and Robert Coles's important new studies of "middle Americans" also provide fresh ammunition for the theory's critics.$ Yet, one suspects, the practical-minded person will dismiss such controversies and point to what seems an incontrovertible fact: lower-income people support demagogues, especially in the South...

...White wood haulers, who were Ku Klux Klan sympathizers if not actually members of the Klan a few years ago, came out in numbers to support Mr...

...Voting data spanning a decade in three of the South's major cities—Houston, Atlanta, and New Orleans—support another interpretation...

...How account for the mass backing of George Wallace or the Dixiecrats or Huey Long, if not in terms of "rednecks...

...In such states as Tennessee and Texas, general elections and the Democratic primaries bring confrontations between racial and economic liberals on the one hand and racial and economic conservatives on the other...

...A case in point is the Huey Long phenomenon...

...The pattern was less clear when the racial liberal did not advocate economic liberalism —as in school board races, where economic matters were usually ignored...

...The two-partyism they envisage and left-wing Democrats...

...With Negroes as the national Democratic Party's base, Deep South whites—once third parties no longer seem plausible—should follow their opinion-molding classes into the Republican Party...

...13 11 Richard Hamilton, op...

...Evidence in support of the theory was found to be inconsistent or inconclusive...

...In 1965 he joined with five other Southern congressmen in support of the Voting Rights Act...

...One possible change would be the introduction into electoral politics of radical economic programs by progressive candidates—policies designed to begin fundamental shifts in the distribution of wealth, income, and resources...

...The Republican strategists think that his racism will win out...

...He also carried the low-income white precincts by a clear majority—while the wealthiest precincts gave him less than a third of their vote, and the precincts in Houston's ultrarich River Oaks subdivision gave him only about 10 percent...

...The image of the ordinary Southern white voters as rigidly racist is challenged by their behavior in Houston...

...9 And while Long's strongest support came from Louisiana's "little people," he was not a race-baiter...

...In 1962 and in 1964, she ran unsuccessfully for the Texas House of Representatives...

...At the time Long began his ascent to virtual dictatorial power in Louisiana, white turnout in senatorial races was around 35 percent...

...Embarked on by blacks and whites, such a venture could foster the interracial cooperation and respect that has so far not been possible in a segregated system...

...596 sometimes the poorer whites did, and in other cases there was no difference by class...

...Within the Texas Democratic party, for example, Ralph Yarborough typifies the liberal leader, John Connally the conservative...

...If he votes Democratic, he votes for still more racial change...

...While not ignoring the race issue, it should emphasize the extent to which racial oppression is perpetuated by economic oppression...

...This fact is clearly seen when we consider the demography of two very different kinds of population in the South: the voters and the nonvoters...

...The very epithet, so relished by commentators on Southern politics, has overtones of its linguistic cousin, "nigger...

...When the racially liberal candidate was also an economic liberal, lower-income whites were more likely to support him than were upper-income whites.' Yet in elections where economic issues were absent, class differences in the support for racial liberals were variable: sometimes the wealthier whites gave more backing to the racial liberals, 1 The following interpretation is based upon voting precinct returns rather than individuals' ballot behavior as the unit of analysis...

...In a famous passage he also denied that a man "may be a good father and a good husband, a conscientious citizen, highly cultivated, philanthropic, and in addi tion an anti-Semite...

...see also V. O. Key, Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961...

...Perhaps the most influential political work in this genre was an article by Seymour M. Lipset, first published in the 1950s, entitled "Working-Class Authoritarianism...

...8 See Robert Coles's ongoing study of "ordinary Americans," entitled Children in Crisis...

...A few years later, however, it returned to its previous low level...

...The black vote was sizable enough and sufficiently unified to provide the necessary majority when it was combined with a white liberal minority...

...This approach was popularized in Jean-Paul Sartre's influ 9 Seymour Martin Lipset, "Democracy and WorkingClass Authoritarianism," American Sociological Review, 24 (1959), pp...

...Nevertheless, the view seeing them as rigidly and totally racist is so widely shared—by Republicans, liberals, and, most important, by blacks—that it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy...

...9 T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969...

...In every election analyzed in Houston, lower-income whites have given disproportionate support to the racial liberal or black candidate whenever he also campaigned as an economic liberal...

...then consist primarily of the less affluent With 22 senators, 106 representatives, and whites and blacks, as it does in the rest of almost one-fourth of the votes in the elec-the country...

...CHANDLER DAVIDSON South believed that "in his attacks on American industry, consumer advocate Ralph Nader has done more good than harm...

...Is Barry Goldwater, who in 1964 was heavily supported by the Southern middle and upper classes, less demagogic than George Wallace...

...Miss Jordan was endorsed by Houston's white labor leaders and campaigned as an economic liberal, advocating a state minimum wage law, industrial safety measures, and civil rights reform...

...Its reactionary economic posi tion alienated the less affluent whites...

...A doubling or tripling of the Southern turnout would infuse the electorate with the previously disfranchised and with unrepresented blacks and lower-income whites...

...14 The Long case challenges the assumption that voter apathy among the lower classes is primarily the result of personality defects or cultural norms that remain unresponsive to changes in the political realm...

...6 Gordon Allport, The Nature of Prejudice (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1954...

...But the success of Goldwater and Wallace in the Deep South during the 1960s ushered in a season of despair, with the consequence that liberal and conservative strategists alike now are inclined to accept the view of the ordinary Southern white as irredeemably racist...

...There seems to be great potential in the consumer movement for providing progressive politicians with economic issues...

...12 Richard Hamilton, op...

...OF WHAT, THEN, should a progressive Southern strategy consist...

...A recent study of the 1968 elections, using an index of class that is probably more accurate than many others employed in interpreting survey results, revealed that outside the South the working class gave only one percentage point more support to Wallace than did the middle class...

...A friend of labor unions, small businessmen and small farmers, he was opposed CHANDLER DAVIDSON in his 1964 contest by Houstonian George Bush, a Goldwater Republican (and currently UN ambassador) who attacked his civil rights record...

...That year Boggs received 93 percent of the black vote in New Orleans...

...He is not capable of good citizenship, cultivation, or philanthropy...

...The region and its people deserve a better fate...

...However difficult it may be to bring about these two changes, it is plausible to think that, once 600 effected, they would mutually reenforce one another...

...2 Chandler Davidson, Biracial Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972...

...A Harris survey in early 1971 found that 83 percent of those expressing an opinion in the 14 V. 0. Key, Jr., Southern Politics (Alfred A. Knopf, 1949...

...be based on affluent whites...

...If he votes Republican, he votes against his pocketbook...

...There is no compelling reason, consequently, to suppose that race must always override economics among ordinary Southern whites...

...This brief upsurge was unparalleled throughout Southern states during that period...

...Sartre denied that we can "look upon persons and characters as mosaics in which each stone coexists with the others without that coexistence affecting the nature of the whole...

...The second possibility of change, therefore, concerns the size of the electorate...

...There are reasons to believe that the data under discussion allow for such a generaIization...

...This, I contend, is a serious mistake...

...KEVIN B. PHILLIPS, 1969...

...Several studies have shown that much the same voting pattern occurs in other areas of the South, even during periods of intense racial polarization...

...Although unable to obtain a majority of the white vote in either election, she nonetheless received about twice the percentage of votes in the low-income white precincts that she received in the most affluent ones...

...Again, the evidence is more complex than the question suggests...

...Is it accurate to put Huey Long in the same category with Wallace...

...But a study of vot-the racial policies of the national Democratic ing patterns I have carried out in three of the party...

...Of the three cities, Houston and New Orleans provided the more dramatic illustrations of this voting pattern...

...Evers during the gubernatorial campaign...

...From its very inception, the theory of working-class authoritarianism has been under attack...

...Yet until the Democratic party is willing to propose measures for redistributing the nation's resources so as to have an impact on ordinary people, the advent of the liberal version of a two-party South, even if possible, would hardly have the hoped-for consequences...

...One of the major political movements said by Lipset to rest on the working class, the white Citi 5 The English version was published as AntiSemite and Jew (New York: Schocken Books, 1948...

...In the low-income white precincts, he garnered 64 percent of the vote, compared with 29 percent in the wealthiest areas...

...Indeed, John F. Kennedy made his fateful .trip to Texas in 1963 in order to try to smooth over the rift between the two men and to reconcile the factions they represented...

...1 W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941...

...In essence, a progressive Southern strategy requires coalition politics involving less affluent whites and blacks...

...Their party would contain weakening...

...Changes of two sorts could conceivably destroy the Bourbon Democrats' hegemony in the South—and at the same time stave off "the emerging Republican majority" or a permanent Wallaceite minority playing a spoiler role...

...Liberals traditionally have hoped that the Which version is more plausible...

...13 Richard Hamilton, op...

...One personal experience of a Negro standing at your side in a strike instead of scabbing on you," Harvey Swados has written, "is worth a thousand Hollywood movies on the charm of Negro children and the rectitude of 'tolerance.'" The experience of Charles Evers, who has attempted to weld an alliance between impoverished white wood haulers and blacks seems to bear this out...

...482-502...

...As my voting analyses have shown, even among the voting population in some Southern cities, lower-income whites and blacks will give majorities to racially liberal candidates who are also outspoken advocates of economic reform...

...The middle-class, better-educated whites often were portrayed in such interpretations as the overt or covert allies of blacks in the struggle for racial justice .4 Social science contributed to this stereotype by linking prejudice to a personality syndrome, a more or less permanent psychological structure that dictates hostile behavior toward "outgroups...

...It also raises the question of what the Southern voter turnout would be like if radical economic alternatives were seriously proposed...

...ential Relexions sur la Question Juive, published in 1946 and later widely read in translation...

...There, too, lower-class whites were more likely to support racial liberals than were upper-class whites whenever the racial liberals were also economic liberals...

...He is caught in a bind...

...Yet the same pattern, if less distinctly, also emerged in Atlanta...

...would depend not upon economic but on The South's allegiance to one-partyism is racial cleavages...

...This stereotype can be traced to longstanding class prejudices that received the imprimatur of liberal social-scientific opinion during and after World War II...

...His Republican opponent, riding on Goldwater's coattails, received 45 percent of the total New Orleans vote...

...toral college, the region's strategic signifi-The Republicans, from Goldwater to cance in national politics has stirred the Kevin Phillips and Nixon, see the South difimagination of both right-wing Republicans ferently...

...One need not deny that racial STALKING THE SOUTHERN WORKING CLASS 597 prejudice exists, but must deny that it necessarily predominates in the political decisions of less affluent whites...