PART IV RED SCARE POLITICS IN GEORGIA

Transcription

1 PART IV RED SCARE POLITICS IN GEORGIA

2 214 McCarthy's Americans The Deep South in the first half of the twentieth century constituted the core of the Solid South, a region noted for its dominance by the Democratic party, its commitment to white supremacy, and its abiding poverty. Progressive strains could take hold in the South, but for the most part the local white oligarchies which exercised power cleaved to conservative political and social ideologies designed to protect their status and interests. Inheriting a sectional identity shaped by slavery and the traumas of Civil War and Reconstruction, the guardians of the Solid South characteristically combined a suspicion of outside influences with a veneration for local traditions. Such a mentality militated against economic growth or indeed change of any kind. The parochial elites of the South, intent on the preservation of racial and economic privilege, presided over a traditionalist political culture in which radicalism seemed indistinguishable from subversion. From the Russian Revolution onward every labour organizer or civil libertarian in the Deep South risked being labelled a red, an alien 'other' to whom the normal constitutional protections need not apply. The South has often been neglected as a source of McCarthyite politics, although contemporary scholars have begun to appreciate its significance. 1 Yet for the duration of the Solid South the resort to red scare politics remained limited. While a red scare was scorching parts of the Midwest in the late 1930s, and while redhunting committees were on the loose on the West Coast in the late 1940s, the South remained relatively unmoved by the prospect of Communist subversion. Even as late as 1955 Nathan Glazer and Seymour Martin Lipset concluded from a poll analysis that the South was 'the most anti-mccarthy section in the country'. Although the political order had long denied legitimacy to Communists and other radicals, it was not until the Solid South was crumbling that a full-scale anticommunist crusade was launched in the region. The old political order, sometimes known as the 'classic' period of southern politics, was characterized by a one-party political system and by the disfranchisement of virtually all African Americans and of many poor whites. Power had come to rest with propertied local interests - plantation owners and farmers, town bankers and merchants, county lawyers and editors, landlords and low-wage industrialists - who could often afford to ignore the

3 Red Scare Politics in Georgia 215 claims of the 'have nots' as they cultivated their own fortunes. The Democratic party was both their vehicle and their symbol, the political manifestation of southern rights. Their uniform and passionate attachment to the party provided southern leaders with a first line of defence against unwelcome national pressures, but also meant that within each state, politics became an illdefined jumble of factions. General elections were meaningless and the key elections were Democratic primaries, a feature which encouraged folksy campaigns and demagogic candidates. The absence of ideological cleavages between rival Democrats put a premium on personality, and while the electorate was narrow it did contain many small farmers and other low-income whites, whose support had to be recruited without threatening the local elites. Whipping-boys had their value to such campaigning politicos, whether Washington bureaucrats, interfering Yankees, uppity blacks - or Communists. The somewhat insular ruling classes of the Deep South saw little need for a sustained red scare, but sighting the occasional Communist subversive helped them to sustain their political order. The CP's conspicuous championing of the cause of African Americans after 1928 reinforced the anticommunism of the white supremacists.2 The state of Georgia typified politics in the Deep South. Its substantial population of African Americans ( 42 per cent in 1920 and 31 per cent in 1950) were effectively excluded from political life, even after the Supreme Court had ruled against the all-white primary in 1944, Georgia perpetuating their debarment by use of a literacy test. The state was overwhelmingly rural, nearly twothirds of the population living in rural areas in 1940, and, as elsewhere in the South, its politics were dominated by the economic elites of its villages and small towns. A counterpoint - and irritant - to rural Georgia was the burgeoning city of Atlanta, a somewhat worldly community with its new-found businesses, civic groups, educational institutions, rather grand newspapers, trade unions, clusters of white liberals and even African American voters. The state's many farmers and textile mill owners wanted to keep wages low, and Georgia's Democrats continued to peddle brands of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian philosophy, with their emphasis on limited government. In some respects the political culture of Georgia seemed not too distant from that of the Jacksonian era, as local Democratic chieftains staked out their

4 216 McCarthy's Americans pos1ttons in their own crudely hewn newspapers, and as a countrified style of politics - folksy, individualistic, racist and anti-urban - drowned out the emerging metropolitan culture of Atlanta. The hold of local elites was reinforced by Georgia's celebrated county-unit system, a unique electoral arrangement that gave the rural counties an excessive influence in primary elections and which exacerbated rural-urban tensions. And quite apart from the county-unit system, malapportionment magnified the strength of rural areas in statewide elections.3 The loosely knit Democratic party tended to polarize into two rival factions in statewide campaigns. The dominant faction for many years was led by Eugene Talmadge, governor in the mid- 1930s and early 1940s, the so-called 'Wild Man from Sugar Creek', who combined an identification with plain folks with a highly conservative political philosophy. A powerful stump speaker, he was able to harness the class and racial fears of his small-town and farming constituents. His anti-labour and antigovernment views also captivated the many businessmen who helped to finance him. Resisting the Talmadge phenomenon were ill-organized and somewhat more liberal (though not integrationist) elements which tended to be associated with urban and with northern Georgia.4 Georgia's traditions meant that Ku Klux Klansmen were more likely to be found within its borders than Communists. This was one reason for the almost casual approach to domestic communism which characterized much of the state's history. Anticommunist measures could be adopted with little controversy and little publicity because no one - or almost no one - in the state was threatened by them. Redbaiting tactics were sometimes deployed in election campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s against liberal candidates, but full-scale red scares did not ensue. The one-party system meant that the Communist issue was not used systematically as a party weapon, as in Michigan, and it took pressure from outside the state to intensify the anticommunist cause. Loyalty oaths were adopted in 1935 and 1949, but they were prompted more by examples set in other parts of the Union than by any fear of disloyalty in Georgia. It was not until 1953 that Georgia politicians seriously discussed a communist-control programme, and not until the second half of that decade that red scare politics were fully embraced. This was the work of political

5 Red Scare Politics in Georgia 217 elites, less subject to populist pressures than were the governing authorities in Massachusetts, but prepared to use populist rhetoric to mobilize support for a traditional regime. As the anticommunist persuasion was fading in other parts of the union, in Georgia it seemed to be gaining momentum. It remained strong into the 1960s, although by then it had assumed some unexpected forms. Georgia had her own distinctive contribution to make to the course of anticommunist politics in the United States. In other parts of the union red scares could be fuelled by such phenomena as class antagonisms, religious ideology and party politics; in Georgia, as elsewhere in the Deep South, race was the underlying issue.