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20 DRAWINGS BY GETZ _democtacy. for. white and_Negro, bi- racial unions, high minimum wages for both races, would.create a producing -and consuming South that would im- measurably improve his own lot. Every _/experience of his life, unemotionally “interpreted; and particularly his con- tacts ‘with Negroes, tends to teach him this. But his logic usually can be swept “away by an opposition which evokes the race fears injected and reinjected since childhood. | First threat. The manner in which this psychological headlock has kept the common people of the South from sustained political action toward pro- gressive ends finds classic illustration in the fate of the Populist movement which swept the South in the 1890's. The Populist program (working in- alliance with Western farmers in the new People’s Party) struck out for broad social and economic reforms, such as federal crop warehouses and federal loans ‘to free farmers from the exhausting mortgage rates of private bankers. For almost a decade this ap- peal drew Southern whites in great numbers from reactionary Democratic state machines. Even many planter spokesmen in Congress were forced for a time to liberalize their oratory and endorse Populist slogans. If the move- ment had held together, it would in- evitably have created the political meta- morphosis which the South has been so long awaiting. It might have created the most progressive statesmanship in ? America. The South is a region of ob- solescent economic methods -and of poor people, Certainly a leadership which truly ‘reflected the needs of the great majority of Southerners would be at the opposite pole’ from the bitter, die-hard reaction which is the creed of Southern politicians today. But feudalism has a dynamic capac- ity to perpetuate itself and to smother challenge. It did not take the control- ling group long to find ways to get at ' the Populist movement with the race legend—the legend by which a genera- tion earlier they had induced ‘poor whites to fight four yeats for the per- petuation of slavery. The poor white farmers were told that a party which identified itself with and endorsed the needs of Negro farmers as indivisible from the needs of white farmers, would lift the Negro ultimately to political dominance and result in the mongtelization of the Southern white race. 7 Leaders of the white farmers who had begun their careers as impressive figures and with a genuine understand- ing of the dedication to Populist princi- ples, began to alter subtly with the passing of time. Almost to the last man, their emphasis changed from progres- sive economic objectives to a malignant agitation of “the nigger issue” as a means of holding the political. offices to which they had grown accustomed. Many of the old Populist leaders at the close of their careers were stalwarts of the Democratic machines they had once bucked. The careers of Ben Tillman of South Carolina, Tom Watson in Georgia, J. K. Vardaman in Missis- sippi followed this course. Senator “Bilbo, who started his career as Varda- man’s protégé, followed this identical pattern in his own day. Second threat. The tealities of world developments of the past 15 years have brought many stimulating influences into the South and into the thinking of many Southerners. Politi- cal reactionaries are now faced with in- creasing popular lethargy about the face question—even sympathy for: ex- tending citizenship to Negroes. This growing maturity on the part of many ~NEW REPUBLIC Southerners has combined: with recent far-reaching Supreme Court decisions to present entrenched political and financial groups with a challenge as. serious as—and ultimately far more setious than—the Populist movement. The depression and the war boom brought federal agencies and govern- ment money into the South, reaching 2 flood tide during the war. This loos- ened the old economic pattern in which a small group had no money, and a large group sat by eager to work for $1.25 a day. The war also carried mil- lions of Southerners, white and black, to other parts of the country and the world, to return with a broadened out- look. Hundreds of Northern factoriesbave... _- moved southward—most of them. pri- marily to exploit the surviving feudal- _istic advantages of the region—but or- ganizets of a vigorous union move- ment, often bi-tacial in principle, fol- lowed in their path. Supreme Court decisions, fair-employment directives, similar documents of page-one impor- tance even in the South, -have carried some fundamental facts and ideas about race relations even into the remotest counties. Here and there college teachers, church women, even an occasional lawyer or businessman, discovered and absorbed the basic ideas of modern ethnology widely disseminated in war- time to counter Hitler’s race propa- ganda. On the other side of the race line, the activities of the NAACP and the Negro press poured an unending stream of information through the post office from which Negro lawyers, teachers, businessmen and _ students built up a psychology of careful but inexorable effort through federal courts. ; During the general turmoil of the war years, there was a sharp retro- ‘gression in race outlook among the whites. Propaganda of extreme vitious- ness swept the region; race-riot ru- mors flared occasionally in every big city;.and many well meaning whites were stampeded back to racism. But many others—a smaller group—were Only confirmed in their growing racial understanding by the senselessness and recast a wee eR TH nr PTE TL SOREN AIOE OIE PA rear erygnertencus