The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics (2012)

In the South, race and class are everything, determinative, and have the half-life of uranium. Given that questions of race and class have shaped the past, present and future of the region, the most interesting aspects of this book is the undeveloped subtext—the legacy of slavery.  Christensen, a newspaper reporter, writes in a Dragnet manner and, to be fair, is not a historian and thus does not put the story of North Carolina politics into a fully developed temporal context. The author is a newspaper reporter who has a column in the Charlotte Observer and is a veteran observer of the political scene in the state and his task is to inform the reader of the modern—twentieth century—political history of his state.

Christensen makes a compelling case that North Carolina is a state caught between progressive ideas and traditional values. At this time, North Carolina seems to count as a border state, lodged between the Old South (to the South) and the New South (to the North). Although it is not on the Mason-Dixon line, over the past two decades, it seems to have joined the category occupied by Virginia and Maryland. As with these in-between states, “outsiders,” business interests, and other “new” industries, such as technology, have invaded North Carolina. Maryland and Virginia are outliers of the federal government and home to people, who come from all over the nation, to live and work in the northern-most suburbs. The result has been a slow sea change in their political and cultural make-up that have left these states, like North Carolina, divided between the old and the new.

While Virginia and Maryland accepted the newcomers passively, North Carolina actively courted them. In North Carolina, the changes have been forced by the modernization of the state through the famed Research Triangle between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and the arrival of the big banks in the city of Charlotte. The state is now split into factions—the more liberal university communities and the more conservative business interests and the outlying rural regions that are reactionary in their outlook. The state that unexpectedly went “blue” for a Black man, Barack Obama, in November 2008 also voted for a ban on gay marriage in May 2012.  Christensen’s book explains why the state should act in such contradictory ways.

Christensen sums up the contradictory nature of the state in his opening page of the book:

Politics was largely controlled by big business. The state lit the cigars for corporate executives but was hostile to organized labor; it generously spent money on roads and universities but was stingy when it came to the poor. State leaders sought a measure of fairness toward its black citizens, as long as it didn’t threaten the system of segregation. It was a business progressivism that was in tune with North Carolina’s growing urban middle class of lawyers, power-company executives, bankers, textile-plant owners, newspaper publishers and editors, and others.

On the surface, this description could be of many or any state with a substantial minority population, but most states don’t have the same cultural legacy that North Carolina does. For all its contrary aspects, for all its position as a border state, North Carolina was, is and will always be a Southern state burdened by the legacy of slavery.  The fact that the culture of slavery and its unsettling consequences should still be so powerful is rather curious.  If one compares crimes against humanity, it is customary for the succeeding generations to increasingly move beyond the sins of their grandparents and great-grandparents.  The young people in Germany are more than ready to vow “Never Again” and to move forward; they, after all, are not the ones who have to atone.

The famous book, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherliche is instructive in that the authors point out the Germany, as a collective society, had difficulty in mourning their loss (the Jews) and were living with melancholia. Many studies, such as that of Lawrence Rees, The Nazis: A Warning From History, the generation that had to come to terms with their crimes refused to do so.  Rees’s shocking book (made into a video) contains testimony of aging Nazis who are too old to prosecute and who were, therefore, willing to “confess” but not repent.  Without getting into the weeds of how to compare cultural crimes, it might be said that the South still has not come to terms with slavery.

But what is the cause of the prolonged melancholia—a psychological condition that has persisted like a cancerous disease for over one hundred and fifty years? What is the “loss” for which the region is unable to mourn? Is the “loss” the defeat of the Confederacy? Or is the “loss” of the feeling of Mastery that slaveholding—owing human beings—brings to the owners (even those who had no slaves)? Or is the “loss” the loss of honor and moral standing for clinging to slavery long after the rest of the civilized world had outlawed it? Or does the melancholia come from the humiliating combination of being marked as wrong, sinful and brought low to a state of abjection?  We can only conjecture at the reason for the South’s insistence that the local customs, however odious, must be maintained at any cost, but it is clear that what sets the region apart is its adherence to slavery and its inability to repudiate its past.

Part of the problem for the South is the consequences of slavery.  And those consequences—a century of segregation—happened not so long ago. Many people living in the South benefitted and benefit still from segregation.  Many people living in the South suffered and suffered still from segregation. Segregation has served the region quite well—if one is white. The result of the continuing benefits is a cultural defensiveness on the part of the whites, who evidence a resentment of “outsiders” who do not accept the unspoken rules of the game.  It is difficult to be condemned by history and to be looked upon with suspicion by the present and to find one’s culture to be out of step with the tide of history. Many Southern states stubbornly defend an indefensible past and stubbornly fight to maintain the traditions of separate and unequal.  But North Carolina splits the difference between an unpalatable past and an unknowable future—it will go along with inevitable change but not too fast.

Christensen outlines the tactics of North Carolina politicians who attempted to navigate the requirement to accept the inherent racism and acknowledge the strata of class in the state. The state began the modern era as a Democratic state.  Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, were few and far between.  In addition to being the party that led the federal government to victory in the Civil War and the party that abolished slavery, Republicans were associated with the decade of Reconstruction. Reconstruction, not to put too fine a point on it, was the Occupation of the South by the North. During this period, backed up by the occupation forces, freed African Americans were given economic and political opportunities and rights.

With hindsight, it seems astonishing that a recently subservient group should move so quickly to political activism, but this remarkable accomplishment got little credit from the outraged whites. By the end of the century, this brief period of relative equality came to an end and white supremacy pushed African Americans out of legislatures and out of the mainstream of public life. Christensen outlines in horrifying detail the long and bloody campaign of the Democrats to regain power through terror and intimidation. He provides a chilling poem of White Supremacy:

THE WHITES SHALL RULE.

The whites shall rule the land or die

The purpose grows in hearts of steel

With burning cheek and flashing eye

We wait what waiting may reveal.

But, come what may the whites must hold

What white men’s patriot valor bought;

Our grandsire’s ashes not yet cold, Hallow the soil for which they fought.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, whites were back in control and African-Americans began to experience life under the regressive laws of Jim Crow.  Christensen gives an account of the violent ouster of African Americans from power in the city of Wilmington—an event of which I was unaware.  Like Tulsa and Rosewood, Wilmington was a city where African-Americans prospered. But all that ended in the fall of 1898, like Tulsa and Rosewood, in the destruction of a Black community at the hands of white terrorists. As Christensen wrote, “Democrats engineered what must surely be one of the few coups d’etat in American history.”

He continued,

The forced exile of the Republican leaders was followed by a voluntary exodus of 2,100 black residents from Wilmington, including many members of the black middle class. Within two years, Wilmington was transformed from a city with a small black majority to a city with a slight white majority. Wilmington would never recover its position as North Carolina’s leading city.

The author noted that the entire campaign of terrorism was bankrolled by the business elite, who wanted to end, forever, the unlikely alliance of Republicans, African-Americans and the lower classes—the farmers and textile workers. By evoking race, Populism could be defeated.  The lower class whites were bought off by being given privileges that African Americans did not have—everything from voting to being allowed to ride in the front of the bus.  Or to put it another way, in order to privilege Whites, constitutional rights had to be taken away from Blacks. And after the campaign of domestic terror, the pre-war status quo was reasserted—African-Americans were inherently unequal and, if slavery were outlawed, then the Jim Crow laws would reify this presumed inequality.

Blacks were put back “in their place” all over the South. North Carolina was but one of many states that rejected federal rule and Reconstruction and any thoughts of racial equality.  In addition, the pattern of separating the lower classes from their natural economic allies, the African Americans was replicated in all Southern states. North Carolina was a fiercely anti-union state and its antagonism to unions was fueled by a natural antagonism to outside “agitators” who would try to change the culture.  Lower class mill workers would rather cleave to the upper classes who exploited them and be complicit in their own oppression because of their shared allegiance to white supremacy. In return for the workers’ willingness to be exploited, the businesses and industries did not hire their greatest competitors, the Blacks.

Having passed through North Carolina some years ago, I noted the presence of the linen industry, the furniture industry, liquor business, and the tobacco industry—long-time business powers in the state.  These industries are huge, providing the nation’s living room sofas, chairs and tables, the nation’s sheets and towels, and the nation’s oral addictions and yet the state was improvised.  On one level, the workers are paid such low wages that the state does not have much of a tax base; on the other level, these industries are enormously profitable and small North Carolina should be a very wealthy state.

Christensen discusses these dominating industries and their political power in the state but I wish he had solved the mystery that puzzled me—where do the tax dollars go?  This is a state that lacked basic fundamental safety conditions on the streets and highways—no reflective paint in the median strips, no reflective caps, and street lights were few and far between, making night driving an exercise in Russian roulette. One can only assume that for over a hundred years, generations of politicians have been paid off by the local businesses and that taxes must be abnormally low, rewarding the few at the expense of the many.

And here is why this book has resonance beyond North Carolina. What is interesting about this book is that it sets out the conditions for today’s politics and patterns that seem inexplicable—patterns that, the author suggests, have spread throughout the nation.  Much has been written about the “Southernization” of certain states and regions in America, most notably Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.  Sadly, starting with Nixon’s Southern Strategy, aka playing the race card, what has been exported has been largely negative—racism, classism, creationism, fundamentalism—none of which is in keeping with the modern world but are defiant survivals of a dead social system.

Without repeating the entire history of all the state’s governors, ably laid out by the author, it is clear that, from the beginning of the century, white supremacy ruled. White supremacy ruled without challenge until the Civil Rights era of the sixties and ended with the two rulings of the Supreme Courts in 1954 and 1955 and the two Civil Rights laws in 1964 and 1965.  Unlike other states that resisted the orders to integrate—Alabama and Virginia—North Carolina quietly complied. But the intervention of the federal government—again—“imposing” outside values and ideas upon a region that cherished its “ways” did not change the minds and hearts of the state.

The problem is that the South is a region of the nation that is often at odds with the Constitution and its ideals.  Off and on, the federal government has to assert itself in attempts to bring these states back into the Union, whether through warfare or legal actions. There was a Southern cultural refusal to accept the authority of the federal government. Ever since the defeat of the South and Reconstruction, the South has understandably never been favorable to Washington D.C. However, the South conveniently ignores the fact that the federal government provides funds and jobs for most of the states through military bases, such as the Naval base in Virginia, and other federal projects, such as the space programs in Florida and Texas.  North Carolina, Christensen stated twice, is “bristling” with military bases.

The problem is not how to escape the contradiction between being dependent upon federal largess and maintaining cultural customs but how to export the attitude of defiance and distrust of the “government” and how to maintain traditional “values” of racism, classism and homophobia. Enter Jesse Helms. Jesse Helms has long since gone to his maker and, upon his demise, cartoonists (who are artists) imagined him going (to his surprise) to Hell for his race-baiting attacks on the fine arts. But to the surprise of those of us in the art world, Helms had far more up his sleeve than the fight against art revealed. According the Christensen, Jesse Helms changed North Carolina from a Democratic state into a Republican state. As he wrote,

Helms became North Carolina’s most famous national political figure of the twentieth century. He helped transform the state into a Republican stronghold instrumental in the elevation of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, shifted the GOP to the political right, and contributed to the polarization of the nation’s politics.

The triumph of Jesse Helms and the Southern Strategy of White Supremacy rests upon the fact that in the South race trumps everything.  Race trumps class. Race trumps gender. Race trumps economic self-interest. Race trumps morality and ethics and honor.  Good and decent people are apparently willing to do anything to maintain the system of White Supremacy.  Christensen does not go into that much detail but he make it clear, from time to time, that enormous amounts of time and energy are spent maintaining a system that oppresses African Americans. But now that so many citizens of color have migrated out of the state, joining the other thousands from other Southern states, this time and energy are expended in maintaining a cultural supremacy of Traditional Values.

That said, it seems that Helms was—compared to the more courtly Sam Ervin—blatantly open about keeping Blacks out of power, assuring that the rights of women suppressed, and maintaining business as the state’s overlord.  The passage of the Civil Rights Act gave Helms an opening.  Christensen remarked, “Few people understood the power of the white political backlash better than Helms.”

  The author explains that the Southerners were conditional Democrats, that is, they would support the national party if, and only if, white supremacy could be continued without interference. After decades of lynchings and oppression and Jim Crow systems could no longer be allowed to continue, the agreement was broken and Dixie sprinted to the welcoming arms of the Republicans.