SOUTHERN LEADERSHIP
Immigrants either from the North or from abroad may be ignored as a
formative part of the South; but the Poor Whites are only a part of the
rank and file. There are many independent farmers, handicraftsmen, skilled
laborers, and small laborers, all parts of a great democracy; and one of
the causes of uplift is the coming of this democracy to a consciousness of
its own power. Nevertheless, in the South as elsewhere in the world, the
great affairs are carried on, the great decisions are made, by a
comparatively small number of persons; and in no part of the Union has a
select aristocracy such prestige and influence.
Before the war this leading element was very distinctly marked off,
because it was nearly restricted to slaveholders and their connections by
blood and marriage. Very few people, except in the mountain districts,
ever held important state or national office who did not come from the
slaveholding families, which never numbered more than three hundred
thousand; and half of those families owned less than five Negroes and
could hardly claim to belong to the ruling class. The slaveholding
aristocracy included nearly all of the professional and commercial men,
the ministers, the doctors, the college instructors, especially the
lawyers, from whom the ranks of public service were to a great degree
recruited.
These people were organized into a society of a kind unknown in the North
since colonial times. In any one state the well-to-do people, perhaps two
to five thousand in all, knew each other, recognized each other as
belonging to a kind of gentry, intermarried, furnished nearly all the
college and professional students, and were the dignitaries of their
localities. In organization, if not in opportunities or in the amenities
of life, they were very like the English county gentry of the period.
Those conditions are now much changed. In the first place, the old ruling
families have almost all lost their wealth and their interstate position.
Deference is still paid to them; a John Rutledge is always a John Rutledge
welcomed anywhere in South Carolina, and a Claibourne carries the dignity
of the family that furnished the first Governor of Mississippi; but it is
a mournful fact that hardly a large plantation in the South is now owned
by a descendant of the man who owned it in 1860. Some of the most
ambitious of the scions of these ancient houses, whose communities no
longer give them sufficient opportunities, have found their way to New
York and other Northern cities, and are there founding new families. Many
more are upbuilders of the Southern cities; some of them are again
becoming landed proprietors. Still the element dominant in society, in
business, and in administration, includes a large number of people who
have come up from below or have come in from without since the Civil War.
Distinctly above the traditional Poor White, though often confused with
him by outsiders, is the Southern white farmer. In ante-bellum days there
was in every Southern state, and particularly in the border states, a
large body of independent men, working their own land without slaves, with
the assistance of their sons--for white laborers for hire could not be
had--and often prosperous. They were on good terms with the planters, had
their share of the public honors, and probably furnished a considerable
part of the Southern Whig vote. Their descendants still persist, often in
debt, frequently unprogressive, but on the whole much resembling the
farmer class in the neighboring Northern states. The destruction of
slavery little disturbed the status of these men, and they are an
important element in the progress of the South.
The old leaders have lost preëminence, partly because the South now
requires additional kinds of leaders. In the modern Southern cities may be
found classes of wholesale jobbers, attorneys of great corporations,
national bank officers, manufacturers, agents of life insurance and
investment companies, engineers, and promoters, who were hardly known in
the old South. In the social world these people still have to take their
chance, for the foundation stones of society in every Southern state are
the descendants of the leaders of the old régime, including many people
whose former back-country farm with its half-dozen slaves has become
magnified into a tradition of an old plantation. As a Southern writer
says: "Legends had already begun to build themselves, as they will in a
community that entrusts its history to oral transmission. For instance,
the fortunes of many of our families before the war became enormous, in
our talk and in our beliefs."
Notwithstanding this presumptive right of the old families to figure in
modern society many are shut out by poverty and some by moral
disintegration. Of course in the South as elsewhere the newcomers have
more money and set a difficult standard of social expense; but, measured
by New York criterions, there are few wealthy people in the South. Leaving
out the Northern men who play at being Southern gentlemen it is doubtful
whether there are thirty millionaires in the whole Lower South; and it
must never be forgotten that nothing in the world is so democratic within
its narrow bounds as Southern society. The social leaders recognize on
equal terms other Southern high-class people, and also outsiders whom they
reckon as high class. There is a sharp difference between the poor farmer
and the well-to-do proprietor or the city magnate; but there is not
necessarily a social distinction between the family which has an income of
three thousand a year and the family which disposes of thirty thousand a
year.
Furthermore, between all the members of the white race there is an easier
relation than in the North; Pullman Car conductors are on easy and
respectful terms with lady passengers who frequently use their line, the
poorest White addresses the richest planter or most distinguished railroad
man with an assured sense of belonging to the same class; society is
distinctly more homogeneous than in the North. It is also more gracious.
What is more delightful than the high-bred Southern man and woman,
courteous, friendly, and interested in high things, bent on bringing to
bear all the resources of intellectual training, religion, and social life
for the welfare of the community? The high-class Southerner believes in
education; he has a high sense of public duty; he stands by his friends
like a rock; unfortunate is the Northerner who does not count among his
choicest possessions the friendship of Southern men and women!
In business the South is developing a body of modern go-ahead men who are
alive to the needs of improvement in business methods, who adopt the
latest machinery, seek to economize in processes, and have built up a
stable and remarkably well-knit commercial system. The South before the
war had many safe banks, and no state in the Union enjoyed a better
banking law than Louisiana. All that capital was swept away by the Civil
War, and for twenty years was not replaced, outside the cities; now little
banks are springing up at small railroad stations, and in remote little
county seats; and there is a concert and understanding between the country
and city bankers which is of great assistance to the material growth of
the South. The Southern business system calls for prudent and courageous
men, and there is no lack of good material.
In politics, however, a new type of leaders has in the last twenty years
sprung up as a result of the genius of Benjamin R. Tillman in discovering
that there are more voters of the lower class than of the upper, and that
he who can get the lower class to vote together may always be reëlected.
As a matter of fact Tillman comes of a respectable middle-class family;
but it is his part to show himself the coarsest and most vituperative of
Poor Whites. Such men as ex-Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, and Senator
Jeff Davis of Arkansas, are also evidences that the hold of the old type
of political leader is weakened. Some people say that the present system
of primary nominations is a sure way to bring mediocrity to the front.
On the other hand, the leaders of society and business and politics and
intellectual pursuits fit together much more closely than in the North. In
part this is the result of a social system in which people of various
types imbibe each other's views; in greater part it is due to the
influence of slavery, and the half century of contest over slavery, in
which the great property owners were also the heads of the state, the
pillars of the church, and the formers of opinion.
The problem of the leader in the South is also the problem of the led;
shall those who concentrate and shape public opinion, who carry on the
corporations, write the newspapers, teach the university students, decide
law cases, and preach the sermons, shall they also set forth a lofty
spirit? Will the mass, the voters, the possessors of the physical force of
the community, accept their decisions? In general, the tone of the leaders
in the South is sane and wholesome; commercial influences are less strong
on the press and on state and municipal governments than they are in the
North. There is at least a greater sentimental and abstract respect for
learning, a larger part of the community is in touch with and molded by
the churches.
The lower Whites, though manifestly advancing, are still on the average
far inferior to the similar class of white farmers of kindred English
stock in the North; and also to many of the foreigners that have come in
and settled the West. Education is going to help their children, but can
do little for the grown people who are now the source of political power
in the South; and there is a turbulence and uncontrolled passion,
sometimes a ferocity, among the rural people which is to be matched in the
North only in the slums.
In some ways the Northern visitor is struck by a crudeness of behavior
among respectable Southern Whites such as he is accustomed in the North to
experience in a much lower stratum of society. A large proportion of the
Poor Whites in the South and many of the better class go armed and justify
it because they expect to have need of a weapon. Tobacco juice flows
freely in hotel corridors, in railroad stations, and even in the
vestibules of ladies' cars; profanity is rife, and fierce talk and
unbridled denunciations, principally of black people. There is doubtless
just the same thing in Northern places, if you look for it, but in the
South it follows you. With all the aristocratic feeling classes are more
mixed together, and it is a harder thing than in the North to sift your
acquaintances. Still there is an upward movement in every stratum of
society; as Murphy puts it: "The real struggle of the South from the date
of Lee's surrender--through all the accidents of political and industrial
revolution--was simply a struggle toward the creation of democratic
conditions. The _real_ thing, in the unfolding of the later South, is the
arrival of the common man." The North has always had confidence in the
average man; in the South the upper and lower strata are in a more hopeful
way of mutual understanding than perhaps in the North.