by Matt Weiland
In mid-July, Ronald Reagan was nominated by the Republican convention in Detroit. In a Comfort Inn on the outskirts of Evergreen, the seat of Conecuh County, I watched the Osmonds sing “Together a New Beginning” on TV. “This convention has shown to all America a party united, with positive programs for solving the nation’s problems,” Reagan told the sea of delegates, “a party ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words: family, work, neighborhood, peace, and freedom.” Outside my room, it was well over 100 degrees; the air felt like a swamp.
That summer I was so intent on searching for what had already vanished that I missed the great change taking place in Alabama. The racial backlash was complete, but the state’s move to the right was only just beginning. Alabama’s history as a bastion of Democratic politics was long, recent, and still showed signs of life. Four years earlier, the state had gone for Carter—the last time it voted for a Democratic presidential candidate. In 1980, Alabama chose Reagan over Carter by only seventeen thousand votes out of almost 1.4 million cast. But that year the politics of cultural conservatism began spreading from the Sun Belt throughout the country, with race one primal theme among many others—God, guns, patriotism, taxes, government, family. The Christian right had emerged as an organized force in politics the year before, with the founding of the Moral Majority. Alabama was about to become the quintessential red state.
Politics in the American South has always been a battle over the meaning of populism. The politician who claims convincingly to speak for the people and against the “elites” (whoever they might be), in the language of ordinary folk, wins the crucial advantage. Even if he loses an election, he secures the title of authenticity. In 1980 in Alabama, populism completed a transformation that had been going on ever since the start of the civil rights movement. The elites—ridiculed from the podium of the Republican convention that summer—became government bureaucrats, privileged do-gooders, unelected judges, out-of-touch academics, meddling outsiders. They were cultural, not economic, elites, and they didn’t understand or share the basic values of “authentic” Alabamians. They were too sophisticated for God, too chicken for guns, too intrusive for freedom, too perverse for family. A “real” person was a white man who lived in a new suburb, drove a truck with a religious or pro-gun bumper sticker, listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd, sent his children to a private Christian school, and voted Republican.
This has been the style and content of Southern populism my entire life. It’s one of the most powerful forces in American history. It reshaped the country’s political map, not just moving the solid South out of the Democratic column and into the Republican camp, but pushing the rest of the country in the same direction. As early as 1974, the historian John Egerton wrote about the “southernization of America,” describing it as a cultural phenomenon as well as a political one. It drove George H.W. Bush to pretend to like pork rinds; George W. Bush to campaign at NASCAR racetracks; and the Democrats to nominate sons of the South in five of seven elections from 1976 to 2000. It identifies real Americanism with a Southern accent, an insouciant swagger, a down-home manner, and an undercurrent of violence. It’s a white male style.
I was a foreigner in Alabama, but I went there because I had extensive roots. When I was a boy we had spent parts of several summers in Birmingham, where my mother had grown up. Until her death in 1974, my grandmother lived in a rambling Victorian house on Rhodes Circle, canning preserves in her basement and playing a card game called Help Your Neighbor in the front parlor. I had assorted aunts, uncles, and cousins scattered from Albertville to Montgomery. My mother’s father, George Huddleston, who died at age ninety, a few months before I was born, and gave me my name, represented Birmingham in Congress from 1915 to 1937. The older of his two sons took the seat from 1955 to 1965. After George Jr.’s death, his widow, my aunt A. J., became a fervent born-again Christian of the charismatic strain.
That summer, I knew nothing about my grandfather other than a handful of family stories told by my mother and aunts and cousins, in which he invariably came off as a remote, stern, just figure, a sort of Old Testament God, with a biting sense of humor who would tolerate no “posturing” or pretense from his much-younger wife and his clan of five children. I remained utterly ignorant of George Huddleston’s public life and political career for almost twenty more years. Then I discovered an Alabama that few people today know or remember. It was a state with a secret history: liberalism.
My grandfather came down from Tennessee in 1891, started a law practice in Birmingham, and later ran for Congress. His public career fell between the end of Reconstruction and the beginning of civil rights. In the summer of 1901, Alabama’s political leaders drafted a constitution that imposed literacy tests, property qualifications, and poll taxes on the state’s voters. Their undisguised intention was to undo the Fifteenth Amendment and disqualify black people from voting (many poor whites were also disenfranchised). With this document the white ruling class took Alabama’s blacks out of politics for the next half century, until the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 began to reverse the crime. In this interval, which coincided with the Populist, Progressive, and New Deal eras, the eternal southern fever of race cooled down and lay dormant for a while. With color removed from politics, Alabama was temporarily free to obsess itself with a different, maybe even more stubborn, problem—class conflict between rich and poor.
The righteous anger of the economically dispossessed became the political fuel of Southern liberals like my grandfather. After winning his congressional seat in 1914 with the vote of Birmingham’s white working class and Jefferson County’s white farmers, George Huddleston gave a series of speeches that could have been delivered by Eugene Debs: “We are confronted with conditions never before experienced and which are getting worse daily. The wealth of the nation is in the hands of the few and everything is monopolized, resulting in trusts which levy heavy tolls on the masses in the shape of unreasonable and unjust profits … I am well versed in the race question which has hung like a dark pall over the South, and being a southerner I know how it feels to have a negro placed alongside of you at your work, but I want to say to you that economical conditions make it more important that you give more consideration to the conditions of your black co-laborer than you do your employer.”
My grandfather was not a religious man—like Thomas Jefferson, his faith lay in human reason and popular rule—but what’s striking about the language of many other Southern Populists and Progressives was the use of religiosity in the cause of economic equality. The same biblical allusions and Christian moralism deployed against gay rights and abortion in the past quarter century were used a hundred years ago against concentrated wealth. The basic appeal to class over race presented a direct threat to the interests that Alabama’s planters and industrialists had tried to enshrine in the constitution of 1901, which, in addition to turning blacks and poor whites into non-citizens, mandated property tax rates so low that they continue to bankrupt the state to this day. When the defenders of Alabama’s working people, like my grandfather, raised their voices, the ruling class, known as the Big Mules, fought back hard; their periods out of state power were relatively brief, but they were unable to consolidate their hold as long as they couldn’t claim the populist mantle. In the early part of the twentieth century, class and cultural politics in Alabama cut across each other in surprising ways.
One of the strangest decades was the 1920s, when Klansmen put on their robes and returned to prominence, creating a reign of terror for blacks and Catholics. During the same period, on the national level, the Klan began to make the anti-elitist attack on the social engineering of liberals that has been the mainstay of right-wing populism and Republican political discourse for half a century now. In 1926, Hiram Evans, Imperial Wizard and Emperor, used the pages of North American Review to sneer at “intellectually mongrelized ‘Liberals’,” saying, “The average Liberal idea is apparently that t
hose who can produce should carry the unfit, and let the unfit rule them. This aberration would have been impossible, of course, if American Liberalism had kept its feet on the ground. Instead it became wholly academic, lost all touch with the plain people, disowned its instincts and common sense, and lived in a world of pure, high, groundless logic.” There’s a straight line from Evans’s essay to the campaign rhetoric of George Wallace, running for President in 1968, about “pointy-headed bureaucrats who can’t park a bicycle straight,” to George W. Bush’s mockery of Al Gore as a policy wonk and John Kerry as a windsurfer.
But at the same time, during the 1920s, politicians backed by the Klan were Alabama’s liberal economic reformers. Governor Bibb Graves, believed to be the Exalted Cyclops of the Montgomery chapter, abolished the system of using state prisoners as conscripted laborers (known as convict lease), raised corporate taxes, and introduced education and health reforms. Hugo Black, a United States senator from 1927 until 1937, when F.D.R. appointed him to the Supreme Court, was a civil liberties and economic liberal who (mainly for opportunistic reasons) was a Klansman in the early 1920s.
For a couple of decades, there was no perceived contradiction in Southern political rhetoric between white supremacy and economic egalitarianism. With the Great Depression and the New Deal, an even more liberal brand of politician came to power in Alabama, holding relatively enlightened views of race. Governor Big Jim Folsom and the state’s United States senators, John Bankhead (uncle of Tallulah) and Lister Hill, made Alabama the most politically progressive state in the South during the 1940s. In 1938, Birmingham’s Municipal Auditorium hosted the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an interracial coalition that included Eleanor Roosevelt, Gunnar Myrdal, C. Vann Woodward, and Hugo Black. Its agenda of economic and racial equality represented the high-water mark of Southern liberalism.
In the postwar years, the Democratic party began to take up civil rights for the first time. And Alabama headed toward an inevitable reckoning, based on the iron law of Southern politics: Whatever increases black rights loses white support. When Harry S. Truman integrated the military and passed equal employment legislation, a large number of Southern Democrats decided to bolt the party. They convened in July of 1948 under the banner of the Dixiecrats, at the same Municipal Auditorium in Birmingham where the Southern Conference for Human Welfare had met a decade earlier. Truman was lynched in effigy from the balcony of a nearby posh hotel. The participants at the States Rights Convention included Strom Thurmond, who became the Dixiecrats’ presidential nominee that summer, Eugene “Bull” Connor, who would achieve infamy in 1963 by turning the full force of the Birmingham police and fire departments on black children marching for civil rights, the anti-Semite Gerald L. K. Smith, and the authors of the books The Place of the Negro and The Jews Have Got the Atom Bomb. The rhetoric was hate-filled and paranoid in a way the South hadn’t heard before. This wasn’t old-fashioned racism, but something new and even more toxic: anti—New Deal, anti-Communist, segregationist, populist. In the eyes of this breakaway faction of Southern Democrats, Social Security and civil rights were conjoined plots on the part of Washington against individual liberty. The nouveau-riche oilman, the doctrinaire libertarian, the purveyor of the Red Terror, and the conspiracy-minded bigot found that they had a political movement in common. Thurmond called the Fair Employment Practices Commission “the nearest thing to communism ever advocated in these United States.” The Dixiecrats didn’t outlive 1948, but their movement signaled a great shift in American politics. The convention that summer in Birmingham gave rise to Goldwater and Reagan, the modern Republican Party, the Southern strategy, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush. It was the end of Southern liberalism and the beginning of the New Right.
Alabama’s secret liberal history depended on the disappearance of blacks from public life. My grandfather’s political career as a defender of the working man—which ended when he was defeated in 1936, after turning against Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation on the grounds that it concentrated too much power in the federal government—was made possible by the accident of its timing. His son was elected to the same seat a few months after Brown v. Board of Education. Instead of standing up for labor against big business, my uncle signed the Southern Manifesto, repudiating integration, in 1956. Seven years later, in the spring of 1963, when the movement was reaching its climax, he got up on the floor of the House to defend the use of dogs and fire hoses on peaceful, mostly underage, demonstrators in Birmingham. And yet he lost the following year to a more ardent defender of segregation, in the wave of Republican victories that Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign carried across the South after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (upon signing it, Lyndon Johnson declared to his aide Bill Moyers, “We have just lost the South for a generation”).
That was the end of the Huddlestons in public life. After 1964, there was no more room for them in state politics.
The tribe of surviving white liberals in Alabama today is so tiny and embattled that they all know one another personally. Separated by color or philosophy from the state’s dominant groups, they are outcasts and oddballs, equal parts Atticus Finch and Boo Radley. They are fiction-writing spinsters, amateur historians, public defenders in small-town courthouses, poli sci professors at Tuscaloosa and Birmingham Southern, civil rights veterans, internal exiles who cannot or will not leave. They drawl apologies in unmistakably local accents to out-of-state visitors for the latest antics of Alabama politicians. They suffer from a commingling of conscience, privilege, and impotence. And a large fraction of them are members of my extended family.
What separates the Huddlestons most dramatically from their home state is not attitudes toward race—these days almost everyone in Alabama claims to be for civil rights—but religion. They are secularists in a state that at times seems to be run as a Christian theocracy. My cousins were particularly embarrassed in the summer of 2001 when Roy Moore, a former kickboxer-turned-cowboy and the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, had a two-and-a-half ton granite monument to the Ten Commandments installed in the court’s rotunda in the middle of the night. The stunt became a national story when Chief Justice Moore defied a federal court order to have the monolith removed. He was unseated in 2003 by a state judicial panel.
In 2004, ex-Justice Moore joined the opposition to a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have removed language mandating racially segregated schools and the discriminatory poll tax from the original 1901 document. Moore argued that the changes would have allowed federal judges to force the state to raise taxes for school improvements—a powerful, if misleading, argument in Alabama. The amendment narrowly lost, and the state constitution remained officially racist.
The Ten Commandments caper and the failure to amend the constitution made Alabama a national showcase for the fringe of the religious right. One of my cousins in Birmingham wrote me during this time to apologize personally on behalf of the state and remind me of our grandfather’s contributions to Alabama politics. And yet, in his uncompromising moralism, his conviction that politics is a contest between absolute good and evil, Roy Moore was a slightly freakish descendant of the original Populists. In 1895, an Alabama Populist believed in federal taxation, regulation of corporations, spending on schools, and enfranchisement of blacks (when it wasn’t too inconvenient). A century and a little more later, an Alabama populist opposed pretty much all of these. But the style and language remained almost the same, as did the core, supercharged issues: race, religion, taxes.
In the late nineties, I started going back to Alabama in order to write a book about my grandfather and the history of American liberalism. I made a series of visits to Birmingham, and through my aunt A. J. and a handful of local friends I discovered that history had begun to take another strange turn in Alabama. Roy Moore was not the only face of Christian populism there. An interracial movement of conservative evangelicals had picked up the fallen banner of civil rights and given it new colors and patterns, co
mbining the aspiration toward racial equality and social justice with an emphasis on individual sin and redemption. In downtown Birmingham, not far from the site of the old Municipal Auditorium where the Dixiecrats had met, there was an unadorned church called New City. Its members, black and white, were far from being Huddleston liberals (one Sunday, the black pastor subjected his pregnant teenage daughter and her boyfriend to a mortifying public outing and confession from the pulpit). But they worked in the black projects with unwed mothers and drug addicts, and some of the members were beginning to realize that saving one soul at a time in an unjust society was inadequate. One of the church founders, a white evangelical named Tim Ritchie, summed up the dilemma: “Structural change is no good if you don’t have change of hearts; change of hearts is no good if you don’t have change of structures.”
