“Mongrel” was not the only threat Democrats perceived. The emerging cross-sectional opposition party named two more symbolic enemies: “carpetbaggers” and “scalawags.” Here is how the new narrative went: When ill-bred men of suspect origins assumed power, virtue in government declined. The despised mudsill of the Civil War era was succeeded by the postwar Yankee invader. The carpetbagger, a rapacious adventurer feeding off the prostrate South, could be identified by the cheap black valise he carried. Worse than the carpetbagger, though, was the “scalawag,” a betrayer. He was a southern white Republican who had sold his soul (and sold out his race) for filthy lucre.21
Though he did not use the word “mongrel,” President Johnson was quite familiar with the danger of “mongrel citizenship”—the very phrase one newspaper used to describe what lay at the heart of Johnson’s veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Missouri Republican turned Democrat and avid Darwinian Francis Blair Jr. had written the president an impassioned letter against the act just days earlier. He insisted that Congress should never be allowed to inflict on the country a “mongrel nation, a nation of bastards.” Johnson agreed. At the beginning of his veto message, he highlighted all the new admixtures suddenly protected under the law: “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes and persons of African blood.” In granting civil rights, the law removed racial distinctions and opened the door to equal suffrage. Johnson’s veto message said that freedmen lacked something naturally endowed: fitness. Finally, the president made clear that he disapproved of any law that sanctioned interracial marriage.22
In 1866, President Johnson effectively abandoned the Republican Party. He had begun political life as a Jacksonian Democrat. It was as a Jacksonian, then, that he vetoed the extension of the Freedmen’s Bureau and Civil Rights Act, and used his executive authority to derail federal initiatives in the South. This series of actions led Republicans in Congress to do more than override his vetoes: they searched for a more permanent constitutional solution, and found it in the impeachment process. Johnson’s apostasy gave momentum to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which passed in 1867 and 1869, respectively. The first guaranteed equal protection under the law as a right of national citizenship, and the second prohibited discrimination in voting based on “race, color, and previous condition of servitude.” Not inconsequentially, the Fourteenth Amendment also denied former Confederates the right to vote, excepting those who federal officials believed had taken the loyalty oath in good faith. Former Confederate officials were barred from holding office.23
For anxious social commentators, “pride of caste” and “pride of race” were under attack, the old barriers of upholding “purity of blood” and “social exclusiveness” eroding as a result of a flurry of Republican legislation. The focus turned to white women. As early as 1867, secret societies began to form, like the Knights of the White Camelia, which first organized in Louisiana. Members swore to marry a white woman, and they agreed to do everything in their power to prevent the “production of a bastard and degenerate progeny.”24
In 1868, Francis Blair Jr., the Democratic nominee for vice president, toured the country and made the mongrel threat one of the key issues of the campaign. The next year, Chief Justice Joseph Brown of the Supreme Court of Georgia issued a monumental decision. The former rebel governor ruled that the courts had the right to dissolve all interracial marriages. “Amalgamation” was classed with incestuous unions and marriages between idiots, which the state already proscribed. By generating “sickly and effeminate” children, Brown insisted, such abhorrent marriages threatened to “drag down the superior race to the level of the inferior.” He was repeating the established definition used by animal breeders to categorize a mongrel. Even more telling is Brown’s eugenic logic: the state now had the right to regulate breeding in order to prevent contamination of the Anglo-Saxon stock.25
Still, for Democrats and Republicans alike, race could never be decoupled from class. This was why the scalawag came under venomous verbal attacks and experienced actual physical violence. The scalawag was seen as the glue that held together a fragile Republican coalition of freedmen, transplanted northerners, southern Unionists, and converted Confederates. For many southern Democrats, this white traitor was a more serious obstacle than the carpetbagger, because he was born and bred in the South, and he knew his way around the statehouse. Dismantling the Republican hold over the South demanded the figurative (and at times literal) death of the scalawag.26
During the election year of 1868, the scalawag was accused of inciting blacks and giving them the idea that they deserved social equality. The so-called freedmen, one angry journalist blasted, were now the “slaves of the scalawag white trash.” He violated social norms by mixing freely with blacks in public and private places. He invited the black man home to dinner, wounding the sensibility of his proper wife. And yet this worthless, ill-bred creature had suddenly acquired power. The very traits they despised in him—his low-class ways, his willingness to commingle with blacks—made him the perfect party operative. In a volatile election year, the scalawag’s racial and class pedigree both became issues.27
A brilliant piece of Democratic propaganda was “The Autobiography of a Scalawag.” The protagonist, John Stubbs, had been born to a poor family of fourteen in Shifflet’s Corner, Virginia, a community known for lowlifes and criminals. Joining the Confederate army, he slid from an artillery posting to teamster to cleaning Jefferson Davis’s stables. He had no ambition for honor or glory; his wartime trajectory was predictably downward.
Deserting, Stubbs lied to the Yankees that he was a Union man. Returning to Virginia in 1866, he became a scalawag and found he had a talent for “nigger speaking.” He defended Negro suffrage not on any high-principled stand, but on his low-down motto: “every man for himself.” Stubbs knew the carpetbaggers had no respect for him, but he didn’t care, as long as a generous supply of whiskey accompanied their snubs. He was rewarded with a county clerk position, without having to improve himself. In his unsentimental journey up the Republican ladder, he learned that his “rascality” was increasingly tolerated as he rose in the world.28
“The Autobiography of a Scalawag” was a beautiful burlesque of the self-made northern man’s story of hard work and moral uplift. Stubbs was a far cry from the hereditary leadership of the Old South, whose education, refinement, and honorable bearing were legend even in defeat. He was a gross materialist, someone who lacked forethought, who lied and cheated to get ahead. He was a powerful reminder that elite southern Democrats still despised the lower classes. As one North Carolina conservative declared in 1868, the Republican Party was nothing more than the “low born scum and quondam slaves” who lorded over men of property and taste. When southern Democrats called for a “White Man’s Government,” they did not mean all white men.29
The scalawag was the Democrats’ version of white trash. Just ask ex–Confederate colonel Wade Hampton, who in 1868 was still eight years from being elected governor of South Carolina. He was a hero of the “Redeemers,” whose movement ultimately toppled Republican rule in the southern states, and he must be credited with the most memorable insult of all, as his words traveled all the way to England. Knowing his husbandry, Hampton invoked the best-known usage of “scalawag” as vagabond stock, “used by drovers to describe the mean, lousy, and filthy kine that are not fit for butchers or dogs.” The scalawag was human waste with an unnatural ambition. He was biologically unfit, and at the same time a skilled operative who stirred the scum and thrived in the muck.30
Thomas Jefferson Speer, a real scalawag, gave a speech that year proudly defending his “kine.” In contrast to Hampton, he was a former Confederate who had turned Republican, served in the Georgia constitutional convention, and would later sit in the U.S. Congress. Speer was unashamed of his common school education, a
dmitting that he was “no speaker.” He had opposed secession, however, and believed that the terms of defeat offered by the Union had been magnanimous. A native Georgian whose “ancestors’ bones reposed beneath this soil,” he asserted that he was a “friend of the colored race.” 31
Like his own rather fortunate naming, T. J. Speer understood that “scalawag” was just a name too. But southern politics thrived on such symbolism. It was rooted in the inherited revulsion to both the real and the imagined dregs of society, whether white or black. When the low-down dared to speak up, reach across the color line, the hereditary leadership class of the South simply could not stomach their overreach.
Mongrels and scalawags were conjoined twins, then, fusing the associated threats of racial and class instability. After the Civil War, and with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery, unreconstructed white southerners imagined an almost gothic landscape in their midst, a theater of sexual deviance overseen by defective leaders. The Fourteenth Amendment appreciably added to those fears, granting equal protection under the law to black male voters, while divesting former Confederates of their right to hold office or even vote. It was a world turned upside down, as buffoons ruled the Republican kingdom. Of course, few white southern Republicans actually fit this manufactured tabloid image, yet the label stuck. Scalawags were assumed to be white trash on the inside, regardless of the wealth (or wealth of political experience) they might accrue.32
As the Reconstruction era ended, so-called men of inherited worth were returned to political power across the South. In the 1880s, the white North and South reconnected. The “redeemed” cracker became a hardworking farmer, while others praised the unsullied mountaineer, both capable of education and having risen enough that they would no longer be a burden on the southern economy. For a brief moment, reconciliation stories were popular, and previously warring sides in the national drama entertained bright prospects for domestic harmony.33
Cracker Joe (1883) was written by a New Englander. The title character’s story was set in Florida, and used love and forgiveness to overcome past wrongs and resentments. Joe, a “born Cracker,” runs a successful farm. He defies his heritage by exhibiting shrewd ambition. He is a “go-ahead” man, an avid reader with a phenomenal memory. He calls his wife, Luce, “the whitest woman, soul and body, I ever did see,” suggesting that he is not quite white, but “only a cracker, you know.” (Like the family in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Joe is a half-breed, his mother of “good blood.”) He is forced to make amends with the son of the wealthy planter whom he had tried to murder more than a decade earlier, and for his part, the planter’s son must reclaim his father’s dilapidated mansion and spoiled lands, saving his legacy in the only way possible, by marrying the daughter of a New York carpetbagger. If all of this isn’t improbable enough, Joe has a mulatto daughter, whom he welcomes into his home with his wife’s blessing.34
Convenient distinctions were drawn. In the 1890s, third-generation abolitionist William Goodell Frost, president of the integrated Berea College of Kentucky, redefined his mountain neighbors: “The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.” The latter had preserved a unique lineage for centuries, and in this important way had not lost the battle for the survival of the fittest. Frost saw the mountaineer as a modern-day Saxon, with the “flavor of Chaucer” in his speech, and a clear “Saxon temper.” He was, the college president wrote, “our contemporary ancestor!” What made this isolated white the best of America’s past was his “vigorous, unjaded nerve, prolific, patriotic—full of the blood of spirit of seventy-six.” Mountain folk formed the very trunk of the American family tree. Frost tried. For many who did not buy what he was selling, however, mountain whites were still strange-looking moonshine hillbillies, prone to clannish feuds.35
It was at about this time that the term “redneck” came into wider use. It well defined the rowdy and racist followers of the New South’s high-profile Democratic demagogues of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: South Carolina’s Ben Tillman, Arkansas’s Jeff Davis, and the most interesting of the bunch, Mississippi’s James Vardaman. The “redneck” could be found in the swamps. He could be found in the mill towns. He was the man in overalls, the heckler at political rallies, and was periodically elected to the state legislature. He was Guy Rencher, a Vardaman ally, who supposedly claimed the name for himself, railing on the floor of the Mississippi House about his “long red neck.” One other possible explanation deserves mention: “redneck” came into vogue in the 1890s, at the same time Afrikaners were calling English soldiers “rednecks” in the Boer War in South Africa, highlighting the contrast between the Brit’s sun-scored skin and his pale white complexion. Such terminology was also a staple of the sharecropper’s rhythmic chant (circa 1917): “I’d druther be a Nigger, an’ plow ole Beck, Dan a white Hill Billy wid his long red neck.”36
• • •
This was the world of W. E. B. Du Bois. This was also the world of Theodore Roosevelt. The two men agreed on very little—and obviously not on evolutionary theory or the science of eugenics, to which Roosevelt was a complete convert. Certainly Du Bois found no comfort in the president’s militarism or his glorification of the white settler’s savagery in the Old West. But they were in total agreement on one thing: the menace of redneck politics.
Roosevelt unexpectedly became president in 1901, upon the assassination of William McKinley. Only forty-two at the time, he was known for daring military exploits during the Spanish–American War, which had earned him a place on the Republican ticket. Though his mother was born in Georgia and he could claim a Confederate pedigree, the New York politico proved himself fairly inept at navigating the rocks and shoals of southern politics. He roused the ire of many white southerners when he dared to invite Booker T. Washington of the Tuskegee Institute to dinner shortly after his inauguration as president. Reviving the script from Reconstruction, Democrats charged the new chief executive with promoting social equality between the races. For angry southerners, breaking bread with a black man in such a public and highly symbolic way was barely one step from endorsing interracial marriage. With no subtlety whatsoever, Vardaman called Roosevelt the “coon-flavored miscegenationist,” describing a White House “so saturated with the odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stables.” Southern satirist Bill Arp predicted a mongrel wedding in the executive mansion. In that Booker T. Washington’s daughter Portia attended Wellesley College, she too would be invited to the White House, Arp mused. And then, he sneered, she would be found to be a suitable match for one of TR’s sons.37
In Roosevelt’s opinion, Vardaman and his ilk belonged to the lowest order of demagogues. Writing the Congregationalist minister and editor Lyman Abbott, the president said that the Mississippian’s “foul language” and “kennel filth” were worse than that of the lowest blackguard wallowing in the gutters of New York City. Such “unspeakable lowness” put this southerner beyond the pale of American values. In excoriating Vardaman, the president refused to repeat his hateful words, but the insult that most infuriated him was a crude birthing allusion, to the effect that “old lady Roosevelt” had been frightened by a dog while pregnant, which accounted for “qualities of the male pup that are so prominent in Teddy.” Vardaman, incapable of feeling shame, joked that he was disposed to apologize to the dog but not to the president.38
So who was this Mississippi carnival barker, known for his white suits and white cowboy hat and long dark locks, who claimed to be the voice of “rednecks” and “hillbillies”? James Vardaman had been a newspaperman, who understood the power of invective. Southerners from Andrew Johnson to Wade Hampton had recurred to the barnyard insult when they damned their enemies. For Vardaman, democracy, no matter how dirty, belonged to “the people,” and the people had the right to say whatever they felt. Friends and foes alike called him the “White Chief,” partly for his white garb and
partly for his supremacist rhetoric. But he was a “medicine man” to his enemies, a witch doctor who knew how to inflame the low-down tribe of white savages.39
He saw himself as the defender of poor whites. In his run for the governorship in 1903, Vardaman pitted poor whites against all blacks. Educating blacks was pointless and dangerous, he argued, and the state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools. The consummate showman rode to Senate victory in 1912—quite literally—on the back of an ox. When his Democratic primary opponent derided his supporters as an ignorant herd, he exploited the incident. Traveling through Mississippi giving speeches, he liked to pull up in a “cracker cart” amid a long line of cattle. At one rally he rode into town astride a single ox. The beast was adorned with flags and streamers labeled “redneck,” “cattle,” and “lowdown.” He dramatically embraced the white trash identity.40
Insofar as the surviving planter elite and middle-class Mississippians despised Vardaman, he intentionally drummed up class resentments. In his reminiscence, William Percy, the son of Vardaman’s Democratic opponent, LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote:
They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted Anglo-Saxons. They were the sovereign voter. It was so horrible it seemed unreal.
Though he had no patience for the politics of hate run as a sideshow, Percy conceded that Vardaman was a savvy politician who gave the “sovereign voter” what he wanted—red meat.41
White Trash Page 24
