Chapter 46
Cotton farming, we used to say in the South, required three items of capital equipment: a strong back, a weak mind, and immunity to sunstroke. It involved … three operations: cotton was planted in the spring, mortgaged in the summer, and left to rot in the fall.
—J. Mitchell Morse
The frost that chills cotton and the dew that descends from the stars is noted, and the trespass of a little worm on its green leaf is more to England than the advance of the Russian army on her Asian outposts.
—Henry W. Grady
COTTON is a tree—a small tree to be sure, but nevertheless a tree, not a grass or a grain. It is also (a) by far the chief American cash crop, and (b) the worst agricultural headache in the nation.
Something like 1,600,000 of the 6,000,000 farms in the United States, or roughly one out of every four, grow cotton, and some 13 million Americans depend on it for their livelihood, if you include processors and distributors; if you count in every aspect of the cotton industry, at least 21 million people, or more than one-seventh of the total population of the country, live on it. The leverage of figures as big as these is the more weighty because, of course, they apply mostly to the South. Forty-three per cent of all American farmers live in ten southern states where cotton is the standard crop. Seventy-three per cent of all farms in Texas are cotton farms, 86 per cent of all Mississippi farms, 85 per cent of all Alabama farms, 80 per cent of all Georgia farms.
The origin of cotton, next to wheat and corn the most important of all things that grow, is, like that of wheat and corn, obscure. Even the derivation of the word is uncertain; it may have come from the Arabic, gutun. The use of cotton cloth was known as far back as 1500 B.C. in India and elsewhere in the east, and it has been a prime commodity all over the world for centuries—and not just for cloth and clothes. It is the only crop that produces “food, feed, and fiber.” We eat cotton, drink it, write on it, shelter ourselves with it, drive on it, feed it to livestock, tie parcels with it, sit on it, sleep on it, use it in multifarious drugs and medicines and plastics, and shoot it off in guns.
Several times, in Georgia and Alabama both, I went out to see the cotton and talk to the folk who grow it. It is a risky and exasperating crop.
To plant a tree from seed every year, cultivate and harvest it and then let the tree die, is a strange and uneconomical way to farm. Cotton, as a matter of fact, will grow year after year in the tropics, but our winter weather, even in the South, kills it.1 It is planted in “clean-cultivated” rows, which is one reason why it devastates the soil; weeding between the rows, you turn up the raw soil, and the next rain may carry this away—also cotton is often planted in hilly country, which increases the tendency to erosion. Millions of acres of cotton land have been totally destroyed, so far as their ability to produce cotton again is concerned; one estimate is that an area as big as the whole state of Georgia, once solid with cotton, is lost to the crop forever; another estimate is that one half of all surviving cotton land in the United States should, for imperative reasons of public policy, be removed from cotton at once, or it too will be destroyed. The hilly terrain should be turned over to livestock, fruit trees, and timber, which will keep cover on the land; cotton should be limited to flat, deep, heavy land where row-cropping won’t kill the soil.
The small cotton farmer picks his crop by hand, and brings it each autumn to the broker at the county seat. Of each dollar of cotton income, the man who actually produced it gets about 7½¢, and if he is a tenant or sharecropper, half his crop is gone before he markets it. The price is of course protected by the “parity” principle. The usual practice is for a cultivator of any size to borrow money from the government on his crop; the system closely parallels that which we described for wheat in Chapter 9. If the price goes up, the grower wins; if not, the government wins. In any case most American cotton ends up in a government warehouse, and the whole national crop is (since the New Deal) controlled by Washington, D.C.
The gist of the cotton problem has been well stated by Claude R. Wickard, former secretary of agriculture and later head of the Rural Electrification Administration:2
Even if farmers received parity for every pound of cotton that could be grown in the South, the incomes of a great many … would still be too low to afford an acceptable level of living. And the prospect of marketing at a satisfactory price all the cotton this country is capable of producing is, to say the least, doubtful…. Here, then, is a tremendous economic and social problem…. For the immediate future of course, we have the price supporting amendment and the export subsidy…. But they are temporary measures. They do not solve the basic problem.
Normally the United States produces about 12 million bales of cotton per year, which is about 40 per cent of world production. At the moment the government has a carry-over of something like 11 million bales in storage, isolated from both foreign and domestic markets, sterilized and useless. The long and short of it all is that this country produces much more cotton than it can sell or consume—this, too, although the acreage under cultivation decreased from roughly 45 million acres in 1929 to 20,098,000 acres in 1944—a sensational reduction of more than half. Hence, the price of cotton must be artificially supported. The government lends money against cotton at 92½ per cent of “parity”; withdraw or modify this parity legislation, no matter how much you may dislike it, and the bottom could fall out of the cotton market like a hot coal going through a bag of tissue paper; the basic economy of the South might well be smashed, with a resultant crisis ruinous to the nation as a whole.
Meantime, with cotton at a very high price indeed, and with those 11 million bales lying idle, kindly recollect the hapless American citizen who spent most of 1946 trying to buy a shirt.
Cotton, alone among American commodities of consequence, had no ceiling price during the war, because the southern senators were powerful enough to keep it exempt. In 1932, during the worst blight of the depression, cotton sold at around 5¢ a pound. By 1940 it had risen to 9¢, by 1941 to 14¢, by 1942 to 20¢, and by 1945 to 25¢. Then during the first nine months of 1946 it roared ahead to reach an almost unprecedented price—39¢. Such a runaway rise had no relation to economic realities; it was caused by the wildest kind of speculation. Then came a neat and nasty little crash. The spiral reversed itself. In October, 1946, the price fell to 29¢ in two weeks, which meant a drop of about $50 per bale; in three days southern farmers were estimated to have lost 225 million dollars; the cotton exchanges in New York, New Orleans, and Chicago were forced to close. Why? Because economic freebooters, supported by the cotton bloc, pushed the price up too fast and got caught. Nothing could better illustrate the extreme vulnerability of the American price system, if enough greedy people get their teeth into it.
But to return to more permanent realities. Cotton is always full of the most grinding troubles. The export market, on which so much depends, has been drastically reduced: the American share in world cotton trade has gone down 30 per cent in thirty years. By every kind of device we keep the price artificially stimulated; but still cotton doesn’t pay its own way. Then too consider domestic competition. Shirts are being made of cellulose instead of cotton; multiwall paper bags for flour and cement are cutting into cotton bags; draperies are being made of paper; nylon is being used for everything from rope to diapers; plastics and glass fiber are replacing cotton in armature windings and cable installations; above all, look at rayon. This was once a comparatively expensive product, and the cotton people sniffed at it. But not today. Rayon has become an aggressively dangerous competitor; it is capable of replacing cotton not merely in bed sheets, tablecloths, aprons, raincoats, and the like, but in the cord winding that goes into automobile tires and multifarious other industrial operations.
Finally consider the mechanical cotton picker, the effects of which may be literally prodigious. Slavery eventually became obsolete after the invention of the cotton gin; Eli Whitney was almost as much responsible for emancipation as Abe Lincoln. Similarly the mechanical cotton picker, together with other new devices like the “flame cultivator” that weeds cotton by burning out the trash, may end sharecropping. The cotton picker can pick something like 30,000 pounds of cotton in a twenty-four-hour day; a man, working eight hours, can pick about 120. It costs roughly thirty dollars to pick a bale of cotton by hand; the mechanical picker does it for about five dollars.
The cotton picker was invented by John D. Rust, who worked almost a quarter of a century to perfect it. The machine looks somewhat like a plexiglass turret upside down, with a long elephant’s trunk attached. It straddles the cotton rows, travels three miles an hour, and can negotiate hills as well as flat country; it works as easily by night as by day, and costs about $1.60 an acre to operate; it has a wonderfully ingenious selective eye, and while getting 95 per cent of the mature bolls, it doesn’t touch those still unripe. Mr. Rust is a longtime Socialist by the way; certainly no other invention of our time is more likely to have a socializing influence.3 Very few of these cotton pickers are in existence today, because production stopped during the war; now, however, three of the great agricultural implement companies (Allis Chalmers, International Harvester, Deere & Company) are about to start big-scale manufacture of various models, and Mr. Rust is demonstrating his own machines in the Delta near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
The cotton picker will “displace 1,000,000 families in ten years,” Mr. Rust estimates; there is no other word for this except revolution. Mechanize cotton fully, and you will cause the greatest social and economic displacement the South has known since the Civil War. Also—with luck—you will greatly increase the standard of living of the entire area, by spreading out the population more evenly. Consider, too, the incidental problems that will be attached, say, to the migration of a million workers of the poorest level, most of them Negroes, from South to North. It is quite conceivable that what we conventionally call the “Cotton Belt” will disappear; cotton will move slowly westward, attracting a better class of labor, and the old cotton lands, far too densely populated and half destroyed anyway, will be taken over by other products.
The scientists work almost as hard on cotton as they do on wheat. One recent development has been the creation of a new fiber, naturally grown, called “Ramie,” which has a tensile strength greater than that of cotton and makes clothes that wear much longer. Another is the use of dyes injected into the root of the cotton plant; cotton so dyed keeps color better than that dyed in the mills, and the process is much cheaper. The bewildered visitor may soon see cotton fields blooming in orange, purple, green, magenta, and baby pink! This development was originally worked out by Russian agronomists in the Soviet Union.
The Alabama Scene
The most interesting Alabamians (not Alabamans) in politics today, aside from Lister Hill, are the new governor, James Elisha (“Big Jim”) Folsom, and the new senator, John J. Sparkman. Both are, by any fair southern definition, liberals. Alabama is much more diversified than Georgia; it has a very substantial iron and steel industry at Birmingham, a flourishing port at Mobile, well-run textile mills like those of a magnate named Donald Comer, and big advertisements in the Montgomery newspapers—CATTLE AUCTION.
The population is diversified too, within the usual southern limitations. Mobile is strongly Catholic; one southern county is largely German; another has Swedes, Greeks, and Chinese. Not less than 98.6 per cent of the population (despite the steel industry and the foreign enclaves) is, by Alabama figures anyway, native born, and more than 87 per cent of its people were actually born within the state. Alabama is
68.8 per cent rural; of its 230,000 farmers, more than 50 per cent are tenants, i.e., they do not own their own land, and of these tenants, almost half are Negroes. The average length of occupancy is fifteen months; then the tenant moves along, leaving little behind, and taking nothing with him. Two-thirds of the entire population is officially registered as churchgoing; few other states can claim a similar proportion. The chief problem is poverty. For instance it is lowest in the union both in retail sales and in value of school property per pupil. Workers in the Birmingham steel plants get on the average 17½¢ per hour less than men doing the same work in the North.4
Alabama has a quite good state university at Tuscaloosa; one of its best-known teachers is Hudson Strode, who has a nice faculty for turning out writers of creative English. Also it has its share of violent reactionary crackpots; one paper I saw, called the Southern Watchman and published at Greensboro, asked recently for the impeachment of Mr. Justice Frankfurter, whom, of all people, it called a “Rasputin.” Another sheet of this defamatory type, The Crusader, edited by a priest named Arthur W. Terminiello (“the Father Coughlin of Dixie”), is angrily anti-Semitic; Reverend Terminiello was ordered by the bishop of Mobile, the Rt. Rev. T. J. Toolen, to get out of his parish and resign his pastorate.5
One thing Alabama is proud of is a spectacular campaign against venereal disease. A new law obliges all persons between eighteen and fifty to take, at state expense, a Wassermann or similar test, under penalty of a heavy fine; Alabama is the only state with such legislation. The employing class opposed this at first, but now they are glad they have it, since they found that it greatly reduced labor costs and the like. About 30 per cent of the Negro population was discovered to be syphilitic. The campaign to put the law into effect was almost hair-raisingly picturesque; big banners appeared on the streets with slogans like PENICILLIN CURES GONORRHEA IN FOUR HOURS. The father of this movement was a state senator and plantation owner, Bruce Henderson.
An uneasy incipient problem is the fate of the tenant farmers and sharecroppers whom the mechanical cotton picker and the flame cultivator seem certain to dispossess. Five million southern workers will be on relief within the next five years, unless they move, according to the estimates of the Alabama secretary for agriculture.6 This figure may seem high. But keep in mind that a single flame cultivator may displace five hundred men.
How many American governors, senators, and the like, have been musicians or semimusicians? It is easy to think of three or four. Of these, few are more striking than Big Jim Folsom, governor of Alabama since January, 1947. But whether we should call him an actual musician is open to question, since he himself plays no instrument so far as I know. The five-piece band he used in his campaign is, however, famous, and it helped him greatly to win the governorship. Folsom had two other weapons too, a big corn-shuck mop and a bucket; he would brandish the former as a symbol of his pledge to clean up the state house when he got there and he would pass the bucket for collections. “You furnish the suds,” he told his audiences, “and I’ll do the scrubbing.” After election he explained his victory by saying that everybody voted for him “who had less than five hundred dollars in the bank.”
Governor Folsom is called “big” with reason. He stands six feet eight in his stocking feet—he likes nothing better than to walk around with his shoes off—and in his 1946 campaign he kissed (for political purposes) 50,000 women, according to his own estimate.7 This may seem to be an impossible figure. But after every campaign meeting, he would kiss all the women who were there. Folsom is thirty-eight and a widower. By trade he is an insurance salesman. He was a poor boy who “chopped cotton and shook peanuts in his youth.” But what counts about Folsom is not the free-and-easy vaudeville tincture but his concrete political program—especially if he fulfills it. Seldom has a Southerner reached a gubernatorial chair with such a sweepingly progressive platform. He came out for outright abolition of the Alabama poll tax, utility rates on a TVA basis for the whole state, minimum wages for teachers and bigger old age pensions, and a revision of the constitution long overdue.8
Senator John Jackson Sparkman, who took over the seat long inhabited by the late John H. Bankhead, is likewise an honest—and perhaps more serious—progressive, with a mostly admirable record in the House where he was Democratic whip for some years. By an odd constitutional quirk, he was able to run for both House and Senate in 1946; winning both races, he naturally chose the Senate. He voted for the Case bill; nevertheless (this takes some figuring out) the CIO backed him. Sparkman was a poor boy in the pattern we have mentioned in this book a hundred times, one of the eleven children of a tenant farmer; he managed however to work his way through college, and has a Phi Beta Kappa key and no fewer than three university degrees. He helped in the fight to keep the military from exclusive control of atomic energy, and is a stanch supporter of TVA.
We must take note of a paradox here. Alabama, a state in ferment, has just elected men like Folsom and Sparkman to big jobs, while one of its neighbors, Georgia, returned Talmadge to office and another, Mississippi, put in for a new term the worst miscreant in American public life, Theodore G. Bilbo. But while doing this Alabama also took a strong backward step on the Negro question, by voting to adopt the so-called Boswell amendment which severely limits Negro voting rights. This amendment is in effect a maneuver to sidestep the Supreme Court white primary decision, by confirming the exclusive right of the registrar in each voting district to determine whether or not a citizen may register. That this will continue in most districts to mean virtual disfranchisement of Negroes, even if Folsom succeeds in killing the poll tax, is of course obvious. For instance the present law governing registration, designed from the beginning to keep Negroes out, provides that an applicant must be able to “read” the Constitution of the United States, and have three hundred dollars in property. By terms of the Boswell amendment the three hundred dollar qualification is dropped——since many Negroes are now in a position to accumulate this sum—but the prospective registrant must not only be able to “read” the Constitution: he must be able to “understand and explain” it. Of course any registrar can hereafter throw out any would-be registrant, by ruling against his “understanding” or “explanation” of any disputed phrase. But to proceed. The point to make is that most Alabama (and other southern) liberals are liberal only up to a certain point, and that point is usually the color line.
Two political curiosities might be mentioned here. One is that Alabama has never ratified the woman’s suffrage amendment to the federal Constitution. The other is that, in a legislature of 141, exactly one member is Republican. He comes from a solidly Republican (and ferociously anti-Negro) county called Winston, in the northern part of the state; this county “seceded” from Alabama after the Civil War, and for a time called itself the “Free State of Winston.”
Alabama, to conclude, has probably the ablest Washington delegation of any southern state. Naturally its members watched the 1946 Congressional elections with extreme interest, and they point out that a challenging and acid situation has arisen on the Democratic side in that, since so many northern Democrats were beaten, the Southerners have their share of Congress even more bottled up than before. Out of the 188 Democrats in the new House, 115 are Southerners, and 25 out of 45 Democratic senators.
The Negro Oxford
Former Governor Chauncey Sparks, an able and interesting man deeply troubled in mind and conscience by the Negro problem, sent me by highway patrol from Montgomery, capital of Alabama (and the first capital of the Confederacy as everybody knows) to Tuskegee Institute forty miles away. En route, I watched the filling stations and country stores, with their tar-paper roofs, sagging benches on warped verandas, and miserable dogs yelping thinly. The stores are owned by men with fine old Anglo-Saxon or Celtic names. Mostly—though I would not presume to generalize from this—the Negroes clustering at bus stops and in the village streets seemed more animated, better dressed, and had a higher level of courtesy than the whites.
Tuskegee is a pleasantly laid-out community, under big comfortable shady trees. This famous school is not the oldest Negro university in the country (Hampton in Virginia predates it), nor the most influential (a toss-up between Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard in Washington, D.C.), but it has a tradition and distinction all its own, mostly on account of the prestige of its founder, Booker T. Washington, and the scientific work done in its botanical laboratories by Dr. George Washington Carver. Some progressive Negroes think these days that Tuskegee is old-fashioned, for instance in its attitude toward segregation; they resent what used to be called the “Tuskegee machine” and the “Tuskegee Compromise.” The main bent of the institute is to emphasize vocational education and to work with the basic economic resources of the region it serves; it trains young Negroes for almost every kind of job, from architectural draftsmanship to child care, from techniques in the leather industry to “fuselage repair and overhaul.” Most of its students are from the lower South; still, thirty-two states are represented in its enrollment, together with five foreign countries or colonies.9 The student body is 99 per cent Negro (there are a few Amerindians); the faculty is Negro exclusively. In both these respects Tuskegee is unusual. For instance white students (mostly Jews) go to Howard in considerable number, and most Negro universities, like Atlanta, have mixed faculties. The president of Hampton is white, and so until recently was the president of Fisk. But Booker Washington wanted Tuskegee to be a truly all-Negro institution, under a benevolent cloak of white “protection,” and so it has remained.10
President Frederick D. Patterson, a Cornell Ph.D. and a conservative Negro leader, took me around and explained his institution’s work. Courses are offered in twenty-three different trades, some for women in particular. The institute has an endowment of about seven million dollars; many prominent whites have contributed to this, such as Julius Rosenwald, Theodore Roosevelt, and railway magnates like the Baldwins. Also Tuskegee gets some financial assistance from Alabama, and it is self-supporting to a degree, both by reason of its tuition fees and because it maintains its own tailor and printing shops and the like.
When I was there Mr. Sparks was still governor of the state, and he was negotiating with his legislature on the one hand, and with Dr. Patterson on the other, toward increase of the institute’s appropriation; Sparks realized its valuable contribution particularly in veterinary services and agriculture. Sparks was, and doubtless still is, a last-ditcher on segregation, but he knows full well that the only way out of an impossible economic situation in the whole South is to raise the living standard of the Negro, and so he wants to help Tuskegee. He has helped in other directions too; for instance, until the Sparks administration, Negroes had no toilet facilities in the state capitol. Sparks is quite proud of the fact that he is willing to shake hands with Patterson (who needless to say is an extremely distinguished man) and to call him “Doctor.”
The Magnolia State11
About Rankin, Eastland, and the unspeakable Bilbo I shall write elsewhere. What else should one say about Mississippi? Plenty! It is, as is notorious, the state with the most damaging statistics; its per capita income is incontestably the lowest in the union. One Southerner, Mississippi born, told me ruefully that it would be a splendid thing for the nation at large if his state should be expelled from the country, because then all American statistics in culture, literacy, wealth and so on would jump precipitously. The proud and loyal Mississippians will not thank me for mentioning this. But let them repair some of their home fences first.
Also I have heard Mississippi described, by Dr. Douglas Southall Freeman, as an exceptionally “gallant” state. This it may indeed be, if you neglect that it elects a jailbird like Bilbo to office time and time again. What Dr. Freeman means, of course, is that Mississippi, so needy, is making a desperate effort, at great sacrifice, to advance itself in such fields as education, industrialization, and agricultural reform.
The one-party system, we do not need to point out, rules Mississippi; this means that the Democratic party itself may tend to split. The conservative faction was led for long by men like Pat Harrison and John Sharp Williams; the “radicals,” who represent the poor whites, the wool hats, the hillbillies from the cracker belt, by the Bilbos and their coterie. The governorship usually alternates between the two groups: hence Mississippi has as a rule good and bad governors, term by term.
I heard it said in Jackson, the capital, that “if you shoot a Republican out of season, the fine will be ten dollars and costs.” Nevertheless Republicans do exist in Mississippi. They too are divided: one wing is that of the “Lily Whites,” who refuse the Negro any voice at all; the other is the “Black and Tans,” a largely Negro group led by a Washington, D.C., lawyer, Perry H. Howard, which is recognized by the Republican National Committee. Mississippi has had only one Republican legislator since Reconstruction days; he was, of all things, a former governor of Nebraska who bought a Delta plantation, settled down to enjoy the sunshine, and was drafted into local politics.
What else runs Mississippi, aside from such familiar southern factors as the Baptist church, Ku-Klux sympathizers, and the county rings? There is no state-wide boss or closely entrenched political machine. The biggest corporation is of course the Illinois Central Railroad, which owns two-thirds of the state’s railway mileage, but it has never played much of a local political role; this is one of the American railroads that has traditionally avoided politics. The dominant utility is Mississippi Power & Light, which was once part of Harvey Couch’s empire. As to newspapers we should mention those edited by Hodding Carter, cited in Chapter 40, and the two Jackson newspapers, owned by the same company but printed in different plants and with no editorial connection. The editor of one, the News, is Frederick Sullens, an explosive personal journalist (and white supremacy addict) of the old school and of great ability, who resembles in some respects W. W. Ball of Charleston, South Carolina.
Jackson is a curious town. Its population was only 62,107 in 1940, but it has steeply grown since; it possesses a handful of impeccably shining skyscrapers, rising straight out of a muck of Negro hovels and poor-white slums. The pictorial impact is very striking. I shall mention later other cities with a similar skyscraper-slum development, like San Antonio.
Mississippi is, of course, overwhelmingly rural; 90 per cent of the people live on the soil, which means cotton. But the state is doing what it can to press industrial expansion; it has a slogan “BAWI” (Balance Agriculture with Industry) and prints advertisements in the eastern papers, trying to lure capital in; it boasts that Mississippians themselves have invested four million dollars in new industrial plants in the past two years, and that it is “the only state with a plan.” Above all, Mississippi looks to petroleum: it is at present the “hottest oil spot” in the entire United States. Oil was discovered in important quantities only about five years ago, and a frenzy of drilling and development began. Some citizens look at the petroleum boom with alarm, pointing to the example of Tulsa and saying, “Oklahoma got oil, yes, but also oil got Oklahoma!”12
Mississippi is of course violently addicted to “white supremacy.” One reason for this is, we know, that it has the highest proportion of Negroes of any state; Negroes outnumber whites in many counties, and in some they are more numerous by six or eight to one. Also, during Reconstruction days, its Negroes participated more directly in politics than anywhere else in the South; twice, incredible as the fact may seem, Mississippi sent Negro senators to Washington! In its attitude toward the Negro problem, according to one expert, it differs more from North Carolina (using North Carolina as an example of a liberal southern community) than North Carolina differs from Ohio. I heard a vehement pro-Negro white say, “Mississippi is the one state that really frightens me!” and I heard a vehement anti-Negro white exclaim, “Can’t you understand?—we’re being inundated here!”
As a matter of fact a great many Negroes have left Mississippi and migrated north; even so, they still number 49 per cent of the population—which serves to intensify “white supremacy” alarm. Many of the old-line whites, however, like those in South Carolina, want to “keep” their Negroes, provided that they stay in their “place” and do not become more “insolent.” One friend told me, “If you want to get shot, just try to take a Delta planter’s nigger away from him!” Another exploded, “Pass FEPC in Washington, and you just watch, we’ll have lynchings galore down here!” Still another asseverated, “You bet your sweet life we will continue to oppose federal aid for schools. That might mean ‘nigra’ kids getting into our own schools!”
Mississippi is a state where, on one occasion, a Bible-reading society passed a resolution to the effect that “Andy Gump, Being 100% American, Should Be Elected President of the United States,” and where an eighteen-year-old colored girl was once shot because her brother aroused a gang of whites by refusing to pay 10¢ interest on a loan of half a dollar.
The following small item is not from something printed twenty years ago. It was picked up by the alert New Republic from the Natchez Democrat13 late in 1945:
Tom Jones, 24-year-old Negro … was aboard a Greyhound bus from New Orleans, Louisiana. Upon arrival at Woodville the Negro started an argument with the bus driver over the whereabouts of his baggage. The argument became heated and the bus driver went and secured the Town Marshal who … upon arriving at the scene found the condition such as made it necessary to shoot the Negro.
But the fact is impressive that, despite the great driving pressures to retain the status quo, Mississippi is loosening up to an extent. A twenty-seven-year-old veteran who lost an arm won a congressional seat in August, 1946, on a liberal platform, and Negroes voted in the primaries in some number for the first time. In December, 1946, the unprecedented and almost unbelievable spectacle was offered of Negroes daring to testify openly in Jackson as to the way they were forcibly prevented from voting in the last Bilbo campaign.
Finally a word on prohibition. Mississippi is, as we know, technically a “dry” state. Nowhere in America does hypocrisy in this regard reach such a dizzily schizophrenic level; though “dry,” it actually maintains what is openly called “a black market tax on illegal liquor” (!) and last year, by official report of the state treasurer, this brought in the not inconsiderable sum of $498,966. Mississippi has never repealed the 18th amendment—but more than a thousand local dealers hold federal liquor licenses! Concomitant with this is the fact that it is notably famous for vigorous hard drinking. The situation is crystallized in a remark by Will Rogers, “Mississippi will drink wet and vote dry—so long as any citizen can stagger to the polls.”14
Blackness in Natchez
Never have I seen a community like this. Natchez, Mississippi, is a museum in several senses of the word. Like Charleston, it is a famous southern shrine, and it imprisons more old Mississippi River culture than any city in the country; the flags of six nations have flown over it, and it is the only considerable American town with no railroad service of any kind.
I liked the crusty old signs in Connelly’s Tavern, built in 1795 and restored by the Natchez Garden Club recently, and I learned that in 1819 a barrel of whisky cost $28.12½. Also:
Fourpence a Night for Bed
Sixpence a Night With Supper
No More Than Four to Sleep in One Bed
No Boots to be Worn in Bed
Organ Grinders to Sleep in the Washhouse
The tavern was a prominent post on the old Natchez Trace ( = trail); here came traders from the Monongahela Valley down to New Orleans, and from New Orleans up to Nashville and beyond. As a defense against both river and “land” pirates, drawbridges were built, and the imprint of the moat is still visible.
Natchez is renowned today mostly for its homes and pilgrimages. The old fortunes were built on cotton and indigo, and most are derelict. So the magnolia-surrounded, anciently rich and placid mansions, which once represented as sweeping a concentration of wealth as anything in the United States, began to go to pieces. Both as a matter of historical pride, and to give aid and comfort to some of the survivors still living in them, the pilgrimages were organized, and tourists came from all over the country to troop through them and admire their dim glory. A visitor may have luncheon in one house, tea in the next, and dinner in a third, for some days, at a reasonable enough fee. A fissure, however, developed in the local citizenry promoting the idea, and for a time there were two rival pilgrimage organizations. Then the war stopped the pilgrimages; Hitler and Hirohito brought peace, as it were, to the Natchez front.
Most of the houses have an aromatic history, and all are picturesquely named. Rosalie (built in 1820) was General Grant’s headquarters in 1863, and is now the shrine of the Mississippi Daughters of the American Revolution; at The Briars (1812) Jefferson Davis married Varina Howell, the “Rose of Mississippi”; Cottage Garden (1793) was the headquarters of the last Spanish governor; Oakland (1838) is still occupied by descendants of Don Estevan Minor; in Hawthorne (1814) General Lafayette once gave a famous party; Propinquity (1790’s) was the home of a lady known subsequently as the “Mother of Texas”; Mount Repose (1824) is still lived in by the family of the original owner. Several houses today have passed into somewhat alien hands; one was bought by a retired Chicago schoolteacher. The “King of Natchez,” the local Coca-Cola bottler, lives in one (Monteigne), and I visited another (Elmscourt), where the present owner, eighty years old, who got it as a wedding present in 1902, continues to maintain its shadowy, ghost-haunted atmosphere. The most extraordinary, I thought, was Melrose, surrounded by azaleas, loblollies white as wax, and ancient stocky water oaks hung with Spanish moss, and containing furniture and oddments of a sort almost unknown to the modern world—a bateau tête-à-tête, a gaming set in which a table fits on a “navel” between two chairs, vases affixed to candelabra, a girandole, and a penholder made of gar scales.
But the antiquity and closed-mindedness of Natchez struck me more particularly in another sphere. I went to a party, and more than anywhere else in the South, or the nation, I heard expressed in their most extreme form the basic issues of the white-black conflict. I happened to mention mildly that there were two sides to the Negro question; I was literally howled and shouted down, and—I hope I am not giving offense to my hosts—several leading citizens of the town almost broke blood vessels to exclaim that I must be a “Communist” or be “influenced by Jews” to hold such a view. At the same time a familiar, curious dichotomy became expressed. Guests cried, “You can’t take my nigger away!” at the same time that they cried, “Good-by to white supremacy—we’re all doomed!” Again and again I heard that the Natchez area was 60-40 Negro, and that “We can’t have our white civilization overwhelmed !” An incidental point which seemed to enrage several people present, and to puzzle others to the point of consternation, was that one of the Negro servants had read my books; it was literally unthinkable to them that this evidence of mild literacy by a black underling could be possible.
That evening, for pure hysteria of mood, was the most remarkable I had anywhere in the United States in thirteen months. I left Natchez feeling that maybe the greatest problem in the South was not so much Negro education, but that of whites.
Louisiana: Good-by to the South
Once again the spectacular particularity and singularness of America! I don’t know how many times I have mentioned that a state or a community is a “special case,” and surely no case is more special than that of Louisiana. Once again I am aghast at the necessity of trying to compress into a page or two material that, if more room were available, could easily fill a brace of chapters. This unique boot-shaped state, Louisiana, has distinctions in many and flamboyant fields—Creole background, the Cajun communities, Mardi Gras, the career of Huey Long, butyl rubber, the shipbuilding and politics of Mr. Higgins, urban politics mythically corrupt, and the fine appetizing restaurants of New Orleans.
There are two varieties of French in Louisiana. The Creoles live largely in New Orleans and the big towns. Technically, by dictionary definition, a Creole is simply a white American of Latin origin; in Louisiana the term narrows down to folk of a superior social class, generally Catholic, whose forebears came from France or Spain.15 The Creoles came into the area early, at the time of Bienville in the 1690’s, and have more or less maintained their own community, very circumscribed and special, ever since. They are the cohesive inner core of New Orleans. Their inherited wealth has, however, tended to fray away, and many, with their estates and plantations gone, have come on hard times. But they remain inflexibly proud of their social prestige, their Faubourg St. Germain manners, and their conservative tradition.
The “Cajuns” ( = Acadians) are quite a different matter. They are Catholic like the Creoles, but by and large they are poor folk who have always been poor, and they live mainly in the countryside, not the cities. There is, of course, many a Cajun great-grandfather or mother in the Creole community; but the Creoles don’t easily admit this. Most Cajuns came to Louisiana from Canada after 1755; they hoped to find and attach themselves, after a long and difficult migration, to a group of their own kind. But the story is that the Creoles only gave them “the snakes, alligators, and mosquitoes.” I have mentioned in Chapter 28 the extreme tenacity of the French Canadians in New England; this tenacity is as nothing compared to that of the French Canadians in Louisiana. Some parishes (the term “county” is not used) hardly seem to be part of the United States. In one congressional district, the Third, the French language is almost as common as English, and along the Bayou Lafourche and near the Gulf of Mexico, there are communities where English is scarcely ever heard. These Cajuns are for the most part a kind of Latin hillbilly. They are like the primitive mountain hardshells in Arkansas and Tennessee—except that they live in swamps and are Catholic. Some of their cultural survivals are picturesque, for instance in the naming of children. One family recently called its four children Carm, Carmel, Carmelite, and Carmedal; another used Antour, Detour, Contour, and Passantour.
Louisiana, an exceptionally complex state, has non-French and Protestant backwoodsmen too.16 The principal cleavage in local politics is, in fact, that between the Protestant north (largely cotton-growing), and the Catholic south (largely rice and sugar). The headquarters of the south is of course the great romantic city of New Orleans. A complex balance of power exists between the two religious communities; for instance it is a maxim that no Protestant can ever be mayor of New Orleans, and no Catholic governor of the state. The only man who ever ran both state and city was the Kingfish, Huey Long.
The main factors in running Louisiana now might be listed as the following: (1) The Boston Club. This is a New Orleans club, like some I have mentioned all the way from Portland, Oregon, to Providence, Rhode Island, the membership of which is a select distillation of the financial and social power of the area. Interestingly enough, Higgins and some of the aggressive new oil millionaires, who have moved into Louisiana from Texas, are not members, and neither Huey Long nor Robert S. Maestri, a Long cohort and a celebrated New Orleans mayor, ever set foot in it.17 (2) Until recently, the Choctaw Club, which is a “club” of a totally dififerent category—the New Orleans equivalent of Tammany Hall, and for years the GHQ of Maestri’s city machine. But Maestri was not powerful enough in the state to elect a governor in either 1940 or 1944. (3) The upcountry, though there are few county rings as in other southern states, and Ku-Klux leftovers. (4) The reformers.
Maestri was, and is, a character. Next to that of Crump in Memphis, his was the most effective municipal machine in the South. But between Maestri and Crump there are considerable differences. Crump, as we know, cleaned up Memphis. Maestri on the other hand lived and flourished in a city which was, to put it with discretion, famous for its liveliness.18 Crump has always separated politics from business, and was, and is, financially correct. But Maestri has been openly accused of “getting” $1,157,161 from the oil interests.19 Crump speaks the King’s English, and is a well-educated man, even if his epistolary style is somewhat floriferous. Maestri once gave Franklin D. Roosevelt luncheon at a great New Orleans restaurant, when the president stopped off on a cruise. He pointed to the luscious plate before FDR and barked, “How you like dem oysters?”
No mayor in the United States was more saltily picturesque than Maestri, and none more thoroughly commingled his own pungent personality with that of the city he ruled, except La Guardia.
A reform wave swept Maestri out of office in early 1946; the same kind of movement made Perrine Palmer Jr. mayor of another southern city, Miami. So, with Maestri, the last important survivor of the Huey Long dictatorship snapped backward out of sight. The man who succeeded Maestri is of an altogether distinct and different type of character, a thirty-four-year-old war veteran, deLesseps Story (“Chep”) Morrison, who entered the Army as a second lieutenant and was a full colonel, with Legion of Merit, at thirty-three. No one gave Morrison much chance to win; the reform-and-independent vote elected him, and he was the most surprised man in Louisiana at his victory; the next most surprised was Maestri. One issue was—as in so many American cities—garbage. The housewives (once again let us note the importance of the women’s vote) were sick and tired of the city’s inefficiency in garbage collection. Also the streets were in bad repair, and every time a citizen felt the springs of his car break, he let out a curse at Maestri—and voted for Morrison later.
Morrison has plans aplenty. He wants to force a reduction in local utility rates, cut out police and municipal graft, and in particular develop New Orleans as a port of entry for Latin America. Between his nomination and election he made a quick trip to Mexico and the Central American states, adducing the geographical and other advantages New Orleans has (over Miami for instance, its great rival) as a market and transportation center. As to gambling, Morrison found himself in a dilemma. First he took the realistic “Catholic” line that the best way to control gambling would be to legalize it, which would serve to reduce graft. But the legislature (largely upcountry and Protestant) refused to approve his proposal to license and tax bookmakers, handbooks, and slot machines. He went ahead independently and, since his authority was complete in New Orleans at least, he shut down all local gambling as the alternative. What the gamblers then did was simply move outside the municipality, where, if a visitor is willing to spend a few minutes in a taxi, he will still find everything yawningly wide open.
I have mentioned musicians among governors. Jimmie (not James) H. Davis, governor of Louisiana since 1945, is not a semimusician, but a professional. A famous crooner, he ran as a reform candidate against a Maestri nominee, and won. I asked a friend what his campaign platform was. Answer: “Mother Love.” He carefully avoided any political commitments at all, and fairly sang his way into the governorship. With a small band he toured the state from top to toe, making only the most innocuous of speeches, but singing his well-known “You Are My Sunshine” and other songs in a mellifluous tenor. During the tour he drank, like Gandhi (whom he does not otherwise resemble), goat’s milk. Some people feared that Jimmie might desert Louisiana to make a movie, if any offer lucrative enough came from Hollywood; before his governorship, he had roles in several pictures. But since election Davis has stayed close to Baton Rouge and his work, though he still keeps up with music. In a recent New Yorker a review occurs of two new Davis songs, “Bang Bang” and “I’m Gonna Write Myself a Letter”; to date, his recordings have sold about a million copies. Jimmie was one of eleven children of a poor white cotton farmer. He worked his way through school, partly by teaching yodeling.
Governors in Louisiana serve a four-year term and cannot be reelected except after an interval, in the familiar southern pattern. Davis’s predecessor, Sam Houston Jones, is also an important presumptive candidate to succeed him. It was Jones who, most people agree, was largely responsible for breaking up the post-Huey Long dictatorship: he did this mostly by forcing through a civil service law. He is a lawyer and an anti-New Deal conservative. When Jones ran in 1940, his opponent was Earl K. Long, Huey’s brother; Earl had the support of Maestri and the machine, but Jones beat him. Earl Long ran again—for lieutenant governor in 1944—and was beaten again. This is a personage almost as stormy as Huey. Once he bit a political opponent in the throat.20
Louisiana has an aggressive Department of Commerce and Industry, and points proudly to its progress in these fields.21 It is one of the few southern states to have pushed hybrid corn development, as in Iowa, and by use of a mechanical cane cutter, roughly comparable to the mechanical cotton picker, its cane sugar industry has been largely renovated. It works hard on dehydrated sweet potatoes, on new feeds for livestock, and on the use of rice hulls for insulating material. Louisiana is the first American state in fur pelts (it has 16 million acres of forests), the second in sulphur, the third in natural gas, either the third or fourth in petroleum, and the fourth in salt.
All this dovetails into a highly fluid labor situation. In the summer of 1946 the legislature passed a law like those in Arkansas and Florida outlawing the closed shop. Governor Davis vetoed it. Then the legislature passed two measures which he did sign, locally called “Louisiana’s Little Case Bill.” One makes unions equally responsible with employees for fulfillment of labor contracts; the other outlaws “violence or threats” in disputes and forbids payment of unemployment benefits to strikers.
Why is industry in the South in general, and in Louisiana in particular, so hostile to organized labor? I have given several reasons in Chapter 40. Another is of course of the simplest, that unionization makes labor costs high, which in turn puts the southern manufacturer at a disadvantage compared to his competitor in the North.
George W. Healy Jr., editor of the most famous of New Orleans newspapers, the Times-Picayune, drove me to Baton Rouge,22 and here we saw the great Standard Oil (of New Jersey) refinery. The tall skinny smokestacks belch orange flame, like tapers; the gases produced are contained in enormous bulbous spheres, like retorts. Step by step, walking down the assembly line, we saw butyl rubber made. First it is a mass of hot white pebbles, then a yellowish gum, then long stringy strips, then a neat stack of thin gray sheets, and finally a bundle marked THIS SIDE UP.
The black crude comes into the refineries from Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas as well as Louisiana itself; the fuel is natural gas from the fields near Monroe. Almost all the great companies have a heavy stake in Louisiana oil——Standard of New Jersey (its producing affiliate is the Carter Oil Company), Standard of California, Gulf (Mellon interests), Texas, Sun (Pew interests), and Humble. The plant I saw, aside from making rubber, processes 135,000 barrels of crude a day, and produces everything from high octane gas, light naphtha ( = gasoline), light and heavy kerosene both, paraffin, and lubricating oil.
I spent one crowded morning in New Orleans as the guest of that well-known tycoon, Andrew Jackson Higgins, and visited several of his plants. Higgins, as everybody knows, builds boats. He is an extremely vocal and picturesque man with a marked instinct for controversy. There came a vivid episode recently when, after visiting Argentina, he not only had good words for Dictator Juan D. Peron; he wrote letters attacking Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden for his anti-Pero̓n views. At the City Park plant I saw PT boats being made, these are built upside down, and the prefabricated ribs and keels are put into place on a long assembly line. Mass production here is like none other I ever saw, because most of the work is done in wood; there is little clang of metal, and the whole massive plant is strangely silent, with a wood-and-shavings odor. Higgins and Kaiser are often compared; they differ radically. Higgins has had a colorful lot of labor trouble; Kaiser almost none. Kaiser, as we know, was mostly government financed; Higgins not so much. Kaiser specialized in big ships, and Higgins in small ones. But Higgins, like Kaiser, is a self-made man. Thirty years ago he lost every-thing in the lumber business; he started all over again as a hand in a sawmill, with nothing in the world, he told me, “except 35¢, a wife, two pistols, and a mandolin with a broken neck.”
Finally, another word about New Orleans. Pre-eminently it is a river city. Here, at long last, the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red, the Missouri, the Des Moines, the Illinois—to say nothing of the Mississippi that contains them all—reach the sea. Pre-eminently, too, its port (which is outside politics incidentally) makes it “the Hub of the Americas”; lately an organization known as International House has been established, to attract the Latin American export trade. Much is written about the famous and indeed unique charm of New Orleans; it is not so commonly realized that, in actual essence, it is a tough dockyard city. Also one should at least mention the two universities cheek by jowl, Tulane (Protestant) and Loyola (Catholic): Loyola has among other things its own 50,000-watt radio station, WWL, which brings it a handsome revenue. New Orleans is also a community where there is a pronounced Jewish influence; the late Lyle Saxon, the city’s most eminent biographer, told me once, “The Jews have all the money here, and the Catholics have all the votes, so everybody gets along fine.” The most distinguished living citizen of New Orleans is, however, of another category—Mrs. Elizabeth Meriwether Gilmer, now aged seventy-six, and known to millions under the name Dorothy Dix.
Do not think I am neglecting the Vieux Carre. Perhaps I am wrong but in a way this “French Quarter” seemed to me more Italian than French. But nowhere else in America is there such a concentration of good food. There are wonderfully good restaurants in New York, like the Colony, and in San Francisco, Beverly Hills, and Milwaukee; the point to make about New Orleans, it would seem, is that practically all restaurants are good. You can drop in anywhere and have a first-class meal; this may seem minor, but try to think of any other community in the United States of which it can be said; the general level of American restaurant cuisine, especially in the South and Middle West, is appalling. Then of course four of the top New Orleans restaurants—Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, Broussard’s, and the Arnaud’s of Count Casenave—are of an excellence unique in the world outside prewar France.
Heritage of Huey
The more one looks back to it, the more noteworthy it all seems. It is easy to be wise after the event; it is also (as somebody once said) wise. In almost every respect the career of Huey Long parallels that of the modern European dictator-tyrant, the Hitler or Mussolini. Huey Long, had he lived, might very well have brought Fascism to America.
The story is so well known that I will only fill in a detail or two and point to a contemporary moral. Huey was an engaging monster. He was infinitely more “human” than, say, Pilsudski or Kemal Atatürk; compared to Franco for instance he was the quintessence of warmth and charm. He was first and last a man of the people, and his appeal to the man in the street was intimate. Any dictator needs, above all, a powerful personality; Huey certainly had one. From the very beginning he had tremendous oratorical power (like Mussolini); he was (like Goering) often self-indulgent and lazy, and (like Hitler) something of a coward physically. He gave his movement religious overtones (like Salazar, Franco, Dollfuss); it was Gerald L. K. Smith, no less, who preached the funeral sermon at his grave. He was flashy (like Goebbels), bawdy (like Kemal), a sentimentalist (like Hitler), a braggart (like Metaxas), and a man with an extremely concrete intelligence (like Alexander of Jugoslavia). In one respect Huey differed from his European prototypes: he had a glistening sense of humor. Also he was a master of political abuse. Once he eliminated an enemy, who had a small beard, simply by calling him “trashy mouth.” Huey could, however, write very effective English. He said on one occasion, “I was born into politics, a wedded man, with a storm for my bride.”
Not everybody liked him of course. The anecdote about the man about to be hanged is famous:
Sheriff: Any last word?
Condemned man: No.
Huey: May I then use the condemned man’s time to make a speech?
Condemned man: Hang me first.
Long spent some months in his youth as a salesman for a kind of lard, just as Hitler peddled post cards. Finally, what beat him down in the end was what beat Mussolini down: corruption.
Always he had great capacity to project himself, whether by getting drunk on Long Island, holding his famous levee in green pajamas, wise-cracking about how he would tear the White House down when he got there, grinning his way through the Senate, and saying to a respectful interviewer who was endeavoring to find out about his character, “Just say I’m sui generis, and let it go at that.”23
Huey was born poor (again like Mussolini); he was the eighth of nine children. He called himself a sharecropper, and even claimed Cajun blood (as Pilsudski claimed Lithuanian blood). He was an inveterate bookworm (again like Mussolini). He had a well-knit capacity to draw thugs of undoubted loyalty to his side (like Goering say), and he began public life by attacking the “interests” and “corporations” (just as Hitler attacked the department stores); he was responsible (again like Hitler) for a considerable public works program. He was (like Franco) absolutely ruthless to his enemies; he called people “Shinola” or “Kinky,” hinting that they had Negro blood, just as Hitler accused his enemies of having Jewish blood. And let it never be forgotten that this Louisiana Pied Piper achieved more power in an American state than any other man in our history.
As to the exact circumstances of Huey’s death there is still some mystery (as with Hitler’s death), but most well-informed people in Louisiana accept now the commonly told version. Huey had imputed a touch of the tarbrush to a distinguished judge; a sensitive young man, who had married into the judge’s family, brooded over this until it drove him into a frenzy, and he killed the Kingfish. The Long dictatorship did not, incidentally, end with Long. A shaky triumvirate carried on for some years, until 1940; during this period some of the knavery that took place outdid anything under Huey. What broke up the gang was, of course, federal prosecution for income tax evasion and similar irregularities; eighteen men went to jail, including the president of the university24 and the governor who succeeded Long. To catch crooks (as we know well from the example of Chicago) the United States government has to wait until they become too successful.
Long was a lying demagogue, a prodigious self-seeker, vulgar, loose, and criminal. His own brother once testified that he had received a $10,000 bribe from a utility subsidiary. But the overriding point is something beyond all this. It is that Huey, who certainly did harm to Louisiana, also did good. He built quite good roads and public buildings; he abolished the poll tax; he seldom did any Negro baiting; he opened up the possibility of education to thousands of youngsters by making text-books free; he built “free bridges” where traffic had been impossible without a toll; his Share the Wealth program had, in part, a perfectly sound social and economic basis; he was a people’s man—until ambition, utter lack of any philosophical values, and corruption combined to bear him under. Why is this point so important? Because, if I may paraphrase Raymond Swing who wrote a prescient article about him in the Nation many years ago, it was impossible to understand how dangerous he was without understanding what good he did too. He gave “good works in return for dictatorship,” and without the good works he could hardly have been a menace at all. Any future demagogue who attempts to carve a road to power in the United States—for instance through the next depression if one comes—is almost certain to follow Huey’s path. There is, indeed, no other. Fascism will come in disguised as socialism. A man will make every promise to the underpossessed, and undeniably improve their circumstances; he will appeal to almost every shade and variety of liberal; on the horizon, emerging, he will seem to be a savior, a disinterested messiah. The awakening comes later—with abrogation of civil liberties, military rule, seizure of the electorate, building of a Hitler-like machine, selling out to the big interests who were originally the opposition, concentration camps for the first followers and all the dissidents, and in the end bilking the people of what they thought they had.
Carnival to Conclude
Nothing like the New Orleans Carnival exists in America, as a fascinating survival of noblesse oblige, a tightly articulated social ritual, and plain fun-making vivacity and hi-jinks.
Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) is of course the day before Lent. From the first week in January until Ash Wednesday, the Carnival advances; then almost all other activity in New Orleans stops, and Canal Street (the widest important street in the United States incidentally) is roped off for five solid days though it is the main thoroughfare of the town; crescendo comes on Tuesday night, with parades and masked dancing on the streets, and the community explodes like a balloon packed with firecrackers.
But actually Carnival is a somewhat closed affair; for instance, as far as inner participation goes, Jews are excluded. “The Jews simply pack up and leave town during Carnival,” I heard it said. Of course this is an exaggeration. But Jews are not admitted to the clubs on which Carnival depends.
These clubs are a very curious and esoteric business; there are thirty-three big ones, and many small. Each gives a costume ball (at some it is the women who are masked, not the men), and several stage extravagant parades. Some of these take place at night, with Negroes bearing torches; the floats can be miracles of painstaking and expensive artifice; this is the part of Carnival that the populace and the tourists see and enjoy. The balls are something else again. The clubs were, originally, and some still are, the extreme inner citadel of New Orleans snobbishness, wealth, and social prestige; normally only a handful of invitations are available to outsiders, and these are fought for vividly. Each club has a king, queen, and court; people may spend thousands of dollars for a single costume. The king of Mardi Gras is always king of the club called Rex, and the queen is the debutante Rex, the Lord of Misrule, chooses. Mostly queens are picked for their wealth and hierarchical position in the community, rather than for good looks; some queens have been plain as pins.
The lines of cleavage among the various clubs are as closely stratified as are the families in the Almanach de Gotha. The leading club is Comus. Its membership merges and overlaps with that of the Boston Club, which is not a Carnival club. Puzzled by these recondite matters I asked a gentleman who told me with serious pride that he had been a duke five times, exactly how the rival statures were determined; he answered with airy tartness, “Comus doesn’t come to Rex, but Rex does go to Comus, and there’s your answer.” The grand climax of Carnival occurs, indeed, at midnight on Mardi Gras, when the king of Rex, with queen, leaves his own ball, and proceeds to that of Comus at the Boston Club, where the four kings and queens first meet.
No club is more interesting than that of the Negroes, of whom there are 200,000 in New Orleans. This is called Zulu, and its good-humored parade is a sine qua non of the entire Carnival. King of Zulu in 1946 was an undertaker, Clem J. Vandage.
The 1946 Mardi Gras was one of the most expensive, crowded, lush, and sensational in history, and 750,000 people saw it. But—labor note!—some of the night parades were not as brilliant as in former years, because the Negro torch bearers asked for $5.00 instead of $1.25 for their two-hour march, and some clubs refused to pay it.
What lesson has Carnival? Only that Americans (like most other of the earth’s human beings) like to have fun once in a while, to show off in fancy dress, to drink and meet pretty girls, to keep ceremonial secrets, to belong to things, and to keep a vested interest in privileges of the past.
So to conclude now with the ten great states of the South. Let us push on to Texas.
1 For some of this material I am again indebted to George S. Mitchell, whom I mentioned in Chapter 40 above.
2 From Cotton, Hearings before the Subcommittee of the Committee on Agriculture, House of Representatives, Washington, 1945. This report gives some indication of the massive complexity of the cotton situation. Several hundred persons and organizations from all over the country submitted rival cotton “programs,” and the text runs to something like 600,000 words in all.
3 Cf. Victor Riesel in the New York Post, October 15, 1046.
4 Cf. A. G. Mezerik, New Republic, “Journey in America.”
5 New York World-Telegram, December 12, 1945.
6 Edgar T. Rouzeau in the New York Herald Tribune, November 18, 1946.
7 Time, October 14, 1946.
8 Like all southern states Alabama, fearful of too much concentration of power in a single man, punishes its governors. Not only can no governor be re-elected until another term has intervened, but for a year after he leaves office he is forbidden to take any state or federal, elective or appointive post.
9 Haiti, China. Liberia, Nicaragua, the Bahamas.
10 Of course some members of its board of trustees are white. Among eminent folk on the board are Winthrop W. Aldrich, Jesse H. Jones, Basil O'Connor, and Frances Bolton.
11 Mississippi has at least five other nicknames: Bayou, Border-Eagle, Ground-Hog, Eagle, and Mud-Waddler. See Odum, op. cit., p. 538.
12 Timber is another important industry, but vast amounts of forest have disappeared. Fifty years ago the state had the biggest stand of long-leaf yellow pine in the world. This has been completely ravaged, like the similar belt in northern Michigan.
13 This newspaper refused recently to accept an advertisement by Harper and Brothers for Black Boy, by Richard Wright, though most other southern newspapers printed such advertisements freely. Incidentally Wright is a Natchez boy.
14 After writing this passage I found almost the identical thing in Myrdal, who says he saw “more hard drinking in Mississippi than he has ever before witnessed.” Also Myrdal quotes the Will Rogers line though in different form.
15 But some “German” Creoles exist today in New Orleans.
16 Also there are such splinter communities as the “Redbones” (Indian-Negro crossbreeds), and “Griffes,” who are one degree whiter than octoroons.
17 This establishment produces a club punch which is, if I may say so, the most explosively delightful thing I ever tasted.
18 In older days a guide to the bordello districts, with highly flavored illustrations and advertisements, was freely published and sold, and until quite recently the opening of a new house was a gala occasion with high officials of the police and city administration in attendance. One mayor said of prostitution once, “You can make it illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular!”
19 New Orleans Times-Picayune, February 15, 1940. A suit against Maestri brought by the attorney general of the state was dismissed on a technicality.
20 Cf. Louisiana Hayride, by Harnett T. Kane, p. 75, the best guide to the whole Long period.
21 But its public debt remains more than twice the total budget.
22 This is still another American city where there is a monopoly in journalism. Charles P. Manship is editor and publisher of both the Baton Rouge papers, and also owns the local radio station, WJBO.
23 Several of these quotations from Long are from Louisiana Hayride, op. cit.
24 The first president of Louisiana State University, the largest in the South, was none other than General William Tecumseh Sherman.