
          Populist Revival in Mississippi?
          By Pigott, BradBrad Pigott
          Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 12-17
          
          My opponent is not the man whose name will appear on the
ballot. Instead, my opposition is a small group of very wealthy and
very powerful men who are financing the campaign against me. These
bigshots oppose me because they cannot tell me what to do."
--Mississippi Congressman Wayne Dowdy, campaigning for Congress in
1982
          "If we win this campaign, we will be sending a message that
if a politician fights the big power companies, fights the powerful
legislators, and makes these people mad, then the people of
Mississippi will stand up for that politician."
--Mississippi Governor Bill Allain, campaigning for Governor in
1983
          A century devoted to the political subordination of black_people in
Mississippi almost silenced biracial aspirations for populist
reform. But with the waning of official racial segregation, there is
evidence that the next era of politics in the most Southern of
Southern_states might be distinguished not by the corporate pampering
with which boosters have hailed the latest "New South," but by a
biracial assertion of common dignity through the populist checking of
private power.
          Populist aspirations have themselves been checked for so many
generations in Mississippi by the tragic lessons of the
turn-of-the-century Populist movement's greatest but last hurrah in
the state, the election of 1895. That year, populist gubernatorial
nominee Frank Burkitt was bringing forth a relentless crusade against
the "putrid, putrescent, putrifying political moribund carcass of
bourbon democracy." The Populists had gathered more than a third of
the votes in the previous year's congressional elections, and were on
the rise. Burkitt took to the stump not just with the familiar
Populist proposals for regulating and taxing economic privilege, but
also with advocacy of free public_education for both black and white
children, and with attacks on the severe franchise restrictions locked
into the state's 1890 Constitution. (Burkitt as a constitutional
convention delegate had refused to sign the Constitution on account of
those voting restrictions.) The Populist political base in the
relatively white, eastern hill country had been consolidated, and the
conservative white Democratic establishment set about frantically to
find some way to choke the Populist momentum.
          They found their way in smothering the economic aspirations of have
not whites with the rhetoric of white_supremacy and solidarity. Their
rallying cry was that a Populist government would tolerate black
political power--portrayed as an appalling threat to every white. The
racist barrage dislodged enough have-not whites from support of the
Populists' economic reform message to assure a solid defeat of Burkitt
and his Populists, who never recovered politically from the stigma of
the Bourbon attacks.
          
            >Twelve Per Cent Democracy
          
          With biracial populist aspirations thus squelched, politics for the
next four generations in Mississippi was the politics of privileged
white_men. By the turn of the century the ruling whites were so
pleased with themselves that they saw fit to include, among
"Mississippi Firsts" boasted of in the Official and Statistical
Register of Mississippi for 1904, the following:
          "Mississippi was the first state in the Union to solve the problem
of white_supremacy in the South by lawful means. The Constitution of
1890 disfranchises the ignorant and vicious of both races, and places
control of the State in the hands of the virtuous, intelligent
citizens."
          The ballot was regarded by Mississippi law as a prerogative of
racial and economic privilege, to be reserved only for monied white
men. Before the Populist movement had had a decent chance to organize
itself in Mississippi, the 1890 voting bars managed to pull much of
the Populist potential out from under the state's people: By 1892,
black registration had been cut to 5.4% of black adults, and enough
white have-nots had been blocked from the ballot to cut white
registration in half. As a result, during the seventy years following
the 1890 disfranchisement, Mississippi's governors were elected with
votes from an average of only 12% of the 

state's adult (twenty and
over) population. No Mississippi governor during those seventy years
ever received the consent of as much as one-fifth of the adult
population of the state.
          What competition there was for power was generally waged between
the planter-lawyer-merchant class concentrated in the western Delta,
and, when they were permitted to vote at all, the "redneck" farmers
concentrated in the hills. Between the planters and the rednecks,
there was never any dispute about whether the black_community was to
be suppressed. There was only dispute about whether to talk about it
openly.
          As if remembering what the "better element" of the Delta had done
to Burkitt and the Populists, politicians who addressed the hill folk
found it necessary to combine their modest spending and reform
proposals with a constant rhetorical attack on the black race. The
brutally racist ridicule offered from the stump first by James
K. Vardaman and then by Theodore G. Bilbo served as a political cover
for their programs of progressive taxation and expanded education for
have-not whites and preempted any charge that they sought to lift
blacks along with their programs to lift have-not whites.
          With the hills' advocates preempting the field of white supremacist
rhetoric, the planters and their allies had little use for open talk
about "the race problem" which they had done so much to create and
sustain. Like their modern successors in the Republican Party, the
planters regarded such public rhetoric as bad manners and as worse
public relations.
          Mississippi politics remained white politics until the decade of
the civil_rights movement.
          
            The New Electorate
          
          By 1970, a third force had arrived in Mississippi politics with the
registration of black citizens in legendary numbers under the
protection of the Voting_Rights_Act of 1965. As recently as 1960, only
5.27% of Mississippi blacks of voting age had been permitted to
register to vote. This pathetic figure had barely changed since the
1890 disfranchisement had shrivelled black registration to 5.4% by
1892. But a remarkable 66% of voting age blacks became registered
voters by 1970, and made up 29% of the Mississippi electorate. The
election of over four hundred black officials to legislative and
municipal offices has kept alive the notion in the black_community
that voting can make a difference, and the increasingly intense
competition for such offices among politically talented blacks is
likely to sustain the level of black voter turnout. The first major
party nomination in this century of a black candidate for federal or
statewide office came in 1982.
          "But it is the populist appeal," says Mississippi civil_rights
organizer Rev. Ed King, "which alone has been able to bring into the
voting electorate thousands of more fundamentally alienated black
Mississippians. Populism expresses their alienation not just from
privileged whites, but from politically established black leaders as
well. When this extra black electorate has been activated at all in
recent years, which has not been often, it has been through an
informal network which lacks a current name, but which is in fact the
remnant of the old Mississippi Freedom Democratic_Party," says King,
who was the MFDP's national committeeman.
          To win a two person, statewide political race in Mississippi
without significant black support would now require over 70% of the
votes of whites. The state's recent political history is a witness to
the political impossibility of such a requirement. Since black
Mississippians became virtually a third of the state's electorate
around 1970, no candidacy has been able to survive mobilization of so
high a portion of the state's electorate against it through open
indulgence in the slogans of racial supremacy and segregation.

          
            The New Bourbon Boosters
          
          Meanwhile, during the very years of black enfranchisement, the
loyalties of the Delta state of mind have been enticed, updated, and
organized by the newly active forces of the Republican Party. To the
usual pretensions of elitist bourbonism, the "New South" Republicans
have added the boosterism of the "new money" metropolitan
suburbs. Like the Delta Boubons of old, the Mississippi Republicans
center their political world around their longing for a social world
that is, above all else, quiet. They are drawn to a political message
which promises for them the quietness within which to pursue the
central mission of their daily lives, their own comfort.
          This "upwardly mobile" world of shopping centers, franchise strips,
and country clubs has claimed 35% to 40% of the active Mississippi
electorate: A 1979 statewide political poll found 39% of likely
Mississippi voters classifying themselves as either Republican (10%)
or Independent (29%). The total in a 1980 statewide poll was 38% (21%
Republican; 17% Independent). A 1981 poll found 33.7% of the
electorate to be made up of either strong Republicans (8.4%), weak
Republicans (11.3%), or Independent Republicans (14%). (Probing by
pollsters of self-classified "independents" in Mississippi has
revealed that, though party realignment toward a Republican identity
has not been completed for this segment of the electorate, their views
are such that they tend predominantly to vote Republican.)
          But a party or a state of mind cannot win elections with 35 to 40
percent of the vote, and indeed no Mississippi Republican has won a
majority of the votes in any statewide election in this
century. Republican Thad Cochran slipped into a US Senate seat in 1978
with a 45% plurality victory over a Democratic constituency split
between an undirected white nominee and a strong black independent
candidacy. Though the Republican nominee for governor in 1975 had
gathered 46% of the general election vote, the same Republican
candidate slipped to 39% in 1979. A different, more conservative
Republican nominee received the same 39% in the 1983 race for
governor. 1981 saw the Republicans lose Mississippi's fourth
congressional district seat, based around the Jackson metropolitan
area and the lower Mississippi river counties, which they had held
since 1972. The predictable Republican share of the statewide vote in
Mississippi seems, at least for now, to have peaked.
          Like their planter-merchant predecessors from the segregation
years, the new Republicans are rendered uneasy by the sound of
outright public and explicit racial combat. Their uneasiness lies not
in any preference for racial justice, but in the fact that the
tensions and embarrassments surrounding open talk about race tend to
disturb the quietness of what has become the Republican state of
mind. Thus Mississippi Republicans are attracted to both elements in
any call to "put race behind us" and to get on about the business of
nourishing and preserving a "good business climate" suitable for the
quiet pursuit of comfort. Outright mention of race risks an
extraordinary intrusion into this state of mind, for the Republican
strongholds of comfort in the metropolitan areas of Jackson and the
Gulf Coast are easily the most racially segregated zones of
Mississippi life.
          Yet the Mississippi Republican Party, in further imitation of its
Delta-Bourbon heritage, has proven itself quick to exploit racial
prejudice through indirection and innuendo where necessary to thwart
the prospect of a biracial coalition against it. Republican Cochran
won his 1978 plurality Senate victory in part with the charge that
Aaron Henry, the veteran NAACP state President who had endorsed! the
white Democratic nominee against Cochran, would have "a rope around
[the Democrat's] neck" if the latter were to go to Washington as
Senator. Republican Webb Franklin in 1982 narrowly won the Delta's
congressional district seat from black Democratic nominee Robert Clark
with the Republican campaign slogan, "A Congressman for Us." Though
the Republican congressional nominee in the fourth district had
learned by 1982 not to boost black voter turnout by repeated reference
to his opposition to the Voting_Rights_Act, his campaign did see fit
to saturate the district with half-page newpaper advertisements
centered around a distorted drawing of his white Democratic opponent's
face, complete with noticeably African features. The white Democratic
opponent, Congressman Wayne Dowdy, had voted the previous year not
only for extension of the Voting_Rights_Act but also against every
amendment aimed at weakening the Act's effectiveness. Dowdy went on to
win reelection in 1982 despite official Republican Party placement at
predominantly black precincts of hired white "guards" and posters
featuring multiple references to the word "jail" as the promised
punishment for noncompliance with registration technicalities.
          
            The Transformed Political World of Have-Not Whites
          
          The Republican innuendo of white solidarity reflects the virtual
desperation of the state's privileged whites in the face of a subtle
transformation by the most complex force in Mississippi politics, the
white have-nots. Those whites who perceive themselves as on the
outside of the circle of power and comfort in Mississippi life now in
fact hold the balance of electoral power as the swing group in the
state's politics.
          There are, for one thing, more have-not whites participating in the
electorate than could ever have participated during
disfranchisement. In silent vindication of the old Populists' 1890
warning that official disfranchisement was aimed at have-not whites as
well as at blacks, whites in Mississippi have been able to double the
total number of whites registered to vote since enactment of the
Voting_Rights_Act of 1965.
          But the real transformation is taking place within the minds of
have-not whites. The choices they have begun to make do not include
outright abandonment of racial bigotry; Mississippi life is still too
richly tragic to allow for that. The question is instead whether the
salience of racial polarization has submerged enough in their lives to
permit the emergence now of economic consciousness as the central
focus of their political choices.
          Some powerful evidence has emerged for the declining significance
of racial polarization as the centerpiece of the political lives of
have-not whites. By significant majorities, white Mississippians with
annual family incomes of less than ten thousand dollars responded that
white students "should go to the same schools" as black_students, and
that -whites have no "right to keep blacks from moving into their
neighborhoods if they want to," when a representative 

statewide sample
was asked in a 1981 academic poll. Half of non-retired whites making
annual incomes under $25,000. asserted in the course of a 1981 poll of
Wayne Dowdy's fourth congressional district that it would not "make
any difference" in their voting decision if a congressional candidate
were "strongly supported by local black leaders." Only 36% responded
that they would be "less inclined" to support such a candidate.
          Within days following the mid-1981 special election in which Dowdy
was first elected to Congress, a Republican Party pollster asked a
representative sampling of the district's voters to isolate an issue
"of particular concern to you personally" in making their voting
decisions. That Dowdy was the first major white candidate in
Mississippi ever to endorse retention of a strong Voting_Rights_Act
had been during the campaign the focus of repeated and highly visible
attention by all sides and by the media. Yet the white respondents who
had voted against Dowdy did not even mention his voting_rights stand
as a factor in their voting decision. The economic issues of social
security and Reaganomics dominated the white voters' responses, with
the Voting_Rights_Act being mentioned only by black Dowdy
supporters. In short, his decisive stand for the continuation of
federal supervision of black voting_rights added to, and did not
detract from, Dowdy's successful populist coalition. (Nor was Dowdy's
congressional voting record in fulfillment of his voting_rights pledge
an issue in his 1982 re-election campaign, which he won handily with
the help of the populist slogan, "Don't let the big shots call the
shots.")
          The decline of racial polarization as an effective political weapon
has brought a decline also in the political potency of what were once
conventional verbal codes for a message of white unity. The ability of
the code word "conservative" to galvanize whites, for instance, has
apparently been dissolved with the withdrawal of explicit racial
combat from the center stage of politics. Though the state's
journalists continue to churn out the conventional wisdom that
Mississippi has a "conservative" electorate, a 1981 statewide academic
survey finds a slightly lower proportion of the Mississippi electorate
willing to accept the "conservative" label (27.8%) than was the case
in the country as a whole (28.3%, from a 1980 national survey). A
separate 1980 statewide poll found only 33% of likely Mississippi
voters accepting the "conservative" label, while only 27% of Dowdy's
congressional district electorate was found to be made up of white
"conservatives" in 1982. The old "conservative" catch-all code simply
rings hollow now for a majority even of white Mississippi voters.
          What can be seen as emerging to overshadow racial resentments in
the political focus of have-not whites in Mississippi is a
preoccupation with economic issues, which now dominate the responses
to every survey question calling for "our most important public
problem." And what has every chance of shaping those economic issues
for have" not whites is an old Southern peculiarity which is just now
being let loose for full political expression: a sense of
psychological distance from a privileged circle of absentee
power-holders who are insulated both from the consequences of their
own power and from the traditional reciprocities of folk values. This
is the stuff of populism.
          There is first the essential estrangement from the flow of affairs
as run by the powerful. A representative, statewide sample of
Mississippi voters was asked this question in a 1980 poll: "Generally
speaking, do you feel things are going in the right direction in
Mississippi today, or do you feel that they have gotten pretty
seriously off on the wrong track?" Among white non-retirees with
family incomes under fifteen-thousand dollars, significantly more
answered "wrong track" (44%) than answered "right direction"
(36%). The responses of these less privileged whites were remarkably
similar to the responses of black participants in the same survey, who
responded "wrong track" (46%) more often than "right direction"
(40%). But the responses of non-retiree whites making over
$25,000. were fundamentally different from those of both blacks and
less privileged whites, with only 28% responding "wrong track" and
with fully 58% responding "right direction." A 1982 poll asked of
likely voters in Mississippi's fourth congressional district an
otherwise identical question aimed at "things in the nation" rather
than in the state. Among blue collar whites, 49% saw the nation as
having "gotten pretty seriously off on the wrong track," while only
35% saw a "right direction." The responses among non-retired whites
with incomes of at least $25,000. reflected the reverse of the blue
collar white responses: 55% of these privileged whites saw a "right
direction" in the nation while only 38% sensed a "wrong track."
          It is by now an item of conventional political wisdom that the
growth of governmental bureaucracies, themselves oversized and
stifling, has provided a new target for the old populist
sentiment. But in fact an attack from the right on such governmental
targets has little chance of attracting a political majority now in
Mississippi, when compared with the biracial attraction to reforms
aimed at private privilege. Any message of attack against the public
bureaucracies would first forfeit the support of most black
Mississippians, who know racial bigotry when they see it in the form
of wholesale attacks upon the organizational vehicle for administering
public policies of compassion. But any "rightwing populism" would also
leave untouched some of the deeper populist values of many less
privileged Mississippi whites. Among non-retired whites with family
incomes 

below $25,000. who responded to a 1982 poll of Dowdy's fourth
congressional district, for instance, the most favored route to
cutting the federal budget deficit was not "cuts in social programs."
It was, instead, "the elimination of tax cuts to business." About half
of those white respondents further indicated that if they understood a
candidate to be "supported by big Jackson businessmen," they would be
inclined to vote against that candidate based on that one fact
alone. The emerging language of populist candidacies in Mississippi
has indeed been directed almost exclusively at the state's own
business elite, concentrated in Jackson.
          Have-not Mississippi whites know that they are prepared to live
their own lives by shared folk rules like frugality, humility,
simplicity and informality. But they know also that the reward these
days for abiding by these old rules is next to nothing. And they can
increasingly sense that the bulky private institutions of the rich, in
exempting themselves from and snubbing the old values, are rewarded
immensely, regardless of their performance.
          
            Early Rumblings of a Populist Resurgence?
          
          It was by no coincidence that the first major Mississippi
gubernatorial candidate in contemporary times to abandon the rhetoric
of segregation was also the first such candidate to invoke the
language of the populist heritage. Bill Waller was elected governor in
1971 on the force of his pledge to check the power of what he cited as
"the Capitol Street Gang" of privileged private institutions centered
around Jackson's principal commercial street. Maverick Cliff Finch
drew entirely on populist symbolism, with a lunchpail as his chosen
campaign symbol, in winning the right to succeed Waller as governor in
1975. But these early rumblings of a biracial populist resurgence
suffered some frustration at the hands of the purported champions of
the revived populist heritage, Waller and Finch. For lack of
ideological sincerity they were unwilling, and for lack of governing
skills they were unable, to transform their symbolism into deeds of
populist reform. (As one black political strategist has said of Finch
in particular, "that lunchpail turned out to be empty.")
          William Winter as Governor sought to draw on a potent deed of
populist reform with his 1982 legislative proposal to raise the oil
and gas severance tax in order to finance a package of authentic
reforms in the state's otherwise dismal public_education system. But
for reasons of political style and personal demeanor Winter was
unwilling to draw the symbolism of the populist heritage to the aid of
his tax proposal, which proceeded to die under the pressure of state
and national oil lobbyists and their friends at the top of the
Mississippi Legislature. The painfully regressive sales tax, to which
those legislators are prone to turn for their answer to every new
revenue need, was once again hiked in order to finance the Winter
education reforms. (Mississippi was already imposing, for instance,
the highest sales tax on food, in the country.)
          Only with the just-completed race to succeed Winter did there
emerge in a major statewide candidacy, for the first time in this
century, an apparent unity between the words and the deeds of biracial
populist reform. His court victories in landmark cases against the
rulers of the state's utilities, utility regulatory commission, and
even the Legislature, were at the center of Mississippi Attorney
General Bill Allain's successful campaign for the governorship in
1983. He protested the holding of closed-door official meetings by
walking out of them, and personally boycotted the posh private clubs
populated by the business elite which runs so much of the state from
Jackson.
          Allain even dared to file and to win a lawsuit insisting that the
State's standpat legislative rulers must abide by the state's
constitutional separation-of-powers provision, which prohibited the
nevertheless pervasive membership of legislators on executive agency
boards. He argued as attorney general before the Mississippi Supreme
Court that if the state is to have a right to ask the average person
to obey the Constitution, "then we must have the right to ask the
richest person, the most powerful person in the state, to do no
less."
          But Allain's central focus has been as an unflappable critic, both
in and out of court, of what was until recently a silent attack by the
state's electric utilities on the old values of frugality and
lawfulness. Here is Allain on the blank-` check rate base
traditionally accorded to Mississippi's larger utilities: "I have seen
their books. . .you are paying those $150,000 and $200,000-a-year
salaries, you are paying their country club dues, and you are paying
when they go up there in that twenty-story building and eat and drink
all that imported wine." As black activist and political scientist
Leslie McLemore puts it, Allain's call for checks on utility spending
reflected "an issue that had an impact on pocketbooks. It transcended
race and class, although it was strongest among people of poorer
socio-economic backgrounds."
          
            Populist Prospects
          
          The electoral possibilities of the revived populist heritage in
Mississippi are dependent on the continuing emergence of a rare and
resourceful breed of populist politician, and therein lies populism's
chief vulnerability. To bring and hold have-not whites and blacks
together after so many generations of bitter hostility still requires
extraordinarily subtle political leadership. It is the uncommon
politician who brings to the task both the necessary political agility
and the necessary psychic detachment for sustaining the wrath of the
privileged which is certain to be released privately against any
populist politician. For such a maverick figure to have access to the
awesome amount of money required to run a modern political campaign is
more uncommon still, and tends to require that the politician have
personal wealth.
          A still more painful hindrance to the emergence of 

biracial
populist leadership is the prospect that white have-nots are not yet
ready to be led by black populist advocates. As long as even the most
talented black politicians are deprived of highly visible offices from
which to act out roles as majoritarian decision-makers, calls by black
politicians for economic fairness will too often be dismissed by
have-not whites as calls limited to the black_community alone. That
black politicians are now relatively handicapped in bearing the banner
of a populist movement aimed at biracial justice is but one more
tragic reminder of the legacy of racism handicapping populism
itself.
          Even for the rare political figure able to survive such hurdles to
be elected, the profound fragmentation of state governmental power
offers an abundance of veto points from which privileged interests can
and do quietly obstruct populist policies.
          Yet there has also emerged a certain amount of institutional and
cultural glue available to the uncommon politician who sets out
through electoral politics to bring together the populist constituency
in Mississippi. The formal Democratic_Party organization in the state
has just begun to generate for itself the money and technology with
which to sustain a network of loyalities capable of biracial political
organizing. And voter identity with the Democratic_Party has itself
stabilized as a potent for reconciliation: the portion of the
Mississippi electorate volunteering identification with the
Democractic Party in statewide polls has been 51% in 1979, 53% in
1980, and 55.3% in 1981.
          The state's relatively small organized labor movement, whose
leadership stood firm with biracial backing of the civil_rights
movement in its toughtest days, has now found political vindication in
its ability to offer populist candidates a ready-made network of black
and white political organizers. Longtime Mississippi AFL-CIO President
Claude Ramsay even says that "the labor movement provided the glue for
Dowdy's" congressional wins, which Ramsay sees as "a pay-off for work
over many years" in holding together a biracial organized labor
movement.
          A hard-won astuteness among black_voters about the necessities of
coalition building is another source of glue capable of holding
together biracial populist majorities. Black independent candidacies
for Congress in 1982 and for governor in 1983 failed to win more than
one-tenth of the votes of black Mississippians. Such failures have
just now put the state's Republican strategists on notice that an
earlier Republican scheme of sponsoring black independent candidacies
can no longer be counted on to split the Democratic vote and produce a
Republican plurality. Mississippi's white Democratic governor and
congressmen made an overdue attempt at reciprocity in 1982 by publicly
campaigning for the election of black Democratic primary winner Robert
Clark in Mississippi's new Delta congressional district. (Though the
votes of about 13% of white voters and a lower-than-expected black
turnout caused Clark a very narrow loss in 1982, he has announced his
candidacy for the same seat in 1984 and has at least an even chance of
becoming this year the first black Mississippi congressman in this
century.)
          Whenever the populist ingredients bubbling in Mississippi's
political culture can manage to come across just the right maverick
advocate, populism will continue to have a decent chance of winning
elections in the state for the foreseeable future. The old
recalcitrance in the face of absentee power, having been drawn on and
abused for so long by the segregationists' clamor against "outsiders"
and federal "intervention," can now be turned against the pretensions
of private powerholders whose isolation comes from exclusive devotion
to their own comfort."
          In moving to check the prerogatives of private power, Mississippi
populism has a chance to claim an anchoring of politics in a moral
purpose: authentic racial reconciliation. Populism can direct the
political attention of have-not white Mississippians away from the
preoccupations with racial bigotry, bringing them instead under the
same banner, in defense of the same values, as the state's black
community. And, through populism, black Mississippians can join in a
majority coalition with whites without evading any of the central
economic purposes on the black political agenda. Populism's attempt at
this historical reconciliation, so long feared by Mississippi's inner
circle of monied whites, need not concede any of the raw, redemptive
power behind a movement rooted in the values of simple justice.
          
            Brad Pigott is a native of McComb, Mississippi who now
lives and practices law in Jackson. His political apprenticeship came
in 1976 77 as issues director of the final gubernatorial campaign of
Virginia populist Henry Howell. In 1982 he managed the reelection
campaign of Congressman Wayne Dowdy.
          
        
