
          The Two Faces of Southern Populism
          By Carter, Dan T.Dan T. Carter
          Vol. 12, No. 5, 1990, pp. 1-3
          
          With the strong showing of David Duke, the racism of the Jesse
Helms and Guy Hunt campaigns and the nation's general mood of
political dyspepsia, George_Wallace's "populist" crusade of the 1960s
and 1970s is back in the news. The resurgence of cruder forms of
race-baiting, not to mention the more generic cry of "throw the bums
out"--we are reminded--is not without precedent in our recent past.
          Racism there is. Guy Hunt's campaign in Alabama was a relatively
soft-core version of the politics of race; David Duke and Jesse Helms
practiced the old-time religion: "Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!"
          Helms has been crawling out of these sewers since 1950 when he
joined Willis Smith's race-baiting/red-baiting campaign against North
Carolina's Frank Porter Graham. With his appeals to hatred against
homosexuals and blacks, his last campaign is a depressing reminder of
his powerful mastery of the witchcraft of scapegoating.
          In the long run, however, demagogues like David Duke may be even
more dangerous than Helms. For Duke has understood that he is
operating in an increasingly subliterate world of television in which
each new day begins afresh, without past, without future. Thus he can
nonchalantly dismiss his past history as a neo-Nazi/Klansman,
concentrating instead on having his face made over by a first-rate
plastic surgeon. As the nation's political culture descends past Oprah
Winfrey 

and Phil Donahue through Newt Gingrich's lexicon of campaign
slogans and downward toward the level of plants and minerals, appeals
to glandular reflexes ("quotas," "parasitic underclass," "tax and
speed") are infinitely more accessible then complex discussions of
budget deficits, income maldistribution or economic exploitation.
          And all three men are the beneficiary of a Republican Party's
quarter-century flirtation with soft-core racism. George Bush may try
to hang a leper's bell on Duke, but it is difficult to take him
seriously when he trucks off to North_Carolina to embrace Helms, whose
campaign has been as squalid as anything David Duke could have
imagined. Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil_Rights_Act of
1964; Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy; Ronald Reagan's amiable
harangues against [black] welfare queens; George Bush's Willie Horton
commercials and his politically inspired veto of the Civil_Rights_Act
of 1990; and now the campaigns of Hunt, Duke and Helms; it's not a
pretty sight.
          But I am not at all certain that Duke or Helms or Hunt can be
explained as reincarnations of George_Wallace; nor do I believe they
are the authentic voices of a resurgent wave of working class
racism.
          After Wallace became the high priest of racial segregation in the
early 1960s he brought to his state a level of rhetorical
vindictiveness that left wounds still unhealed. And in his
presidential campaigns through the 1960s and 1970s Wallace gave voice
to some of the darkest fears and hatreds in American society.
          What is easy to forget, however, is that George_Wallace began his
career in 1946 as a down home social democrat with little enthusiasm
for the race-baiting that often marked Southern political
campaigns. And when the number of black_voters in his state passed the
300,000 mark in the early 1970s, the Alabama governor reversed
directions and welcomed black_voters and politicians into the Wallace
tent. Political opportunism is not an edifying spectacle; when
compared with the unwavering racism of David Duke it has its
charms.
          George_Wallace's convoluted career should remind us that there are
other, more humane populist traditions which come out of the Southern
experience. Wallace himself learned his lessons from an altogether
different kind of Populist, James E. ("Big Jim") Folsom.
          Through two terms as governor and forty years of campaigning,
Folsom resumed again and again to four texts: the Declaration of
Independence, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address, and--most of
all--Jesus's 

Sermon the Mount. And from these familiar texts he evolved
his political catechism:
          That governmental laissez-faire inevitably allowed the powerful
to prey upon the weak; that adequate welfare programs were the
"fundamental obligation of a democracy to its people in order that the
unfortunate may feast on more than crumbs and clothe themselves with
more than rags;" that women were not chattel, but citizens who should
be given the same rights as men; that the black citizens of Alabama
were entitled to equal justice, equal opportunity and a "full share of
democracy;" that there were no problems which could not be cured by a
"good strong purgative of pure and unadulterated democracy."
          In the end Folsom's personal failings (too much whiskey, too many
women, too few honest friends) were as conspicuous as his six foot,
eight inch frame and his size sixteen shoes. His challenge to Wallace
collapsed in the 1962 governor's race when Folsom appeared on
statewide television, too drunk to recognize his own children. When he
ran for governor against Wallace in 1974, he got less than five
percent of the vote.
          The racists he had fought, the "Big Mule" industrialists and the
old reactionary planter class of the Black_Belt seemed to have the
final word.
          And now as the economy falters and the bills for the Reagan
fantasies come due, those voices are returning to join the David
Dukes. The "liberal politics of victimization are over," we are
told. Now black Americans can once more take their historical place as
the scapegoats of a troubled society.
          Folsom had seen it all before. The Ku-Kluxers, the race-baiters,
and "some of the selfish interest groups" would always be present, he
warned in 1949, "spreading their filth, their lies, their old and
ancient hatreds ... trying to boil up hatred by the poor white_people
against the Negroes ... trying to keep the poor white from progressing
by keeping the Negro tied in shackles."
          Still I take heart from the only conversation I ever had with James
Folsom. He was nearly blind and occasionally confused as we sat and
talked in a truckstop diner outside Cullman, Ala. But he retained an
almost child-like faith in the decency and ultimate judgment of the
same voters who had rejected him. The working people of this country-
"the farmer, the factory worker, the mill hand, the school
teacher"-would eventually see through this "blasphemous smoke screen"
of racial hatred, he had predicted. And they would understand that the
promise of this nation lay in the challenge of guaranteeing equal
justice, equal opportunity and equal freedom for every man, woman and
child."
          That's a far cry from the "populism" of Jesse Helms or David
Duke.
          
            Dan T. Carter is Andrew W. Mellon
Professor of History at Emory University. He is writing a biography of
George_Wallace.
          
        
