World War II brought massive changes to the American South. As southern males rushed to volunteer in droves, their native region became home to new or vastly expanded shipyards, ordnance works, explosives and powder munitions plants, aircraft factories, arsenals, and steel and textile mills. In Deep South settings such as Alabama, union density doubled, women and blacks rubbed elbows in the workplace, and New Deal farm policies, urban–industrial opportunities, and the assimilation of the South into an increasingly national labor market all exerted upward pressure on wages and threatened seemingly timeless arrangements regarding race relations and business and planting-class superiority. Into the mix, thousands of “primitive, illiterate backwoods people,” in the words of one touring journalist, “hostile, defiant, suspicious, and terrified,” jammed into tent colonies, trailer camps, and temporary shacks in cities like Mobile – which grew from 79,000 people to over 200,000 in just four years.Footnote ¹

Conservative backlash to such changes largely took the form of a “Great Melding” that would have momentous effects. It was a joining of economic conservatives and racial conservatives into an increasingly irresistible alliance that crossed class lines – and eventually redefined the way politics was done in the South. Of course, this tendency had already appeared to some degree in the South's simmering disenchantment with the New Deal, but during the wartime period it would accelerate and gather rapid and significant mass.Footnote ² Old class-based differences that had occasionally proved problematic for a rural planting and urban industrial class would increasingly fade into the background – and a pan-southern white unity that crossed socioeconomic lines would come into its own. The change was one with clear portents for the future political direction of the region, first into third-party protest movements and eventually into a new Republican ascendance in the South, and ultimately the United States.

The melding process was notably evident in the region's reaction to the non-discrimination clause in President Roosevelt's Executive Order 8802 and the 1941 establishment of the Fair Employment Practices Committee (FEPC). Won from a reluctant Roosevelt by A. Philip Randolph and other black activists as the price of calling off a threatened march on Washington, the compromise was not without blemish. But what the FEPC lacked in teeth it more than made up for in powerful symbolism. The new law called for federal intervention in state workplaces to ensure racially fair employment, and did include the cancellation of contracts with the federal government as a possible enforcement power. As much as any New Deal program, the FEPC put the lie to the age-old southern paternalist fiction of being concerned about the economic advancement of blacks but opposed only to social and political equality. Here was an opportunity for the self-proclaimed “best friends” of the black race to make good on their legion of contentions that they wanted to see African Americans advance economically while remaining in a separate racial channel. More, though, the failure of southern moderates (not to mention conservatives) to get behind the FEPC underlined the impossibility of severing race and social equality in any clean sense from economic advancement and class issues. Race and class were endlessly intertwined in the South – with each other, and with the most notable pillars of a society dedicated to upholding a deeply conservative and stratified status quo: religious orthodoxy, patriarchal gender relations, narrow moral conventions, ethnic purity, and an unquestioning and reflexive patriotic/militaristic creed. White paternalists and moderates could not hold the economic apart from the racial in the past any more than historians can do in the present.

While historians have done a good deal to elucidate southern racial violence during World War II, the postwar period has enjoyed far less attention. World War II was a turning point in southern economic history, but it also had a profound effect on the course of race and class relations in the South.Footnote ³ Black activism, assertiveness, and agitation for voting rights all accelerated in the wake of war. After 1945, a cadre of progressive southern white politicians appealed with some success to build a new biracial coalition of working-class whites and a small but growing black electorate. This progressive cabal was so successful in Alabama that the state soon boasted of having a progressive governor, two progressive senators, and the South's most liberal congressional delegation.Footnote ⁴

Unused to being singled out as an “oasis of liberalism,” Alabama progressives then – and progressive-minded scholars since – have taken great satisfaction in repeating the estimations of national and Northern-based pundits about the state's vaunted “liberalism” without making much effort to evaluate its composition, character, or even potential for survival. While Alabama during the 1940s was certainly notable as a place that had nurtured the economic liberalism of Bibb Graves, Hugo Black, Handy Ellis, George Huddleston, John Sparkman, and Lister Hill, theirs was not a liberalism marked by concern for racial or social egalitarianism. And while their efforts on behalf of working-class opportunity were noteworthy, even somewhat distinctive in the South, Alabama in the 1940s (or in any other decade) was by no means a place where one could get so carried away as to speak seriously about a “flowering of liberalism” or a “golden age” of liberalism – although two of the state's best scholars have done just that. Graves, Black, Hill, Sparkman, Carl Elliott, Bob Jones, Albert Rains – every elected liberal, progressive, moderate, or even centrist that Alabama produced in the twentieth century – all bowed to the deeply conservative cultural and social realities of their region, especially when it became clear that social conservatism in the form of white supremacy had been effectively appropriated by the cause of upper-class, free-market conservatism. And race's inviolable connection to the other pillars of conservative southern orthodoxy – class, gender, ethnicity, religion, militaristic patriotism – made talking about Alabama as the most liberal place around, except on matters of race, the logical equivalent of asking Mrs. Lincoln how she liked the play, aside from the shooting.Footnote ⁵

Once the melding was achieved, elected Alabamians were put in a profoundly difficult position and faced with a tragic choice: conversion, defeat, or retirement. Some – George Huddleston and Bull Connor – converted with gusto. Others – Hill, Sparkman, and Luther Patrick come to mind – changed their tunes less enthusiastically. Some – Horace Wilkinson, Handy Ellis, and, it must be said, the otherwise excellent progressive Bibb Graves fits here – had never been especially enlightened when it came to issues of civil liberties. Elliott refused to convert, and was retired. Hill's sacrifice on the altar of cultural conservatism was deemed insufficient; he narrowly survived two electoral challenges and retired a very bitter man. Hugo Black made inestimable contributions to the causes of civil liberties and civil rights – only he did so from the safe confines of a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Aubrey Williams, Gould Beech, H. C. Nixon, and Durrs did the same – though none of them had to stand for election in Alabama, or even rely on money from within the state to support them. Even Jim Folsom – the man who perhaps went furthest in the direction of honest-to-goodness racial liberalism while he was a public servant in Alabama – found that he had to trim his sails considerably on race. Even then his transgressions in doing things like having a black Harlem congressman for drinks at the governor's mansion led to his forcible retirement from public life.Footnote ⁶ Historical scholarship on Alabama, while taking note of the increasing relevance of white supremacy as a political issue, has not dealt sufficiently with the critical importance and timing of the oligarchy's appropriation of the race issue away from the state's economic populists – and the implications for the survival of “liberalism” itself in Alabama.

As the 1940s wore on, southern “conservatism” increasingly meant the conjoining of racial and economic resistance to what was understood to be “liberal” federal economic policies that also eroded white supremacy. The racial and economic nature of the FEPC, therefore, made it a choice target for conservative disdain. Business took the lead in fighting the economic changes of an FEPC, and did so by capitalizing on the racial aspects of the agency and its mission. The Southern States Industrial Council (SSIC), representing some six thousand local industrial councils and large agricultural interests, waged bitter war against the FEPC in order – as they put it – to preserve the “traditions … principles of living, and … philosophies of life … of the Southland.”Footnote ⁷ Founded in 1934 by Alabama's Robert Rast Cole – a virulent opponent of the New Deal, president of Monsanto Chemicals, and a director of the Associated Industries of Alabama – the SSIC's response to the federal agency betrayed the industrialist affinity for cheap black labor, but it also demonstrated a rapidly maturing awareness of the gains to be had in winning plain-white support for its economic program by stoking racial fears. White supremacist business boosters such as Louisiana's John U. Barr and Mississippi's John Rankin were active in these Industrial Council efforts.Footnote ⁸ Rankin actually denounced the FEPC from the floor of the US House of Representatives as the beginning of a “communistic dictatorship.” He also claimed that the South had not “reduced the Negro to slavery. We elevated him from the position of savage to … servant.”Footnote ⁹

In Alabama, Governor Frank M. Dixon seized on the issue to catapult himself into the state's brightest political spotlight and contribute to a growing tradition of Alabama governors adopting the panoply of sectional champion against outside assaults on racial conventions. In July 1942, in a dramatic public announcement, Dixon rejected a federal contract to have black and white Alabama convicts produce 1·75 million yards of osnaburg cloth for the US Army. His objection concerned not so much the prison makeup of the labor, but the precedent of Alabama entering into a compact in which the state would subscribe to the employment discrimination guidelines of the federal government. For Dixon, acceptance of these terms provided a dangerous opening in which the southern prerogative to discriminate racially in employment and the more general wisdom of business leaders would come under scrutiny and question. In a letter that gained reproduction in nearly every newspaper across the South, Dixon melded the emotional fodder of race and patriotism to argue for upper-class economic control and a purist's version of laissez-faire. The war emergency, Dixon explained, mandated maximum industrial production – and the only way to achieve this was to “permit those experienced in production to run their [own] plants in the way they have found best,” to rely on the wisdom of these “very men” and on “their ability to run [their plants] efficiently,” without government interference. Failure to nurture a free and unregulated market – to elect instead to intrude in a racial way on employment in the South, Dixon warned, could only result in “bitterness and confusion” and in a dangerous “slowing down” of the country's war production that imperiled the safety and security of every American.Footnote ¹⁰ White supremacy was not only in concert with the goal of maximum production, it was necessary for national security and in the best patriotic interests of a country at war.

Dixon's subsequent career as a founder of the Dixiecrat Party confirmed him as a fierce opponent of civil rights. But the larger point is that Dixon personified the marriage between plain folk and Bourbon that allowed privileged conservatism to ascend in Alabama – in the form of the States' Righters and later the Republican Party. Dixon spent his political career as perhaps the state's leading Bourbon spokesman, and continued his post-gubernatorial career as a corporate lobbyist at the state legislature and implacable foe of organized labor. Yet it was Dixon more than any other Bourbon who led the way in making peace between the state's economically conservative planter–industrialist alliance with its more economically progressive plain-folk opposition – based on the common ground of the paramount importance of preserving white supremacy.Footnote ¹¹

Long disillusioned by the New Deal, Alabama's “Big Mule” industrialist leaders and Black Belt planters struck out against what they termed the “economic dictatorship” of “bureaucratic creature[s]” such as the War Labor Board and greeted Frank Dixon's rebellion with an avalanche of praise.Footnote ¹² Heartfelt congratulations flowed into the governor's office from the state's leading businessmen and planters. Much of it emanated from those who would soon form the vanguard of Dixiecrat revolt against the national Democratic Party's racial and economic liberalism: Frank P. Samford, president of Liberty National Life, Donald Comer of the Avondale Mills, Dothan banker Wallace D. Malone, Hamner Cobbs and his Greensboro Southern Watchman, Horace Hall's Dothan Eagle, materials magnate Winton Blount, and noted attorney Horace C. Wilkinson.Footnote ¹³ A good number of those most pleased by Dixon's stand against what they perceived as the racial and economic encroachment of the federal government gravitated after 1948 to a new Republican Party grounded on the melding of race and class concerns for its power in the South: Wallace Malone, Winton Blount, Hamner Cobbs, Horace Hall, Birmingham auto salesman Don Drennen, Mobile attorney J. L. Bedsole, Grove Hill's N. W. Morrisette, and Marshall County GOP leader Oliver Day Street.Footnote ¹⁴

In the tidal wave of approbation for Dixon's stand, it was easy to lose sight of the close familiarity with which oligarchs such as Montgomery banker General R. E. Steiner and Geneva's Bud Boswell moved together with erstwhile class enemies like plain-white tribunes Horace Wilkinson and W. A. Sanford, and moderate Birmingham journalist James A. Chappell. As the prevailing orthodoxy on regional mores went, the class concerns of plain Alabamians, while not being purged completely, were to be repressed – and in many cases actually supplanted – by adoption of an economically conservative creed committed to white supremacist notions about proper black conduct in employment and the economy. At the same time, paradoxically, the class interests of Alabama's biggest movers were fortified by the willingness of plain whites and their representatives to bury their economic grievances in sectional, moral, and cultural allegiance to the god of white supremacy.Footnote ¹⁵ In other words, a class war raged in Alabama, and the have-nots of both colors were losing badly.

Little or no attempt was made to hide the racial essence of the appeal to a cultural closing of ranks. In later decades, as the modern civil rights movement made headway, much would be done in response by economic conservatives to create code words to insulate their message from denunciation on the grounds of bigotry and intolerance. In 1942 and 1943 such demands did not exist. Rotary clubs, Lions clubs, Kiwanis clubs, and chambers of commerce around the state – wherever businessmen gathered – openly rejoiced in the race-based defense of commerce's prerogative to run their companies as they saw fit without the federal government having a word to say. Organized labor was not perfect in its racial record, but its shortcomings were a far cry from the blatant manipulation of race prejudices by southern industrialists and businessmen. The South must “do everything possible to maintain the ‘supremacy of the white race,’” the executive committee of the Mobile Chamber of Commerce resolved in support of Governor Dixon; others around the state did the same.Footnote ¹⁶

In order to bolster their cause with plain-white support, the economically conservative and affluent tapped into a key psychological factor: the human desire to feel superior to someone about something. In Alabama the tendency was particularly pronounced due to the difficult heritage of privation and suffering among much of the state's poor and working-class people. But in giving way to this weakness in a racial sense, poor whites also signed up to support a whole related conservative cultural orthodoxy – not only on race – but on gender, religion, morality, patriotism/militarism, and especially class. In effect, the plain-white indulgence of white supremacy undermined the capacity of plain people to engage in economic dissent in the South – something that would seriously weaken the prospects for a viable economic liberalism to flourish, or even exist, in the region.

The elite strategy was not new. It had been used to divide poor whites in Alabama during Reconstruction, during the 1880s independent wars featuring the Greenback-Knights of Labor insurgents, in the Populist moment, and to pass its notorious 1901 Constitution. And it would only accelerate during World War II. The Dixiecrats, George Wallace, and eventually the modern Republican Party would all profit handsomely in the South by exploiting the racial – and moral – chauvinism of plain whites, and by employing a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine the possibility and the potency of biracial class cooperation.Footnote ¹⁷ Some of the South's truest liberals realized that the poor-white inferiority complex could work here as a distinct liability. Virginia Foster Durr blamed Alabama's racial violence on “poor white rednecks” who were incredibly “ignorant, pitiful, stupid and dangerous.”Footnote ¹⁸ Many of them engaged in violence against blacks and others foreign to Alabama's prevailing culture, Durr hypothesized, because they are “so low down themselves they need someone to kick.”Footnote ¹⁹ In 1945, as after World War I, a rejuvenated KKK would spring up in the South to torment blacks, “uppity” women, and moral nonconformists. Newsweek described the bulk of their membership as the “backward and the frustrated, the poor and the disappointed” of the Deep South. A Greenville, Alabama observer agreed, linking the violence to the state's grinding poverty and illiteracy. Others were less diplomatic. They chose the term “white trash” to describe the ranks of the secret order, “the kind … that feels the need to assert its supremacy by means other than superiority.”Footnote ²⁰

Stimulated by the massive elite approval of Frank Dixon's stand against the federal government, plain-white Alabamians circled the wagons of cultural solidarity. In West Blocton a mass meeting of whites sent a homemade petition to the governor to express their support. From the hill country a rural woman comforted Dixon by advising him not to let “Hitlerites and would-be negro-loving critics … get you down.” A Birmingham woman assured the governor that she and the overwhelming majority of “ordinary people of the South” were behind him – a conviction repeated by plain-white folk around the state and confirmed by Birmingham News editor James A. Chappell, who put the level of support at “everyone who I have talked to.”Footnote ²¹ Nor was this a surprise to Dixon and his business backers. S. Palmer Keith, president of the Bessemer Lions Club, rejoiced that the racial outpouring of support for Dixon's FEPC stand expresses the “views and opinions of every Alabamian of white extraction” regardless of social rank.Footnote ²² Dixon agreed. “There is only one side in this matter of segregation,” he felt. Since “all the white people in the state would have to be on the same side,” Dixon reasoned, “I can't conceive of any division, so there is no [political] issue” for any opponent to exploit.Footnote ²³ Recognizing that the Dixon letter was developing into a cause célèbre, and acknowledging that a champion on white supremacy could not be challenged, the state's politicians dutifully formed a line to register approval of the governor's stance. Every member of Alabama's congressional delegation sent congratulations to Dixon.Footnote ²⁴

Northern blacks responded, aiming most of their fire at Frank Dixon, who was rapidly becoming a symbolic magnet for outside criticism of the South. A New Jersey resident claimed that America was engaged in battle not against Axis powers alone, but really against four enemies of the state: Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito – and Frank Dixon. A New York woman called the Alabama governor a “stooge to Hitler” and suggested that he be hung by the neck. A young northern inductee told the Alabama governor that he was either “in the wrong country or I am to be drafted to fight the wrong enemy.Footnote ²⁵

Southern black criticism was less voluminous but no less pungent. Perhaps more familiar with the regional folkways of the Deep South, including the region's Reconstruction experience and its strong religious convictions, some southern blacks pointed to the obvious chasm between the governor's act and the teachings of Jesus Christ. Others noted with alarm the white working-class and patrician rapprochement that was increasingly apparent in the Alabama reaction.Footnote ²⁶

In the often Orwellian world of southern politics, though, outside criticism was actually a good thing. Damnation and abuse at the hands of Yankees – black Yankees no less – could win for an astute politician a hallowed place in the pantheon of the white South's “national” heroes and, if played correctly, life tenure in office. Frank Dixon emerged from the torrent of northern abuse geometrically strengthened at home. And in one of the deepest ironies, Alabama whites rewarded Dixon for his “courage” and manliness in standing up to the meddling, smart-alec Yankees – even though taking such a stand incurred absolutely no real political risk at home where the overwhelming number of whites were in perfect concert with his position. Dixon rode a personal wave of popularity based on a kind of machismo politics that gloried in his bravery and toughness in standing up to outside agitators – a style of masculine politics that would be taken to a new level in the next generation by an obscure Barbour County judge named George C. Wallace. In an editorial titled “A Southern Champion Arises,” Ed Field's Black Belt Selma Times-Journal lauded Dixon's “strength and wisdom” and called for more of the same to replace the “weakness and compromise” that characterized much of the South's congressional representation; government “in the hands of weaklings.” The Black Belt Sumter County Journal announced that it was bursting with pride in Dixon because he has the “courage and … ‘the guts’ to tell these Yankee social reformers where to go.” In the hill country the Pell City News applauded the governor for having the gumption to “stand on his ‘hind legs’ [to] defend his beliefs” and those of the southern people. A flurry of editorials from around the state – north and south, Black Belt, Tennessee Valley, and the Wiregrass – praised the governor as the emerging knight-errant of southern culture, the panoplied champion of white supremacy and white southern traditions versus the monster of northern usurpers and the federal leviathan.Footnote ²⁷

Such a broad reaction was actually the function of the cultural essence of Dixon's stand – for it was far more than just a racial statement. In standing up to the federal government on a racial issue, Dixon purposefully tapped into, or stumbled on, a cultural defense of the white South and its sacrosanct “way of life” on a host of mores intimately related to race: gender, civic, class, and religious. In defending the racial status quo, Dixon had actually elevated himself to the role of defender of the white South itself and – in the minds of virtually all white southerners of the time – the “Southland.” For African Americans were in no way considered “of the South” in the same way white southerners understood the proposition of their own nativity. Blacks were a part of the South, to be sure, but one with alien roots, and only a legitimate part of the Southland when kept firmly “in their place” of subservience, quietude, and dutiful physical labor.

Southern antipathy to federal involvement in business and employment matters as a cultural question had been evident for some time. Mississippi's John Rankin had made denunciation of the FEPC in racial and cultural terms a staple. A leading journal of Bourbon opinion in Alabama and the South denounced the FEPC as the brainchild of “pink-minded social equality advocates”; not of the South's making, but “thrust upon us – in wartime – by cock-eyed reformers and scheming trouble rousers from way off yonder.” When a black Chicago member of the FEPC actually blurted out that he believed a committee order “supersedes the South's traditions,” the region's economic conservatives became apoplectic, but they trotted out the offending quotation whenever and wherever they thought it might be of use.Footnote ²⁸ Accordingly, when Frank Dixon defied the War Manpower Board (WMB), his stand was received in broad cultural terms. Economic progressives – caught in a tragic set of pincers between their class creed and an overwhelming cultural dictate – chose the latter. For example, Lister Hill, Chauncey Sparks, John Temple Graves, and Albert Rains agreed with dyed-in-the-wool racial and class conservatives that the FEPC was a dangerous thing.Footnote ²⁹ An approving former Klansman recommended that the governor's letter of defiance to the WMB be made “required reading” in every southern school and college for its regional acculturation value.Footnote ³⁰ Others, in Alabama and the surrounding southern states, applauded the Dixon letter as one to be cherished by “every red-blooded Southerner,” as a classic defense of the southern people's “way of living,” and as a stand to “keep the South … our homeland … fit for Southerners to live in.”Footnote ³¹ In the corollary sense, “patriotism” became defined as fealty to the Southland's (read: white South's) way of thinking on race. Conversely, loyalty to section became loyalty to race – and both were greater than loyalty to the central government.Footnote ³²

Much of the cultural reaction was the fruit of the ever-present “Reconstruction syndrome” and the deeply bitter memories of the days when Yankee troops walked Alabama. An admirer in the neighboring Florida Panhandle congratulated Dixon for having the “intestinal fortitude to tell Yankee social reformers where to go” while an Alabamian characterized the racial policies of the federal government as an attempt to “stab us in the back in our own home by Northern zealots.”Footnote ³³ For most of the white South, the black legend of Reconstruction – retold ad nauseum and with greater liberality each time – was remarkably vivid, painful, and real. Decades of the most mind-numbing inculcation of this creed had resulted in the tragic fact that, for the overwhelming number of white southerners, the federal government was not some organic whole of which they felt an active and vital part along with the other peoples and sections of the United States. The central government was not something of which all but the rarest southern whites felt membership or (perish the thought!) pride in – or even something from which they could expect any measure of amity or assistance. On the contrary, the most enduring product of the Reconstruction trauma was the lasting southern conception of the federal government as something foreign, menacing, powerful, strange; a voraciously tax-hungry alien force prone to meddlesomeness, never to be trusted, and only rarely to be complied with. So pervasive, so deeply rooted, and so common was this mindset in the South that even Alabama's tiny coterie of white Republicans repeated its tenets in opposition to federal interference on southern racial customs.Footnote ³⁴

The sentiment soaked every corner of Alabama and, eight decades removed from the Civil War, Frank Dixon did all he could to stoke the flame of simmering resentment against the federal government. For the businessmen of the Bessemer Lions Club, their reasons for backing Dixon, along with the obvious economic motive, were pure Reconstruction memory. Its members saw the federal contract for war cloth as just another “federal bureau's attempted invasion of states' rights … [and] home rule … to invade, undermine and destroy that ancient and time-honored principle [of] states' rights under the Constitution … It was an unwarranted attack.” The governor agreed. The executive order itself that had created the FEPC was the greatest threat to the South “since Reconstruction.” Instead of quelling the brewing rebellion, or doing something to patch the wretched (at least psychological) relationship between his constituents and the federal government, Dixon did all he could to encourage it. For in the memory of Reconstruction and race hurt lay the best possible chance for Alabama's privileged to win the support of the state's common whites. To this end, Dixon journeyed to New York in December 1942 and followed up on his smash hit of defiance to the WMB by delivering a speech to the Southern Society of New York that broached the open possibility of another southern secession – this time from the Democratic Party. While floating a trial balloon of a third party for the South, Dixon told the assemblage that all “true Southerners” were “manning the ramparts” of white supremacy as they did “in the days following the War Between the States.” “True patriots of the South,” Dixon declared, “will arise and drive out [the] … negro using and loving Southerners … just as they did sixty-odd years ago,” so we can all be “let alone to manage our affairs in the South.”Footnote ³⁵ As racial conservatism melded with (and to the service of) the economic variety, cross-class southern white disillusionment grew – unhappiness that would soon grow into open rebellion against the Democratic Party and the eventual embracement of Republicanism.

To be sure, race was at the heart of the Reconstruction proposition and thus at the heart of the whole southern “way of life.” From the North Alabama hill country, the Cullman Democrat supported Dixon's defiance of the federal government as a “courageous stand” against a movement whose ultimate goal was obviously a “mongrel race of whites and blacks.” The FEPC order itself had only come about, the newspaper's editors argued, as an attempt to appease a few radical groups and the growing black vote up North. Dixon agreed that race was at the heart of the segregation matter – as well as continued fidelity to the national Democratic Party, which had pushed the FEPC. The Democratic Party of Alabama, the governor said in regard to the committee, “has as its motto ‘White Supremacy.’ I know of nothing which will wreck the Democratic party quicker in this State than any effort … to abolish segregation.” Once before the federal government had engaged in the “experiment of forcing negro domination on the Southern people,” Dixon warned darkly in conjuring the Reconstruction nightmare. The result had been “unhappy consequences.”Footnote ³⁶

Of course, the Alabama press, largely owned and financed by the planters and Big Mules, did much to encourage cultural solidarity across class lines on almost any issue that challenged the prevailing racial status quo. In doing so, Alabama's newspapers repeated and legitimized the cultural shorthand that was fast developing in the region. It was a shorthand that denoted responsible southern behavior on race, the Reconstruction memory and lingering aversion to “outsiders,” a narrow and skewed construction of what constituted “friendly” relations between the races, a strong animus against federal bureaus as agents of racial change, and a hyper-masculine conception of defending the regional status quo. Frank Dixon has “spoken with courage.” He has spoken like “an American and an Alabamian,” the Tennessee Valley's Decatur Daily wrote. “This newspaper is proud of him for it.” Thomas Abernethy's Talladega Daily Home in the hill country preferred to emphasize that Dixon had thwarted “those radical fools who would force a second reconstruction upon us.” Ed Field's Selma Times-Journal agreed that, in his paper's estimation, as a “friend of the negro race,” the recent trouble was the fault of “New Deal radicals … mothered by Eleanor Roosevelt, whose genius for meddling into affairs which do not concern her is almost unprecedented.” The white Cherokee County Herald agreed that “outsiders … and … white-collared snakes” were to blame, while Horace Hall's Wiregrass Dothan Eagle and the hill country's Gadsden Times elected to stress the greatness of Dixon's stand and his refusal to let the state be “bull-dozed and intimidated” by the proponents of social equality.Footnote ³⁷ Within just a few years, Thomas Abernethy, Ed Field, and Horace Hall would lead the vanguard of disgust with the national Democratic Party over racial liberalism into the States' Rights Democratic Party – and, after that, into the modern Republican Party.

Alabama's news media did perhaps as much to solidify the regional status quo and its cultural canon in the way it dealt with wayward native newspapers who criticized the newly crowned state champion. The methods of compelling cultural conformity, developed during World War II, would be put to extensive use in succeeding decades. The Alabama Magazine attempted to marginalize the perennially conservative Montgomery Advertiser by lumping it in with regional pariahs like the NAACP, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), and the largely communist Alabama Farmers' Educational and Cooperative Union, because editor Grover C. Hall Jr. criticized Dixon's brusque approach (not his purpose) in handling the federal war cloth contract. Horace Hall of the Dothan Eagle took anti-intellectual aim at Grover Jr., his nephew. Junior was apparently taking his stand against the South in the “palpable self-hypnosis” and “delusion” that a Pulitzer Prize which has “so far been beyond their intellectual grasp” could be won by demonstrating naked sycophancy to “the New Deal and the pinkos.” In doing so, Grover Jr. was writing “down to Southern readers and … up to Northern critics” and, as such, was certainly “not representative” of the people of Alabama. In fact, such writings would find better acceptance in the pages of the communist Daily Worker or “some other organ appealing to the Eleanor Roosevelt–Harry Hopkins–Felix Frankfurter–Harold Ickes audience” than in an Alabama newspaper.Footnote ³⁸

So suffocating and complete was the enforced conformity that scores of the Advertiser's employees sent a telegram to Governor Dixon disowning their editor's criticism. Grover Jr., himself barraged by critics, wrote a “clarifying editorial” a week later that stressed his complete agreement with Dixon's segregationist goals and pleaded that he had only taken issue on the basis of methods.Footnote ³⁹

An important upshot of the tidal wave of enforced conformity on this host of allied issues was that many Alabamians developed an enlarged and distorted sense of what constituted “representation” in a democracy. Differing conceptions of representation had certainly long existed, from models ranging from officeholders serving as valued and knowledgeable trustees of the electorate to functioning as public servants. In Alabama, and much of the South, the suffocating atmosphere of mass conformity did much to retard the development of the trustee model and endowed the public-servant model with widespread and virtually unbridled acceptance. Elected representatives, in such a society, were to enact the public will – period. No thinking, no discussion, no interjection of moderation, discretion, or the fruit of learnedness or principle was wanted or needed. Just reflexive personification of the popular will – no matter how unenlightened, uninformed, or unjust that might be. Dissent, therefore, was unsubstantiated and invalid – especially dissent that emanated from within the predominant culture. In the few places that it did occur, it was dismissed as no more than the “hysterical yappings of the so-called ‘liberals’ of the South” and it was “completely out of step with Alabama opinion.”Footnote ⁴⁰

For Alabama's privileged planter–industrialist clique, Frank Dixon's resonance with the people was potentially a huge bonanza. Alabama politics had long been riven by tensions between those with little and those with plenty. In the domestic storms of the New Deal and World War II, though, wealth and privilege glimpsed a way for class healing to begin, a soothing of economic differences that would allow the masses of plain people to align themselves for good behind the Bourbon program. The Great Melding of class and racial conservatism into one allied and sacrosanct strain could, if handled properly, indemnify the conservative cause and compel widespread acceptance of the privileged program – acceptance that cut sharply across economic differences previously thought to be important. And if the national Democratic Party came along, so be it. If it did not, there were other options to explore.

The Bourbons found their long-awaited hero in Frank Dixon. In the WMB controversy Dixon had emerged as a champion of white supremacy and “a national figure of distinctive nature,” the Alabama Magazine rejoiced. Reactionary coal magnate Henry F. DeBardeleben saw in Dixon an emerging sectional champion of white supremacy and the preservation of states' rights against federal bureaucratic intrusions. The logical conclusion was that the Democratic Party, which had sponsored the FEPC, must be reformed or be abandoned.Footnote ⁴¹ I. W. Rouzer, president of the Alabama Mining Institute, agreed. As someone who thought himself a leading friend of the black race, Rouzer argued that white supremacy was in the best interest of blacks – a redux of the paternalist self-deception long in evidence in Alabama.Footnote ⁴²

Joseph Starnes, US congressman from Guntersville in Alabama's hill country and vice-chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), greeted the exhortations of his Bourbon handlers by echoing the call for the preservation of a Democratic Party based on states' rights, white supremacy, and opposition to the New Deal. And he lamented the declension of the party into a sordid collection of undesirables – all soon to be themes of an emerging modern southern Republican Party. Starnes commended Dixon for his defense against the “imposition of Federal power,” and the “planned economy group['s] … invasion of states' rights” and individual freedoms carried on by the New Deal under the guise of the war effort. It was the “negro group; the Jewish group; the CIO; and every pink and radical group in this country” that was the cause of diabolical programs such as the War Manpower Board. “This is a white man's country,” Starnes declared in fusing race with class conservatism. And the time had long past when those who believe “in our system of government and our way of life” – patriots who put white supremacy and economic freedom first – should organize throughout the country to resist the tide of an increasingly liberal national Democratic Party.Footnote ⁴³

During the summer of 1942 much of the attention was paid to Frank Dixon and his stand against the War Manpower Board, yet the ruckus was but the individual expression of the more general FEPC threat of the time. For Alabama's business interests, the FEPC marked a low point in federal–state relations. It was a clear intrusion on what should remain holy ground – the unfettered right of managers and owners to run their business affairs as they saw fit, including the racial aspects of hiring and firing. Further, though, the FEPC embodied an even more offensive threat to Alabamians of wealth and privilege. In the most fundamental of ways it called into question what had never really been questioned before in a sharply hierarchical society – their God-given right to make decisions and exercise authority without regard for, what they felt were, insignificant trifles such as racial fairness. The FEPC threat, therefore, was no purely racial threat. It encapsulated the most profound challenge to the authority of those who occupied the highest perch in the southern pyramid of social and economic power.

To wage war on such an inherently obnoxious statute, the planter–industrialist clique called upon the most powerful levers of cultural solidarity. And in the summer of 1942, when the national FEPC chose four cities seen as regional capitals in which to hold hearings that would garner national attention – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Birmingham – it meant war. Hubert Baughn's Alabama Magazine, long the focal point for planter–industrialist conservatism, reacted to the Birmingham hearings by calling the FEPC a form of “carpetbagging” connected to “halo-wearing missionaries of New Deal socialism” and “starry-eyed Washington dreamers” who were insistent on dishonoring the “time-honored” southern right of white racial control by using wage-and-hour regulations and labor boards to foist a “gigantic … and endless crusade … and cold-blooded campaign for all-out regimentation” on the southern white – the “most understanding friend” the southern black had. The hearings in Birmingham won support from three large city dailies owned by the same publisher but few others in the state.Footnote ⁴⁴

A favorite theme of the Bourbons soon became pretensions about timing – as if steady progress were already being made in the South at a consistent level, and progress on job fairness during the war would somehow empower the Third Reich. Why couldn't the “‘blindly zealous social reformers’ freeze their ‘assault’ against white supremacy” during the war out of simple patriotism, Horace Hall wondered.Footnote ⁴⁵ If only the “crackpots, professional reformers and trouble-stirrers from afar … will stop rocking the boat,” one Bourbon organ wrote, we could “devote full time and energy to winning the war.” Besides, the South had already made “signal progress” on race relations – even in the face of outside interference.Footnote ⁴⁶

A good deal of the Reconstruction-like resentment against the “return of … carpetbagging and exploitation” was aimed at the Democratic Party – Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Deal, to be more precise. “Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt can have her social equality,” an irate Alabama Democrat who was soon to bolt the party fumed, “but she damn well can't ram it down the South's throat, war or no war!” “While the world burned last week,” another disgruntled Alabama Democrat mused, “Southern shipbuilders and plane makers were called upon to take time out to apologize to Mrs. Roosevelt's Pullman porter friends for not hiring their untrained brothers!”Footnote ⁴⁷

While patriotism, convenience, paternalist fiction, and Reconstruction were all important weapons in combating the FEPC, the central issue revolved around the right and ability of the “better sorts” and payroll makers to make racial and economic decisions for the remainder of society. And in the climate of the 1940s the Alabama business boosters who would soon revolt against the national Democratic Party took little pains to disguise this or the white supremacy inherent in it. As the federal employment committee members arrived in Birmingham for the fourth of the FEPC's regional meetings, economic conservatives sympathized with employers who had “carefully nurtured race relations” in their factories and plants for decades and now wondered whether “bureaucratic meddling” would upset customs “long-since proved to be workable.” Columnist Major Squirm, the alter ego of Alabama Magazine editor Hubert Baughn, was more direct. Perhaps the leading paid mouthpiece for business interests in the South, Baughn denounced the FEPC as a “committee to Put More Darkies on the payroll” and lamented that employers would have to suffer the indignity of the New Deal “jerkin' them up before … Dat committee fer de purteckshun uv Rastus & Sambo” that featured “a cullud committee member from Chicago.”Footnote ⁴⁸ In a patent admission of the race-based nature of employer resentment, Alabama's leading business booster scoffed that if an employer “came out flatly and admitted that negroes were not hired in certain places in the South because they are negroes” then this quite reasonable explanation would be rejected by the FEPC as some sort of “out-of-date provincialism.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Its elite solidarity intact against such federal incursions on race and economy, Alabama's oligarchs realized that race was the principal issue on which a broad, anti-federal and pro-business allegiance could be formed.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was the cultural glue and common denominator that could hold together various classes of whites in a solid front against outside incursions that might ultimately threaten the hegemony of the planter–industrialist cabal. There was nothing to worry about on the Big Mule/Black Belt score. The extreme white supremacy and economic conservatism of the planters and industrialists was virtually undiluted. The place for worry was Alabama's plain whites, who had demonstrated a disturbing propensity for attempting periodic coalitions with African Americans against the state's “better sorts.” Yet the record on this front was decidedly mixed. Along with the occasional transcendent class consciousness, the plain folk had also exhibited a strong recurring indulgence of their own racism – a tragic tendency to cut off their noses in order to spite their faces. White supremacy was a suffocating concept, though. If the privileged could meld their economic conservatism as a package deal together with regional conventions on white supremacy as part of a regional stand against federal encroachment, there would be a good chance to forge a pan-white alliance that could transcend party lines – and prove unbeatable in the South.

Important in the resonance of white supremacist tendencies with the people was the conception of the South as a region with frontier origins. To a large extent, the frontier mentality was alive and well in Alabama, even during World War II. It was woefully evident just in the way so many plain whites spoke about blacks – as half-civilized savages who, given an ounce of freedom, threatened to bring down the entire established order, particularly sexual structures. “I don't know what we will do,” a representative young Birmingham woman worried aloud, for “the Army has taken my boyfriend and … negro men [are saying] … that ‘when all these white men are gone [we] will get all these white women.’”Footnote ⁵¹

Much of the antipathy also joined race with class-based notions about black laziness and political liberalism – stereotypes that proved lasting in the Deep South, and apparent in period anti-New Deal doggerel:

Such reasoning portended an important reconciliation that was taking place in the Deep South between erstwhile antagonists – the Kluxer and the Bourbon. While the South's “better sorts” had furnished the most intense and virulent opposition to the huge 1920s Ku Klux Klan, the opposition was based primarily on privileged anxiety over federal intrusion on race relations, an abiding desire to keep the region attractive for the investment of outside capital, and pure political competition. Yet, despite a difference of tenor and demeanor, no fundamental difference existed between Kluxer and Bourbon on the issues of white supremacy or nativism. In fact, the privileged in Alabama had actually welcomed the rejuvenation of the secret order for about a decade until the political contest became critical.Footnote ⁵³ Still, despite its lack of a principled basis, the break between the Klan and the oligarchy had been bitter. During the New Deal–World War II era, though, the increasing melding together of racial and economic conservatism into one alloyed juggernaut offered the possibility of reconciliation between “redneck” Kluxer and privileged Bourbon. It was a healing that, if it took place on the basis of shared affinity for white supremacy, could herald the beginning of an invincible political alliance between whites of various social ranks in the Deep South.

Key in the reconciliation process was the adoption by the Bourbons of the central precepts of neo-Kluxism – that is, an echoing of Klan-minded ideas of native white supremacy and 100 percent Americanism without necessarily espousing violence or praising the KKK by name. Similarly, the Klan-minded would have to suppress their occasional concern for class differentiations and adopt allegiance to the economic conservatism of neo-Bourbon laissez-faire. In an important way, the almost unconcious rapprochement between neo-Kluxer and neo-Bourbon during these years anticipated the button-downed Klan-like organization of the post-Brown v. Board period, the White Citizens Councils.

In Alabama, the unification of neo-Kluxist and neo-Bourbon strains took on flesh and bone in the alliance between former Klan leader Horace Wilkinson and noted Klan opponent Frank Dixon. Mabel Jones West, the 1920s leader of Alabama's Women of the Ku Klux Klan and the Women's White Supremacy League, apprised Dixon of her “one hundred per cent” support of his racial stand and damned newspapers such as the Birmingham News for questioning the governor's wisdom in defying the federal government. A self-described “100% American” let Dixon know that he was supportive of any economic effort for “keeping the niggers under our feet.” A Eufaula native, who also cited the old Klan motto of “100% American[ism],” praised the Big Mules' efforts to “keep the Nigra in his place … down,” and “pay them as [little money] as possible.”Footnote ⁵⁴

While Klan types were able to add economically conservative ideas to their staple racism, Bourbons also showed themselves perfectly willing to express the most representative Klan ideas while retaining their rank's traditional distaste for the order's name – and remaining in denial about the depth of their alliance with the redneck Kluxer. For example, one Mobile attorney proposed a league of white supremacy be formed to keep track of various nefarious plans being hatched to “force racial equality on the South,” yet insisted that the group not be called a Ku Klux Klan. It must remain “on a high plane,” he explained. Perhaps no one was more adroit at self-deception than Monroe Stephens, who proposed the establishment of a Society to Maintain White Gentile Supremacy because the “white race is the only race … that has any real merit,” yet insisted that his group should have “no dealings … with the Ku Klux Klan or like organizations,” but should instead be an organization that “appeal[ed] to the intellect.” Overt association with the KKK could only debase his proposed organization – although Stephens was convinced it was “a Nigger trick to take advantage of the war,” that “‘No Kinky haired race’ has ever done anything worthwhile in this world,” and that the fall of the French government – as well as the Egyptian, Indian, Persian, Grecian, and Roman civilizations – were all directly traceable to the “admixture of negro blood.” Because of that, he was understandably “utterly opposed to amalgamation.”Footnote ⁵⁵

In fact, these years witnessed in the new Kluxer–Bourbon understanding the emergence of the leading figures in what would soon be the ultimate southern expression of the Great Melding of racial and economic conservatism: the Dixiecrat movement. Along with Dixon, four-time state Democratic Party chair Gessner T. McCorvey also came into his own when he sent a well-publicized 1942 warning to the national Democratic treasurer not to expect a dime from Alabama's Democrats until it reformed its leftward-leaning racial policies. “Our people are up in arms”; their indignation is a

Birmingham police commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor, who would win lasting infamy in the states' rights movement and the 1960s civil rights wars, also got into the act by sending a racial warning – in his official capacity and as his “patriotic duty” – to Franklin Roosevelt. Although Connor made certain to denounce the KKK, the letter was actually a model of neo-Kluxist thought and a harbinger of the mixture of paternalism, super-patriotism, and Reconstruction hurt that would become central to the Dixiecrat cause. After telling the President that “Half of our Negroes have venereal diseases,” Connor warned that FDR's abetment of the “downfall of white supremacy” would cause the “annihilation of the Democratic Party in this section” and a race war featuring “impudent, unruly, arrogant, law breaking, violent and insolent” blacks. “I have always voted for you,” Connor wrote, but “don't you think one war in the South … is enough?Footnote ⁵⁷

Perhaps no other Alabama politician emerged from the wartime racial turmoil with a higher profile than Horace Wilkinson – and it was a profile that personified the larger cross-class reconciliation among whites that was taking place in Alabama and the South. Former 1920s Klan leader – as well as New Deal patronage dispenser for Governor Bibb Graves, city boss, and spokesman for the white working class – Wilkinson had long been a thorn in the side of economic conservatives like Frank Dixon, Gessner McCorvey, and Bull Connor. Yet in the wartime crisis of the 1940s Wilkinson's race ideology dovetailed perfectly with his limitless ambition. He patched fences with Dixon and limbered up for their joint leadership of Alabama's 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt by distributing a scatter sheet across the state entitled “A Battle to Death Against the Black Dragon.” But his virtuoso performance, reproduced across the South, came in a July 1942 speech to the businessmen gathered at the Bessemer Kiwanis Club. Both its content and its audience represented the new alliance between privileged economic conservatives and plain racial conservatives along the shared basis of white supremacy.Footnote ⁵⁸

Yet the inspired performance, while primarily racial in nature, was not exclusively so. Wilkinson skillfully hit upon paternalist conceptions of friendship for the black race, a sectional definition of “patriotism,” moral degeneracy and criminal depravity, cultural orthodoxy, and, of course, class considerations – all of which were tied closely to white supremacy and conservatism. After cataloguing a series of racial “horror stories” – insolence on buses and streetcars, blacks working white jobs at Republic Steel, and the like – Wilkinson got to the cross-class threat that loomed. He lingered over the outrage of the FEPC and the US Employment Service, with blacks working at “adjoining desks with white people” and white employers having their sacred “right to operate [their] plant in the most efficient way” stripped from them by an unfeeling federal government. Nor were working-class whites safe from the rapacious appetite of the federal leviathan. White unions were no longer free to segregate their locals or collaborate with management to segregate lines of seniority and promotion. The unbridled aggression of the insatiable central government had destroyed the old plain-versus-privileged order of Alabama politics. And an activist Supreme Court, rather than providing a calming influence, had, through its rulings, “disturbed the thinking of the negro” and fanned the flames of criminal blacks to “murder and ravish and rob.” In stirring and memorable fashion, the one-time working-class plebeian closed by tying America's “national security” to the patriotic South's “way of life.” And, while expressly rejecting extralegal Klan-like methods, no matter how “necessary or effective they may have [once] been,” Wilkinson sealed the argument by proposing a League to Maintain White Supremacy.Footnote ⁵⁹ As with the whole of his speech, and the changing nature of wartime politics in Alabama, such a league would protect not only white supremacy, but also the freedom from federal intrusions that were essential to cultivate economic development and preserve business domination of society.

In all of this the 1940s were critical. While there was not a precise instant when white southerners became Republicans,Footnote ⁶⁰ the 1940s were the moment when conservatives accomplished what they had long wanted to in the Deep South – hitch the wagon of economic conservatism and big business domination to the engine of white supremacy. As long as economic progressives could hold their politics apart from open advocacy of racial integration and federal involvement in the South's social matters, they were a viable force with which to be contended. Moreover, their brand of “liberalism” was acceptable. But once business conservatives managed to meld their cause to the survival of white supremacy (and, perhaps more importantly, define economic liberalism as part and parcel of the racial sort), the days of the South's economic progressives were numbered.

The great tragedy for Alabama and the South was that things could have been different. Looking back at the Dixiecrat Revolt (the crisis point of the decade) from a place of Republican dominance six decades removed, 1948 looms not only as the watershed moment that it was for the South, but as a seeming inexorability. Yet it is important to remember that things were not preordained. Up until 1948 the South – Alabama in particular – had shown a strong tendency toward a kind of economic populism, if not outright liberalism. It was a class-based progressivism that avoided explicit mentions of race, yet was so effective in helping the state's poor and middle-class whites that some pointed to Alabama as a liberal “oasis” in a vast southern desert of conservatism.Footnote ⁶¹ Progressives the stripe of Bibb Graves, Hugo Black, Handy Ellis, Jim Folsom, Lister Hill, John Sparkman, Albert Rains, Carl Elliott, and others called themselves “liberal” – and Alabama home. As wholly alien as such an idea is today, it is a truth that this kind of liberalism was so much in ascendance that, during Alabama's 1942 gubernatorial election, at least three candidates fought with each other to drape themselves in the liberal cloak of Alabama's late progressive leader, Bibb Graves, and call themselves the “true liberal” in the governor's race.Footnote ⁶²

Yet once the cause of economic conservatism effectively melded white supremacy to its cause, these liberals faced a cultural and emotional phalanx of such power that they were effectively left with only three choices: convert (or trim their sails considerably on race), retire, or be retired. Every one of the eight names mentioned above did this very thing. It was the effective maneuvering of privileged conservatism in appropriating the magic of Alabama's most powerful cultural and religious shibboleths away from their economically liberal adversaries – not inevitability itself – that led to the demise of Alabama liberalism, the economic kind as well as, of course, the racial. And in all of this the 1940s were a genuine watershed, a crossroads, a moment to take stock and pause – and whatever other metaphorical superlative we can come up with to denote importance – not only for the future of southern politics, but for the political direction of the country itself. Looking back a half-century later from the hindsight of a solidly Republican Alabama, Jim Martin – a North Alabama hill country Democrat who left his party for the GOP and came within a whisker of winning the governorship and a US Senate seat by running race-baiting campaigns – could say, with a great deal of veracity and first-hand knowledge, that “the nucleus” of modern-day Republican ascendance in the South came together by 1948.Footnote ⁶³