Hip Figures

Stanford University Press

Contents

Chapter One

A political party is a very complicated menagerie. Robert Penn Warren, The Legacy of the Civil War

"Reconstructed but Unregenerate," John Crowe Ransom's introduction to the Southern Agrarian manifesto I'll Take My Stand (1930), wonders whether it any longer makes sense for southerners to remain Democrats. "No Southerner ever dreams of heaven, or pictures his Utopia on earth, without providing room for the Democratic Party," he writes. But in the face of "many betrayals," he doubts whether it is possible for the party to be "held to a principle that ... can now be defined as agrarian, conservative, anti-industrial." He calls upon the South "to reenter the American political field with a determination and an address quite beyond anything it has exhibited during her half-hearted life of the last half a century." The South, he thinks, should unite communities across the nation opposed to "the insidious industrial system" and "thoroughly tired of progressivism and its spurious benefits." It should in particular rally to its cause "those who have recently acquired, or through the generations miraculously preserved, a European point of view—sociologists, educators, artists, religionists, and ancient New England townships. The combination of these elements with the Western farmers and the old-fashioned South would make a formidable bloc" (25).

In the years to come, the professional classes to which Ransom wished to appeal did not in fact align themselves with southern interests. Considered as a whole, "sociologists, educators, [and] artists" would commit to liberal causes and affiliate with the Democratic Party. Likewise, "the European point of view" so prized by Ransom would after the Second World War tend to encompass forms of state socialism that were anathema to the Agrarians. But increasingly, southerners would abandon their long-standing loyalty to the Democrats. Ransom anticipated an epochal change in party alignment, in which southerners sympathetic to corporate interests as well as newly reactionary forms of western populism began to vote Republican. Racism figured crucially in the shift; in 1968, for example, Richard Nixon embraced a "Southern Strategy" that courted southern whites who were hostile to integration and the Civil Rights Movement. The makings of this strategy were already under way when Ransom wrote. In 1928, Henry J. Allen, the publicity chief for Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign, signed on to "a new Republican line in the South." As Allen saw it, "the better class of white people vote for the Democratic ticket" in the South because "big black Republicans control the offices" and dictate "who shall go to the National Convention as Delegates." Allen advised Hoover and his party to "give the white folks down there a chance." As part of this effort, Republican leadership stymied efforts to incorporate into the platform of that year any advocacy of the Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Eighteenth Amendments. They also eviscerated the ranks of black officials in the South under the guise of a crusade against corruption. The strategy worked: Hoover won Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Texas in the national elections, more than any Republican presidential candidate since the Civil War.

The New Deal placed the Democratic Party on still more tenuous footing in the South. While landowners benefited from the farm policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), Roosevelt's social welfare programs and gestures on behalf of civil rights alienated regional elites. In 1948, the New Deal and its legacy drove away significant numbers of southern Democrats. Already inflamed at the formation of Harry Truman's President's Committee on Civil Rights, thirty-five southern delegates walked out of the Democratic National Convention when Hubert Humphrey succeeded in getting the party to adopt a civil rights plank. They formed the States' Rights Democratic Party and were commonly referred to as "Dixiecrats." Faced with a threat from his party's left, in the form of Henry Wallace's Progressive Party, Truman now faced a threat from his party's right. The Dixiecrats nominated the openly racist Strom Thurmond as their presidential candidate. Truman won the election with a narrow margin, but Thurmond carried South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. It would take some twenty years for the Republican Party to consolidate these gains and transform the South into its most reliable constituency, but in 1948 the future course of national party politics was already visible.

Published one year after the so-called "Dixiecrat Revolt," V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation anatomized interest-group behavior and voting patterns throughout the ostensibly "Solid South." The Dixiecrats, he argued, were not able to speak for all the Democrats in their region; support for economic and social conservatism was not uniform. Because the Democratic Party enjoyed a monopoly in the South, substantive issues were absent from most campaigns, which tended to turn on personal loyalties, cliques, and demagoguery. This lent the party a surprisingly varied nature—local machines were often strikingly different state by state. Nevertheless, these machines were united in their antipathy to one symbolic figure: "Whatever phase of the southern political process one seeks to understand, sooner or later the trail of inquiry leads to the Negro." The South was solid for the simple reason that the prospect of African American independence united otherwise diverse interests and constituencies. The agricultural policies of the New Deal and the rapid emergence of a war economy had unsettled long-established social relations. To be sure, working-class whites and blacks, increasingly freed from the debt peonage structures of tenant farming, possessed new affinities. And Key believed that "the South ought, by all the rules of political behavior, to be radical." Poor and agrarian, "pressed down" by local oligarchs and "the colonial policies of the financial and industrial North and Northeast," the region offered "fertile ground for political agitation," in large part because working-class blacks and whites shared economic interests in ways they hadn't before. Key thought that, ultimately, the Democratic Party would profit from this fact. Sooner or later, liberal whites would join with working-class whites and blacks and capture the party from the forces of reaction. But this never happened in a systematic manner, and Key anticipates why: local machines and landowners generated and sustained virulent racism in working-class whites, especially those living in the black belts once central to the region's plantation economy.

Huey Long was a striking exception. Championing a host of welfare services as governor of Louisiana, he declared "Every Man a King." Targeting "thieving" oil companies, "lying" newspapers, and "crooked" politicians, he garnered massive support from his state's working-class whites. More audaciously, he courted African Americans. Some argue he did so only when convenient, and ended up offering little to this constituency once he was elected. But one historian makes room for Long by making a "distinction ... between the [typical southern] politician who framed his public appeal around racism, who deliberately stirred up white racial hatred in a vicious and calculating manner, and the one who merely resorted to 'nigger-baiting' as an occasional political device"; Long, he grants, was unusual for being "a politician of the second type." Another praises Long for being willing "largely to leave aside" racial prejudice; still another describes his outreach to African Americans as "large, almost revolutionary, far more than any other southern politician was willing to give."

To students of American literature, Long is most famous as the model for Willie Stark in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, published eleven years after the governor's assassination and two years before the Dixiecrat revolt. Like Long, Stark is assassinated before he is able to realize his political vision. Warren's novel attributes responsibility for this assassination and analyzes its larger significance, especially in light of Long's interracial coalition; seen in this light, the novel is an account of why the as-yet-unnamed Southern Strategy was destined for success. As Warren has it, Stark's program falls victim not only to the moneyed interests that it would reform but also to the state's liberals, who prove unable to grasp their imbrication in the South's racially exploitative system of wealth production. Liberals would never be a political force in the South, Warren suggests, because they refused to confront the more uncomfortable ramifications of their own economic interests.

Warren's novel became one of the twentieth century's most adopted and adapted templates for fictionalizing the relation of African Americans to white liberals in the Democratic Party. Billy Lee Brammer worked as a staffer for Lyndon Johnson during the late fifties; in 1961, he published The Gay Place, three novellas organized around a liberal southern governor named Arthur Fenstemaker whose character and fate echo Willie Stark's as much as if not more than Johnson's. This confusion of roles makes sense, insofar as Huey Long was something of a model for southern liberals, like Johnson, who risked alienating white voters by appealing to and in some instances militating on behalf of African Americans. Johnson reportedly identified with Long as much as he did with Franklin Roosevelt. Norman Mailer connected Johnson to Long through Willie Stark. In Armies of the Night (1967), he pretends to be Johnson's "dwarf alter ego." Warren provided the impetus for this impersonation: "Ever since seeing All the King's Men years ago he had wanted to come on in public as a Southern demagogue." Shadowing the president provides Mailer with a way to reconcile public and personal experience: inhabiting the president's body by way of Warren, Mailer feels "two very different rivers, one external, one subjective ... come together." But this confluence is also racial in nature. Mailer's language is a direct reference to remarks Johnson had made two years previously when signing the Voting Rights Act. "Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend," he declared. "The stories of our Nation and of the American Negro are like two great rivers." Long kept separate, the rivers were at last merging: "In our time, the two currents will finally mingle and rush as one great stream across the uncertain and the marvelous years of the America that is yet to come." Thus the "American Negro [claims] his freedom to enter the mainstream of American life."

Twenty-five years later, these figurative rivers mingled in the person of Bill Clinton, whose body explained to Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison how topes of blackness mattered to liberalism and the Democratic Party. The most notorious fictionalization of that body, Joe Klein's Primary Colors (1996), was also a point-by-point retelling of King's Men. That Klein's novel so faithfully retells Warren's even as it sticks closely to the actual events and personages of the 1992 primaries is surely testimony not simply to the abiding relevance of Huey Long, but to how cannily Warren's novel anticipates in coded form problems that would prove increasingly central to the Democratic Party. Crucial in this regard is Jack Burden, Warren's narrator; a southern liberal born to a wealthy and privileged community, he nevertheless supports Long's reforms. Burden's attraction to Stark has much to do with racial guilt, but Warren never links the two explicitly. Klein does. He merges Burden and George Stephanopoulos into a black narrator, Henry Burton, who agonizes over the nature of his homoerotic attachment to Jack Stanton, a philandering southern governor running for president who surrounds himself with African Americans and who may or may not have fathered a child by an underage black teen. Burton frets over his attraction to and need for Stanton, just as Burden does with Stark. Burton tells us that his father was black and his mother white. This leads him to believe that his propensity toward "servility" was "a slavery atavism." But upon further reflection, he realizes that his father was in fact "proud and angry," while his mother was patient and accepting. He laughs: "I was a genius at servitude because I was half white." This makes sense as a reading of King's Men: Burden serves Stark, we're led to believe, because he wishes to atone for the racial crimes of his class—because he is white and because Stark, "proud and angry" as he is, is symbolically black.

Huey Long's readiness to transgress racial boundaries impressed the father of future Black Panther activist Huey Newton; raised in Louisiana during Long's reign, Walter Newton named his son Huey because he wanted his son to follow in the governor's footsteps. The black power that Newton would later channel roils beneath the surface of Warren's novel. Stark is accompanied everywhere he goes, for example, by one "Sugar-Boy," who "couldn't talk"; "he wouldn't win any debating contests in high school," Burden reports, "but then nobody would ever want to debate with Sugar-Boy. Not anybody who knew him and had seen him do tricks with the .38 Special which rode under his left armpit like a tumor." The next two sentences give away the novel's game: "No doubt you thought Sugar-Boy was a Negro, from his name. But he wasn't." Burden's narration intimates the threat of black violence throughout, never so suggestively as when Stark is on the scene; the joke here is that in some basic sense Sugar-Boy is black, insofar as he is Stark's muscle and insofar as Stark's political might derives in large part from the specter of an interracial folk composed of whites and blacks who are, as Sugar-Boy is, "from the wrong side of the tracks."

The notion that black muscle backed up the machinations of white liberals became a cliché in the years that followed; Mailer returned to this idea consistently, as we will see. The cliché thrived during Clinton's presidency. Having distanced himself from the disquieting anger of rap during his 1992 campaign, Bill Clinton invoked the specter of black violence during his impeachment, at least according to Joe Eszterhas, who felt that the beleaguered president consciously surrounded himself with impassioned crowds of African Americans. This constituted to Eszterhas a "subliminal White House message that no one would ever articulate": "These are my beloved and loving constituents, Bill Clinton was telling America. They will go to the wall for me. They will be extremely unhappy if I am removed from office. Do you really want them to be extremely unhappy? Do you want that to happen now, when the economy is booming and you don't have a whole lot of worries in your life?" Whether or not Clinton sent this message, Warren's Stark does, though he does so to ambiguous effect: ultimately, he reminds the gentry of his state that they depend on black bodies not as a coercive cudgel but as a form of wealth production. Warren lays Stark's downfall at the feet of liberals like Burden because, he thinks, they refuse to reconcile their reliance on black political muscle with their reliance on black labor power: they would wield the former without recognizing their dependence on the latter.

"The effluvium of brotherly bodies"

In an assessment of Warren's Brother to Dragons (1953), Cleanth Brooks offers by-now-familiar New Critical bromides about the relation between literature and politics: the poet is not "telling us about the experience; he is giving us the experience." The poem's truth "does not reside in a formula. It cannot be got at by mere logic." The antipathy between poetry and logic corresponds to one between literature and politics. Dismissing the notion that literature should "argue for the passage of a particular bill or for the election of a specific political party," Brooks insists that it should instead pursue "something deeper and more resonant." Along these lines, Warren maintained that the subject of King's Men was not politics per se; the novel, he reasoned, "was never intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely provided the framework story in which the deeper concerns ... might work themselves out." Critics have tended to agree. An early review declares, "Warren is no more discussing American politics than Hamlet is discussing Danish politics."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hip Figuresby Michael Szalay Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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