SOUTHERN LEADERSHIP

Immigrants either from the North or from abroad may be ignored as a formative part of the South; but the Poor Whites are only a part of the rank and file. There are many independent farmers, handicraftsmen, skilled laborers, and small laborers, all parts of a great democracy; and one of the causes of uplift is the coming of this democracy to a consciousness of its own power. Nevertheless, in the South as elsewhere in the world, the great affairs are carried on, the great decisions are made, by a comparatively small number of persons; and in no part of the Union has a select aristocracy such prestige and influence.

Before the war this leading element was very distinctly marked off, because it was nearly restricted to slaveholders and their connections by blood and marriage. Very few people, except in the mountain districts, ever held important state or national office who did not come from the slaveholding families, which never numbered more than three hundred thousand; and half of those families owned less than five Negroes and could hardly claim to belong to the ruling class. The slaveholding aristocracy included nearly all of the professional and commercial men, the ministers, the doctors, the college instructors, especially the lawyers, from whom the ranks of public service were to a great degree recruited.

These people were organized into a society of a kind unknown in the North since colonial times. In any one state the well-to-do people, perhaps two to five thousand in all, knew each other, recognized each other as belonging to a kind of gentry, intermarried, furnished nearly all the college and professional students, and were the dignitaries of their localities. In organization, if not in opportunities or in the amenities of life, they were very like the English county gentry of the period.

Those conditions are now much changed. In the first place, the old ruling families have almost all lost their wealth and their interstate position. Deference is still paid to them; a John Rutledge is always a John Rutledge welcomed anywhere in South Carolina, and a Claibourne carries the dignity of the family that furnished the first Governor of Mississippi; but it is a mournful fact that hardly a large plantation in the South is now owned by a descendant of the man who owned it in 1860. Some of the most ambitious of the scions of these ancient houses, whose communities no longer give them sufficient opportunities, have found their way to New York and other Northern cities, and are there founding new families. Many more are upbuilders of the Southern cities; some of them are again becoming landed proprietors. Still the element dominant in society, in business, and in administration, includes a large number of people who have come up from below or have come in from without since the Civil War.

Distinctly above the traditional Poor White, though often confused with him by outsiders, is the Southern white farmer. In ante-bellum days there was in every Southern state, and particularly in the border states, a large body of independent men, working their own land without slaves, with the assistance of their sons—for white laborers for hire could not be had—and often prosperous. They were on good terms with the planters, had their share of the public honors, and probably furnished a considerable part of the Southern Whig vote. Their descendants still persist, often in debt, frequently unprogressive, but on the whole much resembling the farmer class in the neighboring Northern states. The destruction of slavery little disturbed the status of these men, and they are an important element in the progress of the South.

The old leaders have lost preËminence, partly because the South now requires additional kinds of leaders. In the modern Southern cities may be found classes of wholesale jobbers, attorneys of great corporations, national bank officers, manufacturers, agents of life insurance and investment companies, engineers, and promoters, who were hardly known in the old South. In the social world these people still have to take their chance, for the foundation stones of society in every Southern state are the descendants of the leaders of the old rÉgime, including many people whose former back-country farm with its half-dozen slaves has become magnified into a tradition of an old plantation. As a Southern writer says: “Legends had already begun to build themselves, as they will in a community that entrusts its history to oral transmission. For instance, the fortunes of many of our families before the war became enormous, in our talk and in our beliefs.”

Notwithstanding this presumptive right of the old families to figure in modern society many are shut out by poverty and some by moral disintegration. Of course in the South as elsewhere the newcomers have more money and set a difficult standard of social expense; but, measured by New York criterions, there are few wealthy people in the South. Leaving out the Northern men who play at being Southern gentlemen it is doubtful whether there are thirty millionaires in the whole Lower South; and it must never be forgotten that nothing in the world is so democratic within its narrow bounds as Southern society. The social leaders recognize on equal terms other Southern high-class people, and also outsiders whom they reckon as high class. There is a sharp difference between the poor farmer and the well-to-do proprietor or the city magnate; but there is not necessarily a social distinction between the family which has an income of three thousand a year and the family which disposes of thirty thousand a year.

Furthermore, between all the members of the white race there is an easier relation than in the North; Pullman Car conductors are on easy and respectful terms with lady passengers who frequently use their line, the poorest White addresses the richest planter or most distinguished railroad man with an assured sense of belonging to the same class; society is distinctly more homogeneous than in the North. It is also more gracious. What is more delightful than the high-bred Southern man and woman, courteous, friendly, and interested in high things, bent on bringing to bear all the resources of intellectual training, religion, and social life for the welfare of the community? The high-class Southerner believes in education; he has a high sense of public duty; he stands by his friends like a rock; unfortunate is the Northerner who does not count among his choicest possessions the friendship of Southern men and women!

In business the South is developing a body of modern go-ahead men who are alive to the needs of improvement in business methods, who adopt the latest machinery, seek to economize in processes, and have built up a stable and remarkably well-knit commercial system. The South before the war had many safe banks, and no state in the Union enjoyed a better banking law than Louisiana. All that capital was swept away by the Civil War, and for twenty years was not replaced, outside the cities; now little banks are springing up at small railroad stations, and in remote little county seats; and there is a concert and understanding between the country and city bankers which is of great assistance to the material growth of the South. The Southern business system calls for prudent and courageous men, and there is no lack of good material.

In politics, however, a new type of leaders has in the last twenty years sprung up as a result of the genius of Benjamin R. Tillman in discovering that there are more voters of the lower class than of the upper, and that he who can get the lower class to vote together may always be reËlected. As a matter of fact Tillman comes of a respectable middle-class family; but it is his part to show himself the coarsest and most vituperative of Poor Whites. Such men as ex-Governor Vardaman of Mississippi, and Senator Jeff Davis of Arkansas, are also evidences that the hold of the old type of political leader is weakened. Some people say that the present system of primary nominations is a sure way to bring mediocrity to the front.

On the other hand, the leaders of society and business and politics and intellectual pursuits fit together much more closely than in the North. In part this is the result of a social system in which people of various types imbibe each other’s views; in greater part it is due to the influence of slavery, and the half century of contest over slavery, in which the great property owners were also the heads of the state, the pillars of the church, and the formers of opinion.

The problem of the leader in the South is also the problem of the led; shall those who concentrate and shape public opinion, who carry on the corporations, write the newspapers, teach the university students, decide law cases, and preach the sermons, shall they also set forth a lofty spirit? Will the mass, the voters, the possessors of the physical force of the community, accept their decisions? In general, the tone of the leaders in the South is sane and wholesome; commercial influences are less strong on the press and on state and municipal governments than they are in the North. There is at least a greater sentimental and abstract respect for learning, a larger part of the community is in touch with and molded by the churches.

The lower Whites, though manifestly advancing, are still on the average far inferior to the similar class of white farmers of kindred English stock in the North; and also to many of the foreigners that have come in and settled the West. Education is going to help their children, but can do little for the grown people who are now the source of political power in the South; and there is a turbulence and uncontrolled passion, sometimes a ferocity, among the rural people which is to be matched in the North only in the slums.

In some ways the Northern visitor is struck by a crudeness of behavior among respectable Southern Whites such as he is accustomed in the North to experience in a much lower stratum of society. A large proportion of the Poor Whites in the South and many of the better class go armed and justify it because they expect to have need of a weapon. Tobacco juice flows freely in hotel corridors, in railroad stations, and even in the vestibules of ladies’ cars; profanity is rife, and fierce talk and unbridled denunciations, principally of black people. There is doubtless just the same thing in Northern places, if you look for it, but in the South it follows you. With all the aristocratic feeling classes are more mixed together, and it is a harder thing than in the North to sift your acquaintances. Still there is an upward movement in every stratum of society; as Murphy puts it: “The real struggle of the South from the date of Lee’s surrender—through all the accidents of political and industrial revolution—was simply a struggle toward the creation of democratic conditions. The real thing, in the unfolding of the later South, is the arrival of the common man.” The North has always had confidence in the average man; in the South the upper and lower strata are in a more hopeful way of mutual understanding than perhaps in the North.