Читать книгу In Love with Defeat - H. Brandt Ayers - Страница 11

The civil rights movement cut through the center of my generation of white Southerners like a turbulent canyon river separating an ancient civilization from a newly minted one. Long before we could imagine that there was another side of the canyon, there was only the Old South. It amazes me now to think that there actually was such a place—a distant planet, blurred by time and space, where graces for a few and a universal insistence on common courtesy masked the reality that we were born to a backward, unhealthy, undereducated, third-world nation, governed by laws that spawned violence and misfortune. Poverty, pellagra, and prejudice were the three horsemen of that society. We didn’t have much but we had our pride. forget, hell, read Confederate battle flag bumper stickers. As an unconscious antidote to the threadbare hardness of our lives, we did have a lubricant of human community—courtesy. We yes-sirred and yes-ma’amed everybody from barbers and store clerks to parents and teachers. It is a fact that in the South you can say anything, anything at all, if you have the right prefix or suffix: “That sure is an ugly baby, bless his heart.”

When I was born in 1935 in Anniston, Alabama, on the second floor of the old Garner Hospital on South Leighton Avenue, Alabama was a third-world nation in a third-world region. The state’s per capita income was $214—less than a $1 a day. But a boy growing up in the small county-seat town of Anniston, cupped by the blue foothills of the Appalachians, had no sense that he belonged to an isolated, impoverished culture that was mocked by the educated, self-confident people who lived in the “Other” America.

The wilderness from which the model “new town” of Anniston was carved had enough ore and limestone to lure an industrial odd couple, Sam Noble, a Confederate munitions manufacturer from Rome, Georgia, and Daniel Tyler, a Union general from Connecticut. The chance 1872 meeting between the two men in Charleston combined the main elements of the New South formula devised by Henry Grady, the peppery Atlanta editor. Grady reasoned that a region lying in the ashes of defeat, dehydrated by a capital drought, had to import capital in order to rise up as an industrial power. Yankee wealth matched with Southern sense of the geography, geology, and culture was Grady’s formula for creating a New South. Noble and Tyler turned out to be corporate visionaries. From their Woodstock Iron Works my hometown was born as an elaborately planned model city. Grady was excited to see his concept taking shape in bricks and mortar, and confident enough to invest in the company.

The partnership added a new element to Grady’s theory, a dimension that Birmingham lacked, the wedding of capital with an essential, extra ingredient—personal commitment. In fact, Anniston had come into being at the same time as Birmingham, the state’s industrial capital. Both were post-Civil War towns that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But Anniston did not become the state’s major business and manufacturing center—which is too bad, because its founders endowed Anniston with a civic ideal while Birmingham was a runaway frontier town. Anniston had tantalizing mineral deposits, but sixty miles further west lay the major deposits of coal, limestone, and ore needed to make iron and steel. These deposits in Birmingham’s aptly named Red Mountain spawned a helter-skelter city—atop which a statue of Vulcan, god of fire and metalworking, stands today. One industrial titan whose personality dominated the erupting town was Colonel Henry DeBardeleben, described by the writer George Packer as a “coal-maddened Ahab.” DeBardeleben’s civic conscience was expressed in this pretty sentence: “I like to use money as I use a horse—to ride!” His defense against union organizers was a militia whose armaments included machine guns.

Birmingham’s homegrown Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company fell under control of an entrepreneurial Texas stock gambler, John “Bet a Million” Gates. During the Panic of 1907, J. P. Morgan proposed to save the country from a stock market crash by buying TCI stock from the Wall Street brokerage that held a majority of the stock in Gates’s syndicate. President Theodore Roosevelt endorsed the emergency scheme. Morgan bought TCI for roughly a dime on the dollar—thus eliminating U.S. Steel’s major competitor and creating a steel monopoly that became the godfather of Birmingham. From the 1880s until about 1970, the city’s soul was shaped by a succession of managers whose allegiance was to a corporation instead of the community, who helped guarantee that the world was safe for the Big Mules of industry and that the people and the press were orderly and respectful.

If Birmingham’s corporate chieftains saw their community as existing for the company’s benefit, Anniston’s founders wanted their company to uplift the community. Noble moved his family to the nineteenth-century “new town” and General Tyler persuaded his son, Alfred, to take up residence and help run the company. They first chose the name Woodstock, after the ancestral English town of the Noble family near Oxford. When the founders discovered there was another Alabama town named “Woodstock,” they named the new city for General Tyler’s wife, Annie, thus Anniston. The two families were determined to make the place where they lived as attractive as possible. Sam Noble expressed the civic ideal: “Instead of dissipating our earnings in dividends, we have concentrated them here . . . These reinvestments were judiciously made, and every dollar was made to do its best.” One of the earliest investments was a gilt-and-velvet jewel box of an opera house. Another gift was given in 1881, at Sam Noble’s suggestion, when the town council authorized the purchase of 100,000 water oaks to line the orderly grid of broad, north-south avenues named for Episcopal bishops (both families were Episcopalians) and east-west streets. On the east side, Grace Episcopal, a little gem of a parish for the carriage trade, was perched prettily on two landscaped lots which, together with the rectory and a finishing school for young ladies, covered an entire city block. On the west side, St. Michael and All Angels, filled with Italian-crafted marble statuary and set grandly on its own city block, was a cathedral for the working class. The liberal ideal of the founders extended to the workers in other ways, too. General Tyler believed that good workers should be well paid—twice the prevailing wage of fifty cents a day. Instead of paying rent for company-built houses in perpetuity, Woodstock’s workers accumulated equity in their houses, which encouraged upkeep and made the workers stake-holding, home-owning citizens.

In those days, Anniston had the best possible form of government—a visionary and benign dictatorship. As the Georgia-Pacific railroad pushed west toward Anniston, incorporation was required, which introduced democracy, that messy, necessary governing process which in time would clutter the founders’ dream. Among the assets with which this self-governing town began was a newspaper, which the founders established to be an adhesive to community. The first issue hit the streets on Saturday, August 18, 1883, the year the city was incorporated. It is said that Henry Grady and Sam Noble were discussing what to name the paper over a “toddy” on the veranda of Noble’s house when the Woodstock furnace lit the evening sky. “You’ve got to call it the Hot Blast,” Grady is supposed to have said. Grady’s “A Man and a Town,” a reprint of an Atlanta Constitution column, covered four of the seven front-page columns of Volume 1, Number 1 of the Anniston Hot Blast. He detailed the city’s founding and its guiding principles and described what he could see from Noble’s hilltop house. Grady’s excitement at seeing his capital-plus-commitment theory come so vibrantly to life was such that he hoisted the Noble-Tyler partnership to hyperbolic heights: “I thought, as I stood between their two houses, that . . . I had rather have been either of them . . . than to have been the president of these United States.”

Even discounting Grady’s exuberance, the founding vision was liberal to the point of utopian. Democracy’s tendency to choose the means—often the lowest common denominator— couldn’t maintain the brilliance of the dream that inspired the founders. By the time my generation was born, the slogan “Model City of the New South” was more than a little worn. But boys, having no past, are not interested in examining their own roots or that of their city. And having no way of comparing, I thought the place where I was born was pretty much all there was. It was very pleasant for those of us in my part of town, a white universe with black visitors who came on the bus or in old automobiles to cook, clean, garden, and drive for us. We called them “members of the family”; they came to our weddings and funerals, and we went to their funerals, but we all knew where the unspoken line lay between servant and employer. It was a line, not a wall, and thus easily breached by more powerful forces such as grief or affection. Despite that line, genuine bonds of affection and even love developed between individual “coloreds” (the polite term in the ancient regime) and their white employers. Alabama writer and former New York Times editor Howell Raines won the Pulitzer Prize for a magazine piece, “Grady’s Gift,” which poignantly probed such a relationship. It may seem saccharine to Yankees, but Southerners find authentic the line in Driving Miss Daisy when the old lady in the nursing home puts her hand on that of her former chauffeur/handyman and says, “Hoke, you’re my best friend.”

The late Willie Morris, an eloquent spokesman—drunk or sober— for our generation, recalled that his dying grandmother reached not for the hand of her daughter or any blood relative, but for the hand of the black woman who had lovingly looked after her every day for years. Willie and I, and anybody born to the small-town South, know that what passed between those two women was more important than race or station, and we are moved by the authenticity of the scene. Not to a well-known New York writer and his socially conscious wife, however. When Willie told that story at a sophisticated dinner party on the Upper East Side, the writer said, “That is the most racist description I’ve ever heard.” His wife added, “It’s a racist description of a corrupt and racist society.” Poor woman; a head stuffed with stereotypes blinded her to the life-taught knowledge of human interaction. She did not have the key to unlock the attic-consciousness of Southerners: the knowledge of loving and hating, enduring without hope of prevailing through remorse and forgiveness, and caring, eternally caring. At a party once in Willie Morris’s New York apartment, I asked Robert Penn “Red” Warren if he could explain why Southerners are more violent. He thought for a minute and said, “I think it has to do with caring more.” His instincts about us are uncommonly true.

Lila Esau, my first nurse, cared about me, and I loved Lila. She is a fond presence in my memory—slender, small, the color of cured tobacco. After she escaped our narrow universe for the relative freedom of Brooklyn and became a nurse, there would be a birthday note from Lila for me every April 8. The notes stopped years ago, a closure I recall with a stab of regret. A very different personality was Mildred White, the cook, who lived in “the little house” behind our three-story residence. She was no Carson McCullers character, a mass of good will humming gospel hymns and providing a comforting bosom for a boy, sensitive to the sharp edges of childhood. Mildred was a big, strong, ebony woman, a touchy, hard-working loner. She had a talent for frying chicken; she tackled the task with assembly-line energy and efficiency. It was a wonder to watch her machine-like performance, rolling wet pieces in spiced flour, briskly dropping them in the sizzling grease and plucking each golden brown piece at precisely the right moment, as if she were an industrial engineer. I couldn’t imagine Mildred crooning lullabies. Once she informed me sharply that she knew some French from school, her scowl surely born of resentment that she, an intelligent woman, had to cook fried chicken, cornbread, and greens for a white family instead of holding a real job. Mildred was management material, born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Eli Wilkins was my laid-back buddy. Mother felt he performed his tasks as the family’s butler, chauffeur, and yard man without enthusiasm. But he was my friend, somebody to play catch with, a passable Ping-Pong player who let me win sometimes. When I began to have aches in strange places and noticed girls, he explained the birds and bees to me in an arcane style that left me still clueless about female anatomy and the mechanics of “going all the way.” He told me that the first time he had sex, he was embarrassed because he thought he had peed in the girl. This only deepened the alluring mystery. Once I embarrassed myself in Eli’s presence by uttering a remark typical of the thoughtless racism of the time and place. He was driving a group of us boys to a party and the subject of mixed nuts came up. I said I liked everything but “nigger toes,” our colloquialism for Brazil nuts. The word hung in the air, a frozen, ugly thing. I wanted to die, but Eli, either gracefully or with resignation, acted as if he had not heard me.

Though I never heard Mother and Dad utter the word “Nigger,” I can only imagine the indignities overheard by Mildred and Eli from dining room guests in the 1940s and ’50s. Mildred had room and board in a two-room apartment, with bath, attached to the garage. The pay back then was no more than seven to ten dollars a week; it hardly compensated for the social slights they suffered, though Eli’s and Mildred’s meager salaries put them in an economic bracket above the army of black and white sharecroppers.

Clarence Cason, a writer and University of Alabama journalism professor from neighboring Talladega County, explained the economics of sharecropping in his 1935 book, 90° in the Shade. This is how it worked: In March, the typical tenant borrowed about $200 from his landlord or banker. Of this sum, $50 might be designated for the fertilizer dealer, $50 for stock-feed, and $10 for interest. With luck—which seldom visited tenants in the Depression years—the “cropper” would sell three bales of cotton for $200 in the fall. After paying off his loan, the tenant would have left about $15 for each of the next six months until March. Jimmy Carter described the same cycle of hard work and hard poverty in south Georgia in his book An Hour Before Daylight. These are the people about whom James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Despite Agee’s elegant and sympathetic account, the book shamed the families depicted in it because, among other details of their pinched lives, he revealed that the Whites and Gudgers had only two pairs of threadbare underwear. Agee pulled back the curtain so these formerly invisible people and their miserable lives could be seen by the educated, articulate, and well-heeled. He told the croppers’ story in language that sophisticated readers could understand; it was their language, only better. It was important for that audience to know what life was like in the Black Belt but the book shamed the people about whom Agee wrote. They felt as if they had been exposed, in their threadbare underwear, inside a circle of wealthy, educated, fashionable, and powerful elites.

The Gudgers and Whites are also the people about whom the Star alumnus Rick Bragg wrote in his memoir of growing up dirt poor in Possum Trot, a cluster of rural Calhoun County houses whose post office closed decades ago. Bragg knew the people of the hardscrabble South, was one of them from his earliest memory: being dragged on the end of a cotton sack by his mother. His books All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man gave Agee’s people a voice, a story they could be proud of, written by one of their own. Bragg’s work did not “sing the praises of famous men,” as in the opening passage of the verse from Ecclesiastes. He wrote for those who “have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born, they and their children after them.” They are the people you didn’t know, if you were an east-sider like me. They lived in the weathered gray shacks on rural back roads, the people who fought and drank and populated the hospital and police reports in the paper. They were poor people with a code of honor we east-siders didn’t know or understand, but which made them worthy of respect. About them, about his own black family, the late James Tinsley said, “They call it sharecropping, but the big man, he didn’t do too much sharin’.” Mr. Tinsley’s parents escaped the farm to do “public work” in the textile mills for the lordly wages of $7.50 to $10 a week, which they stretched to send their son to Tuskegee Institute.

The Tinsleys’ migration from farm to city came after the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 1890s. Families by the thousands fled from “Tobacco Road,” the indentured servitude of sharecropping, to cities where the mill owners had jobs and housing for the workers—including the children. In fact, the small hands of children were more adept at working the machines than parents whose hands were gnarled by years of cotton picking. By 1900, 30 percent of Alabama’s millhands were children, according to an essay in Alabama Heritage magazine.

Many of these children never saw the sun, trudging to work at dawn and dragging home in the dark for a few hours sleep. A brief survey at the time turned up 450 children under age twelve who worked twelve or more hours every day, Saturday included. They were an army of unschooled (many totally illiterate), indentured slaves—not unlike children in rural Turkey today who sit on stools weaving rugs for tourists all day—some, the family’s only source of income.

Alabama children brought home wages of a dime to forty cents while the mill owners were cushioned by profits of 35 to 40 percent or more. In 1900, the state was no different than a small, third world nation today, ruled by an economic elite. The oppressed workers and yeoman farmers, especially blacks, were soon to be disenfranchised by the 1901 Constitution, written by a convention of our “best” citizens.

A generation of persistent effort, appeals to the conscience of many “best” citizens, and the shocking images of photography—as powerful then as TV was to the civil rights movement—eventually achieved some reform. Mill owners fought against the reformist onslaught in the legislature, arguing that the mills had saved white Southerners from the ravages of poverty, a generally accepted perception at the time; further, mill owners argued that mill parents would migrate to Georgia if the children’s income stopped.

A partial victory for reform was won with the reluctant compliance of Governor B. B. Comer, himself a textile magnate. Even the minimal, sixty-hour week for children under fourteen proved unenforceable. Reform got another boost in 1911 when the National Child Labor Committee convention was held in Birmingham. Former President Teddy Roosevelt told a packed house that Alabamians, who had recently improved their livestock breed, should put equal effort to raising their children.

An exhibit of Lewis Hines’s photographic essay on child labor dramatically galvanized public opinion. Photography was as new to the eyes of early twentieth-century citizens as television was in the 1950s and ’60s. A shocked Birmingham Age-Herald reporter wrote, “There has been no more convincing proof of the absolute necessity of the child labor laws . . . than by these pictures. They . . . depict a state of affairs which is terrible in its reality—terrible to encounter, terrible to admit that such things exist in civilized communities.” With the election of Thomas Kilby as governor, reform finally triumphed. In 1919, the Legislature passed an act reducing to forty-eight the maximum number of hours that children under fourteen could work. In addition, child workers were required to complete the fourth grade.

Working-class Southern blacks and whites, rescued from share-cropping, were in turn exploited by Southern mill owners, and also fell victims to national political and economic forces—the part Calvinist, part Darwinian belief that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” No Marshall Plan cushioned the South’s recovery from the error of attacking the great industrial nation to the north. When the war ended in 1865, capital in the South vanished. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. A hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice as much bank capital evaporated. Merton Coulter, who authored the Reconstruction volume for the LSU History of the South series, estimates the lost capital from the emancipation of slaves to have been between $1 and $4 billion. The desolation couldn’t have been more drastic if mid-nineteenth century Europe had been transformed into the Indian subcontinent.

A society without any currency, and few opportunities to earn any, must invent its own peculiar economic and social system. Of course, a nation without capital will not grow industries and cities where the arts, finance and health care are connected to vibrant, life-giving golden arteries. The shrunken economy of the South, a region as large as Europe, invented the crop-lien system—essentially, a barter economy that perpetuated poverty and such pastoral flowers as Erskine Caldwell’s famous Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road.

Of course, there were exceptions such as the entrepreneurial McGowin clan of Chapman, Alabama. Their unique story is a metaphor for how the South could have grown if national policy had been development instead of regional advantage. James Greeley McGowin was one of those rare people who, set down on the surface of the moon, would invent some way to develop an interplanetary market for dead rocks and a personal life of high culture. From a class of farmers, small-town merchants, and sawmill operators in the pine wilderness of south Alabama, James Greeley McGowin—in a single generation—created a land barony, jobs for impoverished backwoods people of both races, and an aristocracy.

The handsome Greeley and his talented, desirable wife Essie Stallworth McGowin crafted a family heritage of refinement from the materials of culture, education, hard work and travel, set upon a bedrock of indomitable will. The boys’ education included graduate study at Pembroke College, Oxford, and the daughter at Vassar. Essie’s insistence that they all master a musical instrument filled the thick, moist night air of their mill town and the surrounding pine forest with sounds to compete with the symphony of cicadas and bull frogs—a family string quartet. If Chapman’s baronial seat, Edgefield, was a center of civility, grace and learning, life in the “benign dictatorship” of the company town was a far sight better than the rutted, hopeless, treadmill existence of sharecropping. The company provided a steady job, a place to live with a garden, schools, and churches for blacks and whites, as well as a clinic staffed by a doctor and a nurse.

The McGowins could make money from their lumber mills and live baronial lives because they were in a free zone untouched by the punitive economic policies laid down by the Radical Republicans after the Civil War, and perpetuated into the middle of the twentieth century by the interests they protected. Essentially, the South was to be a producer of raw materials in a revival of the mercantile system abandoned by the British in the 18th century. The Louisville and Nashville Railroad provided the company access for its lumber to markets in the northeast and abroad through the port of Mobile, and later to markets in the middle west. When Greeley died in 1934, his sons Floyd, Earl, and Julian, continued to operate the company and used imagination, salesmanship and inventive reforestation to govern Chapman as a highly profitable enterprise, owning some 222,000 acres. As in most enterprises owned by large families, the pull of distant family members who own stock worth millions but wonder if they can afford a new car eventually dismantled the family business, and the company was sold to Union Camp in 1966. By then, a New South was in economic ascendancy and the Old South was about to become a fictionalized memory. The “boys” are long since dead, the mill town has vanished, Edgefield was put up for sale and family cellos and violins no longer competed with crickets and frogs. The entrepreneurial spirit, however, still courses in the veins of the third generation. A grandson, Earl’s son, Mason, has installed a $30-million computer-driven machine to process smaller pine trees (overlooked by previous generations) into lumber. Mason, a big, friendly, emphatic man, likens himself more to his all-business grandfather, Greeley, than his charming father, Earl, but good-naturedly takes his pretty wife Suzie’s ribbing, “The bigger the boy, the bigger the toy.” Sawmills can do what Mason’s magical machine can do, he says, “but not as fast, as much, as cheaply.” Edgefield still stands, as a museum that recalls the charms of a life that was but will be no more.

Railroads provided the McGowins a way to create a good life, because they fit the colonial mercantile system erected by Eastern politicians and interests: Ship us the raw materials and we’ll send them back as finished goods. Henry Grady lamented the South’s peonage in the story of a Georgia funeral in which the casket came from Cincinnati, marble and nails came from New England, and all Georgia supplied “was the body and the hole in the ground.” As if to ensure that the South would not rise from its humid cage, the dominant East imposed a system of discriminatory freight rates that inhibited the growth of industry, cities and capital in the region. Complicated rule making by the Interstate Commerce Commission had this effect: a refrigerator manufactured in Birmingham would cost more to ship to Pittsburgh than the same appliance shipped from Pittsburgh to Birmingham. Why build manufacturing plants in the South if you had to pay an extra tariff to ship the product?

Southern governors, frustrated by the added barrier to development posed by these discriminatory freight rates, formed what became the Southern Governors Conference. In 1937, Alabama Governor Bibb Graves filed a complaint with the ICC on behalf of the Conference. The issue won the sympathy of President and Mrs. Roosevelt. FDR and his chief of staff, Harry Hopkins, cited unfair freight rates as central to the South being “the Nation’s number one economic problem.” The cause of reform was pushed along to the U.S. Supreme Court by Georgia Governor Ellis Arnall, but was not finally resolved until the spring of 1952. I was a seventeen-year-old fifth-former at the Wooster School in Danbury, Connecticut. That year in Mr. Grover’s class I wrote an enthusiastic essay about the South’s growth rates exceeding that of the nation, and got an “F” on the paper. Exuberant Dixie chauvinism met precise Yankee superiority, and Yankee superiority won.

Still, that year, the economic shackles had been struck from the limbs of the South. The economic stimulus of World War II, elimination of the freight rate differential, and the delightful invention of New Yorker Willis Carrier—air conditioning, which became widely affordable in the 1950s—combined to give the South its economic takeoff speed. Irony of ironies, the South’s final recovery from its war came at the same time as the recovery of the Germans, Italians, and Japanese. Because of that bitter irony, perhaps we can be forgiven sullen reflections about how rapidly the South would have recovered socially and economically—thus coaxing the national economy to a faster gallop—if the nineteenth century Radical Republicans had been men of vision such as twentieth-century Republican statesmen Henry Stimson, John J. McCloy, Robert Lovett, Arthur Vandenberg, and Dwight Eisenhower. The bipartisanship that remade the world by the enlightened self-interest of helping our fallen foes to their feet could have made America a much better place, much sooner. Perhaps it might even have accelerated civil rights reforms.

However, we’re not in a mood to dwell on that old mistake, because—irony of ironies, again—the economy of Anniston and a large slice of Alabama across the I-20 corridor is being occupied by the former Axis Powers. Germany’s Mercedes-Benz is on the western side of I-20 and Japan’s Honda has built a plant thirteen minutes from our major shopping mall on the eastern end of I-20. To make the ironic triangle complete, Italy’s Fiat has a plant just forty miles to the south. Of course, the boys and girls with whom I grew up so happily in our third-world cocoon had never heard such exotic names as Honda or Toyota, and if they had, they would have belonged to the enemy. It was beyond our powers of imagination to think that one day the Axis Powers would be our welcomed neighbors.