> JUNE 19, 11:19 EDT
>
> Southern Party Seeks Secession
>
> By ALLEN G. BREED
> Associated Press Writer
>
> RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) =D1 Six score and 18 years ago, their forefathers brought
> forth upon this
> continent a new nation, conceived in secession and dedicated to the
> proposition that states
> are sovereign and not beholden to a central government.
>
> Now, the philosophical heirs to the Confederate States of America are
> making another go at
> it.
>
> Organizers of the Southern Party have registered with the Federal Election
> Commission and
> with the secretaries of state in Florida, Georgia, Texas and Virginia. By
> August, the party
> hopes to be established in all 11 states of the old Confederacy and
> Kentucky, Maryland,
> Missouri, Oklahoma and West Virginia.
>
> The short-term goal is to get candidates elected to state and local
> offices. The long-term
> objective, which troubles independent political observers even though they
> doubt it will
> ever happen: Send enough party members to Congress to push for a separate
> Southern
> nation.
>
> Wasn't that settled in the Civil War? Not in the view of the Southern Party=
> ``The shotgun wedding forced upon the South at Appomattox has reached a
> dead end, and it
> is time to initiate a political divorce for the good of all parties
> concerned,'' declares the
> group's Web site.
>
> Those who believe that such talk is the very heart of sedition are the
> victims of 130 years of
> Yankee propaganda =D1 and of a poor understanding of the U.S. Constitution,
> says national
> committee chairman George Kalas.
>
> ``Lincoln once said that a house divided would not stand,'' Kalas says.
> ``Lincoln was wrong.
> A house divided will stand. It's called a duplex.''
>
> Kalas, a Houstonian who filed the party's Texas papers in March, says
> there's popular
> support for the idea of a new Confederacy. But is he just whistling
> ``Dixie''?
>
> Since 1992, the Southern Focus Polls from the University of North Carolina
> at Chapel Hill
> have asked whether the South would be better off as a separate nation, if
> that could be
> achieved without bloodshed. Between 8 percent and 16 percent of
> Southerners have agreed
> at any given time, and up to 9 percent of non-Southerners have accepted
> the premise.
>
> Twenty years ago, John Shelton Reed, the author, historian and sociologist
> whose
> department oversees the polling, predicted the time was coming when
> Southerners would
> again seek autonomy. His reasoning: Those who actually fought the Civil
> War were all
> dead; America's role in the world was becoming less clear following
> Vietnam, and the South
> was ``finally ridding itself of the incubus of white supremacy.''
>
> ``Although I'm pleased to have my prophecy validated, I'm personally
> ambivalent about
> this development,'' Reed says.
>
> Even so, he adds, ``I certainly believe that any group that's telling the
> 'federales' to mind
> their constitutional business is doing a good thing.''
>
> Separatist movements are nothing new. Groups of native Hawaiians have been
> pushing for
> a return to sovereignty in recent years, and the Alaskan Independence
> Party, founded on a
> platform of secession from the lower 48, helped elect a governor in 1990.
>
> But a Southern nation?
>
> Yes, says the Southern Party, rejecting Lincoln's ``flawed notion'' that
> the United States is
> bound together only by ``some abstract notion of liberty and equality.''
> The group's Web site
> goes on:
>
> ``Rather, we believe the United States in general and the South in
> particular are defined by
> their historically European and Christian ethnic, linguistic and cultural
> core. ... This
> cultural majority represents the true fusion of blood and soil that
> defines what the Southern
> nation is. ...
>
> ``(W)e intend to promote policies that will ensure that Dixie remains a
> predominantly, but
> certainly not exclusively, Anglo-Celtic nation.''
>
> Historian Steven Lawson says minorities should feel ``very uneasy'' about
> this. ``They're
> defining this culture of the South in very limited ways =D1 in a monolithic
> way of whiteness,''
> says Lawson, a professor at Rutgers University and author of books on
> black political
> history. ``They are equating whiteness with Southern culture, and that's
> just a distortion
> of Southern history.''
>
> Kalas says that's not the point at all.
>
> Party supporters envision a country with a weak, decentralized government,
> like
> Switzerland; where schools and courts would proudly display the Ten
> Commandments;
> where most citizens would be required to serve in the military but would
> only wage
> defensive wars against foreign nations; and where immigration would be
> vigilantly
> controlled.
>
> Party supporter Mike Crane of Hollywood, Fla., sees secession as the only
> escape from a
> political system that is irretrievably broken and thoroughly corrupt.
>
> ``I'm tired of working for these Republicrats and Demagods that represent
> things I do not
> believe in,'' says Crane, a software designer who has gotten in trouble
> for displaying a set of
> miniature Confederate flags in his office.
>
> ``I'm tired of a government where those of no faith have more rights than
> those of faith. I'm
> tried of a government that's obsessed with race and focused on special
> privileges =D1
> affirmative action, in other words.''
>
> But party organizers insist their aims are not white supremacist.
>
> ``Sir, the blacks have been an integral part of the Southern heritage for
> years,'' says Jerry
> Baxley, an auctioneer and gun dealer from Richmond, Va. ``We're not
> anything but
> Southerners, and that's how we view our people.''
>
> Kalas says that when he talks of Anglo culture, he's thinking more about
> language,
> literature and legal traditions than about race.
>
> ``The culture that we have today has benefitted everybody, regardless of
> their racial
> background,'' says Kalas, a former CIA investigator whose father is a
> Greek immigrant and
> whose mother is of Cajun and American Indian descent.
>
> When asked if he could foresee minorities playing a role in the party,
> Kalas immediately
> named one =D1 columnist Walter Williams, an economics professor at George
> Mason
> University and author of the book ``More Liberty Means Less Government.''
>
> Williams, who is black, doesn't see himself joining the party. But it's
> not because of the
> rhetoric.
>
> ``It doesn't make any difference whether they're inclusive or not, at
> least to me. That's one
> of the issues of liberty,'' says Williams, who believes in the right of
> secession. ``You have to
> be a brave person to take liberty.''
>
> The party is a project of the League of the South, a 12,000-member
> Southern heritage
> organization. Kalas is the league's ``Rebmaster.''
>
> Party members say the Southern independence movement is part of an
> international trend
> toward smaller, more homogenous states. They cite recent moves toward
> self-determination
> in Scotland and Wales.
>
> Thomas Naylor, professor emeritus of economics at Duke University in
> Durham, thinks the
> Southern Party is right on. In fact, he thinks his adopted state of
> Vermont should band with
> New Hampshire and Maine and join Canada's Maritime provinces, which he
> believes have
> more in common with each other than with, say, California or Texas.
>
> ``The government is too big because the whole damn country is too big,''
> says Naylor,
> co-author of the 1997 book ``Downsizing the U.S.A.''
>
> Kalas says the party will not likely field its first candidates until
> after the 2000 elections.
> And he predicts it will succeed where other third parties have failed
> because its key plank,
> secession, is something the two major parties won't be able to co-opt.
>
> Unfortunately for the party, the region is a politically tough row to hoe.
>
> ``The South is easily the worst place in the country for ballot access for
> minor parties,'' says
> Richard Winger of San Francisco, publisher of the newsletter ``Ballot
> Access News.''
>
> Alabama, for instance, in 1995 tripled the number of signatures needed to
> get a party on
> the ballot to 3 percent of the votes cast in the last gubernatorial
> election. To stay on the
> ballot, a party would have to get 20 percent of the vote, Winger says.
>
> That the movement even exists is disheartening to some.
>
> As a history professor, John Hope Franklin believes that peaceful
> secession is a closed issue.
> But as a black man who daily experiences ``disdain of me and lack of
> interest in my
> well-being,'' he is worried.
>
> Franklin, a professor emeritus at Duke, says the Southern Party leaders
> are articulate, and
> they express views that many Americans share while at the same time ``they
> are against
> much of what this country stands for =D1 tolerance and diversity and, we
> believe, equality.''
>
> He adds: ``They're a bunch of nuts, but they're to be taken seriously.''
>
> EDITORS NOTE =D1 The Southern Party Web site is www.southernparty.org.
> Allen
> G. Breed
> is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh.