Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2001 23:34:04 -0500 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com From: "t. c. frank" <t-frank-3 at alumni.uchicago.edu>
Doug:
Not that it matters, but Ben Tillman wasn't a Populist. According to Lawrence Goodwyn, the leading historian of Populism, Tillman was actually responsible for killing Populism in South Carolina. He was a Democratic loyalist whenever it mattered. Maybe a lower-case "p" populist, but not the real thing.
>
>This is not how Southern politicians responded in the 1870s and
>1880s. Populists like South Carolina's "Pitchfork" Ben Tillman did
>not just fulminate against civil rights laws. They led movements of
>armed, organized resistance, intimidating black voters at the polls,
>defending racial lynchings and, in Tillman's case, being directly and
>openly involved in the murder of black political leaders.
>
>Even as the passions of the civil rights movement were at their
>height, Messrs. Helms and Thurmond (whose father was Ben Tillman's
>attorney) shunned violence. Without ever losing their credentials as
>hard-core defenders of Southern values, they hired African-American
>staffers and gave African-Americans the same level of constituency
>service they gave whites. Even their opposition to affirmative action
>is based on their claim that these principles violate what ought to
>be a color-blind stance on the part of the government.
>
>That is something no white Southern politician, and especially one
>representing Mr. Helms' core supporters of farmers and small-town
>whites, would have ever said before Jesse Helms came along. It is
>something they all say now.
>
>Mr. Helms could have followed the Tillman path and led the white
>South into violent resistance; he also could have failed to carry his
>supporters with him into grudging acceptance of the new racial order.
>He disciplined and tamed the segregationist South even as he
>represented it to a hostile nation. We are all better off because he
>managed this difficult high- wire act.
>