``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.''
t. c. frank
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I wrote something on that Mead article and noted something related to this point, but threw it out. Writing on shit from the WSJ editorial page is exhaustingly hate filled work.
The use of the word Populist to characterize Jessie Helms was a rhetorical device to distance him from the ideologically identical pricks in the Republican party machine. Helms was too blunt and lacked the twisted rhetorical nuances that characterize the reactionary stink-tank talk that is now the preferred style in mass media. I think of Paul Gigot as one of the better examples. Smooth, pleasant, congenial and just as nasty as they come.
While I was looking around for material to rip Mead's slime on Helms apart I came across a much more interesting idea. The Neo-Conservative reactionaries who dominate the Republican party today are actually the ideological heirs of George Wallace. Their formative struggle took place in the middle of Nixon's 1972 campaign to isolate Wallace and take over his potential constituency in the South.
Here is the link:
http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/spring96/wallace.html
This is a review of Dan Carter's biography of Wallace. Carter was the president of the Southern Historical Association. Carter's contention that Wallace is the invisible legacy to the current republican ideologues is supported by his examination of Nixon's papers during the `72 campaign where Nixon worries over Wallace splitting off key southern support. Here is an excerpt from the above review:
"By the late 1970s, there had already been written a number of histories of the 1960s, and Wallace is invisible," he [Carter] says. "He's not there, except as a kind of paper, cardboard figure, and yet he drew the support consistently of twenty to twenty-three percent of the American people. And so I kept thinking, Why is he gone, why is he not part of our past?"
Carter finds the devaluing of Wallace's political currency ironic because of his profound impact on the policies and political agendas of the neo-conservative movement that took root in this country in the early 1980s and now holds sway in both houses of Congress. In The Politics of Rage, Carter writes, "If [Wallace] did not create the conservative groundswell that transformed American politics in the 1980s, he anticipated most of its themes. It was Wallace who sensed and gave voice to a growing national white backlash in the 1960s; it was Wallace who warned of the danger to the American soul posed by the `intellectual snobs who don't know the difference between smut and great literature'; it was Wallace who railed against federal bureaucrats who not only wasted the tax dollars of hardworking Americans, but lacked the common sense to `park their bicycles straight.' "
Conservatives were happy to latch on to those successful themes, Carter reasons, but they didn't want to admit that the source was a snarling, unrefined, Southern racist. "The reason Wallace's role is underestimated is pretty obvious," he says. "The heirs of his power do not want to acknowledge the parentage. The most savage reviews I've gotten have tended to come from neo-conservatives who are outraged that I suggest George Wallace is the spiritual godfather of neo-conservatism. It's usually the followers who lift up an individual and his importance, and since the followers will not acknowledge the parent, then it makes it understandable why his role has been underestimated in American politics."
Even though Wallace had an undeniable impact on American neo-conservatism (a 1986 New York Times editorial said Ronald Reagan "sailed into the White House [on the] tide George Wallace discovered"), Carter posits that the governor's biggest influence may have been on the policies and domestic agenda of Richard Nixon. Carter was the first person to scrutinize the Nixon papers with respect to the president's relationship with Wallace, and what he found was a man obsessed. According to The Politics of Rage, "When George Wallace had played his fiddle, the President of the United States had danced Jim Crow."....
..."In the long run, I think his moment had passed. . . . As soon as another figure came along who could take his message and domesticate it and make it more appealing than Wallace the person, then Wallace was going to be sidetracked. Ronald Reagan takes many of the same ideas, many of the same values, many of the same things that Wallace did, but in a much more appealing way, and sells them to the American people. So I think Wallace would have eventually been eclipsed by a Reagan or someone like that if he would not have been shot."
Little wonder those slimes and scum at WSJ, the White House, and the Republican party don't want to get too maudlin over Helms. Hell, somebody might begin looking around for some of the other creeps from that long gone era and find/remember what I just did. Thanks to Dan Carter for reminding me where these pricks came from and what they really represent. They need to be absolutely stigmatized and Wallace is the perfect means to do so.
Chuck Grimes