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6 Splitting the New Deal Coalition Open you ask any nigger in the street who’s the greatest man in the world. nine out of ten will tell you Franklin Roosevelt. That’s why i think he’s so dangerous. —A white southerner liberals in the Deep south could push and pull the electorate along on economic issues. Although they encountered fierce resistance from conservative industrial and planting interests, and often disinterest from the plain electorate , they could get away with such behavior—especially when times were hard and people were starving—as long as they did not challenge the sacred conventions on race. Clearly in Alabama liberalism began and ended with economics. but whenever “liberalism” bled over into matters that did involve race and the broader but related question of culture, the most liberal-minded Alabamians of the age ran for the hills. They knew very well that they could go only so far. if they were interested in remaining elected officials in the state of Alabama, they had to steer clear of the all-important racial taboo. A precious few liberals did cross the line—Gould beech, Aubrey Williams , Clifford and virginia Durr, herman Clarence nixon—but they were the exceptions that prove the rule. They were not representatives who had to stand for reelection in the state of Alabama. For the most part they were insulated bureaucrats and academics in other states, or outcasts and pariahs who encountered the fiercest and deepest kinds of social ostracism in their home communities. As long as racial and economic issues were held apart, the seats and positions of public-office liberals were safe. but when the two melded together they were increasingly in trouble. And, of course, the two could not be held artificially apart forever—even in Alabama. What the new Deal did, at its most fundamental level, was begin the process of coalescing the two on a national level by including African Americans in relief and recovery in significant and visible ways, by giving aid and comfort to the rising industrial unionism that would organize blacks along with whites, in a hundred dif- 124 / Chapter 6 ferent ways. in effect, the new Deal was the beginning of the end for Deep south liberals connected to the Democratic Party who pushed economic progressivism while remaining true blue southerners on race. The new Deal forebode the day when economic liberalism and racial liberalism would be blended so thoroughly, even in the south, that “liberalism” itself would become an untenable position for a southern white politician to hold. And when class-based conservatism and racial conservatism finally met to marry in solemn ceremonial backlash, anointing the states’ Rights Party into existence , it did so almost ten years to the day—and, ironically, in the same birmingham hall that had hosted the first southern Conference for human Welfare. The new Deal hastened the day in Alabama when it would become impossible to keep “economic liberalism” and “racial liberalism” separate in the public mind—the same day the Democratic Party began to die in the south. Not Only a Mistake But a Disgrace in 1936 three-quarters of American blacks abandoned the party of lincoln for Franklin Roosevelt and the new Deal—a genuine watershed. The shift was primarily a function of Roosevelt’s massive popularity and his administration ’s willingness to include African Americans as Americans, yet some small black discontent with the GoP had been brewing throughout the 1920s. herbert hoover’s forces had openly appealed for Klan support in 1928 and his administration was so racially exclusive that Walter White of the nAACP tagged him the “man in the lily-White house.” Demographic and cultural shifts also played a role: growing assertiveness associated with the “new negro” movement, the nAACP, the undermining of “scientific racism” by sociologists Franz boas and others, the outflowing of culture and art known as the harlem Renaissance, and the Great migration from the south that had, by 1930, moved a fifth of all black Americans north of the mason-Dixon line.1 The southern reaction to first the new Deal and then the Democratic Party as a whole was without question orchestrated from above. yet it was eventually received and echoed with a full throat at the common level. like the most notable instances in the southern past when plain whites and blacks pooled their efforts only to watch their alliances come apart because of racial suspicion and mutual distrust, the new Deal itself was...

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