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10 Race, Religion, and the “Status Quo Society” [The south is] the only place in the western world where a man could become a liberal simply by urging obedience to the law. —hodding Carter Well, around here communism’s anything we don’t like. isn’t it that way everywhere else? —An Alabama dairy farmer The limitations of the liberalism of Alabama progressives like Chauncey sparks and lister hill revealed at an individual level the same kind of softness that afflicted much of what constituted new Deal liberalism in the south. if it in some way involved race, the liberalism could not be sustained. And with almost every issue that presented itself, a tie to racial traditions, perquisites, and mores eventually manifested itself—no matter how hard the historical actors, or historians, have tried to keep the issues apart. matters of economics and religion and gender could no more be held separate from racial considerations than they could be divorced from each other. A Giant Step to the Right interaction between these factors, substantial in any society, were particularly acute in Deep south settings. Alabama, in particular, was a place that can be described as a “status quo society.” Dedicated to the preservation of an interrelated conservative orthodoxy on matters of race, class, gender, religion , patriotism, and ethnicity, these stanchions of the prevailing status quo also worked to mutually support one another. Predicated on the most basic understanding of the social Darwinist creed, society was organized hierarchically by design. men enjoyed sway over women, natives over foreigners, bosses over workers, preachers over flocks, and, at its most primal level, whites over blacks. because society itself was designed by a divine Creator, tampering with 248 / Chapter 10 the status quo implied a rejection of his handiwork—and was thus akin to cultural sacrilege. in such a society stratification not only was, it was the way it should be. more, in such a society the conventional spectrum of political attitudes was skewed noticeably to the right. because protection of the prevailing status quo and its hierarchies was the fundamental value of the society , conservatism itself took on a normative quality. everything took one giant step to the right. Thus those who would most commonly be defined as liberals in mainstream America were classified as radicals in the 1940s south—and so on: centrists were liberals, conservatives were moderates or mainstream, and quasi-fascists were regarded as mere conservatives. sometimes, if the subject were sufficiently polished, the society would even skip a category and a thoroughly conservative individual like Grover hall sr. could roundly be considered a liberal. in such a society, as Pulitzer Prize–winning mississippi editor hodding Carter would later observe, the south was “the only place in the western world where a man could become a liberal simply by urging obedience to the law.” esteemed southern historian C. vann Woodward recognized that in the civil rights south moderates were thought of as “liberals” and integrationists were considered “radicals.” in 1944 swedish sociologist Gunnar myrdal, in his famous study of the south and race relations, An American Dilemma, made essentially the same point: “in the south . . . a person may be ranked as liberal . . . merely by insisting that the law shall be adhered to in practice.”1 Despite significant evidence as to the spotty nature of Chauncey sparks’s brand of progressivism, many in Alabama continued to insist that he was a genuine liberal. Montgomery Examiner editor Charles G. Dobbins Jr. considered sparks a bona fide progressive because of his willingness to expand social services and tax corporations and utilities at a higher level than their absurdly low levy. yet the assessment of sparks as liberal carried over to racial matters as well. James Chappell, the moderate president of the Birmingham News, felt sparks was essentially “a liberal spirit” because of the racial views the governor had articulated in his Founder’s Day speech at Tuskegee—views that were strictly segregationist and even laudatory of white supremacy in nature . sparks himself was well satisfied that he was an enlightened progressive on race issues, even after the same and other statements.2 Public commentators who dared find fault, no matter how qualified, with the “moderate” guardians of white supremacy such as sparks found themselves damned as radicals in the status quo society that was the Deep south. This phenomenon was actually quite remarkable because for decades all three newspapers owned by victor hanson had performed as the most faithful [18.118.184.237...

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