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3. For Blacks Only: The Perversion of Alabama Progressivism
- The University of Alabama Press
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3 For Blacks Only The Perversion of Alabama Progressivism it is Christianity, but not orthodox. . . . it is wrong but right. . . . it is life instead of death. —Charles h. Greer The Progressive movement did not pass the south by. in fact there was a distinct , active, even flourishing movement in the southern states, and Alabama was front and center among them. A great deal of reform was accomplished in the state, and a rich diversity of subjects tackled: health, education, child labor, voting, race relations, the regulation of corporations, trusts, and combinations (particularly the railroads ), the treatment of prisoners and penal reform, social ills related to alcohol , the construction of roads, bridges, infrastructure, and a host of other important items.1 much good was accomplished. but there was also a shadow Progressive movement in Alabama and much of the Deep south, one whose “reforms” were far less savory, far less inclusive , and, it might be argued, even critically determinative of patterns that would afflict the state and region far after the era passed. labor insurgency was crushed; women were kept “in their place”; barbaric and exploitative systems of profit making at the expense of human life and almost inconceivable levels of misery were protected (indeed expanded); whole populations were legally disfranchised and excluded from meaningful political participation; “reforms” widened rather than narrowed the already massive gulf between the races; other forms of discrimination, disfranchisement, and the hardening of lines of social demarcation and stratification were drawn more sharply. even a populist terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan, took on new life during this time and enforced a grotesque form of racial, religious, moral, gender, and nativist conformity in the most violent ways imaginable. All of this, too, was part of the reforms of the Progressive era down south. but the era left behind two overriding and enduring legacies in Alabama, both of which would have lasting and unfortunate consequences for the 42 / Chapter 3 south’s development long after the period officially ended, on a number of fronts. The first was the institutionalization and public sanction of a powerful anti-democratic impulse, one that moved and had its being in the significant interrelationships between various types of political, economic, and religious conservatism—even variants of fundamentalism. The second was the establishment and deepening of a divide between what constituted acceptable forms of progressivism (or what was increasingly referred to as “liberalism”) and those that did not. When it was all said and done, new life would be breathed into the ugly impulse of anti-democratic behaviors (that should have been all the more galling) in a country whose founding ideology and mythology insisted on the basic requisite of popular participation. And the state’s leading progressive figures—emmett o’neal, b. b. Comer, Thomas Kilby, and others— would personify a whites-only economic liberalism that would be enshrined in the state for decades to come in the work of Alabama’s best-known representatives of liberalism: lister hill, John sparkman, George huddleston, and even the venerable hugo black to a degree, as well as lesser-known plebeian figures such as horace Wilkinson and bull Connor. The pattern would find its ultimate expression in George Wallace. Discovery, and recognition, of this important binary would, with time, actually provide a critical missing link in understanding how Alabama (once considered the garden spot and great hope for the emergence of a liberal south) would, instead, choose a very different route. instead of spearheading an awakened class-consciousness and willingness to engage in biracial liberalism , Alabama would choose to lead Dixie down another fork, a tragic fork: the region’s embrace of an extreme racial, religious, and economic rightism that would eventually find enunciation in the Dixiecrat outburst, the independentism of George Wallace, and, given time, the rise of the modern GoP. The Nature of Historical Inquiry and Making Sense of the Past Allow me to begin with two premises. First, historians disagree. in some respects , it is one of the most basic and routine aspects of their calling. not merely to record facts, provide chronology, or to learn, remember, recite, and regurgitate names, dates, and places but to interpret, then reinterpret, then interpret again—until the profession and then the public eventually gain an understanding of the past that resembles reality as closely as it is possible for such a humanistic inquiry to do. of course several disclaimers are in order. Try as they might, historians can never know precisely, exactly, unquestionably what went...