Declarations of Dependence: The Long Reconstruction of Popular Politics in the South, 1861-1908

7 A Compressive Age: White Supremacy and the Growth of the Modern State

7 A Compressive Age White Supremacy and the Growth of the Modern State two years after Tom Settle’s defeat, young Democrats toppled Republicans and Populists in an infamous white supremacy campaign. As they captured the state legislature in 1898, then confirmed disenfranchisement in a 1900 referendum , they created not just Jim Crow but a new image of the relationship between state and subjectinNorthCarolina.Leavingbehindpostwar patronalism, they reached both forward and backward to replace the government of needy persons with the management of an undifferentiated, abstracted people. Their leader, and the state’s new governor, Charles B. Aycock, recast the now-familiar inauguration-day comparison of statecraft and sunshine. Instead of Holden’s justice shining down into every crevice, or Vance’s crop-luring prosperity, Aycock’s sun blurred the boundaries between individuals. In his new regime, ‘‘ten thousand lights’’ would meld into a single ray, ‘‘shining together to brighten life and make the state more glorious.’’ The disappearance of the individual self and its pesky bodily needs made people’s actual wishes irrelevant. In his inaugural address, Aycock dismissed the will of the people expressed in universal suffrage as a ‘‘theory’’ that had ‘‘outrun practice’’ because democracy proved ‘‘incapable of enforcing and preserving order,’’ especially over allegedly bestial African Americans. In its place an intelligent class would manage the ‘‘safety of the state’’ by building a powerful government. Privately, Aycock and his collaborators compressed the citizens even further into what they called the social organism. Drawing upon broad, transatlantic currents, they managed the proper evolution of the state through education, public health, segregation, [186] White Supremacy and the Modern State and, eventually, alcohol prohibition. In the process they answered a conundrum of democratic liberalism: How can the state restrain people’s extravagant expectations for government? By defining happiness upon evolutionary terms, they made personal needs irrelevant.∞ The balance of power between politicians and the people shifted at the turn of the century. Fueled by national, even global, disenfranchisement and new technologies of governance, people’s individual pleas played a much smaller, although not negligible, role in shaping the political system than they had in the previous three decades. In the long Reconstruction that lasted from the 1860s through the mid-1890s, the particular configurations and vulnerabilities of state power extended the boundaries of politics. When those boundaries contracted in the 1890s, so too did the way politics was made. Understanding this shift from governing persons to the people requires looking beyond petitions and pleas to the intellectual, social, and political world that made this transformation possible. This view recasts scholarly assumptions about the intellectual roots of modern white supremacy, the appeal of political racism to rural audiences, and the relationship between democracy and state-building reform. Although historians frequently portray the well-known North Carolina white supremacy movement as a product of thwarted ambition and personal neuroses, it emerged as part of a global selectionist moment. Driven by the notion that society left to its own devices would degenerate, a eugenic movement used newly expanded states to guide society’s evolutionary progress. Often, although not always, utilizing ethnological racial theories of Teutonic superiority, these leaders made white supremacy an evolutionary necessity. In North Carolina this thinking class included several classmates from the University of North Carolina who allied with conservative leaders in 1898 and turned North Carolina into the ‘‘Wisconsin of the South,’’ a model of Southern progressivism known for its scientific, or, later, businesslike, management of the state through education, public health, segregation, disenfranchisement, and alcohol prohibition.≤ The transformation of the state-subject relationship was never as complete as Aycock’s collaborators hoped. Like Populists who dreamt of broad reforms but learned to appeal to the enthusiasm of the crowd, these new governors had to fit their message to their constituents. Along with wellstudied appeals to white men’s power over white women, they also relied upon a less understood way of accessing the fantastic notion of government gifts. Instead of a present of money made through silver, white supremacy Democrats invoked the benefits of membership in an imagined white family. Additionally, they called upon the state as punisher on behalf of aggrieved White Supremacy and the Modern State [187] whites, capable of scourging its enemies like sunlight vanquishing germs. And at times, they ended up relying upon the very patronalism they aimed to displace. Progressive statism was therefore born within...