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5. We Are Not Radicals, Neither Are We Reactionaries: Good Government Veterans and the Politics of Modernization
- The University of North Carolina Press
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John J. Flynt wasted little time when he returned to his home in Griffin, Georgia, in 1945 after many months overseas. Having earned a Bronze Star in the European theater, he resumed his former position as assistant U.S. district attorney for north Georgia. Within a few short months, Flynt won the Spalding County seat in the Georgia statehouse. Shortly after this electoral victory, he appeared as a guest columnist in the Atlanta Constitution, an opportunity Flynt used to explain what Georgia’s veterans wanted and why people should listen to them. Over 60 percent of Georgia’s World War I veterans, Flynt began, never returned to their home state or left it soon after the war’s end because they found “better places to live, or places that were more in keeping with the progressive age in which they lived.”Now, he warned,“unless Georgia keeps abreast of other states, the same thing will happen again.” Those men and women who survived the war“have returned to Georgia because of all the places we have seen we like Georgia best.”Veterans like himself—and Flynt meant white veterans—“have all come back with a determination to make Georgia a better place and to do our part of that job.”Thus, he announced,“the veterans of this, our Georgia, expect and demand the enactment of . . . legislation that will make possible the advancement and progress to which we feel that all Georgians are entitled.” This pro5 : We Are Not Radicals, Neither Are We Reactionaries Good Government Veterans and the Politics of Modernization gram included improving public health services, since “during our war service we have seen the results of both healthful and unhealthful living conditions in all parts of the world.”Moreover, veterans wanted access to twelve years of public school education for their children, to improve and expand the Georgia university system, and to place vocational and trade schools in all parts of the state. Georgia’s veterans “gave up our civilian jobs and professions . . . to fight on all continents and on all oceans,” Flynt explained; now they saw the need for “sound and progressive legislation”for the betterment of Georgia. Above all, he emphasized,“we are not radicals, neither are we reactionaries.”1 The vision of progress painted by Flynt derived from a keen determination that many returning white veterans shared to modernize Georgia’s economy and government. The experience of the war had served as a mirror, in a sense, reflecting back all of Georgia’s social, economic, and political ills to white veterans who rarely, if ever, had traveled outside their state, region, or country before . Traveling throughout the United States and overseas exposed them to levels of development unheard of at home, from modern road systems and public health services to sophisticated educational facilities. All of this underscored Georgia’s apparent backwardness.Moreover,the war against Germany and Japan, and the rhetoric that surrounded it, intimately acquainted veterans with the cost of an extreme politics of corruption, exclusion, and reactionism. Together, these influences prompted often uncomfortable revelations about the causes of Georgia’s obvious economic and political deficiencies. Indeed, the pattern of Georgia’s postwar political life, characterized by inadequate tax revenues, limited public services, civic apathy, political cronyism, and a reactionary resistance to federal economic intervention, met significant challenges as mobilizing for war and then reconverting to peace became top priorities throughout the nation. The usual excuses for spending as little as possible to maintain streets, schools, and sewage systems, to regulate the proliferation of vice and crime, to build public housing, or to develop plans to recruit industry fell flat in the wake of the development and spending that came with the war, undermining popular faith in the fitness of incumbents to rule. The structures of southern political life, particularly a truncated electorate, perpetuated economic and political conservatism even though the challenges and opportunities of the postwar era seemed to demand change.Georgia’s returning white veterans quickly discovered that achieving the prosperity and progress they wanted depended first on winning a homefront battle against the political incumbency, civic complacency , and electoral fraud that had long sustained Bourbon rule. In response, Georgia’s white veterans, riding a wave of civic insurgency that fed on the instability in political, economic, and race relations generated by the 114 : [54.224.90.25] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:36 GMT) war and its aftermath, organized political reform leagues to challenge the...