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7 “Closet Moderates”: Why White Liberals Failed, 1940–1970 I Kerr Scott was the most liberal governor of North Carolina in the twentieth century. He was elected in 1948 in an upset victory over the state treasurer, Charles Johnson. The blunt uncompromising Scott campaigned for his “branchhead boys”—isolated rural voters who lived not at the heads of the rivers but at the ends of the tributaries—and against “lawyer-business” rule. Johnson was supported by most members of the General Assembly, and by most state officials and county commissioners. Scott put together a coalition of lower-income, especially rural, whites and blacks to defeat him. For the first time for years, noted one observer, you did not know who was going to be governor. Johnson had been so confident of winning that allegedly he had ordered a new Cadillac with special hubcaps. Edwin Gill, protégé of Max Gardner, and later state treasurer himself, was so surprised, it was said, that he tried to jump out of his second-floor office window.1 In office, Scott rewarded his liberal coalition. He built 12,000 miles of farm-to-market roads, paving the dirt roads of rural North Carolina, and lifting the state out of the mud. He stimulated a dramatic increase in the provision of rural electrification and telephones. He improved teachers’ salaries and pensions and increased spending on school construction. He raised welfare benefits and widened unemployment compensation coverage. For African Americans, he defused a proposed march on Raleigh by consulting black leaders, fought for increased appropriations for black institutions, monitored black efforts to register to vote, especially in eastern North Carolina, and appointed blacks to state government positions. Above all, he appointed Harold Trigg, 102 president of St. Augustine’s College, as the first African American to serve on the state Board of Education.2 For organized labor, Scott attempted to repeal the state’s anti-closed shop law and to raise the minimum wage. Unlike his predecessors and successors, he intervened in strikes on behalf of the strikers, not the employers: he did not call out the National Guard to break strikes. When textile workers struck Hart Mills in Tarboro and spent most of 1949 on strike, Scott condemned the owners. He complained that the company “doesn’t believe in unions,” that they were inflexible, and set on busting the union.3 When Scott had campaigned for commissioner of Agriculture he had criticized the lack of representation for the interests of thousands of farmwomen: it was a repeated theme. He appointed the first woman, Jane McKimmon, to the state Board of Agriculture. As governor, he attempted to secure more representation for women in state appointments and appointed North Carolina’s first female superior court judge, Suzie Sharp, later chief justice of the state supreme court. Scott also appointed women campaign managers, notably in critical counties like Forsyth.4 Scott sought the economic modernization of the state but it was a New Deal–style modernization strategy, aimed not at attracting low-wage industry through cheap labor and tax incentives, but at creating economic growth through the creation of mass purchasing power, and by sustaining and increasing the income of black and white lower-income voters. There was a liberal cutting edge to Scott’s policies: he confronted the state’s bankers over state financial deposits and revenue; the oil companies over an increased gasoline tax; the utility companies over rural electrification and water resources; and employers over union rights, strikes, and the minimum wage. He recognized the essential ingredient of federal aid if the state were to solve its longterm economic problems: he supported federal aid to education, federal development of water resources, federal aid for hospital construction and low-cost housing, and some form of national health insurance. He was a southern politician firmly in sympathy with the economic policies of a liberal Democratic national administration, a sympathy emphasized when he appointed the former press secretary to FDR and Truman, Jonathan Daniels, as Democratic National committeeman. He confirmed that liberalism by appointing the state’s most advanced New Dealer, UNC president Frank Graham, to the United States Senate. Scott was one of the last North Carolina politicians to be proud of the adjective liberal. As he praised Frank Graham to one audience, “You haven’t got a better liberal in America than the Senator you’ve got.”5 And there were North Carolinians who responded with zeal to this liberal politics. On September 16, 1949, one...

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