War and Politics by Other Means: A Journalist's Memoir

Politics

POLITICS ALL POL I TIC S, to paraphrase former House Speaker Tip O'Neill, was personal when I grew up in the rural South. It was also (Big D) Democratic, the result of Republican-imposed Reconstruction after the Civil War. There was one Republican family in Obion County, Tennessee, where I spent most of my early years, none at all in Leflore County, Mississippi, where I spent the rest. In Tennessee I learned by the age of eight years about politics. The knowledge came along with the grammar school reader and the Presbyterian catechism (Q: "What is God?" A: "God is all things"), and it was even more simplistic. There was good and evil. There was the Crump machine in Memphis, the Mayor Miles machine in Obion County, both bad and thus enemies of the family. There were the Carmacks of Murfreesboro, and their ally, J. Ridley Mitchell, all good and friends of the family. Everybody loved Robert A. "Fats" Everett, clerk at the Obion County Courthouse, where there now stands a statue in his honor. The slimmer, bronze figure of Senator Edward Carmack graces the front of the state Capitol in Nashville, a massive structure in the mode of a Greek temple, still bearing scars from Yankee cannonballs: In Mississippi, I learned of but one significant political figure, Walter Silers, speaker of the state House of Representatives, as in my uncle's instructions to the local representative from the Delta: "Go down there to Jackson and vote whatever Walter tells you to vote. We'll provide a hotel room and send a regular case of whiskey." To 27 28 / POLITICS paraphrase Vince Lombardi, Walter Silers wasn't everything in the Jackson statehouse-he was the only thing. Above these local political personalities was the incarnation of political evil, Abraham Lincoln, who had visited the hated Yankee armies on our land when our forebears, as they perceived their constitutional right, tried to separate from the Union. An older brother, Thomas, made a sight of himself with a speech to the high school assembly denouncing Lincoln on the Republican preservationist's mandated birthday celebration in February I93 5. It was a reflection of our family sentiment, and most likely those of a majority of the Confederate heirs. Simply put, Southern politics of this era was racial politics, as in "who can do most to keep the nigger in his place." His "place" was subject to economic exploitation as well as social inferiority. Campaigns were segregated and then, as now, essentially entertainment. The candidate would draw a crowd to the Union City park near the junction of the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis (NC&St.L) and the Gulf Mobile and Ohio (GM&O) railroads-a critical intersection in I86I when General Grant began his campaign to split the South. General N. B. Forrest raided and seized the junction and town, killing or seizing hundreds of Yankee troops and looting Grant's supply larder. Forrest's Union City raid became a factor in Grant's decision to feed his army off the Southern land, instead of bringing supplies from the North. The park had a covered bandstand in its center where the candidates , all vying for the Democratic nomination, would set up their loudspeakers and hillbilly band. The band played and the white crowds flocked, most of them, in the I930S, commuting from the county's hinters by mule or horse-drawn wagon. The men usually wore clean overalls and always chewed tobacco. The women wore clean, bright-colored dresses made of flour sacks. Horses hitched, the men sat on their haunches listening and whittling on pieces of hickory. When the twanging, hill-drenched music stopped, the candidate would tell how he-as opposed to his opponent-would keep the nigger in his place. Not far away, on the other side of the GM&O tracks, the POLITICS / 29 small island ofnigger-town had a few stores, a broken-down hotel for the infrequent black travelers, a "jook-house" (meaning a house with a juke box) selling whiskey, playing race-music (a.k.a. "the blues"), and sheltering a dice game. Candidates would come on Saturday nights with a free barbecue and a dollar or two for loyal blacks. The dollar was to compensate payment for the state's poll tax, another device for keeping blacks, along with poor whites, in their places. I cannot explain how the candidate made certain the black men "voted right," if...