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11 Liberals, Friends of the Negro, and Charging Hell with a Toothpick The body-odor of negroes, irrespective of physical cleanliness . . . is repugnant to the 100-percent-white, but is tolerated by those whose blood is tainted with the negro strain. To guard against mixed breeds, The Creator attached to the lower grade of those types possible to intermix, an odor that is offensive to the higher type—notably the horse and the camel. The odor of the negro is sickening to full-blooded white people; but is less offensive to those alleged whites whose blood is tainted, even in faint degree, with negro blood. (This may account for the enthusiasm with which some white (?) people promote the “interracial ” gatherings!). —D. Alexander saying that southern liberals were “liberal” except on matters of race is a well-meaning non sequitur. This is so because white supremacy was tied together, part and parcel, with the other main pillars that supported the status quo society of the south: patriarchy, bourgeois domination, religious and moral chauvinism, xenophobia, hyper-patriotism. Race did not—could not—float above and beyond the other buttresses of southern society like some disconnected thing, separate yet real. To speak of race (or class for that matter) in those kinds of terms is to speak of an artificial construct, partial and contrived, and real only in the imagination of the historian. For paternalists and negrophobes—economic liberals and conservatives—arguing that a white southerner was liberal on everything but race was like asking mrs. lincoln if she enjoyed the play—aside from the shooting. in addition to the united nature of the society’s principal bulwarks, the ongoing and successful laissez-faire project of “melding” economic conservatism and racial conservatism into one and the same orthodox mould (on the basis of their shared antipathy to federal intervention) made it increasingly difficult to be southern and be liberal. in effect, the melding process magnified and solidified economic conservatism by making the inviolate subject of white supremacy an essential part of it. in the Deep south the process would eventually make it extraordinarily difficult—even unbearable—to Liberals, Friends of the Negro, and Charging Hell with a Toothpick / 267 be both white and a liberal Democrat. While “liberalism” meant, predominantly , a respectable economic version when the new Deal began, by the time it ended the word implied, in the south, a blasphemous position favoring the federal reformation of both the economy and white supremacy. by the time World War ii was over, it was increasingly hard for white southerners to consider being liberals because to do so meant cultural apostasy and disloyalty to one’s race, region, family, and friends—in effect, to oneself. To be “liberal” meant to be a racial liberal—and that meant losing friends, status , identity, and position.1 The battle to insist that southern liberalism was an honorable tradition, one worthy of continued allegiance—or to keep Alabama Democracy separate and somehow different from the increasingly liberal national variant— was an uphill fight. it was a frustrating path to follow, one filled with ever more frequent and resonant charges of sectional disloyalty and weakness. Rare was the political figure that clung as tightly to the liberal label in the south after World War ii. such a person risked being painted not only as heretic, traitor, and communist but also as unmanly—yet another kiss of death in the machismo politics of the region. Despite these realities it has been possible for some to argue that the south was liberal during the 1940s and Alabama even an oasis of sorts. At an electoral level, southern liberalism did exist during the 1940s and, in a congressional sense, Alabama was an oasis.2 Alabama’s congressional delegation and many of its constituents were new Deal “liberals” in the sense that they had grown addicted to the fruits that fell from the federal tree under FDR: cheap and abundant TvA electricity, federal spending and military installations , satellite industries related to the war effort, federally sponsored employment, and the like. The implicit assumption for many, then and later, was that such liberalism extended to race and cultural matters. yet at a far more fundamental level Alabama was anything but liberal. Conservative cultural values were so deeply rooted, so ingrained, that often they did not require formal enunciation. like the air and the water of the place, they were always present yet taken for granted—and sometimes not even discernable to visitors. yet they...

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