SOURCE: "The Southern Politician," in The Modern American Political Novel: 1900-1960, University of Texas Press, 1966, pp. 191-33.

[In the following essay, Blotner discusses politics as portrayed in literature of the American South. ]

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible, in its action—such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism—these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.

W. J. Cash

The Mind of the South¹

The Southern Politician naturally takes his character and coloration from his region, this most individualistic of American regions.² Students of Southern history and politics object, however, to the stereotypes clustering around such abstractions as "The South," and such figures as "The Southern Demagogue" even while they grant that there is truth in many such stereotypes. It is true that except for North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas, Southern politics has operated until recently under an absolute one-party system. Disfranchisement of most Negroes and many whites has been for nearly a century an accomplished fact. And where disfranchisement leaves off, nonvoting impedes the operation of democratic practices. Experts insist, however, that state politics and leaders are nowhere nearly so homogeneous as is often assumed.

State politics, they declare, presents not one shade or two, but a whole spectrum. Virginia has been dominated most of the years of this century by an organization led by Senator Harry F. Byrd. Stable, powerful, and perspicacious, it can determine which young men will be encouraged in politics and which will be allowed to slip into obscurity. In Tennessee, a working understanding was said to exist in the 1930's and 1940's between the Democratic machine of E. H. "Boss" Crump, based in the city of Memphis and Shelby County, and the Republican faction, based in the mountains of East Tennessee and led by Carroll Reece, for many terms a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1946 Republican National Chairman. The Alabama pattern, however, shows an almost random rise and eclipse of many factions, whereas politics in Florida shows even greater change and variance.³ North Carolina's government in this century is generally called the most enlightened in the South, but in it the power of the Interests has been stronger and steadier than in perhaps any other Southern state. In the view of one native, "The big interests have known when to give way and when to play ball. They have been willing to be fair but not at the expense of their power."⁴ In Mississippi, big delta planters aligned with the Interests have struggled against the hill country people often courted by spectacular demagogues. But here too there are variations and surprises. Mississippi politics sometimes represents an extremity of the Southern dilemma, but it has been observed that in voter turnout, when compared with Virginia "Mississippi is a hot-bed of Democracy."⁵ That there are deeply felt attitudes which make for Southern community of ideas—most notably demonstrated on certain issues in Congress—cannot be disputed. But it is also clear that a greater divergence exists from state to state than is commonly assumed even among intelligent laymen.

The figure of the Southern Demagogue has substantially replaced that of the old-style Southern senator. The amply padded figure with flowing locks, pompously declaiming platitudes, has faded. In his place, in books and on film, strides a man burly and unkempt, wily and unscrupulous. His drive to power is aided by an intimate, emphatic knowledge of the plight and aspiration of the mass of the people. He has sprung from this class, but he cynically ignores their interests whenever they conflict with his own. The Southern Demagogue, writes Key, is a national institution: "His numbers are few but his fame is broad. He has become the whipping boy for all his section's errors and ills—and for many of the nation's. His antics have colored the popular view of a region of the United States."⁶ A whole series of historical figures stand behind the stereotype. And they appear as early as the turn of the century, appealing to the same feelings that provided a favorable climate for the fervent but short-lived Southern Populism of the 1890's. Pitchfork Ben Tillman of South Carolina, "the first great exponent of the role," was followed by a long list of others who added their own variations.⁷ There were Cole Blease and Cotton Ed Smith in South Carolina as well as

the ineffable Jeff Davis larruping the specter of the black man up and down the hills of Arkansas. Here were Tom Watson and Hoke Smith riding hard upon him in Georgia. Here was W. K. [sic] Vardaman roaring to his delighted Mississippians: "The way to control the nigger is to whip him when he does not obey without it . . . and another is never to pay him more wages than is actually necessary to buy food and clothing."⁸

Success bred emulation. In Mississippi, Theodore Bilbo, a self-confessed bribe-taker, followed the path of Vardaman to power. Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, "The Wild Man from Sugar Creek," not only outlasted his downstate rival, Little Ed Rivers (who proclaimed his loyalty to the New Deal while trying to make Georgia strictly his own political preserve), but left his son Herman a following and a name which helped seat him in the United States Senate. In Texas, W. Lee O'Daniel campaigned with a hillbilly band playing his own compositions. Others displayed markedly individual characteristics: in Memphis, Mister Ed Crump shrewdly built statewide influence on a city and county machine base that would have done credit to a Jersey City or Kansas City politician. The most dramatic of all was a man who belonged "essentially to the traditional pattern of the Southern demagogue," but also managed to be "the first Southern politician to stand really apart from his people and coolly and accurately to measure the political potentialities afforded by the condition of the underdog." He was a man, as he himself readily proclaimed, who was sui generis.⁹

Louisiana [writes Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.] was as natural a breeding place for radicalism as its swamps were for fevers. No state in the Union had been so long misgoverned. The old oligarchy, a dreary alliance of New Orleans businessmen and upstate planters controlled by the utilities, the railroads, and Standard Oil of Louisiana, had run things without serious challenge almost since Reconstruction. No state had so high a proportion of illiteracy .. . No state treated its children worse . . . And the submerged people of Louisiana had not only been oppressed, they had been bored: no Cole Blease, no Tom Watson, no Heflin nor Bilbo had arisen to make them laugh and hate and to distract them from the drabness of their days. Half a century of pent-up redneck rancor was awaiting release.¹⁰

When the instrument for this release came, it came from the north-central Louisiana hill country which had a tradition of revolt as well as deprivation. Refusing to vote for Secession, the parish had been jeered at as the Free State of Winn. In the 1890's Winn had reverberated to the storming Populist oratory of Sockless Jerry Simpson. In 1908 Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs stumped the parish for the Socialist Party. Mill hands and cotton choppers responded by electing "half of the police jurors and school trustees on the Socialist ticket."¹¹ These sentiments persisted. "There wants to be a revolution, I tell you," said one man who had seen both Simpson and Debs. "I seen this domination of capital, seen it for seventy years. What do these rich folks care for the poor man? . . . Maybe you're surprised to hear talk like that. Well, it was just such talk that my boy was raised under and that I was raised under."¹² The speaker was Huey Pierce Long, and the boy, the eighth of nine children, was Huey P. Long, Jr. Though theirs was originally a poor white family, college educations were somehow managed for six of the children. But later, on the stump, the boy still claimed that he had worked in the fields from before sunup till after sunset and had known childhood days when he went shoeless as well.

After blooming as an elocutionist at Winnfield High School, Huey P. Long, Jr., had taken to the road at sixteen as a peddler. He sold Gold Dust, a Pinkhamlike compound called "the Wine of Cardui," and ran contests among his customers for the best cake baked with Cottolene vegetable shortening.¹³ He turned briefly from business to education in 1912 when he attended the University of Oklahoma. Then, after another period on the road, he married one of his baking contest winners, young Rose McConnell from Shreveport. Borrowing $400, he began a study of law at Tulane University in New Orleans. The money ran out in seven months, but Long acted with characteristic resourcefulness. He talked the Louisiana bar examination committee into giving him a special examination covering the standard, three-year curriculum of legal studies. He passed it, and on May 15, 1915, he was sworn in as a member of the bar. He was twenty-two years of age.

The pickings were slim at first, and sometimes the pay was humiliation. When he argued against a narrow workmen's compensation law, the chairman of the legislative committee asked whom he represented. His clients, he replied, were several thousand laborers who had paid him no retainer. "They seem to have good sense," commented the chairman. It was a barb Huey never forgot.¹⁴ When the United States entered the war he gained exemption on the grounds that he was married and also a state official. He was a notary public. Working part-time at the law and part-time at the sale of patent medicines, he watched for his opportunity. It came in 1918 when he campaigned for the railroad commissionership of North Louisiana and won the Democratic nomination. And he had his eye on more than railroad matters.

The new commissioner soon began to lay about him. He was, he had let it be known, a friend of the common man. After having Standard Oil's pipelines declared "common carriers," he exerted pressure on Standard's rate-making practices. He compelled the Cumberland Telephone and Telegraph Company to reduce its rates. Meanwhile his Shreveport law practice flourished. In 1920, he helped elect John M. Parker as governor. Three years later, when Parker refused to levy higher taxes on Standard Oil, Long charged betrayal of the people and ran for the gubernatorial nomination. He and his wife and the organization he had built went to work with the old lists of the hill-country customers as well as potential new supporters. Their canvassing extended from the Protestant parishes of northern hill people to the Catholic parishes in the Cajun south. The posters were nailed up, the campaign literature was sent out, and Huey stumped the state. In a rhythmic delivery like the camp-meeting preachers' of his childhood, he roared his invective at the Interests and the "Old Regular" machine of New Orleans. On a rainy January 15th he was defeated, but before 1924 was out, he had been returned to his office as railroad commissioner by a margin of five to one. With the law practice flourishing, he worked to expand his power base.

Four years later Long ran again. His refrain, "Every Man a King but No Man Wears a Crown," was adapted from a Bryan campaign speech of 1900, and it tapped some of the enthusiasm that the Great Commoner himself had aroused. Attacking the wealthy, he called for a financial redistribution. His lament under the Evangeline Oak became famous. "And it is here under this oak," he declaimed, "Evangeline waited for her lover, Gabriel, who never came .. . but Evangeline is not the only one who has waited here in disappointment." The people, he said, had waited for schools, roads, and institutions. "Evangeline wept bitter tears in her disappointment," he went on, "but it lasted through only one lifetime. Your tears in this country, around this oak, have lasted for generations. Give me the chance to dry the eyes of those who still weep here."¹⁵ This time the skies were fair on Primary Day. Huey P. Long, Jr., carried fifty-six of the sixty-four parishes, and the Pelican State had a new governor.

He got off to a running start. His men went in as speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate. Revenue from new tax bills financed construction of roads and schools and underwrote expanding government bureaus and functions. State patronage was brought firmly under control. When the program needed massive doses of new capital in March of 1929, a special session of the legislature slapped a five-cent-a-barrel levy on the oil refineries. Standard Oil thereupon refused to pay and led the other oil companies in a revolt. Then, on March 25, a senator called for investigation of charges that Long had hired a gunman for a political assassination. Two days later impeachment charges were filed against him. Long prepared for counterattack. With the help of powers such as Robert Maestri of New Orleans and with the encouragement of hill men in overalls come south to stand with him, Long flooded the state with propaganda. But his winning coup came through individual action rather than mass action. Huey threatened and cajoled fifteen state senators into signing a "round robin" letter declaring they would not vote against him. The opposition, now clearly unable to muster the necessary votes for impeachment, collapsed. Standard Oil kept on refining at the old rate per barrel, but Long had repulsed his first major attack. From then on, the temper of his steel began to harden.

By 1930 state government had become an instrument that fitted his hand. His law office prospered in New Orleans, and the Louisiana Democratic Association, which he had organized from the ward and precinct level up, tightened control and funneled unrecorded funds into the organization. A year to the day after the impeachment charges had been drawn up, a newspaper he owned announced that Huey P. Long, Jr., would run for the United States Senate. In the election, one parish, St. Bernard's, went for him 3,979 to 9. He served out his term as governor and then, in January of 1932, boarded the train with his entourage for Washington.

Long had acquired the nickname, "The Kingfish"—taken from the radio serial called "Amos 'n' Andy"—and his behavior in Washington was as colorful as the name. His dress was flamboyant. Strutting on the Senate floor, he slapped backs and ignored protocol.

In his manners, values, and idiom [writes Schlesinger], Huey Long remained a back-country hillbilly. But he was a hillbilly raised to the highest level, preternaturally swift and sharp in intelligence, ruthless in action, and grandiose in vision. He was a man of medium height, well built but inclining toward pudginess . . . His face was round, red, and blotched, with more than a hint of pouches and jowls. Its rubbery mobility, along with the curly red-brown hair and the oversize putty nose, gave him the deceptive appearance of a clown. But the darting pop-eyes could easily turn from soft to hard, and the cleft chin was strong and forceful.¹⁶

He attacked senior senators such as Carter Glass of Virginia and heaped on others his home-style invective. Alben Barkley said he was like a horsefly. "He would light on one part of you," the Kentucky veteran said, "sting you, and then, when you slapped at him, fly away to land elsewhere and sting again."¹⁷ He introduced income-limiting bills and plumped for his "Share-Our-Wealth" program. And he was meditating other things. He had come to Washington convinced that he had played a crucial role in gaining the presidential nomination for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Taking the stump for Roosevelt in territory written off as lost, he had produced results that opened Jim Farley's eyes. What he now wanted in return was the disposal of all federal patronage in Louisiana. Neither Roosevelt nor Farley antagonized him, however, despite provocation. He had decisively helped Senator Hattie Caraway in neighboring Arkansas against six opponents trying to unseat her. Thus when his own man, John H. Overton, took Louisiana's other seat, Long controlled a block of three votes in the nation's upper chamber. He had for some time made references—often humorous or cocky—to himself as a potential occupant of the White House. It was becoming evident that these remarks had more in them than jest.

Long moved forward on two fronts. On election day, 1934, 3,000 battle-dressed Louisiana national guardsmen marched into New Orleans. Long's brother Julius, who had earlier described him as "the greatest political burglar of modern times," saw this move as totalitarian suppression of freedom. "With his well-known record for approving gambling and vice; fraud and ballot-box stuffing," he charged, "supported now by some of the outstanding gamblers and dive owners in and around New Orleans .. . he has the audacity and little respect for the intelligence and liberties of the people to pretend that he sincerely wants to suppress vice and has called out the National Guard and state militia."¹⁸ Less than a month later, the legislature gave his officials practically unlimited control of the Louisiana military and subjected the cities in particular and state in general virtually to authoritarian rule. He turned his weekly paper into a national organ called American Progress. In a move traditional with presidential aspirants, he published his autobiography, Every Man a King. By February, 1934, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith—an antisemite and fascistto-be—was organizing Share-Our-Wealth clubs on a national basis. In June of 1935 Long gained more national attention with a fifteen-hour filibuster opposing further extension of the New Deal National Recovery Act. By early 1936 he was all but a formally announced candidate. Long did not care if he split the Democratic Party; he was quite prepared to offer an alternative to both major parties. His view of them suggested David Graham Phillips's young radicals and communists in later fiction. Both parties were selling the same nostrums, he said, "And . . . the only difference . . . I can see is that the Republican leaders are skinning the people from the ankle up, and the Democratic leaders are taking off the hide from the ear down. Skin 'em up or skin 'em down, but skin 'em!"¹⁹

The Administration struck back through a radio broadcast by former NRA administrator, Gen. Hugh S. Johnson, a grizzled and cantankerous veteran who was himself no mean hand at invective. "It was easy," Postmaster General James A. Farley later recalled, "to conceive of a situation whereby Long, by polling more than 3,000,000 votes, might have the balance of power in the 1936 election."²⁰ After Johnson's blast, Long asked for equal radio time and used it to attack Roosevelt and extol the growing Share-Our-Wealth clubs. The Administration turned to a different kind of weapon. If it could not blast Long directly, it would mine his position. Treasury tax investigators had found out a good deal through an investigation prudently begun in 1930, later suspended, and then resumed. Indictments came through against his organization's smaller fry and plans were made to request a grand jury indictment in October. Long would be charged with evading income taxes on graft he had received through the Win or Lose Corporation deviously operating in the natural gas industry. But the following day a very different causal sequence disposed of the Kingfish forever.

Two opponents who had managed to stand against Long were Judge Benjamin F. Pavy and District Attorney R. Lee Garland. Their judicial district comprised the parishes of St. Landry and, ironically, Evangeline. Evangeline parish had never been able to outvote its yokemate for Long, but the Kingfish had devised a solution. It was the familiar gerrymander: his legislature would make Evangeline a separate district and combine St. Landry with three Long parishes. Like others loyal to Pavy, his sonin-law, Dr. Carl A. Weiss, Jr., was outraged. The mildmannered eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist was said to be furious, moreover, at Long's insinuations of Negro blood in the Pavy family. Weiss was waiting in a corridor of the capítol building—the skyscraper which Long opponents called "Huey's silo"—on Sunday night, September 8, 1935, when Long emerged from a meeting and strode down the hallway toward the office of his faithful, rubber-stamp governor, O. K. Allen. He never reached it. Weiss stepped from behind a pillar and raised his hand. A gunshot reverberated off the marble walls as Long crumpled to the floor. Weiss fell riddled by the bullets of Long's bodyguards, dying instantly, unrecognizable after the fusillade of lead. Long sustained only one wound, but like Mercutio's it served, and six hours later the Kingfish was dead. The uncertainty about the circumstances of Long's death was increased by the disappearance of the fatal bullet. Weiss had drawn the short straw, said some, in a plot which included some of Long's own men. Weiss had not fired at all, said others, but merely gestured as he tried to intercede for his father-in-law. Long did not, like Eugene O'Neill's Emperor Jones, die by a special, silver bullet. But the bullet was special, and there was something of the element of the macabre, as in the demise of the other, less powerful emperor.

Although the rise and fall of Huey Long was in many ways more dramatic than that of other latter-day demagogues such as Senator Joseph McCarthy, the causes were if anything less complex. It could be argued "that the combination of ruling powers of Louisiana had maintained a tighter grip on the state since Reconstruction than had like groups in other states." Similarly, wrote Key, "the longer the period of unrestrained exploitation, the more violent will be the reaction when it comes."²¹ There was no question about the complexity of the man. There were many qualities: "the comic impudence, the gay egotism, the bravado, the mean hatred, the fear."²² Huey P. Long, Jr., could play the buffoon, but this mask concealed one of the keenest minds in American politics. He was to Alben Barkley "the smartest lunatic I ever saw in my whole life!" to Rebecca West "the most formidable kind of brer fox," and to H. G. Wells "a Winston Churchill who has never been at Harrow."²³ His wit and humor were folksy and bawdy, but they served—and they stung. Neither the enemy in the Standard Oil Company offices in Baton Rouge nor the aristocratic rival in the White House in Washington was immune. Huey could liken the servants of the Interests to devils, his state foes to rats and lice, and the President of the United States to a bird of prey. Herbert Hoover, he said, was like a hoot owl who burst in the hen house, swept the hen from her perch, and then caught her before she touched the floor. Roosevelt, he said, was like a scrooch owl, who "slips into the roost and scrooches up to the hen and talks softly to her. And the hen just falls in love with him, and the first thing you know, there ain't no hen!"²⁴

The endurance of Long's organization during his lifetime (as he predicted, after him came the deluge) owed much to the fact that he kept faith, by and large, with the people who elected him, the wool hats and red necks, the mill hands and sapsuckers. For their allegiance, writes Schlesinger, "the people of Louisiana got a state government which did more for them than any other government in Louisiana's history . . . Schools, hospitals, roads and public services in general were better than ever before. Poor whites and even Negroes had unprecedented opportunities."²⁵ Huey had unprecedented opportunities himself, and he made the most of them. When his star was at its zenith, the Kansas City Star asserted that "Wall Street has furnished Louisiana about $50,000,000 since the Kingfish took hold . . ."²⁶ William Allen White saw much more than money involved. "Fascism always comes through a vast pretense of socialism backed by Wall Street money," he wrote. "Huey Long is the type we must fear."²⁷ Contributions flowed in from the oil, sulphur, railroad, banking, and utility interests.²⁸ The treasury agent who had led the investigation intended to put Huey behind bars wrote that he "took plenty and he took it for Huey Pierce Long, which made him a tool of the vested interests he fought so vigorously."²⁹ Some, however, got little or none at all: "He sprinkled the state with roads and buildings. But he did little or nothing to raise wages for the workers, to stop child labor, to reduce the work day, to support trade unions, to provide pensions for the aged, to furnish relief to the unemployed, even to raise teachers' salaries. He left behind no record of social or labor legislation."³⁰ In spite of Long's oft-repeated slogan, no one can have been convinced that in the Kingfish's dominions Every Man was a King. But it was clear to see, for all who would, that One Man Wore a Crown.

To many critics, Huey P. Long, Jr., was an American Fascist. Others, while granting like Key that his "control of Louisiana more nearly matched the power of a South American dictator than that of any other American state boss," felt he was innocent of totalitarian ideology.³¹ Huey rejected the comparison violently. Mentioned with Hitler, he roared, "don't liken me to that son of a bitch!"³² He was willing to tolerate a similarity to Abraham Lincoln. Not surprisingly, he came off the better. "Lincoln didn't free the slaves in Louisiana," he boasted, "I did."³³ Another time, he was willing to acknowledge the Great Emancipator as one of his three teachers; the others, he said, were Andrew Jackson and Almighty God.³⁴ The conjunction of Lincoln and Long was in a strange sort of way apt. In the novels discussed in this chapter the two figures become almost mythic, presenting as through polarized, elements good and evil in American politics and culture.

In the following literary analysis, the Southern Demagogue is subsumed under the figure of the Southern Politician, for there appear in the novels—as there did in the South—leaders of a different stripe. Claude Pepper, a vigorous campaigner and eloquent orator on the stump in Florida, became in Washington one of the strongest advocates of New Deal policies. In Alabama, Big Jim Folsom waxed powerful against the planters and the "big mules" of industry and finance from the commanding position of the governor's chair. The difference between national and local politics for the Southern politician was exemplified by James F. Byrnes. For years a Roosevelt stalwart in Washington, he made White Supremacy his program's keystone in South Carolina. Aspects of conservatism were embodied in fiscal policies of Virginians Harry Byrd and Carter Glass, whereas a conservatism so radical as to give rise to the short-lived Dixiecrat Party of 1948 had as its standard-bearer Governor J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. On still another level was Senator J. W. Fulbright, who rose through the faction-ridden politics of Arkansas to a position of power and eminence in the Senate. There he has been not only a liberal Democrat—so far as practical exigencies of Arkansas politics would permit—but a man who has helped shape far-reaching policy under more than one administration. But for all these variants, the stereotype of the demagogue persists. As Cash remarks, it "would not be true to say that... the South had no choice save between demagogues of the Right and demagogues of the Left (in their appeal, not their practice, of course). But there would be a good deal of truth in it."³⁵

One would not hope to give in a few pages the outlines of the twentieth-century Southern politics which have provided the milieu which produced the novels. But some of the salient features of this political terrain can be seen. After Federal attempts at Reconstruction ceased, the Southern states used the Black Codes to re-establish White Supremacy by substituting peonage for slavery. Then, after Populism foundered upon the rock of cooperation with the Negro, Southern politics emerged as a one-party system. The powerful planters of the Black Belts and new industrialists and financiers of the cities exerted great pressure to maintain the racial and electoral status quo (when not in fact extending disfranchisement) and to protect their commercial and financial interests. From the early years of the century they were often opposed by demagogues and popular leaders rising from among the people (or at least giving the appearance of having done so) and making common cause with them against the big planters and the native and absentee industrialists and financiers. Concurrently, industrialization increased and with it the number of industrial workers. But labor's growth into a strong force was militantly opposed by both powerful employers favored under the law and by regional attitudes inimical to such concepts. And though Federal aid was welcomed in the Depression years, the economic structure might prevent it from filtering down as far as it was meant to go—often to the areas where it was most desperately needed—and the incursions of Federal power were resented and repelled.³⁶

Whether political or nonpolitical, serious contemporary fiction depicting the South usually emphasizes problems arising out of the racial conflict and dilemma. This is, of course, only one problem, even if the most acute, of a region with a tragic history. It is one aspect of a larger problem: "Obviously the conversion of the South into a democracy in the sense that the mass of people vote and have a hand in their governance poses one of the most staggering tasks for statesmanship in the western world."³⁷ Surely the extremity of this situation is responsible for much of the power of the best of these novels of Southern politics, the best one of which stands alone.

One of the major assertions of twentieth-century American literature has been that the South is not just different from the rest of the country but that it is, as Long liked to call himself, sui generis. The work of such artists as William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Erskine Caldwell stands as a testimonial to this fact. This same uniqueness is to be seen in the political novel, especially in fourteen novels which appeared in the years between 1922 and 1960. They are novels in which the sense of place is so strong as to set them apart from those of other areas. Often novels of bossism or corruption might as easily have been set in New York as in Ohio, in New Jersey as in Illinois. The novels in this chapter are set (by statement or inference) in Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. None could have been set outside the South, and as the mark of place is upon the novels, so it is upon the men. It has helped create the most dramatic archetypal figure among these novels—the Southern Demagogue—and the best novel—Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men.

The novelists insist on the South's uniqueness. In The Sound Wagon a congressman tells T. S. Stribling's Northern protagonist, "In the South we lack system. We have only a few political machines, and they work creakily and uneasily. Our big deciding vote swings with damnable uncertainty on the whim of the voter. You can buy votes in the South, all you want; but you can't get 'em delivered . . . the Southern votes come singly, and the Southern congressman spends his time getting elected."³⁸ But the regional differences, of course, go deeper than this. They are the products of historical forces which shaped the past and determined the present. In a passage in The Kingpin (1953) which shows the often-encountered influence of William Faulkner's rhetoric and cadences, Tom Wicker writes, " . . . out of this past . . . come the people of the country South, the backwoods South . . . timeless, slow-moving, ill-fed, ill-housed, illclad, prey to all the dark moods and passions, all the hates and hurts and beliefs of a land and a heritage blighted, diseased, cursed by an old black evil, an evil and a heritage they never saw, never knew, only accepted in some deep and bitter resignation. . . ."³⁹

Many of these novelists seem to endorse the view of Southern history which Malcolm Cowley and others see in Faulkner's saga of Yoknapatawpha County. His "Myth of the South," especially in "The Bear" and Absalom, Absalom! (1936), portrays a fertile land, developed by powerful aristocrats and aggressive New Men but made vulnerable by the seed of corruption inherent in the moral evil of slavery. The War and its aftermath come as retribution with native and foreign exploiters replacing the armies of occupation to complete the tragedy. The forces leading to the catastrophe were, of course, complex. One contributory force was that form of ancestor worship which Hamilton Basso's protagonist in The View from Pompey' s Head (1954) calls Southern Shintoism. Robert Rylee's protagonist in The Ring and the Cross (1947) contends that General Robert E. Lee should have accepted Lincoln's proffered appointment as commander-in-chief of the Federal forces in order to shorten the war: "And partly due to Lee's loyalty to Virginia, we still sit here in the South, worshipping before the ruined tombs of our corrupt ancestors, blaming others for our ills—and I grant you others have greatly aggravated them—when it was we ourselves who set off the chain of evil circumstance."⁴⁰

In these novels then, the War has left a legacy of poverty, sickness, ignorance, and hatred. Hatred of the Negro is complemented by xenophobia usually directed against the Yankee, the Jew, and latterly, the agents of organized labor. The new order emerging with the dissolution of the old has most of the ante-bellum vices and few of the virtues. Violence and immorality are commonplace. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan perpetrate lynchings, mutilations, and beatings. Individuals in public as well as private life commit acts of immorality and sexual pathology which often go beyond simple indices of personal aberration and become symbolic of general social decadence as well. Besides the double standard for men and women, there is the one for white people and Negroes. The heritage of the past is seen not only in the clear and obvious—inadequate schools and roads—but in the devious and covert: leases of state resources to influential entrepreneurs, tax structures which favor the moneyed planters, the utilities, and the corporate interests. Corollary is discrimination against the exploited, underpaid factory hands and hard-pressed share croppers—the "crackers," the 'lint-heads," and the "red-necks."

The protagonists produced by these conditions fall clearly into distinct types. Almost all of these Southern politicians are prominent office holders; only a few are Bosses who rule from behind the scenes. These few have a good deal in common with those in Chapter Two. But again, the pervasiveness of the environment, the special conditions in which they attain and exercise power, make them Southern politicians first and Bosses second. Men of lowly birth, usually, they ally themselves with the great mass of the poor. Making their appeal to the "hill-billies" and "wool hats," they pledge roads, schools, and health services, promising to "share the wealth and soak the rich." Others (sometimes these same men once safely ensconced in office) ally themselves with the power companies and large corporations to prey upon the majority of the electorate and the large disfranchised substratum below. A few share the motivation of the Young Knight. Most conform to a pattern, however, which can be called that of the Southern Demagogue—the man who plays upon the emotions of the masses for power, profit, and place. He is usually physically powerful, strong, shrewd, and acute. He has a pragmatic grasp of human psychology in his manipulations of individuals and crowds. He is a dramatic orator whose campaigning combines political issues with the emotions of the revivalist camp meeting and the traveling medicine show. The tones and rhythms of the campaign orations reproduce the antiphonal responses of preacher and congregation. And with them come the twanging of the string bands' hillbilly ballads, the shrilling crescendos of brasses blaring "Dixie."

The Southern Demagogue is usually a complete relativist. He uses what he has to work with, and often the ends are contaminated by the means. He sometimes has an alter ego who may be a villainous henchman or a whipping boy. He is likely to be married to a good woman, whose credentials are sometimes verified by her having been a school-teacher. In almost every instance, however, she has an opposite number too. The Southern Demagogue needs the seductive, loose-moraled sex symbol who becomes his mistress.⁴¹ He is aggressive and ambitious. Like the Young Knight, he is apt to have Presidential aspirations. But fully half these lives end in violent death.

This violence is in harmony with the violence of the country. In some of these settings, frontier only eighty years before, the democratic processes are often carried out in an atmosphere hostile to them. Politics are almost always conducted under a one-party system. One of David Graham Phillips's protagonists, convinced that both parties were agents paid from the same source, would perhaps have welcomed this simplification. But this system is, if anything, more complicated, with primary elections involving run-offs, strategies for splitting an opponent's strength, and the less subtle devices of innuendo, slander, and fraud. Issues are not uncommonly resolved by gunfire, and in these novels set in the 1930's and 1940's there are fascist overtones. Groups of returning World War II veterans band together, as in the novels of American Fascism, to combat near-totalitarian rule. An analogue of this political violence appears in sexual violence. Seduction, adultery, rape, and deviation do not exhaust it. Sadism is commonplace, and there are ingenious combinations and elaborations which can only be called sexual pathology.

The violent passions and events of Reconstruction found violent expression in partisan fiction. Thomas Dixon, Jr., a North Carolina minister who proudly proclaimed himself a nephew of the Grand Titan of the Ku Klux Klan, was fervent and prolific. In novels such as The Leopard's Spots (1902), he depicted an outraged South defending itself as best it could against the hateful repression and harassment of a vindictive victor. The Clansman (1905) gave even wider currency to Dixon's vehement convictions, especially his anti-Negro feelings, when it was made into one of the first genuine classics of a new medium—the motion pictures. Still perennially showing nearly a half-century after its production, The Birth of a Nation caused riots when it was first shown. At the opposite extreme from Dixon was Albion W. Tourgée, an Ohio-born Union officer who resided in the South for fifteen years after the war. Serving as judge of the Superior Court of North Carolina, he had earned the enmity of most of his fellow citizens. In his awkward but intensely-felt novels Tourgée argued that the Federal government had blundered badly in the measures it imposed upon the South. It had failed tragically by thrusting freedom and responsibility upon uneducated masses unable fully to deal with either, then abandoning them and the decent human beings who attempted to ameliorate their lot. The South had predictably responded with repression and atrocity, and Tourgée's novels dilated upon both. In A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880) he had diagnosed, prescribed, and preached. "We presumed, that by the suppression of rebellion, the Southern White man had become identical with the Caucasian of the North in thought and sentiment; and that the slave, by emancipation, had become a saint and a Solomon at once," he wrote in the former volume. "So we tried to build up communities there which should be identical in thought, sentiment, growth, and development, with those of the North. It was A Fool's Errand"⁴² Later, in a prescription for the future, part of which was to be echoed in the next century by such leaders as Booker T. Washington, Tourgée exhorted: "Make the spelling-book the scepter of national power . . . Poor-whites, Freedmen, Ku-Klux, and Bulldozers are all alike the harvest of ignorance. The Nation can not afford to grow such a crop" (366-367). Although Tourgée's novels dealt more with political processes than did the equally wild farragoes of Dixon, neither author's work was as preponderantly concerned with these processes as the novels which follow. These violent partisans, dealing with the time of dislocation and upheaval, treated at length the larger economic and sociological aspects of the problem as well as its political manifestations. But imperfect as these works were, they enunciated themes which were to recur and sketched in the historical background against which better artists would later set their work.

In the three earliest novels of Southern politics in this century, the protagonists were neither Bosses nor demagogues although they briefly achieved both power and notoriety. Two of them emerged from the lower strata of a war-scarred society, making their appeal to an electorate predominantly composed of the impoverished, the uneducated, and the exploited. Unlike most of those to follow, they were unselfishly motivated throughout. The third protagonist was a follower rather than a leader. Although obviously intended to be amusing and even lovable, his effect is the opposite. Insensitive and boorish, he exemplifies aspects of the decadence of his culture. Ironically, in his own limited and insensitive way, he is one of the champions of the right in this culture.

Ellen Glasgow's One Man in His Time (1922) is apparently set in Richmond, Virginia, in the years immediately following the first World War. A young aristocrat viewing the present against the dissolution of the past perceives that "the tide of the new ideas was still rising. Democracy, relentless, disorderly, and strewn with the wreckage of finer things, had overwhelmed the world of established customs in which he lived."⁴³ For Stephen Culpeper the embodiment of this change is Gideon Vetch, white trash born in a circus tent and now governor of the state of Virginia. To another aristocrat he is a demagogue who "deliberately sold his office in exchange for his election—" (148). Vetch does have shady connections. His defense—to be echoed twenty-five years later by the best embodiment of this type—is necessity: "the end for which I work seems to me vastly more important than the methods I use or the instruments that I employ" (173). His goals—new labor laws, social benefits, and eventual nationalization of mines and railroads—are to his aristocratic opponents "mere bombast. . . but the kind of thing that is dangerous in a crowd" (150).

Vetch's figure is immediately familiar, a "tall, rugged figure built of good bone and muscle and sound to the core . . ." (22). This leader of lowly birth smiles down at people "from his great height" (376), impressing even young Culpeper with "the most tremendous dignity a human being could attain—the unconscious dignity of natural forces . . ." (27). Around his story Mrs. Glasgow twists those of Culpeper and Vetch's daughter (another pair of politics-crossed lovers), two older lovers, and the secrets of Vetch's past. In the foreground of the action, he tries to find a solution to an explosive labor dispute while attempting to cleanse his Administration. At this point Mrs. Glasgow does again what she had done twenty years earlier in The Voice of the People: she gratuitously kills her protagonist. Again the means is mob violence. Trying to stop a fight, Vetch is shot. Later an opponent eulogizes his "humanity that is as rare as genius itself (377).

Mrs. Glasgow's intention, as in earlier novels, was to depict another era in Virginia history. Surveying the changes wrought in social and political life by still another war, she contrasted something of the best and worst of the old order and the new. Culpeper was a familiar figure: the enervated aristocrat being thrust aside by the vigorous New Man such as Vetch. Culpeper also demonstrated the process of breakthrough from a stultifying existence to a widening and liberating one. Apart from a few gaucheries in dialogue, the novel is free from obvious awkwardness. But it never wholly succeeds in any of the author's apparent intentions. Each of the explorations is made with a combination of obviousness and insufficiency. And her greatest error, of course, which demonstrates her inability to meet the demands of her theme, is her dispatching of her hero just as he comes to grips with his basic challenges: economic reform in the face of powerful opposition, and the task of escaping contamination by the instruments and methods he has used.

A very different sort of protagonist stands at the center of Glenn Allan's Old Manoa (1932). He is a tall, thin man of sixty who wears a mustache and goatee. Old Manoa serves as commissioner of Towhit County, Tennessee, only to oblige his childhood friend Jedge Warmsley, the hideously fat but benevolent Boss of the county.⁴⁴ The novel spins out the story of the revolt of Jedge's appointees. In collusion with them is the Phoenix Power Company. Aided by "mountain men" with guns, Jedge and Manoa repulse them in action culminating in arson, assault, and death. Balancing these elements are a romance, the relationship between the two old men, and the character of Manoa himself. Loving the horses he breeds and the blue-grass country where his family has lived for more than a hundred years, he is meant to be a cantankerous but lovable old gentleman. But the humor is thin and Manoa's lovableness is not convincing enough to conceal attitudes also found in some of the worst specimens in these Southern novels. To stop his Negro cook from summoning the doctor, this gallant Southern gentleman throws his whisky glass at her. He flings sticks at his old servant Bunk and refuses to allow Bunk's son Jamie to wear a hat "because Jamie understood a whack or a poke better and quicker than he did an order.⁴⁵

This novel presents a curious kind of authorial innocence. It is meant to be humorous, but the discerning reader is much more likely to feel nausea. Towhit County politics are as much a travesty of the democratic ideal as are those in many novels of corruption, and the "good" men who win in the end (with assistance of the state Boss) are authoritarians with racist mentalities whose characters seem to rest, at least in part, upon substrata of sloth, gluttony, and brutality verging on sadism.

The last of the wholly idealistic protagonists in these novels of the Southern Politician appeared in Charles Morrow Wilson's Rabble Rouser (1936). A young redheaded farmhand, he rises to the governorship of Arkansas before he is beaten by the opposition and the Interests (another Power and Light Company). The most interesting aspect of this novel is not Cabe Hargis's career as such but the characteristics which make him an early representative of a common type. His home is Hemmed-in-Holler (threatened by a projected power company dam) in Izard County, and his style, strategy, and values derive ultimately from this fact. His speech is countrified, and the emotion he projects through it is genuine. Hargis turns all his emotional oratory on sympathetic juries when he acts for small litigants against the trusts. On the stump, he loves to see his hearers throw their black hats into the air. He is "for" men with red necks, he tells them, because he is a "redneck" too. (Robert Penn Warren's Willie Stark will later use this pejorative phrase to his own advantage.) He is folksy yet shrewd, campaigning in remote areas other candidates rarely see, sleeping under whatever roof will give him shelter, and wearing down an opponent on a grueling speaking tour. He holds his own in an environment where running a dummy candidate to split an opponent's vote is one of the subtler devices.⁴⁶

Rabble Rouser often reads like parody, so broad do its characters and dialects become. Yet it is far from the worst of this group. Amid the overdone accents (sometimes suggesting the raftsmen of Twain's Life on the Mississippi) are lyric passages on the seasons, the flow of time, and the fruitfulness of nature. For this study, however, the greatest interest resides in the depiction of this young "rabble rouser" who gains power through a combination of skills. Using intelligence and country-style oratory, he allies his own interests with those of the underprivileged mass of the people from whom he himself comes. And unlike many who rise through the same methods, he does not desert his friends after gaining power.

The few Southern politicians who operate primarily as Bosses work behind the scenes rather than as dynamic leaders openly swaying the masses. They differ from their counterparts elsewhere in their manipulation of regional prejudices and resentments, their reliance upon power and intimidation more than upon favors and agreements, and—in one instance at least—readiness to resort to brutality and violence.

Robert Wilder's Flamingo Road (1942) dealt with not just one Boss but two. One of them, like Kevin Costello in Wilder's later The Wine of Youth (1955), is a wealthy construction man whose main interest in politics is protecting his investments, although he does what he can to guard Florida "against the predatory instincts of the men who shared some measure of [power] with him."⁴⁷ Dan Curtis is a kind of half-hearted Chamber of Commerce Robin Hood, for "What he took came from other men: from the stupidly conniving, the avaricious, the combinations which insisted they were smarter than he, but not from his state. If tax assessments favored his enterprises, franchises and contracts came his way, then he built good roads, operated efficient utilities, and, now and then, cut a small slice of pie for his investors." (201). His enemy is a monstrously obese county sheriff who may owe something to Faulkner's Flem Snopes, possessing as he does "a reptilian treachery and the persistence of a beaver" (237). Titus Semple builds his power carefully, assiduously cultivating both the white farmers and the Negroes. He defeats Curtis's coalition by using evidence of their own corrupt practices, but another familiar Wilder character—the intelligent and ambitious whore with a heart of gold (who also happens to have become Curtis's mistress)—murders him for past insults and injuries. Like The Wine of Youth, this novel is technically dextrous. Its fluent prose is almost glossy, and correspondingly, its climaxes have the ring of melodrama, as its assignations have the texture of pulp fiction.

The extremes of Southern politics show up more clearly in a novel by Franklin Coen set in Tennessee or Georgia. Vinegar Hill (1950) begins with the retirement of a former congressman and cabinet secretary called typical "of all of the Old Faithfuls," such as Borah, Norris, Hull, Wagner, and McAdoo.⁴⁸ He finds a struggle under way between the Boss who made him and returning World War II veterans. Finding that the organization uses intimidation and murder, Secretary Tobias remonstrates with one of Boss Tilden's men: "Red's a puny, inept Huey Long. Or tryin' to be. Long, at least, had some feelin' for people. This'll get you nothin' but trouble" (145). The reply is revealing: "Maybe, Toby. Only understand that Red's playin' for big stakes. The South, sir . . . The North ain't sendin' carpetbaggers down here, they're sendin' ideas—damn lousy subversive ideas!" (145). After the Secretary attempts to repudiate his indebtedness to Tilden, the veterans go further. Besieging a hundred deputized out-of-state "gorillas," they breach the court-house wall with a kind of Bangalore torpedo, killing Tilden in the struggle. The new sheriff solemnly informs the press that "the will of the people had almost been subverted, and that this must not be allowed, even at the cost of so many dead" (308-309).⁴⁹

Tilden's power derives not only from a ruthless machine but also from the skillful use of economic fears and resentment against the North. Every prejudice and attitude likely to be useful is mobilized. Symptomatic of a pervasive immorality and sadism is the deputy sheriff who violates female Negro prisoners and also intimidates a respectable young Negro woman to the same purpose. As a young Congressman, Tobias had been thought a Bull Moose partisan, a trust-buster, and a radical. Although he had later been forced to compromise his principles, his long career had still maintained a fair outward aspect. Supporting it, however, had been the rotten substructure of the machine. Behind the machine's façade had been the decadence of the society which supported it. But in this particular middling novel there were signs of a resurgence of decency and responsibility in the values the veterans defend.

The first of the nine novels dealing with the Southern Demagogue appeared in 1941, with five of the rest following within the space of six years. Edward Kimbrough's From Hell to Breakfast came eleven years after the death of James K. Vardaman, six years after the demise of Huey Long, and during the lifetime of Theodore S. Bilbo. It displayed a man and a milieu whose characteristics reappeared in the novels that followed and were to be raised to their highest power in Warren's All the King's Men. In his foreword Kimbrough declared he was using "the technique of satirical exaggeration," portraying "no specific Mississippi politician . . . but rather . . . satirizing a particular type of man." The object of this satire is Gus Roberts, United States senator and Boss of this state once represented by Vardaman and Bilbo. He is opposed for re-election by the son of an old friend, a pro-labor lawyer glad to argue poor men's cases. (When Roberts's daughter falls in love with the young man, the newspapers naturally enough call it a Romeo-Juliet romance.) Roberts wins easily, and his opponent is lucky to escape from Roberts-organized, white-clad "White Knights" intent on castrating him.

Roberts's perennial success is due to his organization, his conscienceless shrewdness in battle, and his sway over the electorate. Once a Methodist minister and revivalist preacher, he still orates with his old-time fervor. His denunciations of radicalism stem not so much from conviction as from their crowd appeal. Well on in years, he still enjoys his long-time association with a whore-mistress named Fanny. When his long-separated wife sues for divorce on adultery during the campaign, he counters adroitly. He declares he wants no divorce and is saved again at a revival meeting. His rule is characterized by graft and bribery, abuses such as illegal use of prison labor, and hate directed at Negroes, Jews, and outsiders. Most of the characters dilate upon the ills of the South, usually blaming them on someone or something else—Yankee-owned plants or labor organizers within them. There is the usual contempt for idealism and reform. The voters are generally regarded as dolts who can be bought with a paid-up poll tax, corn liquor, a cheap permanent for their wives, or as a last resort, cash money. The constituents most zealously protected are the rich merchants, the mill-owners, and the landowners. Throughout the novel there are references to Hitler, to Naziism, to Fascism. The similarities between their regimes and the local one, particularly in violence and corruption, are explicitly noted by the defeated candidate at the novel's end. From Hell to Breakfast is a tiresome novel presenting a dismal picture of its locale, but it is a picture whose details are corroborated in the novels to come.

A year later Hamilton Basso's Sun in Capricorn appeared, its text preceded by the epigraph, "Capricorn is said to be the sign of ambition. It looks like the horns of a goat." The cuckoldry suggested in the second sentence applies neither to Hazzard X, the narrator, nor to Governor Gilgo Slade—whose first name might well set the echoes ringing in the memories of many. Slade is campaigning for the Senate in a northern Louisiana parish, but he has his eye on the Presidency. If anyone is betrayed, it is the voter. Wooed by Slade with old-time, circus-style campaign entertainment—complete with a hillbilly band—he is bombarded from stump and radio by a Big Lie technique suggesting that of contemporary European practitioner, Dr. Joseph Goebbels. The narrator's true and passionate, but unfortunately illegal, love affair is used by Slade against his opponent, the narrator's uncle. Hazzard X's resolve to assassinate Slade is frustrated only by someone else's getting there first. The death of the nobly motivated assassin under the machine guns of Gilgo's bodyguards is another passage likely to set the echoes of memory ringing. At the novel's ironic end, Hazzard X hears two "peckerwoods" regretting Slade's demise and extolling his greatness.

In spite of a convincing narrator, this work is at bottom thin and superficial. There are many untied strands of plot and theme, and Slade, on whom much of the weight of the novel must rest, is only a cardboard ranter and raver. He is, however, another avatar of the type brought to his sinister apotheosis four years later in Warren's Willie Stark.⁵⁰

John Dos Passos's version of the Southern Demagogue archetype, Number One, appeared a year after Basso's in 1943. It showed the illness which produced the Demagogue as it flourished in an oil-rich state strongly suggesting Oklahoma. (With Adventures of a Young Man [1939] and The Grand Design [1948], it formed a partially connected narrative. Following a number of characters through radicalism and corruption in the 1920's and 1930's, the Spanish Civil War, and the early days of the New Deal, the three volumes were finally published together as the trilogy, District of Columbia.) Texarcola-born Homer T. "Chuck" Crawford first reaches the District of Columbia as a congressman. The burden of the novel is his rise as he wins a Senate seat and goes on to enrich himself through state oil lands. And when the oil scandal breaks (suggesting a later and smaller Teapot Dome), he is still secure. His secretary, speech-writer, and public-relations man—alcoholic Toby Spotswood, the other major character in the novel—goes to jail.

Crawford is a shrewd tactician running with the hare in public and hunting with the hounds in private. The slogan he offers the people is "Every Man a Millionaire," and he demonstrates the seeming simple-heartedness that makes him one of them by such endearing mannerisms as playing the ocarina. The biography written for his campaign is entitled "Poor Boy to President." His rusticity is no more than skin deep, and like most others of this archetype, he sees the White House as an attainable prize. His relationship with a roadhouse vocalist is as pleasant as that with his Struck Oil Corporation is profitable.⁵¹ And the latter association is disrupted only because of his exercise of his new-found power. A newspaper commentator writes: "his one man filibuster which so neatly upset one of the majority's most cherished applecarts has so angered the Administration stalwarts that they are willing to go the limit. . . ,"⁵² Crawford differs from most of the other Southern Demagogues in that he meets no serious check. Toby's atonement for his work for Crawford (spurred by the last letter of his younger brother, Glenn, killed fighting in Spain), provides the scapegoat for the income-tax-evasion trial looming as the novel ends.

Though Number One is the weakest novel of the trilogy, it is by no means an ordinary novel. Using few of the experimental devices of U.S.A., Dos Passos tells the story often with directness and power. His only special effects are chapter introductions forming a continuous description of "the people"—a farmer, a mechanic, a chainstore clerk, a miner, and a business executive. The concluding italicized passage, in Dos Passos's familiar hortatory manner, adjures the reader:

weak as the weakest, strong as the strongest,
the people are the republic,
the people are you.

(304)

The appeal was a familiar one—heard in the 1930's and earlier, though then warning of a different danger. This appeal sounded much the same as that of Sinclair Lewis in It Can't Happen Here, urging the citizen to help preserve political freedom by discharging his duty. But Dos Passos's Demagogue did not, somehow, seem as desperate and threatening as his author's tone suggested.

The sense of déjà vu becomes stronger as the reader goes further. And the transparent concealments of several other authors conceal nothing. The title of Adria Locke Langley's novel, A Lion Is in the Streets (1945), suggests the "most horrid sights seen by the watch" which Calpurnia describes to Caesar in Act II, Scene ii, of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.⁵³ But the locale is variously Sherman, Crescent City, or Cypress Bend in Delamore Parish of the Magnolia State. The protagonist is a onetime sharecropper and traveling salesman married to a former schoolteacher. A self-educated lawyer, Hank Martin passes the state bar examination with a phenomenally high score. He rises from commissioner of public works and highways to governor of the state on the strength of his campaign theme of "Divide the Riches." His "kindlin' power" inspires his followers through speeches loaded with Biblical references and rural idiom. It is a camp-meeting technique exercised in revival-style tents. More importantly, however, he organizes a following of country people, paying a stipend to the widows among them out of a $50,000 fee he has frightened out of the Southern Light and Power Co. He insures the franchise of his illiterate followers by "Hank Martin's God-blessed Grandpappy Law," which "says that a man who voted in or before 1867, his sons or his children's children cannot be deprived a' their franchise because of failure t' pass educational or property qualifications."⁵⁴ From photo-static copies of lists of these early voters Martin assigns enfranchising ancestors to his followers.

Predictably, corruption follows power as Martin replaces his fanatical immediate followers with a bodyguard of professional "gorillas." He commits adultery, and his disillusioned wife Verity prepares to leave him.⁵⁵ She feels he has failed as a governor as well as a husband: "With all her heart she wanted . . . the things Hank planned—freedom from tax for the small cabin and the few acres; for the present taxes on the poor were exorbitant .. . she wanted to see schools, and, yes, free schoolbooks, and fine roads. Did the end justify the means? Hank declared it did. She didn't know. She only knew she hated the method" (329). Though he has built highways and a glistening capital building, an opponent likens him and his tactics to Hitler and his Saar plebiscite. His wife has sadly compared him to Mussolini, and he justifies her estimate as he plans the systematic ruination of the opposition's best men.⁵⁶ When the assassin's bullet ends his presidential aspirations, Mrs. Langley's flights of fancy transport her story beyond the bounds of reality. Discovering the assassin in a clothes closet, Verity and her friends promptly aid in his escape as a former member of Martin's staff eulogizes the killer to Martin's dry-eyed relict: "He's all the men of the Boston Tea Party; he's the men at Valley Forge . . . he's all the libertyloving men who live by Patrick Henry's words" (479). It is here, obviously, that Mrs. Langley has departed from the life of her model in the interests of her fiction. Although Dr. Weiss may well have been concerned for democracy in Louisiana, partisan concerns seem more likely to have been uppermost in his mind.

A Lion Is in the Streets was a badly written novel crammed with clichés from the faithful mammy with the syrupy accent to the flashy gangster spectacularly exterminated. The reader is spared neither the melodramatic deathbed message nor the dollops of sex. The novel's principal interest lies in the way it amalgamates the chief characteristics of the Southern Demagogue as they had thus far evolved plus the now nearly ritualized pattern of his rise, rule, and fall. The laws of probability alone would indicate that it was now time for a treatment of this archetype that would do justice to its inherent drama, using its symbolic value to extend its meaning farther beyond the regional. Such a work would comment not only upon man in his political role but also in his engagement in the perennial human dilemma.

When Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men appeared in 1946 it met almost immediate critical and financial success. Seven years later, Warren commented that, "the journalistic relevance of All the King's Men had a good deal to do with what interest it evoked. My politician hero, whose name, in the end, was Willie Stark, was quickly equated with the late Senator Huey P. Long, whose fame, even outside of Louisiana, was yet green in pious tears, anathema, and speculation."⁵⁷ Warren went on to deny that his novel was a roman à clef.

I do not mean to imply [he wrote] that there was no connection between Governor Stark and Senator Long. Certainly, it was the career of Long and the atmosphere of Louisiana that suggested the play that was to become the novel. But suggestion does not mean identity, and even if I had wanted to make Stark a projection of Long .. . I did not, and do not, know what Long was like, and what were the secret forces that drove him along his violent path to meet the bullet in the Capitol.⁵⁸

As Warren said, the novel was widely construed to be the slightly fictionalized life of Senator Long, in spite of the very different and complex intent and motivation which went into its genesis. This misconception has to a large extent become a part of modern literary folklore. In the average class the student who suggests that the novel is about responsibility or self-knowledge will be outnumbered by those who reply, with the quick assurance of the young, "It's about Huey Long." To do them justice, however, there was much in the novel that did suggest the flamboyant personality and spectacular career of the Louisiana senator. The figure who was to become Willie Stark, Warren wrote, was first conceived as

a man whose personal motivation had been, in one sense, idealistic, who in many ways was to serve the cause of social betterment, but who was corrupted by power, even by power exercised against corruption. That is, his means defile his ends. But more than that, he was to be a man whose power was based on the fact that somehow he could vicariously fulfill some secret needs of the people about him . . . But . . . the politician was to discover, more and more, his own emptiness and his own alienation.⁵⁹

Vastly superior to others like it on the moral, philosophic, and symbolic levels, Warren's novel excels too in its technique and the texture of its often poetic prose. On the narrative levels it has much in common with the others. Willie Stark is, for instance, a farm boy who sells products doorto-door then becomes a self-taught lawyer. County treasurer (in a state resembling Louisiana), he becomes governor and, at least jocularly, a Presidential aspirant.⁶⁰ Guided and supported by his wife, another former schoolteacher, Willie is at first a naive idealist. Disillusionment comes after he has been tricked into running for governor by one candidate anxious to split the "cockleburr" vote which will go to another strong in the country districts. With money earned in litigation for independent leaseholders against an oil company, Willie campaigns again, still "symbolically the spokesman for the tongue-tied population of honest men."⁶¹ Even after corruption has set in, Willie's hypnotic oratory still expresses the idealism at first so strong.

And it is your right [he tells them] that every child shall have a complete education. That no person aged and infirm shall want or beg for bread. That the man who produces something shall be able to carry it to market without miring to the hub, without toll. That no poor man's house or land shall be taxed. That the rich men and the great companies that draw wealth from this state shall pay this state a fair share. That you shall not be deprived of hope! (277)

He is a man of extraordinary determination and endurance. Besides his power to fulfill the needs of others, he is a man of other remarkable parts, possessing great shrewdness and an encyclopedic memory. But he is a complete relativist who says that good is made from bad, that "You just make it up as you go along" (273). And his view of the innate sinfulness of human nature lies behind his use of any means to gain his ends: "You got to use what you've got. You got to use fellows like Byram, and Tiny Duffy, and that scum down in the Legislature. You can't make bricks without straw, and most of the time all the straw you got is secondhand . . ." (145). Willie's actions are dictated more and more by expediency, and both he and his methods are contaminated. Turning to blackmail and coercion, he is forced into trafficking with the shadiest elements of his opposition. When death comes from an outraged brother of one of Willie's mistresses, it seems in retribution for all his sins.

Warren had written that "one of the figures that stood in the shadows of imagination behind Willie Stark . . . was the scholarly and benign figure of William James." He added,

I did have some notions about the phenomenon of which Long was but one example, and I tried to put some of those notions into my book. Something about those notions and something of what I felt to be the difference between the person Huey P. Long and the fiction Willie Stark, may be indicated by the fact that in the verse play [which was the first embodiment of the idea] the name of the politician was at one time Talos—the name of the brutal, blank-eyed "iron groom" of Spenser's Faerie Queene , the pitiless servant of the Knight of Justice. My conception grew wider, but that element always remained, and Willie Stark remained, in one way, Willie Talos. In other words, Talos is the kind of doom that democracy may invite upon itself. The book, however, was not intended to be a book about politics. Politics merely provided the framework story in which the deeper concerns, whatever their final significance, might work themselves out.⁶²

Warren's words about the character's function regarding democracy's dangers—sounding a good deal like those of Dos Passos and Lewis—are borne out in the pages crammed with political events. There is the depiction of the corrupt machine which invites its own destruction and of the kind of native dictatorship which succeeds it. And besides the study of political psychology, there is a guide, almost, to pragmatic politics: techniques for coercing legislators, quashing impeachment proceedings, and mustering support for candidates while chipping away at the opponents.

But the politics were, after all, a frame for the deeper concerns of the story. These deeper concerns and this functional use of politics were paradoxically responsible for the stature of the novel, so much larger than that of its competitors, a paradoxical situation which will be examined later. The deeper level of All the King's Men was indicated by the epigraph chosen from Purgatorio , III, of Dante's Divine Comedy: "Mentre che la speranza ha fior del verde. " Together with the preceding line, it may be translated,

. . . man is not so lost that eternal love may not
return
So long as hope retaineth ought of green.

If the epigraph pointed toward redemption, the title pointed away from it. It was immediately obvious that Warren had drawn on the child's nursery rhyme, "Humpty Dumpty." But he was using it in an anything but childish way, for the key word was "fall." The religious connotation was strongly suggested as well as the secular one. Each of the major characters fell from a state of comparative grace into sin, chiefly through an act of betrayal—of others, of self, or of both, the word "betray" occurring importantly in more than half a dozen contexts throughout the novel. Willie has first been betrayed by the agents of the Harrison machine who gain his trust and induce him to run for governor. He is later betrayed into the hands of his killer by a jealous mistress and a vengeful underling. But as he has betrayed his wife in his liaisons, so he has betrayed the electorate and the best elements in his own nature. Jack Burden, the novel's narrator, has betrayed the faith which his youthful sweetheart, Anne Stanton, had placed in him by refusing to give direction to his life. Later, by revealing her father's misconduct he shatters one of the bases on which she has constructed her scale of values. This in turn leads to her liaison with Willie, destroying one of the last illusions by which Jack has lived. As Jack puts it, "That was the Anne Stanton whom Willie Stark had picked out, who had finally betrayed me, or rather, had betrayed an idea of mine which had had more importance for me than I had ever realized" (327). Burden's real father, Judge Irwin, the friend of Jack's putative father, has betrayed his friend by the adultery with Mrs. Burden in which Jack is begotten. For Willie's political purposes, Jack betrays Judge Irwin. Uncovering evidence of his misdeeds (in which Anne's father was accessory), Jack reveals them to the Judge, precipitating his suicide.

This motif of the fall into sin pervades the novel, appearing even in secondary stories and symbolic incidents. The family story contained in the Cass Mastern papers which are to form the basis of Jack's doctoral dissertation in history—if he can ever come to terms with it and its meaning—has as its most dramatic and meaningful incident the betrayal by one friend of another with the latter's wife.⁶³ When Jack visits his father he finds that the latest unfortunate whom he has taken in was at one time a circus aerialist. When Jack asks his former specialty, his father informs him, "He was the man who got hanged."⁶⁴

This recipient of Mr. Burden's Christian generosity now specializes in the making of angels out of stale bread masticated into a puttylike consistency. Jack learns that this sculpture is commemorative as well as decorative: his wife, Mr. Burden says, "did the angel act. . . She fell down a long way with white wings which fluttered as though she were flying." Jack completes the story: "And one day the rope broke . . ." (210).

In discussing the transmutation from play to novel, Warren described what he felt as

the necessity for a character of a higher degree of self-consciousness than my politician, a character to serve as a kind of commentator and raisonneur and chorus ... I wanted ... to make him the chief character among those who were to find their vicarious fulfillment in the dynamic and brutal, yet paradoxically idealistic, drive of the politician. There was, too, my desire to avoid writing a straight naturalistic novel, the kind of novel that the material so readily invited. The impingement of that material, I thought, upon a special temperament would allow another perspective than the reportorial one, and would give a basis for some range of style. So Jack Burden entered the scene.⁶⁵

The use of the hard-boiled newspaperman as narrator was not new, but it helped deepen the novel as Warren intended. It is Burden's probing intelligence that explores the multiple problems of identity that arise: e.g., who and what is Willie Stark? And, who and what is Jack Burden? Is Willie the avenger his country partisans think him or the Fascist demagogue his rich enemies call him? Or is he a man compounded of mingled self-interest and idealism, corrupted by power and the means he feels forced to use by the imperfect world in which he lives? Is Jack a wise-cracking cynic, a man concealing the scars of early wounds with braggadocio, or one slowly and painfully coming to terms with himself as he acquires belated maturity? Through Jack's eyes we see both the secular and spiritual rise and fall of Willie Stark. We see the formation of the view of human nature Willie expresses when he tells Jack, "You don't ever have to frame anybody, because the truth is always sufficient" (358). And we also hear the anguished deathbed words, "It might have been all different, Jack . . . You got to believe that . . ." (425).

It is of course through Jack Burden and his life that the motif of redemption is explored, as the reader sees what amounts to the Fall and Rise of Jack Burden. He makes progress along many lines, finally making the right marriage and changing from political hack to student of history. Learning the truth of his own paternity, he takes back the responsibility of conscience he has abrogated in Willie's favor and changes his whole conception of the human dilemma and the human obligation. He rejects the view that life is ultimately meaningless and that actions are not consequential. (This view is expressed in "the Great Twitch," a sardonic philosophical extension of the random and unrelated activity seen in the cheek of a man with a tic, a view explored from another direction in a series of comments upon a prefrontal lobotomy.) Burden makes a transition first to the position objectified in the image of life as a spider web, in which actions are consequential in the extreme. Looking back, he writes,

I have said that Jack Burden could not put down the facts about Cass Mastern's world because he did not know Cass Mastern [who had betrayed his friend with his wife]. Jack Burden did not say definitely to himself why he did not know Cass Mastern. But I (who am what Jack Burden became) look back now, years later, and try to say why. Cass Mastern lived for a few years and in that time he learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things. (200)

Jack Burden goes beyond this position, however, when he himself gives something of the eternal, redemptive love the epigraph alludes to. He marries Anne Stanton, whom he has wronged. He gives to his mother the mature understanding and love which has previously been beyond him, and he takes into his home his nominal father, now in failing health. And when the old man dictates a heretical tract, Jack finds that he too believes what he has written: "The creation of man whom God in His fore-knowledge knew to be doomed to sin was the awful index of God's omnipotence. For it would have been a thing of trifling and contemptible ease for Perfection to create mere perfection . . . The creation of evil is therefore the index of God's glory and His power" (462). And in the last words of the long chronicle, Jack looks forward to the future when, his father dead and the house consumed by mortgages, "we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time" (464).

Warren's design demanded a technique to match it. Ordinary proficiency could not have sustained it. But fortunately Warren is a poet who can combine arresting clusters of image and metaphor with the narrative drive of a novelist possessing a fine ear for accent and nuance. Occasionally these gifts led him into excess. The novel ran to 464 pages, and it could have been at once shorter and better. Warren gained force for his story through a kind of incremental repetition, a reinforcement through repeated phrase, image, and motif. But at times the returns were diminishing ones, just as the sardonic cynicism occasionally turned Jack Burden from the complex and traumatized seeker after his own identity into a plain smart aleck. Working in the tradition of Conrad and Faulkner, Warren manipulated both point of view and time sequence. The novel opens in 1936 and closes in 1939. But Warren expands this time span by extended flashbacks in the years 1850-1864, 1914-1915, and later. Though the reader may grant him his sometimes labyrinthine method, he is not likely to be so charitable to some of the extended philosophical disquisitions in which fundamental concerns are not so much dramatized as verbalized. But Warren's stylistic resources are still, at their best, dazzling. The dense texture is enriched by subtly used imagery—the death imagery contributes throughout to the force of the dominant themes—and by a kind of epic repetition of characters' attributes, features, and habits. It is a rich prose which can combine the sharpness associated with Hemingway and O'Hara and the rolling rhetoric of that novelist to whom Warren seems much indebted, William Faulkner.

A third of the way through All the King's Men Jack Burden declares that "the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story" (168). As we have seen, it is this cunning strategy that gives the novel its richness. Warren uses these entwined lives to deal with what Dostoevsky called The Eternal Questions—the nature of truth, time, and man, the perception of life as meaningful or meaningless, and the whole problem of cultural and personal values. These are among the considerations Warren designated as "the deeper concerns" which might work themselves out within the political framework of the story. And both these elements were thematically and stylistically related. Talos was "the kind of doom that democracy may invite upon itself (480) through the refusal to realize that every act is so consequential, that man must assume responsibility and—in an extreme formulation—give love. Correspondingly, Jack shows the kind of doom the individual may invite upon himself through a refusal to recognize consequentiality, assume responsibility, and give love. It is this kind of synthesis, combined with Warren's often brilliant technique, which makes this despite occasional prolixity and obscurity, the best American political novel of this century. It helps, moreover, to make it a work of art with promise of enduring.

Hodding Carter's Flood Crest (1947) began with a five-page, poetic description of an oncoming Mississippi flood which suggested the catastrophic dust storm in John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. And like Steinbeck's novel, Carter's used the natural crisis and disaster to parallel one in the social and political realm. U.S. Senator G. Cleve Pikestaff is running for re-election from a state one takes to be Mississippi, the home of newspaper-editor Carter.⁶⁶ Pikestaff is a coarse hillman, a nose-picker and bottom-scratcher who has won his way to Congress, the governor's mansion, and the Senate. Combining shrewdness with old-style campaign tactics and oratory, he has an intuitive understanding of the most exploitable of his hearers' prejudices. Running against a young veteran (another hillman campaigning on issues such as Pikestaff's real but unprovable pardonselling), Pikestaff shows himself as resourceful as ever in the face of changing times and tastes. Pitching his appeal for both the large and small landowners, he hits out at "FEPC. The CIO. Negro suffrage. Social equality. Yankee interference."⁶⁷ Like others before him, he makes his guide pragmatism, not principle:

Cleve laughed to himself .. . He ought to write Joe Stalin a thank-you letter, with a carbon to the American Reds. Those fellows had given him something big; something even bigger, if he worked it right, than white supremacy .. . A Red was one who disagreed with you . . . A Red was any nigger who wanted to vote and any white man who thought he ought to. The lowdown, sneaking labor organizers . . . and . . . everybody who belonged to the CIO. Reporters . . . and most college professors, and the Jews and the rest of the foreign element in New York. So were a lot of dissatisfied young no-goods who got ideas overseas, but you had to go slow about them, because they were Veterans. Some of the younger preachers were Reds too, but you mentioned them only as pinks, and sadly, not critically, on account of the Jesus angle. (144)⁶⁸

He combines accusation and innuendo. At his climactic rally, just before the crashing strains of "Dixie," he holds aloft a perjured statement supporting his baseless allegation of Communist influence: "'Here in my hands—' he shouted. 'Here in my hands is the proof of everything Cleve Pikestaff has been warning you about.'"⁶⁹ The professor smeared by Pikestaff says of him, "It's his kind who're responsible for the hatred and suspicion. Evil little men, willing to open the floodgates to ensure their elections" (132). But though the literal flood is successfully dealt with (by the lieutenant colonel of Army Engineers who breaks off with Pikestaff's daughter), there is no shoring of the levee against the figurative one. Pikestaff is sick over his intelligent daughter's profligacy, but he has the consolation that his overwhelming re-election is assured.⁷⁰ And the lieutenant colonel's words of assurance to his new sweetheart which follow have a somewhat hollow ring. This capably done novel shows the Southern Demagogue at work again—persuasive, cynical, cunning, and adept at combining the effects of old prejudices with new. And he shows no signs whatever of losing any of his power although he undergoes experiences revealing the rottenness around him, and, indeed, very close to him.

A novel published a dozen years later showed the image of the Southern Demagogue just as it had been. Far from changing, it seemed if anything closer to the earlier pattern. In Philip Alston Stone's No Place to Run (1959) the setting is again Mississippi. Sixty-one-year-old Eugene C. "Gene" Massie, born into a sharecropper family but a former senator and state power for years, is running in the gubernatorial primary. He relies on personal appearances rather than television, taking off his coat and exposing his red galluses whenever possible.⁷¹ He delivers the only speech he has ever used. It encompasses the themes through which he has played upon his hearers' prejudices successfully for decades: retention of the white primary election and white supremacy in general, a tax policy designed to "soak the rich," and the retention of prohibition. He admits "stealing" $14,000 in a power contract transaction, but he tells his audience he did it "for you."⁷² Adultery, bribery, coercion, incarceration, libel, and murder occur before Massie predictably wins the primary. His death by gunshot wounds at the hands of an outraged husband follows soon after. The nymphomania of the errant wife is a principal aspect of the sexual pathology in the novel. It is complemented by the satyriasis of Massie and the ignorance of drugstore clerk Eurene Hogroth. Unaware of the effects of her seduction, she precipitately gives birth to a child in an alley. The novel's sexual violence is complementary to its other forms of violence. The most spectacular instance is probably displayed by Massie's father. Outraged by a Negro family's arrival on the same land which he farms for shares, he locks the Negro family in the house. Then he burns it before returning to his own dwelling to shoot his family and himself.

This is a competent first novel though a derivative one which shows the influence of Faulkner, Warren, and Tennessee Williams.⁷³ Stone has a good ear, and he tells a story well, a story here of the basest kind of appeal to abysmal political passions in a nearly mindless electorate. And it is a story in which death is not so much retribution as the result of a destructive drive in the protagonist not so very different from that manifested at various times by his victims.

Two novels published within roughly a half dozen years of each other both dealt with the process by which a new-style Southern Demagogue was created. The protagonists were not successful politicians in mid-career but mature men entering politics. Both stories were set in the early 1950's, and like Flood Crest, they showed the adaptation of the techniques and themes of McCarthyism to the milieu of the Southern Demagogue. Tom Wicker's The Kingpin (1953) is set in a coastal, tobacco-raising state that suggests North Carolina. Its protagonist is Bill Tucker, campaign manager for Colonel Harvey Pollock, a banker backed by a small group of industrialists and businessmen in the primary election for the United States Senate. Tucker successfully devises a campaign based on anti-Negro and anti-Communist sentiments which discredits Pollock's courageously liberal and ethical opponent. But Tucker's power drive is frustrated when he is ousted by a faithful Pollock adherent who discredits him, using the strategy he devised to ruin Pollock's opponent. Tucker's situation is like Frankenstein's with his monster. He observes Pollock in action:

the sweat streaming from his fat face, over all of his body, he howled doggedly on, hitting and running and hitting again . . . at the jellied, quivering fear of the people who listened, howling not so cruelly as Talmadge and Bilbo and McDowell, not so piously as his Reconstruction ancestors, not so viciously as the Klan, but somewhere in between, somewhere in that dreamlike state where a Negro is not a nigger but a Nigra, where segregation is neither an evil nor the will of God but a necessity, where an opponent is not a nigger lover nor a Communist but a pink.⁷⁴

Pollock's appeals to the hate and ignorance of a people "slow-moving, ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-clad, prey to all the dark moods and passions" (184) are made even more effective by the tactics of his opponent. He speaks of the Marshall Plan, the Atlantic Pact, Point Four, and asks for "a new evaluation of policy in the Middle East." An aide thinks to himself, "how in the name of God . . . does he expect a peanut farmer to know what even the old policy is?" (115).

The pressing economic problems involve inequitable distribution of land, violent labor-management disputes, poor transportation facilities, and preferential letting of contracts. The tax structure is shaped for the wealthy interests which control the state machine and which find it necessary to unseat Pollock's opponent—who had been appointed rather than elected to the Senate to fill out a term.⁷⁵ The political problems and strategies which grow out of this situation include the familiar one of splitting the opponent's rural vote. It is accomplished when Tucker lures an old-style demagogue out of retirement. Rooster Ed McDowell's perennial anti-Jew, anti-Yankee, anti-Negro speeches pull the votes sufficient to require the second primary which Pollock eventually wins.⁷⁶ In a newer technique, bogus postcards supporting Pollock's opponent are mailed out from "The National Society for the Advance of Colored People" (116).

The sexual pathology takes familiar forms. Mrs. Pollock's nymphomania in New York, Miami, New Orleans, and Tokyo has been documented by her foresighted husband. Elsewhere, Tucker's bed-partner conveys her contempt for his inferior status through hostile lovemaking, whereas he practices physical violence upon each of the women with whom he is intimate.⁷⁷ This combined pathology and violence runs deep in this novel which is thoroughly professional in technique and execution.

Francis Irby Gwaltney prefaced A Step in the River (1960) with a conventional disclaimer, remarking, "To those who shall insist that this novel is concerned with the political structure of the author's native state: bad cess." The author's native state was Arkansas, and though the disclaimer was no more convincing than most, it was supported by the fact that the protagonist was not another Huey Long image, although he possessed certain elements in the Southern Demagogue archetype. Like The Kingpin, this novel showed the creation and installation of another new-style politician. Wealthy and educated like Colonel Pollock, he is also handsome and magnetic, Thirty-two-year-old John Frank Miller has genius on the platform and shrewdly employs a hillbilly band and a tattooed clown. He also uses of the power of his cousin, who fills many state contracts, and successfully buys off his opposition. The opposition is Preacher Clutts, a backwoods spellbinder who refuses his biennial $50,000 bribe for not running and finally accepts a $100,000 check for his Tabernacle Fund. In return he transfers to Miller a quarter million in cash hotly sought by tax authorities.⁷⁸

This novel's sexual pathology runs riot as Miller and his fiancée engage in a nude orgy including his sister-in-law and the tattooed clown. "I work ten years trying to run a decent establishment," the motel owner complains, "and a candidate for governor organizes a gang bang in my place" (300). This decadence is rejected by the book's narrator, the third of the cousins who serves as their pilot during the campaign. Later to repudiate the old concept of family loyalty, he ironically comments, "I recognize the stench of decay beneath the scent of such a beautiful thing . . ." (79). That the decay is there is clear—in the individuals, the family, the state, and the culture. But it is a decay overlaid with strength which appears capable of perpetuating the rule of this new-style Southern Demagogue on the old power base supporting it. The author has chosen his point of view for reasons, one suspects, which are probably like those of Warren in his creation of Jack Burden. That he does not derive more advantage from this strategy is partly due to the limitations imposed by this particular narrator. Most often tough-talking and taciturn, he is awkward and unconvincing in eloquent passages. Like the others, this book is pervaded by violence. It is competently done, however, and capable at times of bodying forth whole attitudes in a phrase. Preacher Clutts, a man behind "the Confederate Curtain" (107), remarks, "Well I always say .. . if you keep niggers and honest men in their place, they're all right" (287).

Nineteenth-century political novels set in the South usually fell into three categories. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)—a novel more political in effect than in content—one showed the evils of the Southern system. Like Tourgée's A Fool's Errand (1879), another demonstrated the baleful effects of the mismanaged Reconstruction program frustrated by resurgent Southern nationalism. Like Thomas Nelson Page's Red Rock (1898), another embodied the Southern view that federal policies and their results were abominations in both wartime and peacetime.

The reader is struck by the fervor and conviction which run through these novels, whether they are elicited by The Battle Cry of Freedom or The Lost Cause. The novels of the Southern Politician which appeared between 1922 and 1960 were more sophisticated in both form and content and for the most part written from an ethically and politically irreproachable point of view. But they usually depicted fervor and conviction of only the basest kind. The fervor was bred of ignorance and prejudice, and but for the idealism of a few protagonists, the conviction was mostly that of cynical men who had for years successfully made use of ignorance and prejudice. It was a conviction that these conditions were perpetual sources of power which they could continue to tap at will. Symptomatic of this shift from the old to the new is the contest in one of the most recent novels. The victorious Colonel Pollock of The Kingpin introduces certain modern restraints and nuances into his demagoguery, but his line of descent is still from Talmadge and Bilbo. The opponent he defeats, able newspaper publisher Ralph Anson, is a man "self-educated in the best Abe Lincoln manner" (112). The character in the tradition of self-seeking demagogue who appeals to the lowest common denominator wins out over the one suggesting the heroic leader.

Although it is patently impossible to return to the antebellum order, the impulse of most of these politicians is a profoundly conservative one aimed at maintaining the status quo. A minority works to remedy inequities which favor the wealthy landowner and industrialist while handicapping the impoverished small farmer and tenant farmer. More enter into alliances with the wealthy and powerful, protecting their interests and ranging themselves against organized labor and other forces of change. In one view, the complex of emotions and attitudes which creates a favorable environment for the demagogue has an economic base. His wealthy allies support him in return for preferential treatment which will maintain his state as their economic preserve. The poorer whites support him because his doctrine of White Supremacy offers them support against the economic threat posed by the Negro farmer—who can and must work with less for less. He taps prejudices in them which are both traditional and subrational. And these prejudices show no sign of diminution, at least in these novels. They are still directed with undiminished fervor against the Negro, the Jew, the Yankee, and other outsiders.

Later novels involving the Boss often assert that his very existence has been in jeopardy through the increasing influence of the federal government in local affairs. There is no evidence in any of these novels that a similar force is at work in the area of the Southern politician. When foreign concerns do intrude, they are manipulated to serve the interests of the traditional wielders of power. In these novels, the fascism of the 1930's and 1940's merely provides a new and potent weapon for ruining an opponent with greater dispatch. It is still conceived of merely as a useful political tool, however; the ideology implied by the terms used could not have a remoter significance for those who use them. When Calvin Hall, the narrator of A Step in the River, declares he will sue for allegations of communist sympathy made against him, Preacher Clutts, his libeller, is both hurt and aghast. "Now wait a minute!" he exclaims. "Hell! This is a damn political campaign!" (295).

If this amoral adroitness and adaptability of the Southern Politician seems to indicate anything, it is that there has been no material change in the predominant pattern demonstrated through the years of the twentieth century. And equally, there seems in these novels no indication of any fundamental change in sight.

¹ W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, pp. 428-429.

² In political and cultural studies the South is most often taken to include the eleven Confederate states: Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. In the novels considered in this [essay] the qualities of this region are largely carried over to border states such as West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oklahoma as well.

³ V. O. Key, Jr., in his exhaustive Southern Politics, comments, "Florida's peculiar social structure underlies a political structure of extraordinary complexity. It would be more accurate to say that Florida has no political organization in the conventional sense of the term" (p. 87).

⁴Ibid., pp. 214-215.

⁵Ibid., p. 20.

⁶ Key, Southern Politics, p. 106.

⁷Ibid., p. 159.

⁸ Cash, South, p. 248. Goldman notes that Tillman and Vardaman "combined reform and racist attitudes in a formula similar to the one Adolf Hitler was to perfect" (Eric F. Goldman, Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform, p. 65).

⁹ Cash, South, p. 284.

¹⁰ Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval, pp. 42-43.

¹¹ Reinhard H. Luthin, American Demagogues: Twentieth Century, p. 239. See also Hartnett T. Kane, Louisiana Hayride: The American Rehearsal for Dictatorship, pp. 13-35; Allan A. Michie and Frank Rhylick, Dixie Demagogues, p. 110; and Key, Southern Politics, pp. 156-159.

¹² Kane, Hayride, pp. 36-37.

¹³ Michie and Rhylick, Dixie Demagogues, p. 109.

¹⁴ Huey P. Long, Jr., Every Man a King: The Autobiography of Huey P. Long, p. 27.

¹⁵ Long, Autobiography, p. 99.

¹⁶ Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 48.

¹⁷ As quoted in Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 53.

¹⁸ As quoted in Luthin, American Demagogues, pp. 259 and 260.

¹⁹ As quoted in Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 65.

²⁰ As quoted in Luthin, American Demagogues, p. 265.

²¹ Key, Southern Politics, p. 159.

²² Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 51.

²³Ibid., pp. 50 and 66.

²⁴Ibid., p. 56.

²⁵ Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 58.

²⁶ As quoted in Michie and Rhylick, Dixie Demagogues, pp. 113-114.

²⁷ As quoted in Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 89.

²⁸ Michie and Rhylick, Dixie Demagogues, p. 113.

²⁹ Elmer L. Frey, as quoted in Luthin, American Demagogues, p. 250.

³⁰ Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 60.

³¹ Key, Southern Politics, pp. 156 and 164. Rorty and Decter take the opposite view: "He was an ideologue, a theoretician, a planner, an organizer. His library was well stocked with the theoretical literature of both Marxism and Fascism" (James Rorty and Moshe Decter, McCarthy and the Communists, p. 113).

³² As quoted in Michie and Rhylick, Dixie Demagogues, p. 112.

³³ As quoted in Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 60.

³⁴ Luthin, American Demagogues, p. 243.

³⁵ Cash, South, p. 421.

³⁶ In John Dos Passos's The Grand Design, the Reverend Green shows Paul Graves a stricken area. He tells him that in these counties "relief is in the hands of the politicians and the politicians are mostly landlords who save it for their own tenants" (p. 155). For discussion of other inequities, see Goldman, Rendezvous, pp. 348-349.

³⁷ Key, Southern Politics, p. 661.

³⁸ Thomas S. Stribling, The Sound Wagon, p. 164.

³⁹ Tom Wicker, The Kingpin, p. 184.

⁴⁰ Robert Rylee, The Ring and the Cross, p. 285.

⁴¹ This pattern suggests two familiar elements in Southern cultural lore: the idealized image of Southern Womanhood whom the Southern male fanatically praised and venerated, and the seductive woman (often a colored mistress) with whom he found the satisfaction impossible with the idealized Southern Wife and Mother. For an acute analysis of these elements, see Cash, South, pp. 82-87 and 128.

⁴² Albion W. Tourgée, A Fool's Errand, p. 361.

⁴³ Ellen Glasgow, One Man in His Time, p. 2.

⁴⁴ The smart fat man becomes a familiar type of Southern politician. Usually he is villainous.

⁴⁵ Glen Allan, Old Manoa, p. 25.

⁴⁶ Describing his campaign for John M. Parker in 1920, Huey Long wrote, "I took the stump for a period of approximately seventy days and went places where no other campaign orator had ever reached, traveling at times by horseback to fill appointments" (Luthin, American Demagogues, p. 242).

⁴⁷ Robert Wilder, Flamingo Road, p. 201.

⁴⁸ Franklin Coen, Vinegar Hill, p. 4.

⁴⁹ The novel's pitched battle strains credibility until one reads of the eviction by a veterans' group of the brutal machine which had for years ruled McMinn County in southeast Tennessee. In the early morning of August 1, 1946, they surrounded the county jail and successfully laid siege to it with bullets and dynamite. The local vassals of the Crump machine and their two hundred hired deputies (many out-of-town and out-of-state pluguglies) were turned out and the GI slate of candidates installed in office. There were no deaths, but ten of the veterans were wounded and five of the deputies were hospitalized. See Theodore H. White, "The Battle of Athens, Tennessee," Harper's Magazine, 194 (January, 1947), 54-60. (It is somehow ironic that the final vote which decided the issue in the state legislature whose ratification made woman suffrage into law should have come from McMinn County. See National American Woman Suffrage Association, Victory: How Women Won It, pp. 149 and 152.) In the summer of 1946, former Marine Lieutenant Colonel Sid McMath led a movement in Arkansas which captured the mayoralty of Hot Springs by the following spring, touched off a series of similar actions throughout the state, and placed McMath in the governor's chair in 1948. However, "Not all GI leaders were white knights leading crusades against wicked local machines. The revolts picked up the usual quota of opportunists whose chief sincerity was in their wish to ride the GI band wagon into office. Nevertheless, the movement, if it could be called that, included a number of men of extraordinary idealism coupled with skill and coolness in the hardboiled tactics of politics" (Key, Southern Politics, p. 204). In 1948 McMath, as governor, paid off a debt to a political supporter from a place in the Ozark Mountains called Greasy Creek. He named Orval E. Faubus state highway director. When Faubus went on to the governorship and in his second term drew worldwide attention to Arkansas during the Little Rock integration crises, McMath rued his generosity. "I wish," he lamented, "I had never built the road that led Faubus out of the hills" (New York Times, August 5, 1962, Section 4, p. 2E). When Faubus won the nomination for his fifth term, the man who ran third was former governor McMath.

⁵⁰ For a discussion of Basso's rejection of the Communist variety of authoritarianism—especially as seen in interchanges with his friend Malcolm Cowley—see Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism, pp. 339-340.

⁵¹ Schlesinger writes, "if within Long's limits government was benevolent and fairly efficient, it was still intricately and hopelessly corrupt. In 1934, to take an example, Long and several close associates set up the Win or Lose Corporation. The state government considerately made it possible for the new corporation to acquire properties in the natural gas fields; the corporation then persuaded natural gas companies to buy the properties by threatening to increase their taxes if they didn't. Using such persuasive sales methods, Win or Lose cleared about $350,000 in 1935" (Roosevelt, pp. 60-61).

⁵² John Dos Passos, Number One, p. 228. Though bills have been talked to death by a number of legislators, the filibuster is particularly associated with the image of Senator Long. Dos Passos had seen Long and had not been well impressed. He looked, the novelist wrote, "like an overgrown small boy with very bad habits indeed" (as quoted in Schlesinger, Roosevelt, p. 49). Other obvious elements in this roman à clef include Crawford's start as county road commissioner and subsequent rise to membership on the State Utilities Commission. He manages to get his state delegation accredited over the claims of a rival faction at the national convention, as Long had done in 1932.

⁵³ What the watch actually reports is that "A lioness hath whelped in the streets." Miss Langley's use of the masculine gender may perhaps suggest simply that a predatory beast is afoot rather than calling up the portents which, to Calpurnia, augur the fall of Rome's dictator.

⁵⁴ Adria Locke Langley, A Lion Is in the Streets, p. 247. Illiterate whites were able to evade the literacy test for voting through the so-called "grandfather clause" of the state constitution of Louisiana, put into effect without popular vote in 1898. The provisions were identical with those in the novel. Although the stratagem had been rejected in South Carolina because of its doubtful constitutionality, it was adopted by other states before it was declared unconstitutional as a result of litigation begun in Oklahoma. See Key, Southern Politics, pp. 538 and 556.

⁵⁵ Although one doubts an intentional reference, one may recall the plight of Spenser's Red Cross Knight in Book I of The Faerie Queene after Una (Truth, among her other attributes) leaves him.

⁵⁶ Though Key does not label the Long machine a case of native Fascism, he notes Long's nearly absolute power: "He dominated the legislature. He ripped out of office mayors, parish officials, and judges who raised a voice against him. Weapons of economic coercion were employed to repress opposition. When they failed the organization did not hesitate to use more direct methods. Huey, at the height of his power, brooked no opposition and those who could not be converted were ruthlessly suppressed" (Key, Southern Politics, p. 156).

⁵⁷ Robert Penn Warren, "A note to All the King's Men," Sewanee Review, LXI (Summer, 1953), 479.

⁵⁸ Warren, "A note to All the King's Men" SR, p. 480. Warren had taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge during the Long era.

⁵⁹Ibid., SR, pp. 476-477.

⁶⁰ Goldman prints an excerpt from the New York Times, November 17, 1935, quoting Long as asserting, "your Kingfish Huey, asittin' in the White House, will know how to handle them moguls." Goldman speaks of Long "clawing his way toward the Presidency," and discusses his potential strength and the threat it was felt to constitute to the Administration in 1935 (Rendezvous, pp. 362-363).

⁶¹ Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men, p. 68.

⁶² Warren, "A note to All the King's Men," SR, p. 480.

⁶³ An indication of the extent to which the act of betrayal permeates the novel is to be seen in the presumptive betrayal of the guilty wife to the injured husband at the hand of her slave Phebe. The wife's retaliatory act selling her down the river is described by the narrator as "the betrayal of Phebe . . ." (p. 189).

⁶⁴ Thinking of the echoes of Dante in Warren, one may wonder here if he has not, like that other echoer of the Florentine, T. S. Eliot, chosen also to echo a different inscriber of myth, Sir James Fraser.

⁶⁵ Warren, "A note to All the King's Men," SR, p. 478.

⁶⁶ Key writes: "Hodding Carter's novel Flood Crest . . . builds on the theme of the reconciliation of Bilbo and the delta" (Southern Politics, p. 244). Carter knew at first hand political excesses other than those of Mississippi's "Bubonic Plague." Writing for the Hammond Courier as an outspoken critic of the Long regime, Carter had been forced to carry a weapon for his own safety. See Carter, "Huey Long, American Dictator," in Isabel Leighton (ed.), The Aspirin Age, p. 341, and Carter's book, Where Main Street Meets the River, Chapter Eight.

⁶⁷ Hodding Carter, Flood Crest, p. 133.

⁶⁸ Writing of the strike of textile workers in Gastonia, North Carolina, in the spring of 1929, Cash asserts that it served "to clinch the matter, to fix solidly in the minds of the great mass of Southerners the equation: labor unions+strikers=Communism+atheism+social equality with the Negro—and so to join the formidable list of Southern sentiments already drawn up against the strikers the great central one of racial feeling and purpose; and, in fact, to summon against them much the same great fears and hates we have already seen as giving rise to the Ku Klux Klan" (Cash, South, p. 353).

⁶⁹ Cash, South, p. 124. This same gambit, couched in the familiar phrase, "I have here in my hand," will be seen again in the novels of McCarthyism considered in Chapter Eight.

⁷⁰ Discovering the two in a compromising situation, Pikestaff struggles with the convict, who uses his pistol to inflict a scalp laceration on him. Later, speaking at a rally, Pikestaff wears the vote-getting bandage as testimonial to his valor in fighting what he calls the pro-red, anti-American forces which will stop at nothing to silence him. Key writes, "In 1934, Bilbo brought into play his genius for rough-and-tumble campaigning. He wore, from an earlier campaign, a scar won in his oratorical battles for the people. He had been rapped over the head with a pistol butt by an opponent," one he had particularly vehemently calumniated (Southern Politics, p. 242).

⁷¹ Describing Eugene Talmadge's first campaign for office in 1926, Key writes that his "lambasting of the corporations was reminiscent of the populists. Then and after his colloquialisms on the hustings and a pair of bright red galluses marked him as a man of the farming people" (Southern Politics, p. 116). Key also writes that a candidate "of Talmadge's audacity, occasional uncouthness, iconoclasm, disrespect for established processes always aligned against him a healthy number of Georgians who are usually damned with the designation 'respectable'" (Southern Politics, p. 125).

⁷² Philip Alston Stone, No Place to Run, p. 75.

⁷³ The author's father, Phil Stone, an Oxford lawyer, had befriended young William Faulkner when he returned to Mississippi from World War I service with the R.A.F., lending him books and providing him with free secretarial services. Like the rest of Oxford, Stone knew many of the exploits of the fabled Faulkner family. In No Place to Run, when Massie's career is threatened by accusations of rape, he goes to his sometime mentor, aristocratic old Judge Rogers. When the Judge receives him coldly, Massie is daunted:

"why, I thought I'd jest come by for a little visit and see you—" "Gene," said Judge Rogers, "our relations are business and political. They are not social. Good afternoon." And he closed the door in his candidate's face and started back up the hall (240-241).

J. W. T. Falkner, the novelist's grandfather, was a supporter of the "redneck" politician, Senator James K. Vardaman. Mr. Falkner allowed a young Mississippian named Lee Russell to read law in his office. After he received his degree from the University, Russell practiced law for a time as an associate of Falkner. He was elected to the state legislature and in 1915 ran successfully for lieutenant governor. The gubernatorial winner that year was Theodore G. Bilbo. One life-long resident of Oxford recalls that one Sunday afternoon following his victory, Russell appeared at the door of the Falkner home. When Falkner asked him what he wanted, Russell replied that he had come to pay a visit. Whereupon Falkner told him that their relations were business and political, not social, and slammed the door.

⁷⁴ Tom Wicker, The Kingpin, p. 287.

⁷⁵ It has been suggested to me that this unsuccessful campaign of liberal Senator Ralph Anson owes something to the defeat of Frank P. Graham, "by all odds the South's most prominent educator and versatile public servant" (Key, Southern Politics, p. 206). Graham had left the presidency of the University of North Carolina in 1949 to accept appointment to the U.S. Senate. He was defeated the next year when he ran for election to the post.

⁷⁶ Names such as Rooster Ed are plentiful enough in American politics so that one need not necessarily ascribe one to a specific, not to say Southern, source. One thinks of Oklahoma's Alfalfa Bill Murray. But one thinks also of South Carolina's Cotton Ed Smith, a fruitful model for the political novelist, being, in Cash's words, "the archetype of the man who served only the planter and industrial interests in his state, while whipping up and delighting the people with attacks on the Negro, appeals to such vague shibboleths as states' rights, and heroic gasconade of every sort" (South, p. 422).

⁷⁷ One of these women provides an interesting perspective on the changing role of women. She is observing Pollock's campaign in order to gather material for a Ph.D. dissertation "on the effects of women's suffrage in a specific election" (Wicker, The Kingpin, p. 65). Her effect is to provide Tucker with a bed-mate.

⁷⁸ The evangelical, revivalist preaching style is often seen in these novels in rallies which have much of the prayer meeting tempo and fervor. Key gives an indication of the continuing efficacy of this technique: "In 1948 in Arkansas 'Uncle Mac' MacKrell was accompanied in his votegetting tour by his gospel musicians and the hat was passed. 'Uncle Mac's' pastoral experience gave him exceptional skill in the extraction of contributions. Hardboiled politicians almost wept when they saw the collections" (Southern Politics, pp. 479-480). Religion and politics have, of course, been more intimately connected in the South than in most other American regions, particularly during the Reconstruction and after. At the time of Al Smith's candidacy, "the ministers of the evangelical sects finally towered up to their greatest power, until almost literally nobody in the South dared criticize their pronouncements or oppose the political programs they laid out . . ." (Cash, South, p. 335). Though the power of the clergy does not extend so far in the more recent novels, it is still formidable.