But Blease and all such fellows from Tillman forward were nevertheless in some fashion rebels--the center of a bitter conflict? Of course. But rebels, not against the social and economic set-up as such, but simply against the job-holding hierarchy of the established Democratic organization…

Thus, as much after Populism as during it, attacks on Wall Street, the Cotton Exchange, and that indefinite but exceedingly villainous race called "the rich"--all identified with the regular party organization and particularly the hierarchical candidates of that organization against whom they were immediately arrayed for the prize of office--tremolo references to their own origins among "the common people," and sighs for "the horny hands of toil" and "the poor, hard-working, God-fearing farmer" formed a part of the stock in trade of all the demagogues second only to nigger-baiting. In addition to flattering and delighting the common man with fiery representations of himself masterfully hazing the black man, these demagogues would also flatter and delight him with equally fiery visions of himself, in the persons of these his champions, elbowing the always a little resented lordly ones out of the seats of power, or at least sitting side by side with them.

4. Naturally enough, these men were hated and bitterly fought by both the party hierarchies and the classes the latter represented. The class division, as I have indicated, was never complete. Both Tillman and Blease always had some planter following. But by and large the upper crust was militantly against them. The party organizations everywhere used their control of the election machinery, not merely to disfranchise as many of the demagogues' followers as possible but often to steal votes outright, in the high conviction, fixed by Reconstruction, that, since they had no doubt their cause was righteous, it was wholly justifiable. And planter, banker, factory-owner, professional man, and editor foamed against the Tillmans and Bleases for "arraying class against class," with all the old intensely personal blackguardism native to the region. In South Carolina the fight over Tillman waxed so hot as to eventuate in the killing of N. G. Gonzales, editor of the Columbia State. And fist-fights and cutting-scrapes revolving about the name of Blease were numerous.

It was easy to see the scene as one torn by the most genuine sort of class struggle in politics. But that appearance was mainly illusory. The upper classes were naturally made uneasy and angry over the appeals of the demagogues to the masses' awareness of themselves as "the poor." And of course the better sort of Southerner despised their ruffian appeals to race hatred. But the extent and depth of all this can fairly be gauged by the fact that the hierarchies' own candidates often adopted the methods of the demagogues in one measure or another. For instance, Cotton Ed Smith, who was elected to the United States Senate from Blease's own state in 1908, there to remain to this day. The candidate of the South Carolina Democratic hierarchy, Smith was peculiarly the representative of the rich planters and the industrial and commercial interests, and throughout his career he has served them faithfully and exclusively. But he got elected by dressing up in a farm hat and riding about the state on a farm wagon loaded with cotton, quavering over "the poor, hard-working, God-fearing farmer," and inveighing against Wall Street and the Cotton Exchange, precisely as Tillman had done, in heroic and highly picturesque profanity--by these things, and by nigger-baiting as blatant and as barbarous as Blease's own.

What mainly explained the smoke and heat about the Tillmans and Bleases was something quite simple and obvious: the astonishment and outrage of the hierarchies and the classes they represented that anybody should dare to challenge their traditional exclusive privilege of naming the succession to office and appeal over their heads to the masses, whose historical role it was merely to follow where they were led and to vote for one of the men offered them; the will of these hierarchies and classes to hold on to that privilege in toto. Such was the true extent of genuine class struggle here.

And when these demagogues had won the Democratic nomination anyhow: We return to the fact that, bound within the lesson of Populism, they not only never had any concrete program to offer the commons but never tried to do anything real for them once they were in office--that politics in the South went right on serving only the interests of the upper orders quite as though the demagogues had never been elected at all. And to that must be added the fact that they rarely made any systematic and determined effort to destroy the subsisting hierarchies. They built up their own machines, surely, but these machines were devoted to their perpetuation in office rather than to raising up a whole new succession. The people, for that matter, went right on voting for the candidates of the hierarchies most of the time, entirely content with having only an occasional Blease for their own.

Hence the hierarchies could and did accept these demagogues. Not that they ever took them to their bosom. Far from it. But they did find it entirely possible to tolerate them as members of the Democratic Party and the Proto-Dorian front with themselves; and might even, when the occasion required it, and in return for support for their own candidates, lend such a nominee grudging support at
the polls.

Do I make it sound coldly cynical and calculated? I do not think it was greatly so. We have to remember that all these men, including the demagogues, were simple, unanalytical men, operating within a pattern they had been born to. If it were not always strictly true that the demagogues were the progeny of the poorest sort, as they claimed, it was certainly true that all of them had been familiar with the lot of the poorer farmer from childhood up, and that they were the heirs at once of the forces that had produced Populism, of the tradition of that movement itself, and of the most fanatic Negrophobia in Dixie. It was probably the great secret of their success, indeed, that they profoundly and perfectly summed up in their proper emotions and their own proper minds the things the masses felt.

It is just because of this, however, that Blease's explicit appeal to the cotton-mill workers--which is what we were originally concerned with--seems to me conclusive evidence that these workers were beginning to respond to the logic of the circumstances I have noted, and to become remotely aware of themselves as an estate whose interests were not always identical with those of their masters. The man was a sort of antenna, as it were, fit to vibrate in perfect unison with their exact sentiment--in his every word and deed precisely to render what, given all the forces at play upon them, they most secretly wanted: the making vocal and manifest of their slowly gathering melancholy for and resentment against their economic and social lot, without ever losing sight of the paramount question of race.

5. But now in 1914 there was thunder on the Somme and the Marne. And for the next five or six years events would operate with great force once more to reverse the process, to turn back the Southern mill worker's irritation, and to reduce tension. After 1916 so much would follow naturally from the fact that his energies would be absorbed, like those of other Americans, in the common national excitement and in the common national purpose of winning the war. But the case was more direct than that.

For, after a pause in the fall of 1914, the cotton mills of the South (and the cotton mills, of course, may stand for all industrial establishments) were to come in for an enormous increase in business. With the mills of Lancashire, northern France, and Germany bottled up by the war, America was to capture most of the world's trade in cotton goods. And once the American flag was raised in France, domestic orders would swell rapidly. Thus before long every Southern mill would be running night and day. And before long, again, there would begin a vast expansion of equipment, a swift and unparalleled surge of Progress, the headlong throwing up of new mills--until by 1920 there would be nearly twenty million spindles whirring in the region…