Annotations for Speakers: Bryan Jones

It's a real pleasure, Jeremi.

Well, I think it's a great poem, Zachary. It touched me. And the one thing you said in that poem I want to stress, and that is this stuff becomes background.

I puzzled how people could put up with Jim Crow for so long in a situation that was so unjust. Friends of mine, my parents and others, and it's background. They don't think about it anymore.

Black's the same way. It's a terrible thing to be stuck into, but it doesn't change without a push. And the book's about some of those pushes over time and how my parents or my ancestors experienced them and viewed them as much as I could show that.

But it's really a book on history and politics. And I think your poem has a little bit of that too in both cases.

It's very important. We get used to thinking of the South as a bunch of mansions and slaves and slaveholders and the organization being very hierarchical because of that. It's an oligarchy in parts of the South where cotton grew, but it wasn't in uplands and to some extent near the coast where poor farmers dwelled.

They were Democrats, little d, big D too for that matter, and they really opposed many of the policies of the planters because it was a class interest that separated these two groups. But the game of the planters, the oligarchs, was to try to make a single South, a single South in which they ruled and the planters ruled and the hillbillies in the hills were quiet. Go take care of your cheap farm.

And you can read lots of editorials and writing about that from the black belt newspapers. Just get in line. You're above the blacks, just be satisfied with that.

But they weren't always satisfied. And some of my ancestors were not satisfied and they participated in the populist revolution. And let's not think of populism the way it's talked about today.

Back then it was an alliance between those upland poor farmer whites and the blacks who had just been freed and were allowed to vote for a few years before Jim Crow closed down in about 1900. So I try to tell that story and what happened afterwards.

That's a question that's relevant back then and today too because we see over and over again people in the lower reaches of the class structure as voting against what we would think or others would think were their self-interest. They will support in many cases the oligarchs and what they stand for. I try to make the distinction, I do make the distinction in the book between class politics in which a struggle goes on for the distribution of resources, are we to spend the collective goods on more investment funds for the planters or making life better for the poor farmers and poor laborers later on as time went on or are we to fall for the status politics situation in which I feel better than somebody else and that's all that matters. So you see that in racism. Racism was about, and white supremacy in particular, that form of racism in which the whites benefit and the blacks don't from the status allocations, not just class, it's status.

I'm better than you are and that's all that matters to me. So much of the struggles we have in the south and elsewhere is about whether we're going to adhere to status politics or class politics. The way the planters in the black belt regions of the south, the cotton growing regions of the south, pull this off was threefold.

One, try to get people to think of themselves in a hierarchical system. Two, to make sure that the poorer whites understood they were better than blacks. And three, that if needed, there would be massive voter cheating on the part of the planters.

It took all three to put down this populist revolution where the populist party put out the word to the poor farmers that, look, you're being used here. Let's ally with the newly enfranchised blacks and try to overturn the planter oligarchy. And that's what my ancestors participated in up there in North Alabama.

I tried to, in the book, compare these two structures of society in the south because it had a planter ancestor and some populist ancestors. They didn't compete with each other because they were in different parts of the state but they joined different factions. One, a part of the oligarchy, small-time oligarchy, but still part of the planter and slaveholding oligarchy.

The other free farmers, craftsmen, and much more willing to enter in democracy in the northern part of the state. There's a vigorous democracy there in North Alabama and western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, northern Georgia. These parts of the south where the Appalachians are dominant.

Yeah, so we're taught in so many situations that they were hillbillies. We still think about that, of the hillbillies sitting on his front porch and drinking homemade bourbon and playing his banjo. That's kind of the woven thing of the Appalachians, isn't it?

All by himself up there, his family around. But at least in parts of this time, especially in the populist era, there were just vast meetings, political meetings, church meetings. But the amount of religious zeal during the period of the whole 19th century, or much of it, was so important.

And Jacksonian democracy and the second great awakening, which is this great religious awakening that took place in the United States, they go together. So we have this explosion of Jacksonian democracy, these preachers going around all over the South to talk to people, and that spilled over into politics. So some of my ancestors did have preachers wandering around the South, having them in and having the neighbors over.

So there was much more of this group politics that took place in the supposedly lonely hollows of Appalachia in North Alabama than we think of. And we can trace some of that too. It's just underappreciated in much of history right now. Although there are scholars breaking this through, and I hope I'll be one of them.

It was fundamental to the populist movement. They needed the Black to all Republicans, then, for obvious reasons. So the alliance was cross-party too.

A populist party joined up with Black Republicans as an attempt to overthrow the hierarchies. But there were precursors of that. In many cases, there are agricultural movements all over the place, the grains being the first and most important, but it was non-partisan.

The grains established both, they were not integrated sets of people that were dealing in these grains collectives, which is what it was, collectives, getting together and buying fertilizer and tools at a lower price. But they learned from each other. There were Black collectives and there were white collectives, but they worked together in the sense of having to cooperate or wanting to cooperate and learn from each other.

As time went on, these groups became more political, and in the end, being a populist party in which the populist began to fuse with the Republicans, and there were plenty of upland Republicans in places like Georgia and Alabama too. And they fused to make this sort of a collective good in politics for these two groups. Unfortunately, in the story, it was sad because the planters counted out all the votes, cheated the Blacks mostly out of their votes as time went on, and the upland whites were left alone.

Part of it, certainly the populist collection of people put together to do this kind of politics was broken up by politics, but there was plenty of racism too. And so the planters operated on both racism and cheating Blacks out of their votes. The populist called this bourbon rule.

And by bourbon rule, they meant, well, it's kind of like the French trying to put the bourbon back on their throne again. That's what the planters wanted to do. They wanted to restore slavery or tenant farming and those kinds of things that looked like slavery.

And so they called them bourbons. And they were the bourbon faction of the Democratic Party and the populist faction of the Democratic Party that struggled for a long period of time. In fact, did so throughout the history of the South up until the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Those two factions struggle with each other. But the populist faction, or what they call the liberal labor faction, always lost because of the lack of votes by Blacks. They were outlawed in many of the Southern states as people outlawed.

Yes, I, by the way, enjoyed your book very much.

The post-Civil War period. It's brilliant. And I appreciate it very much. I learned from it. I wasn't able to use it much in this book because you wrote it too late. You should have written a few years before. Yeah, it's true.

But the possibility of an integrated society Van Woodward, the historian Van Woodward, and others, VLK, the political scientist, thought that that was possible. They thought that that could have emerged earlier had there not been the massive cheating. And the violence was there, but Blacks were intimidated by it.

But not as much as these guys were tough. They wanted to be Democrats, and they wanted to participate in society. And this idea that the slaves wanted to just hang around and be tenant farmers afterwards, I got much truth in it.

I find the Blacks, they were as dynamic in their group formations as the upland whites. I just haven't studied that. At any rate, there was certainly a desire after the period called Redemption, in which the Black planters took back the governments in the southern states to try to suppress Black votes.

And to a great degree, they were successful. But hundreds of thousands of Black voters still took part in the elections around 1900. So they were not gone. They were tough. And the alliance could have worked had they not been counted out in Alabama and in North Carolina and other places by the planter class. And I show that one of my own ancestors was a vote cheater.

Well, look, I'm not responsible for somebody who lived before me. That was his stupidity, his fault. But that was the way it was done. By the way, if anybody follows up on this and does another book trying to integrate history, and there have been several, history and their family lines, don't tell, don't feel guilty for what your ancestors did. You feel guilty what you did. And you can make up for it somehow if you want to, but that's your fault.

Well, the Blacks being denied the vote, the vote was rampant in the South up until that time, although in areas of the South, they began to break up already because of the action of Blacks and allied whites to break this up through legal and other means, including marches and so forth. But that was a marking point where you really, the Black Belt Blacks could vote. In some parts of Alabama, in the North part of the state, Blacks could vote by then.

And they could vote by then, even though they had still had to do all these, going through all these hoops that white voters had to also. But things like the poll tax disfranchised both a lot of Blacks and a lot of white farmers. As a matter of fact, some studies have shown in 1940 that there are more whites disfranchised by the poll tax than there were Blacks, just because there are more whites in Alabama than Blacks.

So the Voting Rights Act made a marker of when Jim Crow ended. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act made sure that the South could no longer use laws to segregate Blacks from whites, to keep Blacks from having the same rights as whites. So these laws are just enormously important.

And unfortunately, much of the Voting Rights Act has been struck down by the Roberts Court, taking away some of the mechanisms that were used to break out white monopolies in the voting rights. So you're finding that over since 19, or 2011, is that right? With the Shelby County decision in Alabama again, that struck down part of the Voting Rights Act, there has been another fall off in Black voting because of the actions of whites passing laws and ordinances that gets in the way of Black voting. So then...

Well, yeah, the ID laws, that's not the worst thing, but most of the problems are in registration. You file up your registration form or something like that, or you move and people forget to... There's a lot of what some of my colleagues call bureaucratic burdens, administrative burdens that are put in the way that affect Blacks more than they do whites.

Oh, that's absolutely right. Exactly. I mean, what you do is you use the two techniques.

If you're in the planter class, you want people to stay in their place, whether they're Black or white. Because if you get challenged by the less fortunate classes, you get class politics. If, in the worst extent, if there are Black and white or minorities plus white voters unified on the class issue, then you're going to have to fight class politics, and oligarchs don't like to do that because they generally lose.

So what you do is you try to keep this oligarchy together through these status-based systems, the bourbon rule, as the populists call it. So you're absolutely right. This is absolutely deeply about that form of government and how Jim Crow kept that in place legally for 75 years, at the end of the period of populist revolution to 1965.

And we know a lot about the Civil Rights Movement and how that got broken up, and I write about that in the book. We know very little about the populist period in which we almost broke it up. We almost got an interracial political class division back then in which the oligarchs had to contend with both whites and Blacks.

They scared the crap out of them too, by the way. They immediately called constitutional conventions and legislative sessions to try to figure out ways to keep Blacks out of politics. And in the Alabama Constitution, they said, look, we've been doing it illegally through violence and through vote cheating.

We want to pass laws that make sure we get it done legally. The whole Jim Crow system was built on putting together oppression in a legal manner, where it was between the Civil War and the populist era, it was done through illegal means. Whether they're enforced or not, it's a different matter.

But this book is fundamentally about this kind of, or much about this kind of bourbon rule that just caused the South to be a backwater for so long.

It's called backlash. We're all familiar with it now, but what looked like a problem solved ended up being a stimulus for George Wallace and his ilk. And I helped in a campaign of a decent man running against Wallace.

And I covered this in the book. I was sent by his campaign managers to talk as a substitute in a football stadium. And I was selling, as my candidate was, moderation.

We can do this moderately. It'll work. If there is any reason for us not to play what I would call today class politics and make everybody's life better, collective good, as others would call it.

And I got a smattering of applause. And then up comes George Wallace's spokesperson, and he says a few things, same old racist crap in code words. And the audience goes crazy, half full football stadium.

And I said, we are dead ducks. And sure enough, we were because there was more white backlash than black voters. And that's what happened in Alabama.

The white south became more unified, unlike the dual south I wrote about through most of the history. It became unified around the race issue at George Wallace did.

Yeah, this is the question that so many of us are trying to answer and can't really come to conclusion. Why did status politics went out over class politics so thoroughly in the Appalachian regions? And why didn't it come up before if it was there? And frankly, we just don't have an answer to that.

There are lots of partial answers like the resentment politics that some have written about Kerry Merritt, for example, in the South. The resentment politics has led to more difficulties than we had imagined. And it stuck with us today because the resentment politics is spread all over the country, starting with George Wallace, who may have been president had he not been shot.

But Trump plays the same sort of bourbon politics that George Wallace played, except he's not nearly as good the demagogue as George Wallace was, because George Wallace never felt sorry for himself. And sulked. And he didn't. He was out there dynamically talking and stuff that most of us wouldn't agree with to listen to this podcast. I certainly don't. That cracked up class politics and put it, jammed it back in the status politics area. It's a white supremacist presidency we have right now. And George Wallace was a white supremacist. And unfortunately, that seems to work, at least in the short run.

So you see our current moment as part of a long backlash that, in a sense, began in Alabama and elsewhere in the late 1960s.

I think you can put it that way. But maybe we ought to think of it as something that dwells within all of us. And it could be brought out or not. The religion of Manicheanism talks about there's the devil and the good in all of us. And sometimes the right leader or the wrong leader lets out that worst part of us. And people like George Wallace and other demagogues in the South, and people and presidents like Donald Trump, allows us to feel sorry for ourselves rather than look forward to a better future.

And the resentment comes out. And who is the resentment directed at? These days, it's blacks, browns, immigrants in particular. We find somebody to hate. And George Wallace found that. And other demagogues in the South, George Wallace spread it nationally. And I think that was the start of our troubles. But we have to remember there's more people who these days, not like Alabama in 1966, but these days, I think there are more people that object to that system than support it. But the coalition, the interracial coalition that failed in the populist period that we thought won in 1965, we just have to be honest with ourselves and say we didn't. But if it doesn't get organized again, we're stuck with that kind of white supremacist regime for a while. And I don't want that to happen.

Absolutely. That's absolutely right. And I think because of the way in which our electoral college and the Senate system works, we tend to cater more to the white working class, not because they're not important. They are. But we kind of forget the basis of support of that interracial regime was not just those white working class folks, but blacks in the black belt. And we have to appeal to an interracial situation. I think we're in much better shape to do that now than before.

But again, we had some splitting off of racial groups because of the status politics issue that I've been talking about, and especially in the last election. I suspect we'll have more class politics, but not if we don't get better organized on this and show just how I think Trump is pure bourbon rule. He wants the white working class to have hate and racism, and he wants the immigrants and minorities to have nothing because they've got to be the people you're directing hate at.

And it's a white supremacist set of ideas that are spewing out of his mouth and more and more over time. Just take a look at the South Africans that just showed up on our shores. So that's what we're looking at. And if you look back in the past, like I hope I did in my book, you can see those elements of it back then. And if you bring it forward, you can think about American politics much broader than I think most people have before.

One of the interesting things that's happening today, and we see it at the University of Texas, is just how diverse of a student body we have now that wasn't that diverse even 15 years ago. And the white, black, brown coalitions are people just talking to each other on campus. They don't seem to be race structured particularly.

And I find that more and more as I observe over time. I had a student from the LBJ school who came from the University of Alabama, did her undergraduate work there, and she just commented herself, and she's of Asian background, that it was so much easier here, the interracial kind of communications and so forth, it was so much easier here than back in Alabama where we're still pretty segregated groups got together that way. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but that's what I'm seeing right now. And I think that that bodes well for our future. But we can't let them do it on their own.

And that's one of the things I have spent some time on in my other self, studying information processing in political institutions. And there's no doubt that democracies, we know diversity, diverse decision groups make better decisions. And the reason is clear. They point out different aspects of problems that those of us that have different characteristics might not see. We do better problem definition when we are diverse. My other work shows that pretty clearly. But the same thing that happens is we build institutions that help find those problems. And they're diverse institutions through ideas and backgrounds and so forth. And congressional committees and how they work is an example of that. You don't find that in autocratic regimes. We make fun of congressional committees, but enormous amounts of information and understanding come out of those things.

And other areas in which there's these diversities built into our very structure of doing things, political institutions, of economic institutions. So the DEI approach could have been a little overly excessive and formalistic in some ways, but it was critical to building that kind of interracial democracy. And to see it cut off hurts my heart and hurts my head, too, because I think better decisions would be made in that kind of a situation. Our military would be much worse off with the guys that are running it now all white. Than with a mixed leadership.

I would like to close with, and it's a funny thing to close on, I was taught growing up this lost cause stuff that I write about in the book, a bunch of myths that were just wrong, one of which was that the Yankees deserted in ways that the Southerners didn't. Absolutely wrong. Who would you think from listening to this talk tonight, who deserted more? Well, of course, it was the uplanders. They weren't going to fight for those planters any more than they had to. And when they realized what they were doing, they went home. So the great desertions occurred from the mountains in Alabama and Georgia and North Carolina and so forth, not among the Midwestern farmers in Kentucky and Indiana and Ohio.

I've enjoyed it tremendously. And thank you so much, Jeremi, and you too, Zachary, for your points and poem.