FOR years it has been the fashion with historians to explain the white cracker of the South as simply the product of degenerate blood-strains from Europe — the progeny of the convict-servants and redemptioners of Old Virginia. But the theory defies logic and the known facts.

Actually, the source of the cracker is identical with that of at least 90% of all other Southern whites. He stems, mainly that is, straight from the common Scotch-Irish, English, and German stock which from about 1740 on was slowly filling up the huge Southern wilderness lying between the thin sliver of coastal civilization built on tobacco, rice, and indigo. And in that backwoods of the eighteenth century, he was so little set apart from his neighbors that he married very much whom he pleased, became by 1800 related to nearly everybody within a radius of thirty miles about him, and so today boasts exactly the same names as the most pretentious Southern families.

What differentiated him, what created the type, was the invention of the cotton gin and the spread of the plantation to the back country. The plantation was inordinately greedy of land; the acreage adjudged suitable for the growing of cotton was limited; the number of possible units was small. And in the fierce competition thus engendered (a competition complicated by wildcat finance), these prizes fell swiftly and mainly to the strongest among the population; the weaker elements were driven back to the rejected lands and the estate of either the yeoman farmer or — on swamp and sand lands and in the pine barrens and red hills — of the poor-white. Nor were they only driven back. Because of the peculiar static quality of the Southern order, they were locked up and closed in — completely barred from any economic and social advance as a body.

The life to which the cracker was thus condemned was one of constant impoverishment. The plantation and his own waste had presently destroyed the forest. The hunter who had formerly foraged for the larder while his women hoed the corn now spent most of his time on his back, disdaining to do work which habit had fixed as effeminate, and consoling himself for the poorness of the shooting with a jug of what he himself had named “busthead.” His diet sank to a routine of cornpone, hog, and turnip greens. Nutritional disease, hookworm, malaria, indolence — all these joined hands to accentuate the lankiness, the boniness of head and feature, which the backwoods had already stamped upon him; conspired with the blistering sun of the land to give him the marked swarthiness or the odd colorlessness of skin and hair which distinguishes him.

But more important still was the fact that the plantation contrived, not deliberately, not consciously, yet with a great effectiveness, to see that he developed no ponderable resentment against his fate. Thus, if it had robbed him, the plantation had nevertheless nearly everywhere left him some sort of land, and, having no use for his labor, it nowhere directly exploited him. His independence was untouched. Thus again, if it had blocked him off from advance en masse, it had not closed the door on him as an individual. Always it was possible for the strong, sturdy lads, who still thrust up from the old root-stock, to make their way out and on. Thus once more, if it had introduced distinctions among white men, the plantation had also introduced that other all-dwarfing distinction between the white man and the black — at the very moment of the poor-white’s degradation, it had elevated him to a tremendous superiority that, come what might, he could never publicly lose. And finally, the coming of the plantation had definitely created the celebrated Southern manner — a genial, expansive, hand-on-shoulder manner which would be ideally calculated to draw the sting from the rising contempt for the cracker.

The upshot was certain. The cracker almost completely abandoned economic and social focus, failed wholly to develop class feeling, and, in the great leisure that was his, gave himself up cheerfully to elaborating the old backwoods pattern of amusement and distinction — became in his fashion a remarkable romantic and hedonist.

To fiddle, to dance all night, to down a pint of raw whiskey at a gulp, to bite off the nose or gouge out the eye of a favorite enemy, to father a brood of bastards to fight harder and love harder than the next man, to be known eventually far and wide as a hell of a fellow — such would be the pattern he would frame for himself. And if this left him a little uneasy, if it bred in him a sense of sin, well, there was escape in orgiastic religion.

But after the Civil War — in which he fought manfully to keep things just as they were — the cracker’s world was to be rudely upset. For the South, bled white and needing money imperatively, was to turn with increasing passion to the pursuit of that fata morgana, cotton. From 1870 to 1880 it doubled the production; in the next decade it tripled it. And that, mind, primarily by falling back on the lands which had once been held as of no account for the staple — the lands of the yeoman and the poor-white.

Growing cotton on such lands, however, required fertilizers. And to provide fertilizers there arose the credit-merchant, who normally demands 40% (sometimes 80%) interest for his services, an exaction before which the poor-white was hopelessly lost. Literally by the thousand he attempted to grow cotton, failed, and was sold out. Nor was he alone. Hundreds of those who had been yeoman farmers met the same fortune.

So there grew up in the South the white cropper and the white tenant — the head and font of the poor-white in our time. And this, of course, might naturally have been expected to restore economic and social focus and to beget class consciousness in him. For here, plainly, was an end to his freedom from direct exploitation and to his independence.

It was not to be, however. At the moment when so much of his heritage was crumpling, the remainder of that heritage was being greatly enhanced in value. Everywhere the South was engrossed in its great fight for white supremacy, everywhere preservation of superiority to the Negro was becoming the first thing. And in the poor-white, who had no other superiority to lose, this feeling was most intense of all. Hence, when he found himself falling to the status of cropper and tenant, what held his gaze to the exclusion of everything else was the spectacle of the grinning face of the ex-slave rising into his own.

Conceivably, of course, this fixation itself might have issued into hatred for the plantation order, in revolt against the whole social arrangement. But the cracker was habituated to thinking of his masters not as antagonists, but friends. And now these masters, seeing that there would not be room on the plantation for both the blacks and all this increasing crowd of whites, terrified at the imminent prospect of a life-and-death conflict between the two groups, a conflict that might easily upset the entire Southern fabric — now at last these masters were concerned with what was happening to the poor-white and were moving heaven and earth to find at least a partial sanctuary for him. Out of that, as much as anything else, came the Southern cotton mill.

Thus, the cracker, seeing hands everywhere reaching down to bear him up, seized them eagerly, grappled back with the pathetic passion of his heritage, and gave himself over fully to the purpose, not of making his own way up but of keeping the black man down. And there to this day he still stands, helplessly caught in his obsession.

Through the years, his status has swung steadily downward. Industry, if it saved him racially, has elsewhere merely heaped evil on evil. With its consort, commercialism, it has piled the banker on the credit-merchant and begot the cracker an army of new masters. Widening opportunity for a moment in the beginning, it has now all but closed it up. Spawning towns and shifting the center of social gravity, it has introduced and made well-nigh universal the vicious wrong of absentee landlordism. And in rolling up relatively immense wealth at the top, it has infinitely broadened the social gulf.

All of which means eventually that the cracker has been increasingly despised. Only the politicians treat him to the old easy manner now. For the rest, the treatment meted out to him daily assimilates itself more and more closely to that meted out to the black man.

Does he fail wholly to see this? Of course he doesn’t. It has been eating into him for years, making him bitter and sullen. But there is nothing he can do about it. For at the end of every possible road lies this implacable fact: to succeed in revolt he must join forces with the Negro. And rather than do that, he prefers to starve and to rot.

Accordingly, the cracker goes on steadily tumbling down the slope into degeneracy, waxing ever more shiftless, and perforce discharging his energies, in so far as they are not squeezed out of him, in the old channels — in striving at once to console and to amuse himself, to achieve dignity and value, by playing the hell of a fellow. In dancing and fiddling when his ministers will let him, in fantastic religion, in hard drinking and hard fighting and hard loving, but above all in violence — above all, in violence toward the Negro. And perforce, too, the ennui, the bitterness, the viciousness, bred in him by the always-narrowing conditions of his life, pour over to the elaboration of this pattern, to making him at his worst a dangerous neurotic, a hair-trigger killer, a man-burner, a pig quite capable of incest — in brief, everything that William Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell have made him out to be, and perhaps something more.

______

The American Mercury, May 1935

A review of Meet General Grant by W. E. Woodward (Horace Liverwright, publishers); The American Mercury, 1928

THE DREADFUL title of this book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of man.

His imagination was the imagination of a respectable hay and feed dealer, and his virtues, such as they were, were indistinguishable from those of a police sergeant. Mr. Woodward, trying to be just to him, not infrequently gives him far more than he deserves. He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men. He was even a poor judge of other generals, as witness his admiration for Sheridan and his almost unbelievable underrating of Thomas and Meade. If he won battles, it was because he had the larger battalions, and favored the primitive device of heaving them into action, callously, relentlessly, cruelly, appallingly.

Thinking was always painful to Grant, and so he never did any of it if he could help it. He had a vague distaste for war, and dreamed somewhat boozily of a day when it would be no more. But that distaste never stayed his slaughters; it only made him keep away from the wounded. He had no coherent ideas on any subject, and changed his so-called opinions overnight, and for no reason at all. He entered the war simply because he needed a job, and fought his way through it without any apparent belief in its purposes. His wife was a slaveholder to the end.

At Appomattox he showed a magnanimity that yet thrills schoolboys, but before he became President he went over to the Radical Republicans, and was largely to blame for the worst horrors of Reconstruction. His belief in rogues was congenital, touching and unlimited. He filled Washington with them, and defended them against honest men, even in the face of plain proofs of their villainy.

Retired to private life at last, he sought out the worst scoundrel of them all, gave the fellow control of his whole modest fortune, and went down to inglorious bankruptcy with him. The jail gates, that time, were uncomfortably close; if Grant had not been Grant he would have at least gone on trial. But he was completely innocent. He was too stupid to be anything else.

Mr. Woodward, as I have said, is very generous to him. There is, on almost every page of this book, an obvious effort to make the best of his good impulses, and to gloss over his colossal imbecilities. Sometimes the thing comes close to special pleading: Freud and the unconscious have to be hauled in to make out a plausible case. There is some excuse for that attitude, for Grant, for all his faults and follies, was at least full of honest intentions. Like Almayer, he always wanted to do the right thing. The trouble with him was that he could seldom find out what it was.

Once he had got beyond a few elemental ideas, his brain refused to function. Thereafter he operated by hunches, some of them good ones, but others almost idiotic. Commanding his vast armies in the field, he wandered around like a stranger, shabby, uncommunicative and only defectively respected. In the White House he was a primeval Harding, without either the diamond scarf-pin or the cutie hiding in the umbrella closet.

He tried, in his dour, bashful way, to be a good fellow. There was no flummery about him. He had no false dignity. But he was the easiest mark ever heard of. It was possible to put anything over on him, however fantastic. Now and then, by a flash of what must be called, I suppose, insight, he penetrated the impostures which surrounded him, and struck out in his Berserker way for common decency. But that was not often. His eight years were scarlet with scandal. He had a Teapot Dome on his hands once a month.

Mr. Woodward’s portrait, despite its mercies, is an extraordinarily brilliant one. The military automaton of the “Memoirs” and the noble phrase-maker of the school-books disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic. Grant went to the high pinnacles of glory, but he also plunged down the black steeps of woe.

I don’t think that his life was a happy one, even as happiness is counted among such primitive organisms. He was miserable as a boy, he was miserable at West Point, and he was miserable in the old army. The Mexican War revolted him, and he took to drink and lost his commission. For years he faced actual want. The Civil War brought him little satisfaction, save for a moment at the end. He was neglected in its early days in a manner that was wormwood to him, and after luck brought him opportunity he was surrounded by hostile intrigue.

He made costly and egregious blunders, notably at Shiloh and Cold Harbor; he knew the sting of professional sneers; he quailed before Lee’s sardonic eye. His eight years in the White House were years of tribulation and humiliation. His wife was ill-favored; his only daughter made a bad marriage; his relatives, both biological and in-law, harassed and exploited him. He died almost penniless, protesting that he could no longer trust a soul. He passed out in gusts of intolerable pain. It is hard to imagine harder lines.

If, in this chronicle, he sometimes recedes into the background, and seems no more than a bystander at the show, then it is because he was often that in life. Other men had a way of running him — John A. Rawlins during the war, Hamilton Fish at Washington, Ferdinand Ward afterward.

His relations to the first-named are discussed in one of Mr. Woodward’s most interesting chapters. Rawlins was the Grant family lawyer at Galena, and had no military experience when the war began. Grant made him his brigade adjutant, and thereafter submitted docilely to his domination. Rawlins was a natural pedagogue, a sort of schoolmarm with a beard. He supervised and limited Grant’s guzzling; he edited Grant’s orders; he made and unmade all other subordinates. “I have heard him curse at Grant,” said Charles A. Dana, “when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do…. Without him Grant would have not been the same man.”

Gossip in the army went even further; it credited Rawlins with actually sharing command. “The two together,” said James H. Wilson, “constituted a military character of great simplicity, force and singleness of purpose, which has passed into history under the name of Grant.”

Rawlins gets his due in Mr. Woodward’s story, and so do many of the other great characters of the time, most of them already grown fabulous. The book shows hard study and great shrewdness. It would be hard to surpass, for sound sense, the analysis of Andrew Johnson’s vexed and murky personality in the twenty-fourth chapter, or the picture of the Negro freedman which follows it. Here is not only good writing; here is also a highly enlightened point of view. Mr. Woodward is a man of Southern birth and grew up in the midst of the Confederate katzenjammer, but there is no sign of it in his narrative. He is magnificently impartial. The fustian of the Federal patrioteers does not deceive him, but neither is he deceived by the blather of their opponents. He knows how to be amusing without departing from the strict letter of history. He conceals erudition beneath a charming manner. He has written a biography of great merit. It more than fulfills the promise of his Washington.

The American Mercury, September 1930

NO AMERICAN historian, so far as I know, has ever tried to work out the probable consequences if Grant instead of Lee had been on the hot spot at Appomattox. How long would the victorious Confederacy have endured? Could it have surmounted the difficulties inherent in the doctrine of States’ Rights, so often inconvenient and even paralyzing to it during the war? Could it have remedied its plain economic deficiencies, and become a self-sustaining nation? How would it have protected itself against such war heroes as Beauregard and Longstreet, Joe Wheeler and Nathan D. Forrest? And what would have been its relations to the United States, socially, economically, spiritually and politically?

I am inclined, on all these counts, to be optimistic. The chief evils in the Federal victory lay in the fact, from which we still suffer abominably, that it was a victory of what we now call Babbitts over what used to be called gentlemen. I am not arguing here, of course, that the whole Confederate army was composed of gentlemen; on the contrary, it was chiefly made up, like the Federal army, of innocent and unwashed peasants, and not a few of them got into its corps of officers. But the impulse behind it, as everyone knows, was essentially aristocratic, and that aristocratic impulse would have fashioned the Confederacy if the fortunes of war had run the other way. Whatever the defects of the new commonwealth below the Potomac, it would have at least been a commonwealth founded upon a concept of human inequality, and with a superior minority at the helm. It might not have produced any more Washingtons, Madisons, Jeffersons, Calhouns and Randolphs of Roanoke, but it would certainly not have yielded itself to the Heflins, Caraways, Bilbos and Tillmans.

The rise of such bounders was a natural and inevitable consequence of the military disaster. That disaster left the Southern gentry deflated and almost helpless. Thousands of the best young men among them had been killed, and thousands of those who survived came North. They commonly did well in the North, and were good citizens. My own native town of Baltimore was greatly enriched by their immigration, both culturally and materially; if it is less corrupt today than most other large American cities, then the credit belongs largely to Virginians, many of whom arrived with no baggage save good manners and empty bellies. Back home they were sorely missed. First the carpetbaggers ravaged the land, and then it fell into the hands of the native white trash, already so poor that war and Reconstruction could not make them any poorer. When things began to improve they seized whatever was seizable, and their heirs and assigns, now poor no longer, hold it to this day. A raw plutocracy owns and operates the New South, with no challenge save from a proletariat, white and black, that is still three-fourths peasant, and hence too stupid to be dangerous. The aristocracy is almost extinct, at least as a force in government. It may survive in backwaters and on puerile levels, but of the men who run the South today, and represent it at Washington, not 5%, by any Southern standard, are gentlemen.

If the war had gone with the Confederates no such vermin would be in the saddle, nor would there be any sign below the Potomac of their chief contributions to American Kultur–Ku Kluxry, political ecclesiasticism, nigger-baiting, and the more homicidal variety of wowserism. Such things might have arisen in America, but they would not have arisen in the South. The old aristocracy, however degenerate it might have become, would have at least retained sufficient decency to see to that. New Orleans, today, would still be a highly charming and civilized (if perhaps somewhat zymotic) city, with a touch of Paris and another of Port Said. Charleston, which even now sprouts lady authors, would also sprout political philosophers. The University of Virginia would be what Jefferson intended it to be, and no shouting Methodist would haunt its campus. Richmond would be, not the dull suburb of nothing that it is now, but a beautiful and consoling second-rate capital, comparable to Budapest, Brussels, Stockholm or The Hague. And all of us, with the Middle West pumping its revolting silo juices into the East and West alike, would be making frequent leaps over the Potomac, to drink the sound red wine there and breathe the free air.

My guess is that the two Republics would be getting on pretty amicably. Perhaps they’d have come to terms as early as 1898, and fought the Spanish-American War together. In 1917 the confiding North might have gone out to save the world for democracy, but the South, vaccinated against both Wall Street and the Liberal whim-wham, would have kept aloof–and maybe rolled up a couple of billions of profit from the holy crusade. It would probably be far richer today, independent, than it is with the clutch of the Yankee mortgage-shark still on its collar. It would be getting and using his money just the same, but his toll would be less. As things stand, he not only exploits the South economically; he also pollutes and debases it spiritually. It suffers damnably from low wages, but it suffers even more from the Chamber of Commerce metaphysic.

No doubt the Confederates, victorious, would have abolished slavery by the middle of the 80s. They were headed that way before the war, and the more sagacious of them were all in favor of it. But they were in favor of it on sound economic grounds, and not on the brummagem moral grounds which persuaded the North. The difference here is immense. In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished. The triumph of sin in 1865 would have stimulated and helped to civilize both sides.

Today the way out looks painful and hazardous. Civilization in the United States survives only in the big cities, and many of them–notably Boston and Philadelphia–seem to be sliding down to the cow country level. No doubt this standardization will go on until a few of the more resolute towns, headed by New York, take to open revolt, and try to break out of the Union. Already, indeed, it is talked of. But it will be hard to accomplish, for the tradition that the Union is indissoluble is now firmly established. If it had been broken in 1865, life would be far pleasanter today for every American of any noticeable decency. There are, to be sure, advantages in Union for everyone, but it must be manifest that they are greatest for the worst kinds of people. All the benefit that a New Yorker gets out of Kansas is no more than what he might get out of Saskatchewan, the Argentine pampas, or Siberia. But New York to a Kansan is not only a place where he may get drunk, look at dirty shows and buy bogus antiques; it is also a place where he may enforce his dunghill ideas upon his betters.