Postcards of the Hanging: Race and Sex in Tennessee
By Chris Floyd
Created Nov 2 2006 - 11:30am
"The past is never dead. It's not even past." - William Faulkner

I.
WATERTOWN, Tennessee - The 20th century was well into its seventh decade,
but he still came to the back door every time he needed to see "Mister
Edsel" about some business or other. No amount of cajoling would induce him
to knock on the front door. Finally, one day, in exasperation, my father
told him: "Jim, if you don't come around to the front next time, I'm not
going to talk to you. This just won't do." Jim shook his head, perplexed; it
seemed a concept too radical to grasp or accept: knocking on a white man's
front door.

The past lives longer in the South, as Faulkner, that great bard of race and
sex, knew well. Habits of subservience from the days of slavery more than a
century before were still lingering here and there, as I could see on my own
back porch that day, watching Jim and my father. It was like a scene from To
Kill a Mockingbird; and indeed, "Mister Edsel" had come to play the role of
Atticus Finch in the town: an advocate and mediator for people like Jim - a
black man from the country, deprived of education, shunted into stoop labor,
living in the margins, forever under arbitrary threat from an uncaring
officialdom or from sudden outbursts of the deeply-ingrained racial enmity
that lurked beneath the placid surface of the white faces all around him.

It was an unsought role that came to my father simply because he was one of
the few white men who treated black people like they were ordinary,
fully-fledged human beings, not lepers or clowns or dangerous trash. It was
a rare attribute in those days - and it is still much rarer than most would
care to admit, even in the "New South," where Tennessee congressman Harold
Ford Jr. stands within reach of becoming the first African-American senator
from the old Confederacy since Reconstruction (or as some still like to call
it, "the Yankee Occupation").

Ford's surprisingly strong campaign has exposed fault lines long buried
beneath Tennessee's creeping - or rather, galloping - suburbanization, where
old ways, both good and bad, are rapidly being submerged in the
undifferentiated glop of modern American franchise culture. But when money
and power are on the line, atavism is the order of the day: ancient fears
and hatreds re-emerge - or are mightily encouraged to re-emerge, with all
the subtle and not-so-subtle arts of high-tech mass persuasion stoking the
flames.

For the stakes in the battle for Tennessee's Senate seat - once considered a
lock for the Republicans - have suddenly grown exceedingly high. A Ford win
could wrest control of the chamber away from the GOP, putting a serious
crimp in the party's bacchanal of greed and graft. What's more, it opens up
the possibility of investigations, subpoenas - and worse - for an
Administration that is not only suppurating with massive corruption,
incompetence, extremism and deceit, but has also openly acknowledged several
criminal actions, including torture and warrantless surveillance. The Bush
Faction simply cannot afford to face accountability for its monumental
failures and misdeeds.

And so this month, with Ford rising rapidly in the polls, even overtaking
his opponent - Bob Corker, a typical tycoon-politician with a bland manner
masking sharp practice in his murky business dealings - the Bush Party got
serious and whipped out a barn-burning theme from days of yore: the "hot
black buck with nothing but white women on his mind." This was the
now-infamous advertisement that featured a scantily-clad, bottle-blond young
jezebel saying she'd met "Harold at the Playboy party" and asking him to
call her. (Ford, along with 3,000 other people, had attended a party thrown
by the magazine at the Super Bowl.) The ad, procured by the Republican
National Committee, was so ludicrously over the top that Corker was forced
to denounce it, while RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman washed his hands of it,
saying it had been created by an "independent organization" without the
Party's input.

It was, in fact, created by Scott Howell, an old Karl Rove hand who had
helped craft some of the biggest smear jobs in the last two election cycles,
including scaremongering attack ads for George W. Bush in 2004, as the New
York Times reports. Howell was hired for the Ford hit by professional
spinmeister Terry Nelson, who had been the political director of the 2004
Bush-Cheney campaign, where he worked cheek-by-jowl with a certain Ken
Mehlman. Despite these intricate threads knitting the race-baiters to the
White House, Mehlman continued to maintain, with a straight face, that he
had no idea what kind of ad his two old friends might concoct when he handed
them a big wad of cash for the operation.

The ad made the national news as a symbol of the unprecedented use of
gutterball in the 2006 campaign, was roundly condemned by pundits and
politicialns everywhere, got Nelson fired from a plum job as a "political
adviser" to Wal-Mart, evoked outpourings of sympathy for the victimized
Ford, and was finally yanked after just a few days on the air. It was an
ignominious failure in every respect but one:

It worked.

Corker, who'd been reeling in the polls for weeks, was suddenly back on top,
surging ahead five point after being down by that same margin at the first
of the month, as The Tennessean reports. Nor was he so wary of the ad now.
"Ever since that attention came on this race from the national media, our
numbers have skyrocketed," he told reporters as he held affable court in the
leather recliner on his campaign bus. In fact, the "Playboy" piece was
immediately followed by another "independent" ad so scurrilous and
inaccurate - falsely accusing Ford of, among other things, pushing abortion
pills on children - that some stations refused to run it, while Corker
himself then produced a widely aired radio spot that featured brooding
jungle drums every time Ford's name was mentioned.

Corker had called to "the base"- the hard-core conservatives who had
abandoned him after he won a bruising nomination fight against two of their
favorites - and they had come home. The seemingly irresistible momentum of
Ford's rise, which had carried him from also-ran status to the cover of
Newsweek, was stalled. Going into the final days of the campaign, his
five-point deficit in the published polls was probably much larger; every
black candidate must deal with a "shadow quotient" - a number of white
voters, usually 10 to 15 percent, who tell pollsters they are voting for the
African-American, but once in the booth pull the lever for the white
opponent.

It's old and tattered, and seems to come from another age, a vanished world,
but the race card can still win a hand. Especially in the South, where the
undead past exerts its ghostly pull on the tides of modern life.

II.
Of course, seamy slurs about sexual transgressions are being used by the GOP
all over the country, as the Washington Post reports. For example, New York
Democrat Michael Arcuri is being lambasted for "phone sex" because one of
his aides once misdialed a number for a government office and momentarily
got a porn line instead. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Ted Strickland has
been accused of being secretly gay and supporting sex with children: both
charges completely spurious - and both prime examples of Freudian projection
coming from the party of Mark Foley and his protectors. The list of leering,
panting, hand-beneath-the-raincoat Republicans muttering about sex in ads
paid for by "secret" committees goes on and on.

In one sense, then, the attack on Ford could be seen simply as part of a
broader smear operation focused on sex, not race. But this is sinister
sophistry. You cannot introduce such an ad in a contest between black and
white candidates without knowing full well what ugly spirits you are
summoning from the deep. Especially in the state which gave birth to the Ku
Klux Klan, and where, as across the South, the lynching of black men accused
of dallying with white women is well within living memory.

Tennessee wasn't the worst state when it came to that signature expression
of white power, ranking only sixth in the nation for total lynchings, behind
such champions as Mississippi, Georgia and Texas. Even so, hundreds died
here by noose, knife, gun and flame. Nor were these murders always furtive
affairs, kept from the eyes of good Christian society. Lynchings were often
carried out in a carnival atmosphere, with families bringing picnic baskets
and all the young'uns to watch the fun. Upcoming noose-fests and auto-da-fes
were even advertised in the newspapers. On one memorable occasion in Ford's
hometown of Memphis, more than 15,000 people gathered to watch the burning
of Ell Person, alleged killer of a teenaged white girl, as the Tennessee
Historical Society notes.

Side by side with the lynching - indeed far surpassing it in terms of depth
and reach through the black community - was the money angle. The end of
slavery didn't mean the end of servitude by any means. As each Southern
state was returned to the control of its defeated white elites after the
Civil War, they quickly gamed the legal system to provide them with a
virtually unlimited supply of convict labor - without rights, without
protection, in chains, under the bullwhip, just like the good old days. The
smallest infractions of the law, petty fines, bad debts - or often, nothing
at all but the need of the local bossman - swept multitudes of black men and
women into minor jail terms that would be extended by months, sometimes
years through draconian "fees" and "court costs" they would have to "work
off" - in the fields, in the mines, laying rail, building roads, draining
swamps. Savvy brokers contracted with state and local governments to manage
the trade in these convicts, many of whom were simply worked to death or
crippled for life. There was no profit in looking after them anymore; they
were no longer someone's valuable "property" but just so much
ever-replaceable fodder churning endlessly through the legal machine.

Freed but disenfranchised, emancipated but still in chains, balked by law
and brutal custom from full participation in society, the Southern blacks
also made handy targets to divert the anger and dissatisfaction of the "poor
white trash" from the elites that exploited them as well, albeit less
severely. If even the poorest white man could consider himself superior to
someone, if you could keep him tied up in psychological and emotional knots
about inferior darkies messing with his women, going to his schools, sitting
at his lunch counters, drinking from his water fountains, swimming in his
public pools, living in his neighborhoods, why then he'd never make common
cause with his black brothers and sisters in poverty to fight for a better
life. Canny patricians played whole decks of such race cards to win the
votes of the crackers and rednecks they privately despised: "Don't vote for
that commie over there talking about unions and fair wages and equality;
vote for me, vote for the man who'll keep your women and children - and your
drinking water - safe from the Negro!"

This was the system that built the "New South," and was openly maintained
and celebrated as late as the 1970s. And despite many cosmetic and some
substantive changes, you can still see it peering out from behind the modern
scenery at times, in incidents like Trent Lott's hymn of praise in 2002 for
Strom Thurmond's virulently race-baiting 1948 presidential campaign. For if
the mental habits and unexamined emotional states of subservience can last
for more than a hundred years, as in Jim's case that day on our back porch,
then certainly ingrained attitudes of racial superiority -and the seething
racial hostility bred by guilt and fear, by misdirected anger over economic
injustice, by sexual anxieties converted into powerful taboos- are still
very much alive in swathes of the white majority today, just a few decades
after these traits were being publicly exalted as lofty "traditional
values."

This history, this system is the real context for the RNC ad and Corker's
jungle drums. These are the deadly ghosts that the Republican Party has been
dancing with for decades in its "Southern Strategy" of fomenting white
resentment and marginalizing black political participation. Anyone who says
that such tactics are not racist is either a fool or a liar - or has no
Southern blood, where these restless spirits dwell.

_______
Chris Floyd

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson