Talking about leadership, just think about this for a minute. In
Arkansas, in Tennessee, in Florida, in Alabama and maybe one or two
other places in the South right after the war there emerged these
new-wave politicians. I wouldn't call them new South politicians, but
they were definitely different from what had been there before. What
characterized the difference more than anything else was their
willingness to thumb their noses at the machine politics that had run
state governments since forever.
In Arkansas it was a guy named Sid McMath. He was a war hero and he was a
pragmatic man who had no patience with all that hierarchical kind of
feudal stuff. He had been fighting the war for democracy and he came
home and he wanted some damn democracy. He wanted it right now, he was
impatient. He ended up being pretty consistently liberal even on racial
stuff, right on through. He came in the middle between—I can't remember
exactly now how this worked—but Ben Laney was the governor right after
him and may have been the governor just before him, too. Ben Laney was
one of the Dixiecrats. So, you have this sort of roller coaster thing.
Then you had Jim Folsom come into office in Alabama and nobody knew quite
what to do with Folsom, but he definitely was not your garden-variety
racist demagogue. Even Earl Long in Louisiana who was, I think,
inaugurated about that same time had his inauguration party in the
football stadium at LSU and served corn bread and buttermilk. It was
this kind of populous explosion and yet there was Herman Talmadge, and
Strom Thurmond, a couple of War heroes. They came from the same War, the
same darn experience and they came back and they couldn't have been more
reactionary and more backward focused.
What is it? Is it just personality? Or is it just the luck of the draw or
is there something deeper working here that retarded leadership at this
crucial time? Do you have any insight on what that was?