Category: Change

I recently read ‘Rising Tide’ by John M. Barry, a book whose focus is on the 1927 Mississippi flood and man’s efforts to control that mighty river. It is much more sprawling in scope than simply flood and river management.

What led me to the book was interest in Walker Percy, the 20th century author, and his roots. Percy’s family was Southern aristocracy, the most notable being his great uncle, LeRoy Percy. LeRoy and his son, Will, are central characters in ‘Rising Tide’. [Will raised Walker upon the death of Walker’s parents.] LeRoy was a plantation owner in the Mississippi delta. He recognized the need to control the Mississippi to develop and preserve the farm lands. He also saw the need to keep African Americans in Mississippi to sharecrop the land, this at a time when many were moving to northern cities. His views were in many ways prejudiced, but he was enlightened in his view of race relations by the standards of his day. In the 1920s the Klan was on the rise, not only in southern states, but Indiana, Colorado and elsewhere. The Klan was not focused solely on blacks. It opposed Catholics, Jews and change.

These are excerpts from the book, pages 136 and 137:

“The 1920s Klan had roots that ran deep in America. It was racist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic. Yet it represented not only bigotry, but a desire to find an anchor in a sea of change, to shrink the large world into a smaller, more understandable one.

The nation was both striding into and resisting the modern age.

…

The tensions contained within those two nations – the one surging forward, the other clenching tight – grew out of more fundamental shifts.”

Barry summarizes the Klan activity on page 154: “The Klan of the 1920s represented something in America, frightening because it ran so close to the mainstream…The Klan’s target was change. Out of fear the Klan enforced a populist conformity…the Klan of the 1920s does fit uncomfortably close to America’s populist tradition. American populism has always been a complex phenomenon containing an ugly element, an element of exclusivity and divisiveness. It has always had an ‘us’ against a ‘them’. The ‘them’ has often included not only an enemy above but also an enemy below. The enemy above was viewed as the boss, whether a man like Percy, or Wall Street, or Jews, or Washington; in the 1920s the enemy below was Catholics, immigrants, blacks and political radicals.”

Barry writes of the flood of immigrants, many from eastern and southern Europe, people foreign and different to Americans. The country tried to re-create a sense of small-town community.

“Then, during the World War, President Woodrow Wilson turned the desire for community into something foul by encouraging, manipulating, and exploiting the nation’s fears.”

LeRoy Percy condemned the Sedition Act, and wrote, “If this country lives through the scholarly idiocy of the present administration, Providence must surely be watching us.”

The description of 1920’s America applies today, almost 100 years later. Our world is changing. Coal mining is dead. But that culture and its people cling to a fantasy that it will return, fed by the lies of a megalomaniac who will say anything to promote his warped agenda. Today’s headlines feature Klan protest in Virginia, one more incident in a rising tide of right wing action.

LeRoy Percy fought the Klan despite political cost to himself [he lost his Senate reelection campaign in a landslide]. He did succeed in keeping the Klan out of his area of influence. He told a friend who argued that opposition to the Klan would feed it, “Nothing that is founded on pure absurdity can long survive.”

Percy spoke against the Klan publicly, “[Klansmen] are guilty of one grave defect. They are lacking in a sense of humor. You know humor is the saving grace of human life. It enables you to get a proper perspective, size things up in their true proportion.”

On his reelection defeat, Percy wrote, “If I can keep this small corner of the United States in which I reside, comparatively clean and decent in politics and fit for a man to live in, and in such a condition that he many not be ashamed to pass it on to his children, I will have accomplished all that I set out to do. A good deal has been written about ‘shooting for the stars.’ I have never thought much of that kind of marksmanship. . . .I rather think it is best to draw a bead on something that you have a chance to hit. To keep any part of Mississippi clean and decent in these days, is a job that no man may deem too small.”

***I highly recommend ‘Rising Tide’ by John M. Barry.