Kent on the South

"The most interesting part of the United States today is the South. There is not the slightest doubt of that. . . . The growth here is greater than anywhere else; the changes are more vital and rapid; the tides of industry, agriculture and population are set in this direction; the real development is down in Dixie, not out in the West. It is plain as can be that in some more or less distant day the weight of wealth that has so long enabled East and North to dominate the rest of the country will be shifted to this section."

Able Baltimore Sunman* Frank R. Kent recently toured, then exposed, censured, praised the South. Blushingly he conceded that "all this sounds like the dull booming of a local Chamber of Commerce." Then, full-throated, he said, "The astounding thing is that the figures of the Birmingham growth and development, of Atlanta's march ahead, of the strides in the Winston-Salem and Durham districts, check up. The claims made cannot be discounted nor the statements of the extraordinary expansion refuted. The rise in Birmingham's population from 35,000 in 1900 to 250,000 in 1926 tells the story better perhaps than anything else."

Mr. Kent's clearly-defined, well-timed exposures of three important Southern topics may be summarized as follows:

The Negro. Academicians comfortably contemplating euphonious, equitable principles may well advocate social and political equality of Whites and Blacks.

Argumentative Yankees, long irritated by the South's faith in an inerrant Jefferson Davis, are likewise distressed by your "Colonel's" failure to perceive any analogy between violation of the 14th and the 18th Amendments. A Main Street inter-racial dialog illuminates the difference: White Man: "Can you vote down here?" Negro: "Oh, yes, sah, I kin vote all right--dat is I kin vote if I kin git registered, but I has been trying to git registered fo' de pas' ten years, and I is always jes' too late or jes' too early." (Other States give the sceptre to the Nordics by making constitutional knowledge prerequisite to the ballot, in which case Negro political aspirants are asked what is meant by the four kinds of ex post facto laws as set forth in the case of Calder v. Bull. One grinned his reply: "Boss, Ah guess dat means us niggers don't vote.")

The reason that "niggers don't vote," that there are no race-riots and little real racial antagonism in the South, is that the relative positions of Negroes and Whites are so well understood by both races that emphasis by snobbery and insults is unnecessary.

Anyway, no amount of agitation will secure the Negroes either the ballot or dinner invitations.

Governor Alfred E. ("Smiling") Smith. "In the light of the undeniable facts about Smith and his record, along with the repeated demonstrations of his ability to carry New York, few posted persons will dispute that the real bar to his selection as the Democratic candidate for President is his religion and not his attitude toward the Volstead Act. . . . While it is as well understood among his foes as among his friends that Mr. McAdoo is even now running again . . . the more deeply this situation is analyzed, the clearer it becomes that, if Smith, as now seems sure, runs again for Governor in New York and is for the fourth time elected, it will be practically impossible in 1928 for the Democratic convention to refuse him his chance at the Presidency because he is a Catholic."

Although Governor Smith's Wet Tammany background would cause Southern corner-grocerymen to crunch soda-crackers wrathfully, the repellent fact is that many an astute politician doubts any Roman Catholic's ability to carry states like Georgia where the Protestant-Catholic ratio is 120 to 1. But it seems clear that the South would remain solidly Democratic even for Governor Smith, if only for the reason that drawling rustics possess but the one choice of being Democrats or "nigger-lovers."

Politics. "It has been a matter of more or less general comment that the higher types that once made the Southern representation (in Congress) notable and distinguished are fast disappearing and an inferior grade taking their places . . . but . . . the fact is that when you start to criticize Alabama, or any other Southern State, for political backwardness, thoughts obtrude of Indiana, Jim Watson and his Klan-ridden domain; Iowa, Brookhart and his muddleheaded radicalism; Pennsylvania, the rough-necked Vare and a $3,000,000 primary; Massachusetts, Butler, his smug partisanship and self-righteous air. . . . The unfairness of picturing the South as the particularly politically decadent section is too manifest to ignore."

The science of politics no less than chemistry must explain such undesirable phenomena as Senator Heflin and Senator Blease; it does so by pointing to lack of party organization. Able, self-respecting despots like Senator Simmons of North Carolina or Colonel Ewing of Louisiana contemplate with pain such states as South Carolina, where "there is less pretense of a machine, of a boss, of discipline or cohesive political thought than exists in any other section of the country. Every primary is a free-for-all and no one has the remotest idea who is going to win until the votes are counted."

The shouting from such joint-debate campaigns is echoed by the tramp to Washington of men like "Colie" Blease. "Of all the men the South has sent to Washington in the past 20 years, he is easily the least creditable, the most blatant, brazen, bombastic blatherskite of them all. Shrewd, calculating and, they say in South Carolina, wholly insincere, Blease is a deliberate demagog--the type that laughs in his sleeve while he roars and tips his friends off to 'watch me do my stuff,' before he gets up to hammer the wolves of Wall Street, to accuse the diplomatic corps of drunkenness, or to dilate upon the evils of education."

Truly, Mr. Kent has exposed, censured, praised. Yet, in spite of fundamentalism, evangelism, illiteracy, and Senator Blease, his order of the day is to go South, Young Man.

*In Baltimore, people ask for Sun-papers both morning and evening.