Burning Atlanta

AS A CONSERVATIVE WHO HAPPENS to live in the Atlanta metropolitan area, I was quite curious about a book that promised to explore the role of my adoptive hometown in “the making of modern conservatism.” I wondered what the author had in mind since, so far as I knew, no seminal “modern conservative” thinker or pioneering “modern conservative” political leader had his roots in Atlanta. Newt Gingrich is surely an interesting and important figure, but not even he would call himself a “maker of modern conservatism,” presumably deferring to men like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, not to mention the intellectuals so responsible for shaping the various schools of thought that comprise “modern conservatism.”

As it turns out, Princeton historian Kevin M. Kruse and I have very different views about what constitutes modern conservatism. For Kruse, modern conservatism is the ideological superstructure built upon “the politics of suburban secession,” which, in turn, simply represents a new and more sophisticated version of old-fashioned racism. What began as raw and unadulterated resistance–“massive” or otherwise–to integration became, in the crucible of conflict, “a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism.” Leading themes of contemporary conservatism–like school choice and privatization–have their roots, Kruse argues, in 1950s Atlanta, where whites both defended “their” neighborhoods and sought every way possible to avoid interacting with African-Americans in the public sphere.

Despite our notorious civic boosterism, we Atlantans will likely resist the temptation to take pride in the central place Kruse gives our city in his narrative. Atlanta is important, he contends, not because it is “everycity,” a paradigmatic case simply emblematic of struggles taking place across the country, but because it was Ground Zero in the confrontation between the civil rights movement and segregationists–a dubious honor we’re only too happy to cede to Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma, or Little Rock. While certainly the home of the King family and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Kruse inconveniently reminds us, also served as headquarters for a time of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as the home of “a number of the South’s leading segregationists . . . including Eugene and Herman Talmadge, Marvin Griffin, Calvin Craig, and Lester Maddox.”

Yes, but–this is only the first of a number of occasions on which Kruse overreads his evidence. Every Georgian will tell you that there has, since time immemorial, been an enormous difference between Atlanta and the rest of the state. The Talmadges and Griffins are actually rural Georgians, living in Atlanta only because the Governor’s Mansion is there. And like many Georgia politicians of that era, their bread and butter was running against the big city. To say that their segregationist leadership somehow bespeaks Atlanta is misleading. We’re then left with the undeniably Atlantan Lester Maddox and Calvin Craig, a 1960s-era KKK Grand Dragon, neither a figure of national stature and only Maddox of arguably regional significance.

Once you look a little more closely at the evidence, Kruse’s argument for the centrality of Atlanta begins to diminish. Atlanta may be paradigmatic, but it’s not obviously nationally influential. The booster in me heaves a sigh of relief.

Kruse’s portrait of the (perhaps exemplary) racial conflict in Atlanta is interesting and certainly adds to our understanding of the city by shining a light on some understudied facets of its recent history. Most accounts of Atlanta begin from Floyd Hunter’s seminal work, Community Power Structure (1953), which provided a detailed glimpse into the informal elite networks that undergirded the formal governmental structure. Clarence Stone’s Regime Politics (1989) updated Hunter’s argument and demonstrated how the white business elite had sought, and often found, interlocutors in the African-American community. More popular histories, like Gary Pomerantz’s Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn (1996) and Frederick Allen’s Atlanta Rising (1996) maintain their focus on the black and white elites, emphasizing their cooperation, and situating racial conflict in its context and at the margins.

To his credit, Kruse strikes out on a different path, focusing first on the working-class whites whose harsh and overt racism contributes only the occasional jarring note in the other accounts. Thus, we learn more than perhaps we wanted to know about the unabashedly fascist Columbians, who in the immediate aftermath of World War II briefly purported to represent whites in their struggles to defend their neighborhoods against African-American encroachment. Kruse offers a genealogy of white resistance to integration that begins with the Columbians, continues through the KKK, and culminates in much more “respectable” appeals to the middle class. He describes in great detail the ways in which particular neighborhoods responded to the efforts of black homebuyers and “realtists” (the standard term was then available only to whites).

When overt racial hostility didn’t work, it was replaced by appeals to defend “home, neighborhood and community.” When communal solidarity couldn’t withstand the pressures of the marketplace, appeals to individualism and choice came to the fore. The reader is left with the impression that because race and racism are the engines animating almost all political behavior, thought, and speech in the Atlanta of the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s, all the political arguments are merely opportunistic, chosen or invented to serve this deeper need.

If you want to believe that conservatives are essentially racist, you may be persuaded by Kruse’s account; but there are so many holes in it that a skeptic is certainly entitled to remain skeptical. Take, for example, the aforementioned genealogy. It is, in the first place, striking that the authorities went to great lengths to suppress the Columbians and the KKK. To be sure, “moderates” were behind this suppression, but Kruse’s account leaves us wondering whether these groups were ever anything more than marginal. He never offers any evidence of direct lines of influence from the more overt to the more respectable “racists.” Instead, his story simply encourages us to draw the conclusion that there must be a connection because, after all, these are whites confronting blacks over the issue of residential segregation. Given the context, anyone who defends neighborhood integrity must be a racist.

Furthermore, since in Kruse’s story the roots are supposed to be revealing, we’re invited to draw a line from the Columbians ultimately to suburban neighborhoods today. Leaving aside the class differences–Kruse himself often isn’t clear as to whether his subjects are working class or middle class, and uses that confusion to advance his argument–it is quite clear that most Atlanta suburbanites (roughly half of whom have arrived in the metropolitan area since 1980) have no idea what went on in neighborhoods they have never heard of in the decade or two before they were born.

If they care about community integrity, it has nothing to do with what happened in Adair Park in 1955. Likewise, if they apotheosize individual choice, it’s not as a response to the failure of the defense of community integrity in the 1950s. Rather, like those onetime Atlantans, they make use of, or are persuaded by, arguments that are in the air, an integral part of American political culture. That they use language and ideas also appropriated by people who may well have been racially motivated doesn’t make them racists.

Indeed, Kruse’s own argument makes use of the terms he tries to tar by their association with racial appeals. When working-class Atlantans sought to advance “communitarian” arguments to rally support for their white neighborhoods, Kruse tilts in the direction of the free market. When, in response to the working of the market, those white Atlantans fled to the suburbs, he blames them for evading their communal responsibilities. If Kruse can appeal to community without necessarily being a racist, so can anyone else. If Kruse can (within limits) celebrate the virtues of the marketplace without necessarily being a racist, so can anyone else.

If the arguments and positions are themselves free from essentially racial underpinnings, everything then turns on the direct personal connections and lines of influence. But where you would expect Kruse to offer them, they’re not forthcoming. This is clearest in his discussion of Howard “Bo” Callaway, who, in 1964, became the first Georgia Republican elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Kruse calls Callaway “a staunch segregationist in his own right” and asserts that he and Lester Maddox (his opponent in the 1966 gubernatorial campaign) “were virtually indistinguishable in their politics.” The evidence? Callaway said that “‘God, the individual, and free enterprise’ were the three ideals for which he stood,” a “statement which could easily have come from his opponent.” This is breathtaking. It would seem that otherwise neutral language appropriated by a racist becomes racist language. I can’t believe in God without being a racist? I guess all those African-American preachers ought to abandon their pulpits, lest they, too, be accused by Kruse of guilt by association.

Properly not satisfied with this slender evidence, Kruse tries to offer more. Callaway’s racism is said to be demonstrated by the zero he earned from Americans for Democratic Action, and by statements from two of his political opponents to the effect that he was too slick to avow his real views on race. Last I heard, we were entitled to doubt and discount politicians’ statements about the views of their opponents, but since Kruse can’t find a smoking gun, he has to make do.

But wait, there’s more: “[T]he rise of southern Republicanism, in the person of Bo Callaway and others like him, was largely due to the white backlash against the Civil Rights Act.” The evidence for this is supposed to be Barry Goldwater’s success in the South. But Goldwater’s own position, even as described by Kruse, is complicated: Not only did he regard Maddox as a “Stone Age” figure, but he also had no objection to–indeed, favored as “wise and just”–integrated schools, simply denying that the Constitution permitted federal intervention in the field of education. This is not a racist view, unless anything that favors limited government and strictly construing the Constitution is, by definition, racist. But that’s assuming what Kruse set out to prove.

Of course, many southern whites did, indeed, support Goldwater. Some were likely racists, as were some who voted for Lyndon Johnson. George Wallace took votes from both parties in 1968: The Republican presidential vote in Georgia dipped by almost 230,000 from 1964 and the Democratic vote by almost 190,000. Still, offered a frankly regional and racist appeal four years later, 388,000 conservative Georgians eschewed it and voted for Richard Nixon instead. To say that they’re almost all, nevertheless, racists is to assume what you have to prove.

Arguing for a position for which there is little or no direct evidence, Kruse has a tough row to hoe. Those darn Republicans and conservatives simply didn’t use overtly racial language in ways that could easily be documented. We’re left, one might say, with their behavior. They populated and continue to populate the suburbs (as, even in Atlanta, do a substantial number of liberal Democrats). They resisted and continue to resist incorporation in large metropolitan communities. Kruse would have us believe either that the racial motivation for this behavior hasn’t changed since the early 1960s, or that both the behavior and its justifications are tainted by a racist past. Any position once taken by a racist, any argument once made by a racist, ought to be unavailable to any right-thinking person, even if there are perfectly good nonracist grounds for holding the position or making the argument.

Take Kruse’s “suburban secession,” which, in Atlanta, had its roots in “white flight.” Were suburban sprawl historically and currently associated only with racial divisions in the United States, he might have a point. But sprawl is, for better or worse, a global phenomenon, even where racial divisions and tensions were never part of the picture. What’s more, like everyone else, when they were afforded the opportunity, African Americans fled to the suburbs, too. There are plenty of reasons why anyone might choose to do so–more space, larger, newer homes (often at better prices), better schools, greater apparent security. These may be mistaken or misguided choices, but they’re not driven by race.

But, Kruse might respond, what distinguishes American suburbs from their counterparts elsewhere is their political, moral, and social disconnection from the metropole, or central city. Fair enough: metropolitan government is a tougher sell here than elsewhere. But the reasons for it are not obviously racist, except in Kruse’s special sense: That is, they may once have been offered by racists, who appropriated them from the larger political culture.

Most suburbanites prefer not to render themselves vulnerable to the redistributive policies often associated with metropolitan government, not to mention the higher rates of taxation that often follow. Selfish? Perhaps. Racist? No. Most suburbanites would prefer neighborhood schools rather than the cross-town, cross-county, and cross-metropolitan programs called for by the most ambitious integration schemes. These are parents following their natural instincts to care for their children, and black parents demonstrably feel the same way, in many cases going so far as to favor another of Kruse’s “racist” policies, education vouchers or school choice.

As a spate of recent efforts to charter new cities in Atlanta’s suburbs suggest, suburbanites favor local political control over county, let alone metropolitan, government. Kruse would explain it all in terms of overt, covert, residual, or “objective” racism, but my friends and neighbors have a different view: What they perceive is a county government indifferent to their local concerns about untrammeled commercial growth, residential density, and traffic congestion. It’s not race, it’s quality of life.

Kruse’s gospel of suspicion would lead to the conclusion that, avowed or unavowed, it’s race. But he can only assume it, not prove it, especially in regard to the baby boomers and transplants who populate Atlanta’s suburbs, not to mention those of Nashville, Charlotte, Houston, and, if you will, Chicago, Minneapolis-St. Paul, or Los Angeles.

This isn’t to say that Kruse’s argument doesn’t have some rhetorical strength, regardless of the tenuousness and tendentiousness of its analysis. The genealogy of “modern conservatism” is intended to make “right-thinking” people shy away from opinions and positions once held by racists. If Lester Maddox once believed in “God, the individual, and free enterprise,” then, by golly, I should probably rethink my own positions. Well, maybe not.

But those on the other side of the spectrum can go to bed confident that, even if they’re losing elections, they’re morally superior to those conservatives who are really just dressed-up racists. As someone once said, “Good night, and good luck.”

Joseph M. Knippenberg is professor of politics and director of the Rich Foundation Urban Leadership Program at Oglethorpe University.