In his autobiography, the Italian-American manager Lee Iacocca (baptismal name Lido Antonio, whose parents Nicola and Antonietta had left for America from the outskirts of Naples), general manager of Ford from the 1970 to the '78 but known above all for having restored and relaunched Chrysler in the first half of the '80', reports an episode that says a lot about the depth of the roots of a social psychology that somehow has proved to be still present in the South of the United States.
In the 40 years Iacocca worked in the sales department of Ford, in the Chester office, in Pennsylvania, and in the 1949 he became director of the Wilkes-Barre area. When at the end of the same year the time came to make his first business trip to the South, his area manager and mentor, Charlie Beacham, born and raised there, called him to give him some tips.
Among other things Beacham tells him: your name won't like it. So here's what I want you to do. Say you have a very strange first name - Iacocca - and your surname is Lee. You will see that in the South you will like your name as their hero. And in fact it reminds of Iacocca: liked it very much. At each meeting I started with that version and got excited. In that way I managed to disarm all the southerners. They passed over the fact that I was a Yankee, and moreover an Italian, and I was accepted as one of them. (“An autobiography”, Sperling & Kupfer, 1986).
After about 4 generations, more than 80 years after the end of the War of Secession, for the majority of the inhabitants of the South, General Robert Edward Lee, first in command of the army of North Virginia and since February 1865 commander in chief of the army Confederate, it was still their hero.
A curious and illuminating example of what was the social climate that was breathed in the period immediately following that fratricidal conflict, can be found in the history of the factors that led to an important juridical innovation in the field of private law relations: the contract of commercial affiliation or franchise, whose introduction dates back to the day after the American Civil War.
With the end of hostilities some northern businessmen tried to open a network of branches and sales points in the territories of the former Confederation but following incendiary or explosive attacks these structures were regularly destroyed.
To avoid the continuous sabotage of their company settlements, Yankees industrialists and traders stipulated a series of agreements with local entrepreneurs to whom they granted the exercise of their own distribution activity with attached use of the brand and sign, limiting themselves to elaborate some general guidelines to which the southern concessionaires had to comply in carrying out the activity.
In a certain sense the use of franchising agreements was a counter-insurgency provision and it can be assumed that the United States had made their first significant counter-insurgency experience precisely on the occasion of the setting and subsequent conduct of a policy of pacification of Dixie Land.
For reasons of historical-descriptive convenience, in treating the events relating to the Civil War there is always a tendency to adopt a scheme that identifies a sequence of three phases: the approach of conflict, actual combat and reconstruction. In reality, the difficulties that would inevitably have accompanied the latter were already present in the political evaluations of the unionist ruling class well before the end of the war.
Whatever one defines it, political reintegration of the South in the United States or creation of a network of post-emancipation social relations, the Reconstruction started in practice when the first Union soldier set foot in the so-called "Confederation". The problem of what would be the fate of the South once conquered or attracted back into the Union still existed before the war (Reid Mitchell, "The American Civil War", the Mill, 2003).
Not for this reason the pacification of the South and effective reconciliation were less problematic, and the fault lines within the Lincoln administration itself and subsequent federal governments further complicated matters.
For about a decade, the insurrectionary legacy of the War of Secession has found expression in the picturesque costumes, in the crosses of fire, in the extravagant rituals and violent raids (baptized with bombastic names: Horrible Sepulcher, Bloody Moon, Last Hour), of so-called "loyal chivalrous order" of the Ku Klux Klan.
The original nucleus of this organization was formed by 6 young former Confederate soldiers who on Christmas Eve of 1865 abandoned the gray uniform a few months ago (a few weeks ago for some, given the complicated and staggered surrender calendar of the various departments that formed the 'army of the South), met in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee, and in the study of Judge Thomas M. Jones they "formalized" the birth of the Ku Klux Klan.
The name, which had been chosen with the intention of giving the association (since the denomination) a suggestive halo of mystery, descends in its first part from the Greek word kuclos (circle, circle), while klan was a tribute to Scottish origins of some of the founding members. The latter, which the delusional rhetoric of which the Klan and its sympathizers are imbued with will define "the six immortals", were called: Calvin E. Jones, John B. Kennedy, John C. Lester, James R. Crowe, Richard R. Reed, Frank O. McCord.
To tell the truth, later on none of them ever proved particularly interested in the "political" commitment or took seriously the aims that the organization that had helped to found and, as far as is known, the components of the original group participated in actions of some importance. After all, all six came from establishment families and not long after they undertook a respectable and well-paid career in the liberal professions.
However the fuse had been lit and the flammable material was certainly not lacking: the Confederate currency was heavily devalued, the prospect of a generalization of emancipatory decrees threatened to subvert the whole economy of a certain South accustomed to the comfort afforded by the work of the slaves.
The Nordic and republican imprint of the reconstruction policy that they tried to graft onto the ashes of secession and slavery, made it particularly hateful in the eyes of what remained of the southern economic, political and military elites, who still exercised a strong despite the defeat taken over one's own people.
The Congress had launched the Office of Refugee and Liberated Slaves, a political-administrative body with which the aim was to extend federal authority in economic affairs and in the production and implementation of legislation to reform the regulation of social relations throughout the South.
In every state the Republicans organized themselves to give concrete implementation to the Civil Rights and the XIV amendment (both of the 1866), which met the intransigent opposition of the conservative white majority whose interests were traditionally represented by the Democratic Party.
As everyone knows, the latter has definitively amended his racist past by expressing (with the election of 4 November 2008), the first African-American president of US history (in the photo, the president on the right), thus completing a journey of " liberal mutation "started with the presidential mandates of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. The latter (who signed the 2 July 1964 Civil Rights Act), converted to the civil rights case after speaking out against extending the suffrage for blacks early in his political career in Texas.
In this picture the Ku Klux Klan did not take long to go from what was little more than a playful goliardia of the beginning, to organized terrorist violence. At the 1867 conference held at the Maxwell House Hotel in Nashville, Tennessee, the participants elected Nathan Bedford Forrest as head of the Knight Order ("Great Wizard of the Unseen Empire", according to their terminology). During the war he had distinguished himself as one of the most brilliant cavalry commanders of the Confederate army and before that he had been plantation owner and slave trader.
In Forrest we owe the first true organization of the Klan based on a military-inspired model articulated in bands composed of a minimum of 20 to a maximum of 60 men who, acting as light formations, carried out their punitive night expeditions aimed at hitting liberated blacks , progressives whites, teachers of schools attended by black students, Jews and Catholics.
The members of the association were in fact an expression of the traditional dominant class identified by the acronym WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), and although blacks were undoubtedly the favorite target, they did not disdain to take it out on "Jewish conspirators" and "papists" Romans ", which naturally led to targeting the Irish (mostly Catholics), and the Italians.
The country of origin of the latter was defined pejoratively as "Dago" or "Wop", terms translated into Iacocca's memoirs as "Terronia", and the former top manager (born 15 October 1924), remembers how he usually came in his youth labeled - despite living in Allentown, Pennsylvania, which was certainly not a Klan stronghold - with the nickname of "little wop" that sounds like "terroncello".
In hindsight, the incursions of the self-styled "defenders of the supremacy and purity of the white race" did not require who knows what military skills: the disintegration of the law and of the characteristic order of every post-war period, the tolerance or the real complicity of numerous local authorities and the aid of the night made these businesses easy and risk-free.
However, what seemed to be an unstoppable extension of the Klan's organizational network - largely attributable to the work of General Forrest (photo on the left) and his friendships with former officers of the Confederate army - and his rooting in the social fabric and in the political institutions of the South, they constituted a problem that could not be underestimated.
In a report from the beginning of the 1868, William Carlin, a former major general unionist commanding the first division of the XIV Corps, became director of the Office for Refugees and Slaves Liberati wrote: The organization of the Klan is so extensive and so well organized and armed that the possibility of putting a moral or legal restraint on its deeds is unthinkable. The strength of the weapons is the only one that can bring them back to order.
The culmination of the KKK violence was recorded in the second half of the 1868 in Arkansas, where in the 3 months preceding the November 3 elections (which saw the appointment of Ulysses Grant, former commander-in-chief of the Union, as president) who will be re-elected in the 1872), no less than 200 murders were committed. This apparent show of force will trigger the reaction that will mark the end of the Ku Klux Klan's first cycle of activity.
In the aftermath of the elections, the governor of Arkansas, Powell Clayton, decreed martial law and territorial militia departments (ancestor of the US National Guard to be officially established in 1916), divided the State into 4 military districts in which they started a methodology mopping up, with arrests and frontal clashes against the Klan gangs that disintegrated in a few months.
Having to face the troops of the militia was very different thing from making night raids taking advantage of the surprise factor and the weakness of the victims. Furthermore, the advantage of the complicity of the local authorities who had been taken out of the martial law had also failed.
In the spring of the 1869, the Ku Klux Klan of Arkansas was practically annihilated and in the other states it was not long to imitate the "Clayton model": martial law, special courts, mobilization of the militia and intervention by federal troops, put an end to the 1873, to the KKK as an element of organized guerrilla warfare and an instrument of political influence, at least for the following 40 years. In fact, after this first phase the history of the Klan recorded two other important cycles of activity in the years between the two world wars and from the mid-50 to the beginning of the '70.
Local groups of associations that in some way refer to the KKK tradition are still present in the United States but their hold on the social fabric (except for sensational flashbacks), is reduced to a residual level and the last truly mass gathering - convened by the then "Imperial Wizard" Robert M. Shelton, a former worker in a rubber factory, originally from Tuscaloosa, Alabama - dates back to the spring of 1971.
Although in the initial phase its members undoubtedly recognized themselves in Forrest's charismatic leadership, the Klan never had a centralized hierarchical structure that would coordinate its actions. The various sections responded only to local leaders, among whom in the last period strong rivalries were born. The gathering convened by Shelton was in fact an attempt to smooth out internal conflicts but proved to be a failure.
In all this history, however, it must be borne in mind that the repressive activity alone could not erase the social basis that was recognized in the symbology and proclamations of the Klan and to which the latter, despite all its strangeness, had given representation having in the end of direct expression accounts.
In the 1873, once put in a position not to harm the possessed white knights, the questions of reconstruction and pacification of the South remained open and these will remain for several decades.
The devastation caused by the war was compounded by the damage caused by the greedy speculations of the "robber barons" (barons thieves), a lever of entrepreneurs who, as the nickname with which they passed into history, in taking their business forward did not concern themselves with certainly the possibility of generating positive repercussions for the South, limiting itself to plundering its resources.
Being able to count on a fertile land, a mild climate and sufficient rainfall: the Tennessee valley seemed destined to become a second California. But then, at the end of the nineteenth century, the robber barons capitalism had arrived [...] In the space of a few years the forests were cut down, causing massive soil erosion and transforming large areas of fertile land into a lunar landscape (Wolfgang Schivelbusch, "3 New Deal. Parallelisms between the United States of Roosevelt, Italy of Mussolini and Germany of Hitler. 1933-1939", Tropea Editore, 2008).
Noting that for the reconstruction of the South one could not rely on "animal spirits" and that (in spite of what Adam Smith claimed), rarely does the free satisfaction of individual egoisms spontaneously lead to the satisfaction of the collective interest and to social harmony , to revive the fortunes of the South another type of policy was opted for, which registered a strong acceleration in the 1933, at the beginning of the first term of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
As already seen on other occasions, the public investment cycle started with the New Deal has played a fundamental role in the economic development of the South and in this sense it can be considered the first real reconstruction project after the Civil War, having laid the foundations for the effective all-round reintegration of Dixie Land into the Federation.
From this emerges the dual nature that characterized the New Deal which for the United States represented the response to the Great Depression, while also performing the function of a sort of internal Marshall Plan.
It can be assumed that this constituted the real turning point for the economic rebirth of the South which was accompanied by its rise in terms of political influence and in both paths the cutting edge is represented by the State of Texas.
About 20 years after the start of the New Deal, the Texas National Democratic Party boasted the most powerful congressional delegation in Washington and had installed its men in key places that allowed them to control the prices of the main foodstuffs (corn, rice, wheat and fruit), the cultivation and sale of cotton, as well as the allocation of funds to the Defense, the energy policy (with the oil component in mind), and finally the realization of public works.
Lyndon Johnson's presidency, initially replacing Kennedy (22 assassinated November 1963 in Dallas), and then 1964 election winner, marks a watershed in the relationship between the South and major US political forces, which in both the alignments certainly did not lack their good dose of transformism, with a substantial reversal of roles with respect to the first Civil Rights of the 1866.
Regarding the vote of the southern states in the 1968 elections, the democrat Hubert Humphry managed to assert himself only in Texas, while in the rest of the South the independent George Wallace (former governor of Alabama), and the former vice president of Dwight " Ike "Eisenhower, Richard Nixon who reported victory in the race for the White House.
Although he had supported the anti-segregationist normative component, Nixon proved adept at challenging the civil rights provisions approved by the Johnson administration (which also ended up weighing the constant worsening of the situation in Vietnam as a rock), presenting them as a kind of creeping attack on traditional US values, so dear to the "silent majority" of Americans.
The Republican candidate accused the Democratic Party leaders of having proved incapable of managing the social reflexes of that legislation and ended up turning their back even on the white and unionized but conservative-minded working class (traditionally part of the democratic electorate and including Nixon's campaign will break through, to run after blacks and intellectuals.
The process that marked the return to a leading role in the South in the US economy and politics, was combined with the shift in the electoral weight of this region from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and the political parabola of the Bush dynasty is emblematic of this repositioning.
At the end of the 40 years George Bush senior (after graduating in economics at Yale in 1948), moved from New England to Texas where he made his fortune in the oil industry. Later he also became a leading exponent of the Republican Party of the State, reorganizing in particular the section of Houston that will be the springboard for a political career that will take him to the White House, first as vice in both Ronald Reagan's mandates (1981 -1989), and then, from the 1989 to the 1993, as president, a position then also covered by his son George Walker Bush (former governor of Texas), from 2001 to 2009.
Certain electoral rhetoric, in chasing the vote of what it considers the "average southernist", it condones, and not infrequently tickles, the visceral impulses that are expressed in the typical anti-establishment invectives (therefore anti-Washington, identified as the headquarters of the corrupt and oppressive federal bureaucracy), ignoring the fact that for decades the same ruling class in the South (and through this the social demands connected to it), is an integral part of that establishment in all its forms: big industry, high finance , editorial-media chains, political elite, grand commis, etc.
This implies that, even in the Deep South, any presidential candidate must inevitably come to terms with the establishment sooner or later, because if we think about it carefully, we realize that there are not a few areas that make up the social fabric of the South to benefit from a direct relationship with the much-reviled federal institutions, given that: the aerospace industry depends on the budgets of NASA and the Pentagon, the agri-food sector (which, for example, including cattle breeding, accounts for 20% on Texas GDP), it is fed by state subsidies and the oil industry enjoys protection from hydrocarbon imports from the Middle East.
On balance, with their presidential mandates the two George Bushes embodied the political recognition of the definitive fulfillment of the process of reconstruction and reintegration of the South that had been the object of concern at the highest institutional levels from the moment in which the first Union soldier set foot in the so-called "Confederation".
(photo: web / Palazzo Chigi / White House)
