So suburban white animosity toward blacks was repeated in the treatment of poor whites. Smith found that the formerly poor southern white and the upwardly mobile immigrant population had something in common: “What everyone has always wanted in this country, what most came here for, was to get away from all those others who smell bad, are sleeping in a shanty, and are eating fatback and are going to loaf tomorrow because there is no job to go to.” Moving up meant staying ahead of those still trapped in the “poverty ditch.” But rather than help others escape destitution, this new addition to the middle class deeply resented a government that wasted money on the poor.16
Democrat Robert Byrd of West Virginia fit this mold. Newly elected as the Senate whip in 1971 by beating the patrician Edward Kennedy, he was, as the New York Times Magazine quoted, the “po white kid that could climb to the seat of the mighty and whip millionaires.” An orphan, a former butcher and grocer who boasted having Lyndon Johnson as his patron, Byrd made his mark by attacking welfare, rioters, and communism. He hired investigators to kick cheaters off the welfare rolls in Washington, DC. Rioters, he declared with marked callousness, deserved to be mowed down, and looters shot on sight “swiftly and mercilessly.” Byrd made himself one of the most hated men in the Senate, where he was compared to Dracula, Jekyll and Hyde, and Uriah Heep—the obsequious, greedy, upwardly mobile clerk in Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield. After Byrd became whip, one top Senate aide remarked that Democrats would now have to look up at the “pinched Mephistophelian features of a redneck who made good.”
Byrd referred to people on welfare as “fornicating deadbeats.” He even appeared unsympathetic to children obtaining government assistance: if they were merely hungry, but not starving, they did not merit aid. As a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Byrd conveniently distinguished welfare recipients in the District of Columbia (mostly black) from the deadbeats of his home state of West Virginia. Thus he made no effort to root out welfare cheaters among the mountain whites; they were his ticket into politics. In his first run for office, he courted the hillbilly crowd by playing fiddle tunes in the backseat of a car as he went from shack to shack. Reenacting the old tale of the Arkansas traveler, he cleverly played both roles in the nineteenth-century drama: the poor white and the ambitious politician. The New York Times declared Byrd to be the “embodiment of poor white power.” He was Lillian Smith’s angry redneck, who had “hacked his way out of the bushes” of poverty. As a symbol of political intolerance, he was as ruthless as they came.17
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At the other end of the spectrum was the Georgian Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat who, when elected in 1970, appeared on the cover of Time as one of the “new southern governors.” Though decades removed from odious southern politicians like James Vardaman and Eugene Talmadge, Carter still had to run a “redneck” campaign in order to win. He could not ignore the example of Alabama governor George Wallace, who could ignite the white man’s rage. To capture the votes of blue-collar and rural voters, Carter painted his equally liberal opponent Carl Sanders as a corporate lawyer out of touch with the average man. Nicknaming Sanders “Cuff Link Carl,” Carter’s staff devised a television commercial with a closed country club door and a voice-over saying, “People like us aren’t invited. We’re too busy working for a living.” Carter’s team circulated the ugliest pictures of their candidate they could find in order to make him look like a poor country boy—in some he was riding a tractor. His money came from the honest trade of peanut farming, and from a warehousing operation—or so the logic went. Jimmy Carter was not one of the “Big Wigs” in Atlanta or Washington.18
During the runoff election, Sanders’s team went on the offensive, producing flyers with photographs of the run-down homes of the tenants on Carter’s peanut farm. The flyer’s caption played off Carter’s own slogan: “Isn’t it time someone spoke up for these people?” The most damning of the opposition flyers had Carter climbing into bed with a racist leader. Here Carter was drawn as a clownish, barefoot redneck—the absurdity exacerbated by his polka-dotted suit. The point was that he was a leopard who could change his spots, manipulating his class identity just enough to satisfy politically conservative voters. The attack was not far from the truth: Carter was okay with alienating black voters in the primary, but in the general election he shifted, toning down his redneck appeal.19
As a politician, Carter was forced to endure a screening of Deliverance in Atlanta in 1972. He remained wary of its promoters’ claim that the film was good for the state. Indeed, James Dickey and Jimmy Carter were two Georgians who had absolutely nothing in common. Carter was a Baptist and had a teetotaler wife, while Dickey was an outrageous alcoholic and an egomaniac, born to wealth. Haunted by insecurity after a pampered and effeminate youth, Dickey reinvented himself as the child of hillbillies—one of the many lies he told about himself. His North Georgia relatives were actually large landowners, whose past holdings included a considerable number of slaves.20
Dickey’s novel, published in 1970, was a tortured exploration of lost manhood, an attempt to recover his “inner hillbilly.” On the surface, the novel (and film) is about four men on a canoe trip in Appalachia. When the chubby bachelor Bobby (Ned Beatty) is raped in the movie by one of the mountain men, he is called a “sow” and told by his attacker to “squeal like a pig.” In the psychosexual thriller, the dandified city folk aren’t merely given their comeuppance; they are forced to rediscover their primal instincts. Dickey saw this as a good thing, and his hero ends up a stronger man. In one interview, the novelist admitted that the lure of the backcountry was to him the possibility of one’s becoming a “counter-monster,” behaving as men did who lived in remote parts, “doing whatever you felt compelled to do to survive.” In the novel and film alike, the city men commit two murders, conceal the death of one of their traveling companions, Ronny Cox’s character Drew, and make a pact never to reveal what happened on their ill-fated trip. Rechristened as blood brothers, the surviving trio carry their dark secrets away with them.21
Drew had to die. He was the only one of the four Atlanta businessmen who showed any compassion for rural people. He reached out to the idiot-savant teenager after their banjo-and-guitar duet. (Lonnie, the character in the novel, was supposed to be an albino.) The film’s message was clear: sympathy was a sign of weakness that city boys had to overcome. Only by resorting to violence and taking a vicarious plunge into the uncensored psyche of the backwoodsman could they recover their feral redneck roots.22