Jehovah of Tar Heels

About the Honorable Furnifold McLendel Simmons, senior United States Senator from North Carolina, there is nothing reminiscent of either God or the traditional Southern Senator.

For thirty years he successfully played God in his native province, and he has retained his seat in the Senate longer than any party colleague now sitting in that body.

In him one discovers nothing of the flashing eye, the craggy mien, the Bryanesque shine which one instinctively associates with the Lord God Jehovah and the Senator from the South.

Nevertheless, the man's deeds are worthy of the stateliest Neanderthaler who ever cooled his heels on a Capitol Hill desk, worthy even of Jehovah in His most waggish moments as reported by the Hebrew historians.

In all the gallery of illustrious rogues who have graced the Senate in the past, nor even ill Omnipotence Itself, could one find a talent capable of measuring up to what begins to emerge as Simmons' most notable achievement.

For the plain and horrible fact is that he is a Republican, and has always been Republican by every rational test.

For thirty years, sitting as a Democrat, he has served Republican causes and the Republican high priests, with all the power that has been his in the Senate and in North Carolina, with all the very power that he arrived at and has maintained by captaining the Democratic party in his State, by making himself the hero and veritable God of Hosts of its Democrats, to be worshipped blindly and drunkenly, and obeyed without question.

Thereby, quite incidentally but inevitably, he has brought about what no avowed Republican has ever been able to bring about.

He has lifted the Republican party in the State to fighting equality with its foe, and set North Carolina on a path that, according to every omen, must lead finally to Republican rule. That is the Simmons masterpiece.

So long ago as 1912, it was clear to his contemporaries in the Senate, and to all the nation with the exception of his infatuated, race-haunted constituency, that he was a Republican.

The Democrats were then at the height of the Progressive Liberalism which was to end with the War for Humanity. The Republicans, taking the other direction, had kicked the smelly liberalism of Roosevelt downstairs. It was a time of charming forthrightness. Sweetness and light had not yet been hatched. The

People were the Masses. The flaming rapier of their righteousness was, in theory, the Democratic party.

His is the story of a realist, moved only by self-interest, knowing exactly what he wants, and playing upon zanies and romantics to attain his ends.

His deeds are those of a scientist who has measured exactly the potentialities in the ferment of hate and fear in the minds of cowherds and cotton mill laborers on the one hand, and the bitter nostalgia for lost glories in the master class of the Old Days on the other.

His method has been the time-honored one of using the red herring. The tools with which he has attained and held his godhood have been the Black Man and the Cotton Mill.

Lately, however, he has replaced the Black Man with Great Moral Ideas.

It is necessary to understand that he came upon the stage in a period of transition.

Reconstruction, and the Black Man in Politics, was flaring for the last time.

A Republican governor, backed by a Republican Assembly, to make certain the Republican hold on the State, began the systematic enrollment of Negro voters, rained honors upon them, being particularly lavish in the creation of black magistrates.

Indignation swept the State. Violence broke out.

At Wilmington, a Negro editor, having cast aspersions on the virtue of the white female, was ordered to leave town. When he declined, a mob destroyed his printing plant. Rioting followed, with the net result that many blacks - the number is curiously indefinite - were killed and thrown into the Cape Fear river.

In that red hour Simmons, who had already shown his capacity as a local machine boss, was made chairman of the State Democratic Executive Committee.

A Democratic convention, dominated by him, adopted a White Supremacy platform. On the heels of it, Red Shirt Clubs, modelled on the Ku Klux Klan of thirty years before but differing from that organization in the absence of masks, night forays and violence, sprang up overnight to deflate the new-found glory of the black brother with ominous parades. On election day the black voter shivered at home behind closed shutters and the Democrats swept back to power.

The Republican party, convinced of the utility of attempting to rise on the shoulders of the black man, was to turn its back on him and spend the next thirty years in sackcloth and ashes, at the bitter task of rehabilitating itself in the esteem of the outraged whites.

But Simmons had emerged as the hero of the conflict.

In the popular mind he was the Little Giant of New Bern who single-handed had slain the dragon of Black Rule.

Once in power, he found the black man a weapon ready to his hand to keep him there.

He had grown up in the old river town of New Bern against the background of Reconstruction, and understood the morbid concern of his people with the menace of the black. Old bogeys live long in conservative communities.

Ghosts sway alike the merely ignorant and the backward-yearning romantic - the two classes which embrace the mass of North Carolinians. The shadow of the black man was to be as haunting in the next thirty years as the fact of him had been in the previous thirty.

Accordingly, Simmons made the Black Man his major theme. For thirty years, mounted on the Democratic ass, he rode forth, in fanfare of trumpets, to ghostly jousts which cheering thousands counted real.

The medium through which he fed the flame of this phobia was the so-called Simmons machine, which reached to the headwaters of every Little Buffalo and Sandy Run in North Carolina, into every alley of every Factorytown. It carefully planted as axiomatic in the people's mind the belief that its overthrow meant inevitable subjection to their ax-lackeys. He was the symbol of White Supremacy. Topple him, it toppled.

Behind them lies the Southern Power Company.

This huge corporation (now known as Duke Power), darling of the late Buck Duke, once a blood-brother to Blackbeard but now canonized in North Carolina, along with Dr. Wilson and Walter Hines Page of the Bended Knee, is generally credited with being the power behind all Simmons' activities.

Certainly, his record of smoothing the political pathway for its grabbing of water-power sites in North Carolina, of consistent voting with the Power Lobby in the Senate, and of opposition to the Power Trust inquiry indicates a close alliance, at least.

Cottonmills were rising upon the land. North Carolina was at the beginning of the era which was to lift her from turpentine and razorbacks to the forerank of Kiwanis.

The gentry were losing their ascendancy to coarser, more virile spirits. The Cannons, Reynoldses, and Dukes were emerging as the new masters of a new order. Simmons, with canny judgment, promptly aligned himself with them, and in that alliance is probably to be found the explanation of his interior Republicanism.

That was the situation when Al Smith loomed over the skyline and the pastors began to whet their bowie knives.

Now, just as his enemies were unlimbering their preliminary ballyhoo for Candidate Al, he struck again, this time below the belt. It was the thing they had told themselves ten thousand times could never happen. Was it not Simmons who had taught them to lisp "from constable to President"? Perish the thought! The Senator would never desert! But he did desert, announcing simply that, though he would support the State ticket, he would not vote for Smith.

It was a master stroke. Far from bringing down on his head the odium which is the portion of the turncoat, it definitely established him in the North Carolina mythology as a Man of Honor who placed Principle above Party, identified him forever with the rising philosophy of Great Moral Ideas, and increased his stature from that of a mere hero to that of a legendary figure, a tribal god.

More, it just as definitely established his foes within the Democratic party as a snide lot of time servers and bench warmers, placing Party above Principle, opposing Great Moral Ideas and potentially if not actually in the hire of the Pope.

Spiritually, and often enough in fact, they are the descendants of the Know Nothings of the '5os, a group which was strong in the State.

Hate for Catholicism is their inheritance.

They have been held in the Democratic party through tradition and the feeling that it was peculiarly the party of the South. But, unless I miss my guess, control of it will not soon return to the South, and, though it will not care to nominate another Catholic, it obviously is not, under its present leadership, going to repudiate its action in nominating the last one, the only possible thing that could clear it of the sour suspicion of these hinds.

Tradition, violated once, will not again deter them from expressing their apprehension at the polls. The entire group shows the tenacious fidelity to a single idea characteristic of Freudian cases in general.

The dread handwriting is on the wall. North Carolina is going Republican.

From the article by W J Cash in The American Mercury magazine 1929

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Simmons brought to the table in the elections of 1898 the idea of white supremacy. Here is a portion of the letter he wrote to white voters in order to win their vote.

To the Voters of North Carolina:

The most memorable campaign ever waged in North Carolina is approaching its end. The issues which have overshadowed all others have been the questions of honest and economical state government, and WHITE SUPREMACY.

The people of North Carolina are sufficiently intelligent to discriminate between good and bad government. They are sufficiently virtuous to want good and honest government. They have seen the government of the last two years, and they recognize it to be bad and corrupt . . . public opinion.

The horrible condition of affairs in the eastern counties and the progress there of Negro domination over white communities raised the question of whether in any part of North Carolina men of Anglo-Saxon blood should be subjected to the rule and mastery of the Negro . . . by the threat of federal bayonets.

The business of two of the largest and most prosperous cities in the state had been paralyzed by the blight of Negro domination.

White women, of pure Anglo-Saxon blood, had been arrested upon groundless charges by Negro constables, and arraigned and tried and sentenced by Negro magistrates....

Negro congressmen, Negro solicitors, Negro revenue officers, Negro collectors of customs, Negroes in charge of white institutions, Negroes in charge of white schools, Negroes controlling the finances of great cities, Negroes in control of the sanitation and police of cities, Negro constables arresting white women and white men, Negro magistrates trying white women and white men, white convicts chained to Negro convicts and forced to social equality with them....

And this, from a recent Raleigh(NC)News & Observer:

A pair of powerful senators

By ROB CHRISTENSEN, Staff Writer Sunday, January 5, 2003, The Raleigh News and Observer