When the federal judge handed down his desegregation order in January 1956, Clinton’s municipal leaders assumed that whites in the town would follow their lead and obey the court’s ruling, and they made no contingency plans for how they would respond if relations in the town disintegrated. They did not recognize that the segregationist protest movement had begun over a year earlier when the federal government desegregated Oak Ridge’s schools. 264
As a military installation, Oak Ridge was subject to the executive orders that
desegregated the armed services. In September 1955, one hundred black students enrolled in the town’s junior high and high schools. That event introduced the previously inconceivable possibility that other schools in the county would desegregate as well. Alarmed by that prospect, a group of local whites founded a chapter of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government. When the order to desegregate Clinton High came in January
Clinton Courier-News, August 30, 1956, 1:1.
1956, the chapter mobilized. Over the next few months, they assembled a mailing list of sympathizers and sent a representative to lobby Tennessee’s Congress, asking the
representatives to pull state funds from any desegregated schools. They also spread the word that desegregation in Tennessee had begun. In response, chapters of the Tennessee Federation for Constitutional Government popped across the state. The new members sent money back to Anderson County to fund the resistance efforts there. 265
While the Federation’s members lobbied for outside support, other segregationists in Anderson County began planning for local resistance efforts. In late July 1956, they
circulated a petition protesting the desegregation of the high school. Over four hundred county residents signed it. As the beginning of the school year neared, they also organized protestors who agreed to stand outside the high school and demonstrate. “‘Nobody [from the outside] told us to do it,” a picketing teenager told The Oak Ridger on the first day of classes. “There was supposed to be a lot more of us but they didn’t show up. They just talked
big.’” 266
Few among the middle class joined the militant segregationists’ efforts. Almost all of the individuals who signed the petition came from two white working-class neighborhoods: the houses clustered in the textile mill village of South Clinton and Rural Route Two, a county road leading through the heart of Anderson County’s farm land. All the individuals 267
June Adamson, “The Lit Stick of Dynamite: Clinton, Tennessee Faces Brown v. Board of
265
Education” (Oak Ridge, TN: by the author, 1999), 100-01.
Clinton Courier-News, November 15, 1956, 1:1, 1:4; The Oak Ridger, August 27, 1956, 1-2.
266
Many of the individuals who signed the petitions provided their addresses so that their residency
267
within the county could be established, which helped fight the charge that segregationist activists from other counties had signed in lieu of the local whites.
who were later arrested for their activities also came from those two neighborhoods or others like them.
Class tensions had long divided Anderson County’s white population, and the installations at Norris and Oak Ridge exacerbated those differences. Though Clinton was a small town, the two classes of whites worked, socialized, worshipped, shopped and ate at different locations. As a result, the middle-class white Clintonians who led the town had little social contact with the white working class, which meant that they had very little
understanding of working-class grievances. Because of their isolation from the workers, 268 middle class whites did not understand how much anger was brewing among the working white community. 269
Sometimes white working class dissatisfaction was expressed in labor strikes. In both 1941 and 1955, for instance, striking laborers and their sympathizers flooded into downtown Clinton, converged on the courthouse lawn and threatened to dynamite the mayor’s house, activities that were repeated during the riots of 1956. Other times, working-class and middle- class whites battled each other over social issues. In 1956, just a few months before
desegregation began, these class differences blossomed into a debate over moonshine whiskey, which was a popular and profitable business in Anderson County.
The county’s mountain farmers were cut off socially, economically and
geographically from the rest of the county. Because it was difficult for them to transport
I am defining “social contact” as interactions that are friendly and equalitarian; Vincent Jeffries and
268
H. Edward Ransford, “Interracial Social Contacts and Middle Class White Reactions to the Watts Riots,”
SOCIAL CONTACT 16 (Winter 1969),313.
Celdon Lewallen of Clinton, TN, interview by author, October 22, 2005, Clinton, digital recording,
269
produce to market, some of them turned to the illegal liquor trade and distilled their corn into moonshine. Though prohibition had ended several decades earlier, many middle-class whites in Clinton remained teetotalers. Furthermore, municipal leaders could not allow this trade to go untaxed and unchecked, so they periodically launched campaigns aimed to halt the bootlegging. They began one such attempt in January 1956. 270
The first arrest came on January 5 when officers found and destroyed a one hundred gallon still along the banks of the New River, a stream that flows through the isolated eastern edge of the county. The next week, they apprehended a man who was transporting fourteen half-pints of whiskey. Two weeks later, they arrested another man for hiding five-and-a-half gallons of moonshine in his corncrib. He was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary. At that point, the campaign accelerated. By February 16—when the deputies busted up
Raymond Harvey’s two stills and confiscated his whiskey—the officers had found and destroyed fifty-three stills in six weeks. 271
The raids did not put a significant dent in the bootleg whiskey trade, however. Two years later the sheriff found the largest still ever captured in Anderson County to that date. It held one thousand gallons of liquor, and its operator had twenty barrels of mash and more than forty half-gallon jars, which the Clinton Courier-News estimated would be “enough to supply the average housewife for twenty years.” Nearby, officers found two more stills of similar size. One was under construction, and the third had been discarded recently. The same
Anna Holden, Bonita Valien and Preston Valien, Clinton, Tennessee: A Tentative Description and 270
Analysis of the School Desegregation Crisis Field Reports on Desegregation in the South (New York: Anti-
Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, 1957), 3-4; Clifford R. Seeber, Good Morning, Professor (Sl: self published, 1977), 17-18; Clinton Courier-News, October 11, 1956, 1:1.
Clinton Courier-News, October 11, 1956, 1:1; ibid., January 5, 1956; ibid., January 12, 1956; ibid.,
271
week, Oliver Springs’ officers found a one-hundred-twenty gallon still, seventeen gallons of whiskey and seventy gallons of mash. 272
As the white supremacist movement gained momentum, they drew on the experiences of earlier labor strikes and the whiskey debate. Despite the tradition of labor organization and uprising, the town’s white leadership steadfastly denied that the workers had the intelligence or sophistication necessary for staging the 1956 protests. For instance, in a 1990 interview with journalist June N. Adamson, Buford Lewallen—the former district attorney and husband of one of Clinton High’s teachers—believed the crowds gathered outside the courthouse understood little of what Kasper said to them. One day early in the first week of school, Lewallen left his office and wandered into the midst of a street meeting where he heard Kasper “regaling them with the laws of Blackstone and Disraeli.” He marveled, convinced that “none of them ever heard of Blackstone or Disraeli unless they thought they might have been a truck driver or up at the coal mines or something.” Lewallen argued that the crowd listened to Kasper and cheered him on because he used scholars and theologians to explain their actions, which lent the unruly mob of mountaineers a veneer of dignity and validity that they otherwise lacked. In the eyes of Lewallen and other town leaders, the white working class in Clinton were Kasper’s pawns, moving about as he commanded rather than using the events to achieve their own ends. Or as his wife Celdon Lewallen explained to me, they concluded that the poorer whites were “prime for these agitators to appeal to because that could make them important.” 273
Ibid., March 27, 1958, 1:1.
272
Buford Lewallen of Clinton, TN, interview with June Adamson, June 20, 1990, Clinton, analog
273
Thus, when John Kasper arrived in Clinton, he stumbled into a town already in turmoil. “‘Hillbillies pissed off at TVA, Atom Bomb, niggers, jews, politicians, preachers, professors,” he gleefully summarized in a letter to his mentor, the fascist poet Ezra Pound. “[Hillbillies are] the most wonderful people living, ready with squirrel guns, ready to find out, need some ammo. … [Clinton is] Hot! Lit Stick of Dynamite.” But while Kasper was thrilled with the anger brewing among Clinton’s whites and eager to join their fight, local segregationists accepted his offers of assistance with some wariness. He did not fit the typical profile of a segregationist sympathizer. 274
Kasper was born in Camden, New Jersey, and he seems to have been a troubled child. In early adolescence, his parents sent him to a series of military academies, but even these institutions had difficulty controlling him. At one of these schools he erupted in anger during a Sunday school meeting, yelling that the church members around him were all “‘fakes and hypocrites.’” Following this outburst, his parents took him to Philadelphia for psychological observation. 275
Despite his spotty academic record and history of emotional instability, Kasper enrolled at Columbia University after high school. While there he became enamored with the fascist poet Ezra Pound. Pound, who was born in 1885, was an influential modernest poet and literary critic. Like many of his literary contemporaries, he had spent his youth living as an expatriate in Europe. When World War I erupted, he was living in London. The brutality of the conflict caused him to begin questioning the capitalist system. He moved to Italy in the
John Kasper to Ezra Pound, May 24, 1957, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, Yale
274
University, quoted in Adamson, “Dynamite,” 1. Adamson, “Dynamite,” 95-97.
mid-1920s and joined Mussolini’s Fascist uprising. When Hitler seized power in Germany, Pound spoke in favor of the new Fuhrer as well, lauding the new ruler’s fight against the Jews. He remained in Italy during World War II and participated in propaganda radio broadcasts criticizing the United States. Invading Allied forces arrested Pound in Italy in 1945. When he was returned to America, he was deemed mentally unable to stand trial for treason and incarcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital in Washington, DC. 276
In the summer of 1950, Kasper traveled to Washington, DC, where Pound was
incarcerated at St. Elizabeth’s Mental Hospital. Following that meeting, the two men began a correspondence that would last almost a decade. Soon they were exchanging letters on a weekly basis. As the relationship grew closer, Pound’s influence over Kasper increased. Though Kasper had previously been proud of his complex, grammatically-correct writing style, he adopted Pound’s more explosive, unstructured voice. Pound told Kasper what was best in music, art, politics and economics; he advised the young man as to whom he should meet and he told Kasper what books to read. 277
Kasper graduated from Columbia in 1951 and attempted to enlist in the armed forces. The military decided he was not fit for service, so he moved to Greenwich Village and opened a bookstore instead. He named it the Make-It-New Bookshop after a 1935 collection of Pound’s essays. He also partnered with another admirer of Pound’s work and philosophies to launch the Square $ book series. 278
Adamson, “Dynamite,” 93-97; Poetry Foundation, “Ezra Pound,” http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
276
bio/ezra-pound; the Academy of American Poets, “Ezra Pound,” http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/161. Adamson, “Dynamite,” 93-97.
277
Ibid.; “Cover Story,” Metro Pulse, August 24, 2006, http://www.metropulse.com/news/2006/aug/24/
278
Because major publishing houses held the rights to most of Pound’s poetry and literary criticism, the Square $ focused on Pound’s political works and selected other authors who shared his fascism and anti-Semitism. The Make-It-New Bookshop, however, had much less ideological coherence. On the one hand, Kasper stocked anti-Semitic, fascist and Nazi texts in the store. At the same time, he carried more liberal political works and hosted interracial parties there. At times, Kasper seemed to realize the contradictions within his behavior. In one instance, he piled all the psychology texts in the store in the middle of the floor and stuck a sign on them labeling them “‘Jewish Muck.’” Pound convinced him to put the books back on the shelves. 279
Kasper’s personal life exhibited similar dissonance. While in New York City, he joined the National Renaissance Party—an organization devoted to anti-Semitism and the belief that “what national socialism bestowed upon the German people stands before the world as a monument to all of the Western World”—and opened his shop as a gathering spot for the members. He also espoused increasingly virulent anti-Semitic views. “You know Gramps,” Kasper wrote to Pound one week, “This city gets me down. … God! how it stinks! I sometimes go over to Yorkville on the East side to get a breath of fresh air. That’s where the German population of NYC live, and they have managed to keep the Yits out of their lives socially, but not, of course, financially. There are a few Nazis over there still and I enjoy talking to them. They know what is fact and what ain’t.’” At the same time, Kasper attended NAACP meetings and distributed their materials in his store. He began a romantic
Ibid., Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 67.
relationship with a young black woman and brought her to visit Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth’s, and he helped a mixed-race couple find housing in New York City. 280
Shortly before traveling to Clinton, Kasper moved to Washington, DC, to be closer to Pound. This seems to be when his anti-Semitism morphed into fully developed white
supremacy. In Washington, Kasper joined the Seaboard White Citizens’ Council, a fringe chapter of the national organization whose motto was “Honor-Pride-Fight/Save the White!” He wrote and published a series of pamphlets to publicize his new organization. These propaganda pieces laid out Kasper’s racial philosophies.
In “Segregation or Death,” Kasper asserted that different races developed different abilities, which is the reason he warned his readers against the push for racial equality. He alleged that Jewish leaders used the idea of racial equality “to subvert existing Gentile order everywhere.” Ultimately, the Jews hoped to use the civil rights movement to undermine democracy and bring America under communist control, Kasper explained. To achieve “the race-hating, nation-destroying schemes of the NAACP and the red Sanhedrin,” Jewish leaders were transforming “the Nigra” into a “subversive, sharply un-American in character … a stooge of world-Jewry, blindly led into the vortex of Jewish power, dedicated to
overthrowing all existing order.” 281
Ibid.; East Tennessee Reporter, February 8, 1957, 1, 4; Neil R. McMillen, “Organized Resistance to
280
School Desegregation in Tennessee,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 30 (1971): 320; “Kasper Not Wanted in Arkansas.” Arkansas Democrat December 2, 1957; Lana Carmen Seivers, “Words of Discrimination, Voices of Determination: Reflections on the Desegregation of Clinton High School,” Ed.D. Dissertation, University of Tennessee Knoxville, 2002, 67.
Neil R. McMillen, The Citizens’ Council: Organized Resistance to the Second Reconstruction, 281
1954-1964 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 23; John Kasper, “Segregation or Death” (Washington,
When Jewish leadership convinced white Christians that all races were equal, they were undermining the fabric of western civilization. If they were successful, then America’s government would topple and the Jews would be free to step into the void and help
“themselves to the loot and booty of the thousand year old civilizations … to benefit
exclusively their own race, the Jewish.” The vitriol with which Kasper attacked Jews was one of those qualities that separated him from mainline white supremacists such as the White Citizens’ Council, who avoided “the stigma of anti-Semitism” even while their writings “carried a persistent though guarded strain of hostility toward the Jew.” 282
Many other segregationists did see the same link Kasper did between the fight against civil rights and the Cold War struggles. Some of them argued that the ruling had undermined Americans’ right to choose their associates. Others alleged that the use of troops in Clinton, Little Rock and elsewhere demonstrated that the federal government was using the
movement to promote a totalitarian state. Similarly, others returned to the debate between states’ rights and federal rights, insisting that in a democracy, the states would determine whether to desegregate their schools. Historian Ellen Shrecker summarized segregationists’ effective use of the Red Scare effectiveness. “Besides destroying left-wing civil rights organizations,” she wrote, it “isolated or silenced individual activists, broke up alliances …,
McMillen, The Citizens’ Council, xxiii, 23; Seivers, “Voices of Determination,” 68; John Kasper,
282
narrowed the movement’s internationalist perspective and deflected the struggle … toward the attainment of … legal, rather than economic goals.” 283
While John Kasper and other conservative Americans spoke abstractly about the Red scare, Clintonians understood Communism and the Cold War as an immediate, concrete threat. They knew that if the conflict with the Soviets ever heated up, Oak Ridge was a logical site for a nuclear attack, and they tried to prepare for that possibility. Some concerned citizens organized local defense corps to supplement the protection the government provided. Beginning in the mid-1940s, Clinton High School students manned the Clinton Ground Observers Corps, which watched the skies above Anderson County for enemy aircraft. In January 1956, the county’s Civil Defense Director decided to expand the program. He called for volunteers willing to staff a round-the-clock observation rotation known as “Operation Skywatch.” 284
To keep town leaders informed on the threat to their community, local civic organizations invited speakers to educate their members on the atomic threat and what it meant for Clinton. For instance, at the November 1956 meeting of the Timely Topics Club—
George Lewis, “White South, Red Nation: Massive Resistance and the Cold War,” in Massive 283