Sometimes one can find truths in ruling class literature entirely missed by the Left, or at least a good portion of it. In this quarter’s issue of Foreign Policy, a prestigious think tank publication of the Establishment, Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy magazine, the leading foreign policy publication in the United States, says this:
For many decades after Reconstruction southern political leaders skewed the electoral rules to disenfranchise blacks, but to avoid northern charges of discrimination they also disenfranchised whites in comparable economic and social conditions. The result was that while black political participation virtually ceased, white participation also fell precipitously. By the 1920s black voting in the South had effectively ended, and white voting had fallen by more than 50 per cent from the 1876-1892 period. In some years only a little more than 30 per cent of the white population turned out to vote in presidential elections. The South thus became a reactionary anchor for the rest of the country.
Charles William Maynes, Foreign Policy
I would only amend Maynes’ description to point out that the poor white was disenfranchised, not out of concern for northern political opinion but because benighted as they were, poor whites still posed a threat to the plantation elite who ran the South.
