Alabamians have labored under the burden of Populist demagogy. Alabama, once the heart of the Confederacy, became the Snopesian netherworld of American politics— the home of “Bull” Connor and Admiral Crommelin, of Collie Leroy Wilkins and Sheriff Jim Clark, of George and Lurleen Wallace, of Imperial Wizard Shelton and the United Klans of America.
Like the rest of the South, Alabama had become alienated from the American experience of success and affluence; it had endured the defeat of the Confederacy, the Cause of Henry Grady’s “New South,” the national rejection of segregation. Alabamians responded to these conditions by turning to a Democratic Party that hated the ante bellum aristocrat, the capitalist, and the Negro with equal force. They rallied behind egalitarian slogans, cursed the “Wall Street bankers,” glorified the poor redneck, and created what James Silver has perceptively called the “closed society”—the society of one- party rule, Jim Crow, the lynching bee.
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