Insofar as the surviving planter elite and middle-class Mississippians despised Vardaman, he intentionally drummed up class resentments. In his reminiscence, William Percy, the son of Vardaman’s Democratic opponent, LeRoy Percy, best expressed the class anger. Recalling how he surveyed the surly crowd, wondering if Vardaman’s army would launch rotten eggs at his father, Percy wrote: They were the sort of people that lynch Negroes, that mistake hoodlumism for wit, and cunning for intelligence, that attend revivals and fight and fornicate in the bushes afterwards. They were undiluted
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Yikes. Inflaming class politics aside, the explicit admiration of stupidity and elevation of violence is terrifying. It still is, when demagogues today go that route. It seems there will always be people for whom the brutalization - verbal or physical - of others will be most attractive.
