Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

by Nancy MacLean

One feature eliminated local control of education; it compelled the governor to close and cut off funds to any school that planned to desegregate under federal court order. That meant white students would go without education if local officials conceded to the courts, because it was the white schools that faced lawsuits. Another law authorized tax-funded tuition grants to enable white parents to send their children to private schools to evade the Supreme Court ruling.

An additional seven laws set out to debilitate the NAACP so that it could no longer protest the injustices of the system. Indeed, the civil rights group lost one of every three members of the once thriving Virginia conference in a single year, owing to what an American Jewish Committee study found to be the South’s “most elaborate, systematic and sophisticated attempt to frustrate NAACP activity.”46

Colgate Whitehead Darden Jr.47 He was a leading member of the state’s tight-knit white elite, anchored by the landed rich yet inclusive of corporate leaders. He had been elected to Congress and then backed as governor because he stood on the right side of every issue related to employers’ power, states’ rights, and racial segregation.

Darden knew that they expected every decision he made to reflect that awareness. But the Columbia Law School– and Oxford University–trained attorney also knew that the massive resistance laws were doomed.

Locals called the yearlong struggle that swept five counties from East to Middle Tennessee the “convict wars.” The coalition of farmers and miners that elected John Buchanan governor wanted one thing above all: the end of the system of coerced private prison labor whereby Tennessee’s state government helped mining magnates secure cheap labor and fat profits at the expense of innocent miners trying to earn enough to feed their families. The widely reviled system, so redolent of slavery, created a perverse incentive to lock men up for petty offenses so the state could rent them out to coal companies as dirt-cheap labor to take the jobs of free miners, who had organized the United Mine Workers of America to demand living wages and decent treatment.

More than a thousand miners marched on the hated Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company (TCIR); farmers, local merchants, professionals, and like-minded women joined them along the way. The exasperated citizens wrecked the TCIR’s stockades and liberated the black and white convicts held in them. They even supplied changes of clothes so the abused prisoners could avoid recapture.

His defeat left Buchanan convinced that too large an electorate was a problem for the white, property-owning class of men like himself.

The whole family had high hopes that the bright young Jim would go into politics, as his grandfather had done, and perhaps reclaim the governorship someday. But he lacked the winning charm of his father. More simply put, Jim did not enjoy other people—or they him—in the way that those who succeed in politics do. His bearing was “austere,” a later colleague explained; while he was “a good person”—a man of integrity—he was also “one of the coldest people I have ever met.” A solitary child in his formative years, he would describe himself, toward the end of his life, as “always an outsider.” At his memorial service, in 2013, a friend of thirty years was asked how he had gotten to know Buchanan. “Did I?” he responded.10

The Nashville Agrarians concluded that the best defense of their region’s established ways was a strong ideological offense.

they also cultivated an image of the South as having been victimized by northeastern elites, such that the militant white former Confederates who had used violence to drive black voters from the polls were merely engaging in reasonable self-defense. They would ennoble the scorned Confederate cause even if, as their correspondence reveals, it took willful blindness, outright falsification, and the highly strategic demeaning of African Americans to achieve it.12

Buchanan triple-majored, in English, math, and economics, and won a scholarship to attend graduate school at the University of Tennessee, where he earned an M.A. in economics. But he never got over the way others, more privileged in their schooling, seemed to sniff at his alma mater.

Indeed, rather than sympathize with the plight of black Americans, Buchanan later argued that the failure of the black community to thrive after emancipation was not the result of the barriers put in their way, but rather proof that “the thirst for freedom, and responsibility, is perhaps not nearly so universal as so many post-Enlightenment philosophers have assumed.”18 It was a breathtakingly ignorant claim, a sign of a willful failure to see what his paradigm would not allow him to. Both Koch and Buchanan would make similarly blind and insulting claims about others who did not do well in the labor market these men chose to believe was free and fair.

Whether it was the cogency of Knight’s teaching or the upheaval on Chicago’s South Side as steel and meatpacking workers downed tools in the most massive strike wave in America’s history was not clear. But Chicago price theory provided a science to support his existing “antigovernment” feelings. Buchanan took from Chicago school economics a conviction that socialism in any form—that is, any group or government meddling with the market—was a sentimental and dangerous error.

The new Republican majority in Congress used its power to end the controls and to stymie the ambitions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), among them the unionization and democratization of the South, by passing the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.24

The lineaments of a long battle were being drawn: collective security versus individual liberty.

The rise of first Communism, after 1917, and then fascism appalled them.

Tall and lean, with a tightly trimmed mustache, rimless round spectacles, and gracious Old World manners, F. A. Hayek had been worrying since the early 1930s about the growing appeal of social democracy in particular. He was concerned about the model of government that so many organized citizens of Europe and the United States were seeking, based on labor unionism, a welfare state, and government intervention for economic security.

Here was the rub: “It is because nearly everybody wants it that we are moving in this direction.” Everywhere, people were deluding themselves “that socialism and freedom can be combined” when in fact they were dire enemies. The growth of government, he argued, would in time undermine all freedom and usher in totalitarian states.31

There was no other choice, then: “socialism means slavery.”32

Even as James Buchanan took inspiration from his mentor and committed to the transnational battle of ideas Knight helped to set off, he was finding his own distinctive voice, in part through wariness about the younger generation of the Chicago school, particularly Milton Friedman, whom he experienced more as an irritant than as a muse.

By his last year in the program, he was flatly annoyed with the fixation on mathematical “technique.” He mourned the parting of economics from its origins in “a comprehensive moral philosophy” like that of Adam Smith. He dreamed of someday building a program to battle collectivism in a bolder way.

Buchanan chose an area of economics not surprising for a libertarian seeking a job in a southern public university: public finance, which focuses on the proper role of government in the economy. It encompasses taxation, government spending, and the relationship between the public and private sectors, matters on which southern officials had firm convictions.41

When he set to work, the primary focus of scholars in this area was “market failure”: situations in which for-profit enterprises failed to allocate goods or services efficiently or fairly, thus requiring government action to correct the problem. He chose to build a career by turning a critical eye the other way: identifying and analyzing perceived “government failure,” so as to make the case that it should not be relied on by default without a sophisticated evaluation of its drawbacks.

Where his interest and genius lay—even if you call it an evil genius—was in his intuitive grasp of the importance of trust in political life. If only one could break down the trust that now existed between governed and governing, even those who supported liberal objectives would lose confidence in government solutions.42

Wicksell articulated the notion that tax policy ought to be arrived at through unanimous consent. “It would seem to be a blatant injustice,” he wrote, “if someone should be forced to contribute toward the costs of some activity which does not further his interests or may even be diametrically opposed to them.”44

He had found theoretical anchors for both sides of his fiscal inclinations: to curtail taxation and contain government spending. “Pay as you go” was both economically wise and morally just, Buchanan concluded in his first book. He took his stand alongside “the much-maligned man in the street,” who compared national budgets to household ledgers and abhorred red ink in either. A government forced to balance its books every year, he believed, would act more like the nineteenth-century federal government and the southern states whose ongoing tightfisted policies he equated with economic liberty.46 Left unspoken was how that framework appealed to the more right-wing members of the propertied class by keeping their taxes low and denying basic services—schools, roads, and sanitation—to those who could not pay for them.

With the help of Nutter and a steadily growing number of others at UVA, Buchanan would be able to turn a regional libertarian creed into a national counterrevolution.

The center’s members, Buchanan vowed, would take up such matters of concern to Virginia’s governing elite as the growing power of labor unions; the correct relationship between the federal government and the states (made all the more urgent by Supreme Court decisions such as Brown); what he depicted as the “problems of equalitarianism” (among them “income redistribution,” “the welfare state,” and “the tax structure,” his archaic way of speaking of egalitarianism an indicator of how his program would approach them); and “the social security system and [its threat to] individual initiative.”2

More specifically, the center aimed to combat what its founders referred to as “social engineering” by changing the way people thought. They hoped to break “the powerful grip that collectivist ideology already had on the minds of intellectuals,” as Buchanan later put it.3

Put simply, most Americans then trusted their government. In such an era, Buchanan said, “our purpose was indeed subversive.”4

Colgate Darden was less vocally right-wing than his father-in-law, but he shared his new hire’s disdain for how powerful labor unions, civil rights organizations, and others were looking to the federal government to bring about what they depicted as social justice.

To their minds, they, not the federal government or their employees, had made the U.S. economy into a world powerhouse.

He relished the opportunity to build a team of intellectuals who would develop political-economic arguments to “preserve a social order based on individual liberty” and thereby lay the groundwork for an intelligent pushback against federal power.

Meanwhile, the state of Virginia had done nothing to integrate its public schools; instead, its officials continued to bluster, with massive resistance as their official reply to the Supreme Court. The militant standoff was also buying time to set up a new infrastructure of private academies that, being private, had no obligation to integrate under Brown.

Eschewing overt racial appeals, but not at all concerned with the impact on black citizens, they framed the South’s fight as resistance to federal coercion in a noble quest to preserve states’ rights and economic liberty. Nothing energized this backwater movement like Brown.

Who exactly were these libertarians and what so excited them? For New Yorker Frank Chodorov, the founder of the cause’s first publication, The Freeman, and an inspiration to many, it was the opportunity the resistance to Brown presented to finally do away with the “public school system,” and see its buildings “leased off to individual groups of citizens and operated on a private basis.”18

The book that resulted in early 1957, The Sovereign States, drew plaudits from advocates of economic liberty on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Among them was Robert Welch, who two years later would recruit Andrews and others among his free-market backers, including the Notre Dame legal scholar and right-wing radio host Clarence Manion, to form the John Birch Society.32

President Eisenhower was not particularly interested in assisting integration, as he more than once made clear, but he worried that he could not maintain face as the leader of the free world if he ignored this affront to the nation’s legal system, one the Soviet Union was broadcasting to the world.

National Review editor William F. Buckley Jr. defended the governor’s actions, telling his readers that Faubus had been merely “interposing” his authority against the Supreme Court’s “tyranny.” Buckley condemned “the shameful spectacle of heavily armed troops patrolling . . . once tranquil towns.” The nine justices of the Supreme Court had created a situation that could “be settled only by violence and the threat of force.” And besides, Buckley said, the NAACP was exaggerating the mistreatment of the black students. What were “ugly epithets,” spitting, and being “pushed around” compared with “the picket-line practices of monolithic labor unions”?38 The “line of bayonets in Little Rock,” intoned Buckley, was what had always been hidden under “the maternal skirts” of “Mother Welfare State.” What civil rights, labor unions, and social insurance came down to in the end, Buckley warned, was the “army of occupation . . . enforcing unconditional surrender.”39

there were so few on campus who might raise difficult questions about whose liberty was being saved, and at what cost to others.

And so Gregory Swanson was able to enroll in the law school, the first black person besides a menial worker to gain official access to the university in 125 years.

The AFL-CIO was a thorn in the side of the Byrd Organization, what with its push to bring some democracy to workplaces and its fights against the poll tax and massive resistance.

Before long, the cofounders of the center were able to seize an opportunity to prove their enterprise’s value to the Byrd Organization on the issue that mattered most to its stalwarts in these years: the future of the public schools.

Those local plans triggered the implementation of the 1956 state massive resistance legislation empowering the governor to close any white school that planned to admit any black students. His act would deny public education to some thirteen thousand white students, all told, from first graders to high school seniors. (No whites were suing to enter black schools, so they were unaffected by the closures).3

Her name was Louise Wensel. Dr. Wensel minced no words in explaining why she was running: because Senator Byrd’s “massive resistance program is designed to close our schools, thus hurting our Virginia children more than any other group.”4 That was the horror that moved her, as a mother of five, to run.

And that was just the beginning of the changes she was campaigning for. With the demand for agricultural labor shrinking, she announced, the state should cease being so tightfisted and spend money on public works projects to combat unemployment.

Wensel was fearless in shaming Byrd for presiding over an electoral system rigged to keep most citizens from the ballot box. “I believe that people everywhere,” she said, “in Virginia as well as in Russia, should have a chance to vote for a candidate who opposes the political machine that oppresses them.”

The Richmond-based Virginia Industrialization Group (VIG), most of whose members were from the state’s largest banks, retail operations, and new industries, warned the governor that public school closures were “an obstacle” to industrial recruitment and a sword hanging over Norfolk, where so many jobs depended on the federal government.

While most Virginians now assumed that the path forward would include gradual integration in most parts of the state, albeit with mechanisms holding it to a minimum, Professors Buchanan and Nutter made the case for the very opposite: unlimited privatization of education.