Poverty

I just finished reading "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." The great Depression era narrative of Southern poverty by James Agee with amazing photographs by Walker Evans. The book chronicles the lives of three Alabama sharecropping families in 1936. None of these people had indoor plumbing or electricity and lived desperate lives farming cotton. I remember seeing Evan's haunting photographs a few years back in a retrospective at the National Gallery and they have stayed in my subconscious ever since. This book was written two years after my late Grandfather was born, and it illustrated to me how it must have been to grow up as a small child during the Depression. My Grandfather had better circumstances than the people in this book, his family owned their small tobacco farm in North Carolina, but his father died when he was young and I imagine his experiances were similar to those in this book. I'm a lifelong Southern Democrat, and the poor whites and small landholders of my Grandfathers era were as well, the New Deal saved many of these people from ruin, most of my family would have lost everything if not for FDR. It's amazing to me now that the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of these folks throughout the South have been tricked into voting Republican out of some kind of misguided patriotism, against their actual economic interests. When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act he predicted that the Democratic party would lose its white support in the South for fifty years, so far his prediction has been right. Its time that the Democratic party reconnect with Southern voters, W's incompetence has given us the opportunity to do so.