Identity Pellagra Is Way Off Base

Editor’s Note: This will be another long day on this website.

Occidental Dissent doesn’t want to go back to the South of company towns, sharecropping, debt peonage, pellagra, hookworms, malaria, illiteracy, poverty, dirt roads, cash crop agriculture, child labor and corn pone. We support a 21st century economy! We’re better than this, Dixie https://t.co/eggJFl7f3R

— Prozium (@CptBlackPill) April 1, 2019

Fulton Skipworth writes:

“It is hard to tell what is going on over at Occidental Dissent these days. Simply web-searching the phrase brings humble web browsers to a link that includes the phrases “Nationalism, Populism and Reaction,” but in its erstwhile operator’s latest dissociative breakdown he has taken leave of all three, urging readers to “learn their history,” while quoting George Tindall’s Emergence of the New South (pages one, two and three). He wants us to believe “Southerners Used To Be Progressive.”

I find this to be a strange take.

The tag line of Occidental Dissent reads “Nationalism, Populism, Reaction.” It hasn’t changed in years and neither have my politics. As always, I write under the pseudonym “Hunter Wallace” on this blog, which is a nod to George Wallace. That’s because I am clearly a populist-identitarian writer.

As a populist, nationalist and identitarian writer, I am someone who values Southern identity along with social cohesion and economic fairness. This is why I incline toward Southerners in the mold of George Wallace and Huey Long. I’m kind of the opposite of folks who value social liberty and economic liberty. Honestly, I am somewhere in the center of the electorate, not on the fringes.

Please help.

I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this idea that Southerners were not “progressives” at some point in our history. Didn’t we vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1912?

Didn’t we vote for Woodrow Wilson in 1916?

Didn’t we vote for FDR in 1932?

Didn’t we vote for FDR in 1936?

Didn’t we vote for FDR in 1940?

How about FDR in 1944?

Didn’t we vote for Adlai Stevenson in 1952?

Didn’t we vote for Adlai Stevenson in 1956? I mean … even that guy, twice.

How about JFK in 1960?

As an amateur historian and a political scientist, I look at Southern history and notice we seem to have voted for Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, JFK and LBJ. Now, it would seem to follow that at some point in Southern history our ancestors were populists and progressives seeing as how they voted for all of the most progressive presidents in American history.

Woodrow Wilson carried every Southern state (except West Virginia in 1916 twice). FDR won every Southern state in national landslide victories on four occasions. Harry Truman carried most of the South in 1948. Poor Adlai Stevenson only won the votes of Southerners in 1952 and 1956. Southerners continued to vote for JFK and LBJ in the 1960s. Finally, it was the populist George Wallace who led the exodus from the Democratic Party in the 1960s and 1970s before going back.

This notion that Southerners have always been conservatives or lolbertarians is historically laughable. No, the South was quite clearly the foundation of the New Deal coalition for generations, which was a populist-progressive electoral coalition. It was even customary in the Democratic Party for a White Southerner to get the VP nod on every ticket in the New Deal coalition era: to name a few, Garner, Truman, Barkley, Sparkman and LBJ. The Solid South didn’t start to reemerge as Republican until the 1990s and wasn’t this completely polarized until the 2010s. This was after Jimmy Carter won every Southern state but Virginia in 1976. Hell, even Bill Clinton carried Fulworth’s home state of Louisiana twice as recently as 1992 and 1996.

I’m having a dissociative breakdown … what?

via GIPHY

No, I am simply better trained in history and political science, and I see through a lot of this obvious bullshit. Does anyone remember the 20th century?

As for my pro-Andrew Yang punditry, I sense that he has a platform and personality that appeals to younger voters. I also think he is capable of scrambling the electoral college and winning Southern states that haven’t gone Democratic in years in much the same way that Blompf carried the Upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. He can do it simply by exciting the populist and nationalist swing voters who voted for Blompf in 2016 and which he is already doing.

“Now, excepting for a moment, the historical importance of George B. Tindall and his mammoth book (which this humble scholar has read in full, in addition to the first three pages), let’s take a look at the specific text excerpted by Hunter Wallace …”

I’m not surprised that the mental image of hundreds of thousands of White Southerners parading through Washington and doing the Rebel Yell while watching bands play Dixie in support of Woodrow Wilson is so highly triggering for Fulton.

So, I think I will share it again:

“Three hundred thousand marchers took four hours to pass down Pennsylvania Avenue; the represented the victorious Democracy from coast to coast, but reporters noted that a vociferous “Rebel Yell” broke out whenever a Southern figure rode by or a band blared Dixie! “Thousands of voices sang the words of it in unison.” If any Southern observer caught the portent of top-hatted and gray-gloved Negroes among the Tammany braves, that detail seems not to have been recorded.”

This happened, right?

There is a lot of good stuff in this book and all the others that I have read. The Southern past was a lot more complicated than the Reaganite conservative-lolbertarian coalition. Didn’t the progressive Woodrow Wilson also love Thomas Dixon and D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of Nation?

“It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” – President Woodrow Wilson

“In Tindall’s totally Reconstructed world (and, ostensibly now Wallace’s), the “agrarians” are “petty middle classes.”Populism” and the 1896 movement to coin silver and feed a cash starved rural hinterland is a “conspiracy to debase coinage.” The reactionary nationalist Bourbon regime of the late 19th century comes out cleanest– simply a normal heresy that is less sensationalized, probably because of the Bourbons’ catastrophic decision to back gold and form the National Democrat Party in 1896, thus ensuring the New York Republicans victory. We are left wondering exactly which elements of “Nationalism, Populism and Reaction,” are left over at Occidental Dissent, which now proudly claims to hold “left authoritarian” economics, while backing thoroughly libertarian Andrew Yang.”

If you look at the electoral maps above, it can be pithily summed up as one huge revolt across several generations of Southerners against the Bourbon Democrats and lolbertarian economic principles introduced in the South after the War Between the States. Southerners voted for Wilson to redistribute wealth through the income tax and for FDR to break the back of the sharecropping system and debt peonage which had entrapped and impoverished our ancestors for generations. BTW, everyone who has studied Southern history knows that Populists revolted against the disastrous economic policies of President Grover Cleveland, who was a Bourbon Democrat, so this idea that the Populists were at odds with tight money and laissez-faire economics in general … rings true?

“Now, let’s look at Tindall and his now apparently authoritative text on The Emergence of the New South. Tindall was, like the deified subject in this passage, Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner. Unlike Wilson, Tindall lived most of his life in the South. He was born in South Carolina, graduated Furman, served the Empire in the Pacific theater– and like many men of his generation utilized the G.I. Bill to finish his education at UNC Chapel Hill, which put his America-worshipping military training to use singing the praises of progressive democracy. He put these skills to good use in the Cold War, like many Southern historians of the day.”

There were lots of men of Tindall’s generation in the South who were populists and progressives and who supported the New Deal coalition. There was a reason for that too. It was due to the chronic poverty and underdevelopment under lolberg economics which has fortunately been largely eradicated in our own times. No one in the South suffers from malaria, pellagra, hookworms anymore.

As a Southern aristocrat, I highly doubt :

“The first case of pellagra in the United States was reported in 1902.[5] Soon pellagra began to occur in epidemic proportions in states south of the Potomac and Ohio rivers.[6] The pellagra epidemic lasted for nearly four decades. It was estimated that there were 3 million cases and 100,000 deaths due to pellagra during the epidemic.[4] The exact cause of pellagra was not known. The patients felt ostracized and were shunned. The social stigmatization was similar to that of the present day epidemic of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.[4] Joseph Goldberger of the US Public Health Service solved the secret of the malady of pellagra. Goldberger’s epic work and the social history of the pellagra epidemic in the United States are reviewed. …

Pellagra was a rural disease among the sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and cotton mill workers of the South. Its occurrence in epidemic proportions was linked to the economic depression of the times and the monoculture of cotton cultivation. Depression meant less money for food and subsistence on an inadequate diet. The cotton monoculture and nonexistent animal husbandry resulted in a lack of locally produced food. Along with poverty, corn was the common denominator among pellagrins in the United States and Europe. Corn had been the staple diet among the natives of Mexico and Central America for several centuries without causing pellagra. Why had corn suddenly become pellagragenic in United States and Europe? The answer to the problem lay in the methodology of corn processing, cooking, and milling.[36] The natives of Mexico and Central America had always soaked the corn in alkali before cooking. The alkali treatment liberates the bound niacin in corn, thereby enhancing the niacin content of the diet to the point of being protective against pellagra. The process of degerming in the preparation of cornmeal became feasible with the development of the Beall degerminator in 1905.[36] The process of degermination reduces the niacin content of corn and could have precipitated the development of pellagra among a vulnerable population.

Public awareness campaigns, agriculture diversification, change of food habits, and food fortification with nicotinic acid were all responsible for the eradication of pellagra in the South.[8] The recommendation of the Food and Nutrition Board regarding the enrichment of bread and flour with thiamine, niacin, and iron was endorsed by the members of the baking and milling industries in 1941.[37] Soon the food fortification program played a crucial role in eliminating pellagra. The consumption of enriched flour and bread ensured that the dietary intake of niacin and thiamine was adequate, thus ensuring the prevention of pellagra and beriberi. Pellagra was truly conquered in the American South during the Second World War.[38] Paradoxically, there was relative prosperity during the war. The economy improved, there were more jobs, and almost everyone had an income. The wartime rationing also made the people conscious of eating high quality food. By 1945, pellagra had become extinct in the South, and the pellagra producing 3-M diet of southerners had become a relic of the past.”

Here we go