Oral History Transcript - Everette Swinney - November 18, 1986
Interview with Dr. Everette Swinney
Interviewer: Michael Hellrung
Transcriber: Michael Hellrung
Date of Interview: November 18, 1986
Location: Dr. Swinney’s Office, Texas State University, San Marcos, TX
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Begin Tape 1, Side 1
Michael Hellrung: [This is an interview with] Dr. Swinney by Mike Hellrung and question number one is where were you born?
Everette Swinney: I was born in Lima, Ohio.
Hellrung: Is that where you graduated from high school?
Swinney: No, I graduated from Ada, Ohio, high school.
Hellrung: How do you spell that?
Swinney: A-D-A.
Hellrung: A-D-A, that’s pretty good. And Lima, is that like the bean?
Swinney: Yes, like Lima, Peru, only it’s pronounced differently. It’s a nearby town. My parents lived in Ada, but the hospital was in Lima.
Hellrung: I see. Where about is that in Ohio? Is that in the center?
Swinney: It’s up in the northwestern part of the state—south of Toledo, north of Columbus.
Hellrung: I have relatives in Toledo.
Swinney: Is that right. My wife has a relative in Toledo as well.
Hellrung: Is that where you met your wife?
Swinney: Uh-huh, we went to high school together.
Hellrung: Oh really! That’s interesting. Let’s progress here. What degrees do you hold?
Swinney: Bachelor of Arts degree from Ohio Northern University, Master of Arts degree from Penn State University, and PhD from the University of Texas.
Hellrung: Oh, so you’ve been around. I have a brother, two brothers, who have degrees from Penn State.
Swinney: Oh, is that right. That’s a nice school.
Hellrung: It’s really isolated there, in the middle of nowhere, isn’t it?
Swinney: Yeah, they planned it that way. It was a farmer’s high school. Once those kids came to school there, they didn’t want ‘em to get out.
Hellrung: Why did you come to Texas?
Swinney: Well, that’s a little difficult to explain. Basically because of the job opportunity. I graduated from Penn State with my master’s degree. I’d taken a contract to teach high school in a little town in Ohio called Gibsonburg. And meanwhile, this job opportunity came up. And when it opened up, I broke the contract in Ohio and scurried to Texas. I intended to stay just one year. But that’s been thirty years ago. So, I guess maybe it’s going to work out.
Hellrung: I think it has, so far. When and where were you married?
Swinney: We married in January of 1953 in Decatur, Indiana. My wife and I were both—well, she wasn’t underage, I was underage in Ohio. Males had to be twenty-one at that time—females, eighteen. We were both nineteen. And so in order to get married, we had to go out of state.
Hellrung: How many children do you have?
Swinney: We have four. The eldest is now thirty; she’s a teacher here in San Marcos. In fact, she and her husband both teach in San Marcos’s public schools. And then we have a daughter, Gretchen, who is twenty-eight. She is an accountant in Austin. And our third daughter, Suzanne, who is twenty-six, is also an accountant in Austin. And then the baby of the family, our son, Larry, is, I think he must be twenty-two. And he’s a student, a senior, almost a senior at Southwest Texas, majoring in technology.
Hellrung: Do you come from a large family yourself?
Swinney: Only child.
Hellrung: You changed that around!
Swinney: Well, I have a theory these things skip a generation. Children generally aren’t content with what they experience. So only children often have large families. And then, kids from large families sometimes will have only children. So, every other generation kind of repeats.
Hellrung: That makes sense. Do you belong to any fraternal organizations or honorary societies?
Swinney: Fraternal organizations, no. I’ve never been much of a joiner. I suppose that since I belong to an honorary, I’ve been a member of Phi Alpha Theta, which is the history honorary. I joined that when I was at Penn State. I’ve occasionally participated as a faculty member in Phi Alpha Theta activities here, but I’ve not been terribly active.
Hellrung: Do you belong to any specific organizations or educational organizations?
Swinney: A good many of historical societies: American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Southern Historical Association, and two or three others. And then a good many of professional organizations of the sort that are designed to improve the status of teachers. I’ve been a member of the AAUP [American Association of University Professors] for years. I’m a member of TACT, Texas Association of College Teachers. A member of this new organization which Ken Margerison is helping to get started, the Texas Faculty Association. I’ve long been interested in things like teachers’ rights and that sort of thing and so have belonged to most of those organizations over the years.
Hellrung: Keeps you busy?
Swinney: Yeah.
Hellrung: What books and articles have you written?
Swinney: I’ve written; let me start with my doctoral dissertation. My doctoral dissertation was a study of implementation of the Reconstruction Amendments. What I was interested in, and still am to some extent interested in, is the process by which law or policy actually gets implemented. Americans have a tendency to pass laws, but then sometimes we don’t enforce them very effectively. Obvious examples would be things like 55 mph speed limit. We have a law that says we drive 55 [mph]. But if you get out on Interstate 35, any day of the week, you can gather a large amount of empiric evidence to suggest that that law is not rigorously enforced. When you raise your sights a bit from that sort of thing that’s easily observed and take basic constitutional provisions, like the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided citizenship for newly freed black slaves after the Civil War, and the Fifteenth Amendment, which enfranchised those blacks, then I became fascinated with the process by which these constitutional provisions were actually implemented. So my doctoral dissertation was a study of the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Primarily civil rights kind of subject. As a spinoff of that dissertation, I did several articles early on, in the sixties, particularly one article published in the Journal of Southern History dealing with the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment[s] and two or three other things. And then after I became Chairman of the Department of History in the late sixties, I found it increasingly difficult to do anything much with those materials. I kept thinking I would revise the dissertation for publication. Never got around to it. But here, last year, a publisher in New York has negotiated a contract with me to bring that dissertation out. So it will be published later this year or early next year—probably next month, as a matter of fact.
After I left the chairmanship in 1980, I’d been chairman from 1967 to 1980, and many of the old interests, of graduate school and the early period of teaching here, had changed a bit. And I really, I was anxious to get back to teaching after thirteen years of administration, but I wasn’t quite certain that I wanted to pick up the old topics. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments still interested me. In 1980, I began to work with those materials again, and then it became apparent that my heart really wasn’t in it. So in 1980, I made a career change of sorts. I began to investigate quantitative history, computers, [and] ventured into computer programming. And in the last four or five years, I’ve been much involved in the development of software, computer application programs, things of that sort. And so, if one talks about publication, I suppose I ought to mention my software as well. Business application was my first venture in software publishing. My colleague here, Cecyl Stott, in the accounting department, we published back in ’80–81 with an outfit out of Chicago called Microlab, which in the early days of the Apple computer phenomenon was one of the big publishers. We published a package called “Asset Manager,” which was fixed asset management system. And then, since then, I’ve done some other things. A second program that’s on the market, just out in revised edition, is “Super Quiz II,” which is a multiple choice quiz generator—one of several of that genre which are on the market. And then I have some other programs under development. A program I call “Bibliophile,” which is another teacher’s utility tool, makes it easy to generate bibliographies for classroom use. And I’m currently working on a, I suppose you’d call it an educational package—a pedagogical package, which I’m currently calling “Stats 101,” which is designed for use in quantitative history courses to introduce novices to some of the processes involved with the collecting and interpreting of quantitative historical data. So my interests in recent years, then, have moved from traditional historical scholarship into these other areas, particularly computers.
Hellrung: One question I had skipped, that was after a previous one, and that was do you hold any scholarships or fellowships?
Swinney: Well, not currently. When I was going through the university [Ohio Northern University: 1951–54; Pennsylvania State University: 1951–54; Pennsylvania State University: 1955–57], at one time or another, I had fellowships. Probably the most important one was research fellowship at the University of Texas [1959], which enabled me to do the year of course work on my PhD. And that came at a very timely moment. I was already teaching here. I really needed to get about the doctorate, but I didn’t have the money to abandon teaching. And that fellowship gave me the opportunity then to get the PhD underway. So it was very helpful.
Hellrung: I suppose you own a few copyrights now with all the computer software and perhaps with your dissertation that’s going to be published?
Swinney: These things sometimes are copyrighted by the author, sometimes they’re copyrighted by the publisher. Actually, I think in all cases, the software, I have signed paper with the publishers then have processed. Usually, this is part of the agreement that’s reached at the time the contract is done. So, technically, in terms of applying for a copyright, I have, I do have of course, rights to any of these materials that I’ve created.
Hellrung: What hobbies do you have?
Swinney: Well, let’s see. What hobbies do I have? I’ve been in and out of most hobbies there are, I suppose. I like active things: was an avid golfer for years, played handball for years. My wife and I enjoy camping. At times I’ve been an enthusiastic motorcyclist. I still own a couple of cycles. But, truth to be told, I don’t ride that much anymore. I suppose right now the thing that I enjoy most outside of the university would be camping. A couple years ago, my wife and I bought a camper. And on two successive summers, we’ve taken elaborate western-northern tours and next year plan to head to New England. So one of the things that come when the children are raised is the freedom to get out and see the country. And we have enjoyed that immensely.
Hellrung: Did you first start teaching at the University of Texas? Was that your first [position as a professor] or were you teaching here?
Swinney: Well, my first teaching was really at Ada, Ohio, high school. When I graduated from college, I spent one year as a high school teacher—at the magnificent salary of $2,400 a year, which was the state minimum at that time. And actually, I enjoyed high school teaching very much. I thought at that time that was going to be my career. The move to Penn State and to graduate school, after one year of high school teaching, came in the context of the Korean War and draft obligations and things of that sort. The year I taught I had a deferment to teach based on the teacher status. At that time, they were deferring teachers. More folks were eligible for the draft than they could draft at that time. And so the government instituted a system whereby one could volunteer for the draft, as they called it. So, as I finished my year of high school teaching, my wife and I had decided that I go ahead and get that military obligation out of the way. I went in that spring to volunteer for the draft. And they told me it would be nine months, maybe twelve months, before they would take me. And at that age, it was just intolerable to me to wait that long to get anything else done. And I couldn’t teach. No one would hire me because of the draft obligation. So, it was at that point that I decided to go on to graduate school. I had been curious about graduate school anyway. I had an extra year. And so we headed for Penn State and a master’s degree. It turns out that the first year we were at State College, Pennsylvania, our eldest daughter was born. And at precisely that time the Eisenhower administration began exempting fathers from the draft. And so as it worked out I never did go into the service and completed the master’s degree. And then when I finished that in 1957, we came down to Texas. I taught two years at Penn State as a graduate assistant, then moved directly to the job here. And my work on the PhD at Texas was part-time work. I was a fulltime teacher here, a part-time student at UT, except for the one year when I had the fellowship.
Hellrung: That answers the next question. So I’ll skip that and go on to what is your current position at Southwest Texas State?
Swinney: Well, currently I’m a professor of history, which in terms of academic rank is the highest rank one can achieve. Also in the last three years, in addition to teaching history, I’ve been teaching some computer science courses and introductory CIS [Computer Information Systems] courses, which I found to be good change of pace. I’ve taught a great variety of history courses. But still one must teach, to some extent, the same course sequence over and over again. And after a few years, one becomes a big stale. And the problem then is to find something new and interesting and different to do. And I think that’s what really drew me to computers. It wasn’t that I didn’t like history anymore, but I wanted something in addition to that. And with the development of the computer interest and a certain amount of expertise, the possibility of teaching in another department opened up. And so at present, I’ve got a very delightful situation at the university. I teach a variety of history courses: typically a freshman, an advanced course, and a seminar, which gives me variety. And then for complete change of pace, the CIS course. So it makes for an interesting, if busy, year.
Hellrung: When did you become the chairman of history at Southwest Texas, and why do you think you were appointed as such?
Swinney: I became chairman in September of 1967. And at that time, the month—a couple—three months earlier, the out—the former chairman, Cecil Hahn, who is now retired and still lives in San Marcos but is now retired, Cecil Hahn had announced his intent to leave the chairmanship. And President McCrocklin called a meeting of the history department and asked all of us to fill out a little slip of paper on which we’d write the name of whomever we thought should be the next chairman. Or, if there was no one in the department that we thought should be that—should assume that position, then to indicate “outside.” Meaning to have a search and bring someone in from the outside. That meeting didn’t last very long, ten, fifteen minutes. And we walked back down the hill, [to] get a cup of coffee, and had just taken a sip or two, when I got a telephone call from Principal McCrocklin. They had tallied the votes, and he invited me to take the chairmanship. So in a sense, I was the choice of my colleagues. That’s normally not how chairs have been chosen on this campus. It was kind of a unique circumstance where it was almost a faculty election. And I always felt like that I was chosen by the faculty and tried to do my best to represent the faculty interest during the period when I was chairman.
Hellrung: That’s interesting. I’ve never heard that—a chairman being selected that way before. Why did you decide to resign as chairman?
Swinney: I reached the point in the late seventies when I felt like that I had done just about all I could do in that position. Those administrative positions are very exciting for a while, and one can do important things. But as you go through the routine of university business, it does eventually become fairly repetitive. For example, each semester a schedule must be drawn for the next semester. The drawing of a schedule can be a challenge, and it can be interesting, but after you’ve done it for ten, twelve, or more years, it loses some of its charm. Each year, budgets must be drawn. Each year, plans must be laid, and so forth. And I think that eventually it was the repetitiveness of it, boredom, if you will, and a desire to do something different. So, as a matter of choice, in 1980, I decided to go back to classroom teaching. It turned out that I had the opportunity in 1980 also to get a developmental leave, one semester off with pay. And so I planned to end the chairmanship with the semester off which I used to make a move in the direction of quantitative history and the computers and embrace of these new interests. And it was very helpful then in making the transition. But the thirteen years as chairman was a very, very pleasant period in my life. And I left it with awfully good feelings. I was just tired of it, and full-time teaching is a challenge of a different sort. And I have enjoyed this last five years as much as I enjoyed the thirteen as chairman.
Hellrung: You’ve already told us what courses you’re teaching currently. Could you comment on how student life has changed since you first came to Southwest Texas? Such as dress requirements or living accommodations.
Swinney: Well, obviously, there have been lots of changes. Fewer students live in the dorms these days. Living in the dorms was always a requirement. When I first came to the university, the college still felt that it had essentially a parent’s responsibility to look after students. The old principal of in loco parentis, as they called it, the university would take the place of the parent. And so dorm rules tended to be very strict. Of course, in those days, students were still minors. One didn’t reach majority until age twenty-one. And so there was no possibility for drinking or some of the other things that one associates with majority status. I think the most obvious change then has been as the university has grown, the students both because of national political pressures and because of the impossibility of the university, with now twenty thousand students, of possibly playing the in loco parentis rule—role that students now have a good deal more freedom. They’re adults. They’re going to want to be treated by adults, treated as adults. They increasingly live off-campus and regulate their own lives. And I think that’s a very positive change.
As far as other aspects of student life are concerned, I’m not sure that that’s changed as much as we sometimes think it has. The students that I see in freshman courses, basically, I think have not changed that much over a thirty-year period. We still get a blend in our freshman courses of a few very good students, and that’s been a constant throughout the thirty years I’ve been here. I’ve seen some excellent good students. We get a large number of students who perhaps are not motivated as strongly as they might be. And I think that mix, the serious as opposed to the less serious, has remained fairly constant at Southwest Texas. Perhaps we get more able students than we used to. It’s difficult for me to judge that. But it seems to me, that essentially the student body, except for the trappings of adulthood which are so obvious, especially since San Marcos has gone wet in the meantime, but aside from that, students have not changed all that much in a thirty-year period.
Hellrung: With all the other changes that have happened in San Marcos, some things still remain constant.
Swinney: Well, I may misjudge that. I might elaborate as little bit. It’s always fascinated me to how; let’s see how to phrase this. We have a tendency to generalize about generations. And we see the student generation of the sixties as being an activist generation. My own generation, for example, kids born in the 1930s and reaching high school, college, in the late forties and early fifties, was always pegged as a very quiet, serious generation. So each generation of young people seems to take on a personality of its own. What my suspicion is, that relatively few behavior patterns actually change. Granted that you have a few leaders, like in the sixties, who were very active, but by and large, our student body in the sixties, as I remember it, was not appreciably different from the generation in the fifties or that of the seventies. You get the change of behavior of a few prominent students, which colors the generalizations we make about a generation. But I’m not really sure that rank and file of students really do change that much from time to time. It’s possible I misread that. But that’s been my observation.
Hellrung: A little more about your computer involvement. Do you think computers have changed the operating environment at Southwest Texas?
Swinney: I’d have to think some I suppose about all of the implications of computers. I guess we’ve had them now for off and on fifteen or twenty years. And there’s no doubt but what it has totally changed the way the university works. I’m not sure all those changes have been for the better. I think on the one hand, we have become more productive. The whole idea of computerization, of course, is to make us more productive. And I think in some cases, individual productivity has increased through such things as word processing and, in some disciplines, data base management, the use of spreadsheets, and these other computer programs, which everyone knows about. But the computer can also decrease productivity. We can become so dependent upon the computer that we can’t function without it. And I think this becomes obvious, say with a university process like registration. Registration at best is a hassle. I suppose now we couldn’t do it without the computer. And yet, as students go through registration at least three or four times a year, one of the biggest problems they face is the computer. If the computer doesn’t work, then long lines develop. Or the computer operator makes an error [resulting in] them missing enrolled in classes. And that’s difficult to straighten out. So computers are not an unmixed blessing. It seems to me that they do create the parameter in which we operate. They give us some freedom, increase our productivity, but they also make it difficult for us to be flexible and to accomplish some things we want to do. And of course, the computers are extremely good at paperwork. They make bookkeeping relatively easy. And so I think the computer revolution has been accompanied by an immense increase in the amount of paperwork that teachers and students alike do, most of it done in the name of accountability. This may or may not turn out to be a positive thing in the long run. I think we’re too close to it now to judge. But I have some reservations about the large-scale use of the computer in institutions. It can create lots of problems.
Hellrung: Do you think that maybe the reason registration has been rather, shall I say, not as effective as it could be? Do you think that is a problem of the computer, the environment itself, or the way it is actually utilized? In other words, after we have gone through the registration process—pre-registration process a couple of times, do you think this will eventually work itself out, or do you think they are problems that are created by the computer that will never be overcome?
Swinney: Well, that’s a difficult question to answer. This whole business of registration does, I think, help me make my point about the two-edged sword that the computer has become. Pre-registration, to take that point that you raised, is obviously experimental at this juncture. We have had a couple of run-throughs, and now this semester we are attempting to do the real thing. And it’s a brand new system. Most of the problems that I’m aware of with pre-registration are not computer problems, per se. They’re people problems of schedules that weren’t ready, confusion about what advisors are to do. Anytime that you have a new system, there are bound to be problems of this sort, and I suspect that they can be worked out. Of course, none of it would be possible without the computer. Or it would be possible, but it would be difficult to imagine enrolling twenty thousand students without computer assistance. The thing that fascinates me is that with this preregistration system as it exists now, that it’s taking us an immensely large number of man-hours to get students registered than it has in the past. The idea of advanced registration was that it would be quicker and easier and a convenience. But it turns out to take more faculty time. I’m not sure it takes any more student time. But it takes immense amounts of faculty time to provide the advising. And so we’ve managed in an age of computers, when jobs are supposed to be getting easier, to design a system where it takes four or five weeks to do what we’ve always done in three days. That’s not a computer problem. But it is a problem related to how we use the computer to manage our systems within our large university establishment. So, the computer is in that equation. But I think the people problem of how we go about handling the human side of the problem needs additional attention as well. I’m not sure whether any of that makes sense, but I am fascinated with the fact that as we are attempting to become more productive in lots of ways, we seem to be less productive. This new system is not a very efficient system. Maybe it can become an efficient system in time, but it’s not an efficient system now.
Hellrung: There’s recently been a new program instituted by President Hardesty, the General Studies Program. What is the General Studies Program, and what changes do you think it will make at Southwest Texas?
Swinney: Well, basically the General Studies Program is a reworking of the old Academic Foundations Program. And I think it turns out that as far as Southwest Texas is concerned, in most of the courses that are taught in the freshman and sophomore level, the basic so-called Academic Foundations will still be taught. The courses which are required in general studies are very much like the old academic foundations courses. There’s a difference here or a difference there, but it’s essentially the same system that we’ve had for a good many years. But then it goes beyond that old academic foundations notion by introducing the concept of accountability for one thing. Under general studies, we increasingly will ask students to actually take the freshman and sophomore courses when they’re freshmen and sophomores. And then at the end of that period, before they move into the junior year and on into majors, we’ll be asking for some evidence of whether or not they’ve accomplished the goals which general studies has set. Namely, can they read effectively, write effectively, and handle minimal mathematical calculations. So, it’s in essence a kind of back to basics and the concept of the rising junior exam. That is, a new test will be given at the time one moves into the junior year to ascertain whether or not those basic concepts have been acquired or not is new for us. In the terms of the things that I do, most namely, most obviously, teaching freshmen in advanced American History courses, general studies has brought a new emphasis on the writing component. Now, ever since I’ve been at Southwest Texas, and I include many years before I came, that the history department was committed to the notion that students must write effectively. We have always required that over 50% of the examinations in freshmen history courses be essay examinations. So, in that sense, we have always been what is fashionable today to call “writing intensive.” The term “writing intensive” is used by general studies to designate those writing courses which have a substantial writing requirement. Under general studies, the only thing which was required for writing intensive courses was to require an out-of-class essay of at least five hundred words. An ample writing course, but the writing intensive courses now require that there be an independent essay. So this semester, for the first time, I’m experimenting with that requirement, in addition to the other things that I’ve always done in History 1310 and 20, we’re now asking students to prepare an essay outside of class. As a matter of fact, just this morning I was just beginning to prepare the materials to hand out to students later this week leading to that first set of essays. And at this point, I don’t know how it will work. I think it’s a good idea. It means, of course, additional grading. But the objective, which is more effective writing, is well worth the additional work. But at this point, I just have no clear notion as to how it will actually work out in practice. But I’m excited about it. I think that the students are something less than excited about it. We’ll just all have to see what we get here when we move through this experimental period.
Hellrung: A necessary evil. Do you think that quality of education will increase because of this? Or do you think it’s more something that you’ve already been doing?
Swinney: Well, that’s hard to know. The word “quality” is itself a problem. The whole society is concerned about the erosion of student skills. And for long years, standardized exams have revealed the fact that our students seem to have less knowledge than they had some years ago, you’re familiar with that. The performance on many standardized exams, especially those that are used for college admission, have, the scores have been declining. And partly because of the society as a whole is interested, and has been for the last four or five years or more, in returning to basics. And essentially, general education is a formalized program that’s designed to get back to basics. In other words, it’s an attempt to implement a notion that’s very strongly held. The central notion here is reading and writing effectiveness, I think. The university, indeed the intelligents, generally are distressed that students don’t read and write as effective as they used to. The problem is, I think, that in our society right now, despite our concern about basic skills, that reading and writing is not probably as essential as it once was. This tends to be a visual generation. We’ve been moving in that direction ever since the advent of TV right after World War II. Students don’t read for pleasure. And they find required reading sometimes very onerous. And in a sense then, the attempt to move back to basics is swimming against the whole stream of what this society does. And it seems to me that it’s very early to tell whether we can reverse this trend or not. Cynic that I tend to be sometimes, I suspect that maybe we can. That’s we’ll get back to reading and writing at a point when it becomes apparent that society is just not concerned about declining test scores, when it is concerned about education for better reasons. In other words, a set of circumstances will come into play which would require good and effective reading and writing, then perhaps we could achieve it. So I think the jury is out. I don’t know if we can simply create a problem or pass rules or designate intensive writing courses and really accomplish anything of permanent value. I hope that’s not too cynical, but that’s basically the way I look at it.
End Side 1, begin Side 2
Hellrung: For the last question, in reference to a lecture given on March 16, 1965, on the origins of the Ku Klux Klan. What factors of that society’s 1870 movement do you think are present today in Central Texas?
Swinney: That I guess you picked that up from the university morgue.
Hellrung: Yes, I did.
Swinney: And in 1965 I was working very hard to complete my doctoral dissertation. And that was a speech which I gave that was a spinoff of the research that I had been doing. The Klan connection, of course, was very important in my dissertation. One of the main threats, if not the main threat, in the South for the implementation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was the Klan. The Klan I was dealing with was the Reconstruction [Era] Klan, not the Klan of the 1920s. The Reconstruction Klan, I think, was, well, I know it was much more similar to the modern Ku Klux Klan than was the Klan of the twenties. The Klan of the 1920s tended to be more a reaction against urban phenomenon and less single-mindedly anti-black than either the Reconstruction Klan or the modern Klan. I guess the answer to your question would be that—I’ll leave the Central Texas out of it, I’m not sure I could comment on that—in terms of the Reconstruction South and the modern South, that the factors which produced Klanism in both periods were much the same. It’s pretty much pure racism if you reduce it to its lowest common denominator. And clearly in the modern South those sentiments still exist. The crucial difference would be in the proportions. During the Reconstruction period, most white southerners were racist and Negrophobe. In the modern South, the number is far smaller. Whereas the Klan-related phenomenon, general phenomena of racism and Reconstruction, was omnipresent in the modern South, it has come to be a less dominant force. And I think that’s progress. The amount of progress we’ve made since the 1960s on this issue of race is clearly phenomenal; a veritable revolution, as a matter of fact. So, I think it’s rather difficult today to compare attitudes in the two periods. In the 1950s, the comparison would have been more pronounced. Southern reaction to the desegregation decision of Brown versus Topeka Board of Education, in 1954, reminded one very much of Reconstruction. But since 1954, we have come a long, long way. And I think Southern society has opened up in ways that even the most optimistic of the civil libertarians could not have imagined in the forties and fifties.
Hellrung: Thank you very much for your interview. It was very informative.
End of interview