My column today may appear to be about our endorsement of a candidate for the state Senate. But that was just an excuse for writing about something I’d been thinking about for 20 years — the meaning of the phrase "good old boy," as used in S.C. politics.
This post is to include some additional stuff that I didn’t have room for in the column, in addition to what I already wrote about the movie I referred to.
First, there was my reference to Billy Carter. Remember that he was the one who tried to define the difference between a "good old boy" and a "redneck." He said a good old boy drives down the road in his pickup truck drinking beer and throwing the empty cans back into the bed of the truck (or into a recycling bag, in another version). A "redneck" throws them out onto the road.
In any case, his point was to make a "good old boy" out to be something not so bad. And indeed, through the 70s and into the 80s, while a Northerner or even a snobbish Southerner might look down on a "good old boy," it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. It was an OK thing to be.
As I said in the column, my first memory of hearing the phrase used politically by a Southerner as a bad thing was after I returned home to South Carolina in 1987. I kept hearing of the way that Carroll Campbell had used it in the 1986 campaign.
As I noted also in the column, when used as Campbell used it ("good old boy system), the phrase seemed a bastardized hybrid of two very different concepts — an uncultured, generally rural, working-class white Southern male on the one hand, and a member of the very upper crust (Old Boy Network) in Britain or the American Northeast, referring to alumni of the poshest schools.
A footnote: Not until after I had written the column, and was looking for links for the blog version, did I learn that someone else had drawn the same contrast, in a letter to the editor in The New York Times in 1991. That writer, a William M. Ringle of McLean, Va., also used Billy Carter in defining one of the phrases, by the way. Finding that made me feel slightly less original, but then also slightly less crazy. The main point is that Mr. Ringle saw the two phrases as just as jarringly incompatible as I did:
According to your report that Yale University’s Skull and Bones club has voted to accept women into its ranks (news article, Oct. 26), the secret society "can no longer rightly be considered just a ‘good old boy,’ network." You make the common mistake of splicing "good ol’ boy" onto "old boy."
An old boy is an alumnus, originally of a British public school, which is of course a private school. Such old grads have been credited with creating the kind of network that Skull and Bones supposedly fosters. Old school ties maintain the bond.
Good ol’ boys, however, are Southern Americans not known for a burning desire to go to Yale. Even if they got there, they wouldn’t be tapped for Skull and Bones. Gregarious, charming and politically wise though they can be, they can’t be imagined swapping stories, between bites of Moon Pie and gulps of R. C. Cola, with the likes of William F. Buckley Jr. or President Bush. Billy Carter might epitomize the good ol’ boy.
Despite strained similarities, old boys are old boys, and good ol’ boys are good ol’ boys, and never the twain shall meet.
Anyway, back to Carroll Campbell, who had hit upon this odd usage. It was really rather brilliant for a man who would be the first Republican governor since Reconstruction who was not elected by a fluke (the Establishment’s — or shall we say "Old Boy Network’s" successful scuttling of the Pug Ravenel candidacy). Since everyone in power in the state was a Democrat, it was appropriate to evoke the concept of the Old Boy Network in opposing that entrenched power. And "good old boy" was a familiar Southern term by then, giving the concept a particularly South Carolina flavor — one that conveniently evoked the notion that by voting Republican for a change, you would be raising yourself above those rednecks who are running things. This played subtly to the traditional notion that Republicans were in a higher social class than Democrats.
The brilliance of this combination of ideas was that it gave voters an opportunity both to identify subliminally with a higher social class (if you voted for Campbell, you were not a "good old boy"), while at the same time satisfying a populist urge to strike a blow at the Establishment (the "Old Boy Network"). One could hardly find a better psychological formula for encouraging people who weren’t used to doing so to vote Republican.
The phrase worked so well that over the years, people across the political spectrum took it up. You found women and blacks — generally Democratic constituencies — using it to describe the white men who kept them from power. The meaning in those contexts was simpler, because it directly replaced "Old Boy Network."
Cindi Scoppe, in editing my column, said I was full of it. She said there was nothing new or original about Campbell’s use of the phrase "good old boy system." But I believe she thinks that because she doesn’t remember the time before that. Cindi came to work at The State in 1986, fresh out of college (UNC). She didn’t start covering state politics until I recruited her from the metro staff in 1987 or 1988. I, on the other hand, had dealt with politics professionally since 1975, mostly in Tennessee (as likely a place to find good old boys as anywhere).
Nevertheless, she did plant a small seed of doubt. Fortunately, Bob McAlister was able to clear it up for me. I called Bob late Friday just to give him a heads-up that indeed I was about to use the quotes I had dragged out of him a couple of weeks earlier. And Bob insisted that the "good old boy system" WAS original to the 1986 Campbell campaign.
In fact, he believes (immodestly) that a TV commercial he produced, entitled "Good Old Boys," was what won the election for Campbell. The thrust of it was to drive home the cozy relationship between the developers of what then was called the AT&T building on the site of the old Wade Hampton Hotel (neither Bob nor I could remember what it’s called now; it’s had several aliases). The clincher was a picture he had taken of a banner in front of the building itself supporting Democratic nominee Mike Daniel.
But while Bob took credit for the spot, and therefore for the victory, when I asked whether the "good old boy" rhetorical strategy was his, he said no: Carroll Campbell had been using it in the campaign all along, and it was original to him.
The tension between "good old boy" and "Old Boy Network" inherent in "good old boy system" had never consciously occurred to Bob, he said.
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Fascinating parsing of those 2 very different phrases. It had not occurred to me, although Campbell’s melding of the 2 certainly got my attention at the time.
Thank you for another schoolmastery lesson, Professor Prig.
(I’m ribbing you a little.)
Here’s a lesson of my own: definitions converge, diverge and evolve over time. The definitions of “conservative” and “liberal” in US politics came to differ from original their British usage. And I would guess that you remember firsthand when the word “bad” gained a superbad connotation.
When a group of people agree that a word represents something, then that’s what it means.
Cool?
Don’t get me wrong. I agree, members of the Ivy League Old Boy Network and Southern Good Ole Boy Network probably wouldn’t be caught chillaxin’ at each other’s respective cribs, but they both represent a common form of human behavior seen in more than one culture: a small, generally closed group of people who 1. share a common trait or experience, 2. have accumulated power and resources, and 3. use those resources to maintain the power of the group, to the exclusion of those not in the group.
The Good Ole Boy Network has the outer trappings of the local culture– whether it’s the highbrow version with country club memberships, housekeepers, and beach houses, or the working class kind with deer stands, mud flaps and gun racks, or a mix of both– they serve the same purpose: keeping a group in power.
To point out that Old Boy and Good Ole Boy networks are different is just to say that we don’t live in New England. The behavior has been the same since before Machiavelli described it.
I’m officially bored to tears. I need a nap now.
Either you’re seeing the window without looking through it, Mr. Warthen, or you’re peering through the window without realizing the glass actually separates you from what you’re seeing.
Good ol’ boy, old boy, farther, further. The twain have met, and by now, they share grandchildren, whether they wanted them or not.
As a non-native, I never fully realized that there could be positive associations with the term “good old boy.” Interesting lesson in the evolving mores of Southern culture!
“never fully realized that there could be positive associations”
Too young to remember the Dukes of Hazzard theme song on TV? or just don’t consider it “positive”? 🙂
Damn, Brad, if I had known you were going to take a snippet out of a half-hour conversation, I would have elaborated upon the Good Ole Boy spot. It is true I produced it, but it was not my idea alone. As I recall, Warren Tompkins, the campaign manager, and Tucker Eskew, our press secretary, were equally involved in the spot. And Campbell had ultimate say. It was a team effort, something I didn’t bother to explain because that part of the conversation didn’t seem all that important. But I do maintain it galvanized the electorate. That spot, followed by an on-camera spot with Campbell outlining his goals, did it. By the way, he accomplished every one of his goals during his governorship despite having a Democrat legislature.
Hi guys. There is no nonsense so errant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.
I am from Scotland and learning to write in English, give true I wrote the following sentence: “Buy dermal fillers take care of excessive sweating on amazon.”
Thank you very much ;). Yank.
Love is an active power in man, a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him ovrecome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits to be himself, to retain his integrity.
Thank you for this article. Being politically involved, and an activist, I have been researching a few more topics for the point of persuasion and this being one of them. Since I am from the North, we were taught that, the “good o’l boy” was a highly valuable asset to have in a community, but the “old boy” was despised. So, from the time of my upbringing to the modern day, I also had to adjust to understanding a difference in meaning of the “good o’l boy”. Now that I live in the South, and in a very diverse area, the good o’l boy system, is only benefiting particular class of people. These two terms have come to represent the hiring practices, the business owners and the town elections to control the undesriables or other words don’t higher or elect the black guy. I enjoyed your article to help put into prospective the differences between the two terms. Thank you for your writings.