On March 6, 1900, North Carolina author Mary Oates Spratt Van Landingham referred to North Carolina as being a “vale of humility between Two Mountains of Conceit.” She, and many North Carolinians like her, considered their fellow Tar Heels to be more humble than their upper-crust Virginian neighbors, and more stoic than the rebellious and noisy South Carolinians.
North Carolina was idealized as a patchwork of Yeoman farms spread from Manteo to Murphy, lacking the ills that the other Southern states faced. In reality, North Carolina has exhibited some of the worst excess, bigotry and oppression characteristic of the Southern political tradition.
While poorer than its neighbors to the North and South, early North Carolina was still dominated by the plantation-owning ruling class. Headquartered in New Bern, the colony was governed through an aristocratic system, in which the interests of slaves and poor whites were pushed out of the way in order to fulfill the desires of the “gentleman” class. The excessive taxation and excess lifestyle of royal governor William Tryon’s administration prompted many western North Carolinians to take up arms and fight against the government.
This system continued following the War for Independence. In 1856, less than five years before national tensions turned to civil war, North Carolina became the last state to remove property qualifications for voting. Despite the introduction of universal white male suffrage in 1856, it wasn’t until after the Civil War that a non-elite would become governor of North Carolina. Even then, he was be impeached and removed from office due to his perceived heavy-handedness in dealing with the Ku Klux Klan in the state.
Several non-elite governors succeeded him despite a hostile elite establishment. This chain of rule was broken with the end of Reconstruction in the American South and the re-election of wartime governor and planter’s son, Zebulon Baird Vance. Property requirements were restored, and they would not be lowered again until Republican-Populist Daniel Russell came to office in the 1890s. However, an elite, Democrat-controlled legislature overturned these concessions in the legislature, disenfranchising many of the state’s poor whites and Blacks.
Russell’s successor, Charles Aycock (a UNC alumnus), would be one of the most vociferous racists to hold the governor’s office, instigating the violent overthrow of the liberal Republican-Populist government of Wilmington and the race riots that came with it. A memorial to him still stands on the Capitol grounds in Raleigh.
Tides began to turn following World War II. More progressive governors — like William B. Umstead, Terry Sanford and Jim Hunt — made improvements to voting rights and public education. In 1971, a new state constitution declared that the state’s government should exist “solely for the good of the whole.”
However, the corruption and decay ingrained in the North Carolinian political system still rears its ugly head more often than any of us should care to see. The 2000s saw two governors — Mike Easley and Beverly Perdue — scandalized by allegations of campaign finance law violations. In 2014, Charlotte mayor Patrick Cannon was arrested after taking $44,000 in bribes from FBI agents working undercover. On October 9, 2019, it was revealed that state representative David Lewis received a $500,000 loan from a man that was later convicted of bribing a public official.
This affinity for corruption isn’t a partisan issue: both the Democrats’ and Republicans’ hands are stained with the remnants of injustice, corruption and elitism that dominate North Carolina’s government. North Carolinians of good conscience should disassociate themselves from these corrupt institutions that have for far too long cast the people’s desires and needs aside to cater to the elites, and build up new grassroots organizations that will carry out the will of the people.
