Columnist traces the contradictions in state politics

The News & Observer's Rob Christensen covers the Old North State's modern political era from post-Reconstruction to the 21st century in his new book, The Paradox of Tar Heel Politics. Today through Tuesday, The N&O will publish excerpts.

One day in the 1930s, Gov. O. Max Gardner and U.S. Sen. Josiah Bailey went for a stroll in Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery, the Valhalla for many of North Carolina's leading political figures. The two men came across the grave of a 19th-century populist leader. Only the lower part of the monument had been constructed, and Gardner asked why it was never finished.

"Because the money gave out," Bailey replied. "That is the way life is. One minute a man's name is on every tongue and all are anxious to do him honor, and then suddenly he is cut down. At first people praise his memory and then in a little while he is forgotten."

"That," Gardner said, "is what the erosion of time often does to a man's fame."

Gardner and Bailey are barely remembered today, even though they helped shape North Carolina politics in the 20th century.

Gardner, a high-living textile tycoon, was not only the architect of modern state government, but he shaped the state's sensibility regarding politics. Gardner was an advocate of business progressivism, the animating force in 20th-century Tar Heel politics. Politics was largely controlled by big business. The state lit the cigars for corporate executives, but was hostile to organized labor; it generously spent money on roads and universities, but was stingy when it came to the poor.

State leaders sought a measure of fairness toward its black citizens, as long as it didn't threaten the system of segregation. It was a business progressivism that was in tune with North Carolina's growing urban middle class of lawyers, power company executives, bankers, textile plant owners, newspaper publishers and editors, and others.

Bailey, a former editor of the Biblical Recorder, represented a more unvarnished brand of conservatism that grew out of the tobacco and cotton fields, the hard pews of fundamentalist churches, and what one astute observer called "a dark and unfathomable abyss of race feeling." Bailey's brand of conservatism called for less government, for the enforcement of traditional values of morality, and for a strict racial line.

But conservatives and pro-business moderates such as Bailey and Gardner have never been able to rule the state unchallenged. The unfinished Oakwood grave marker the two men mused over belonged to Leonidas Polk, a national Populist leader, who set in motion the most powerful pitchfork uprising in the South in the 1890s -- one that sent the conservatives and their business allies packing.

North Carolina has always had a strain of cornbread populism -- an unwillingness to give Wall Street, or the big banks, or the big insurance companies free rein. So North Carolina elected populists such as Marion Butler, Robert Reynolds and John Edwards to the U.S. Senate, and put Daniel Russell and Kerr Scott in the governor's mansion.

The strains of business progressivism, conservatism, and populism are often commingled so that thousands of people voted for both a conservative such as Sen. Jesse Helms and a business progressive such as Gov. Jim Hunt. Many people's politics don't fit into nice little pigeonholes.

National observers are often confounded by North Carolina's puzzling politics. What kind of state is North Carolina? Was it the state that repeatedly sent Jesse Helms, Josiah Bailey, Sam Ervin and a parade of other conservatives to Washington, or was it a state that elected a stream of center-left Democrats such as Jim Hunt, John Edwards, and Terry Sanford?