When I wrote about Jesse Jackson recently, I said his politics were those of a black Jim Hightower, meaning that if he were white his politics would guarantee him obscurity. But if it’s a flaming leftie you want, Hightower is actually a much more interesting proposition than Jackson. You’re unlikely ever to get the chance to vote for him unless you live in Texas, where he’s Commissioner of Agriculture, but you might enjoy knowing he’s around.

He’s an old-fashioned, traditional Texas populist, for better and for worse. You just have to ignore his puerile soak-the-rich rhetoric. And I suspect the only reason he doesn’t go in for jejune Third Worldism is that state agriculture commissioners don’t get asked their foreign-policy views much. But he’s not just another pretty face.

I started out skeptical about Hightower. For one thing, he’s the darling of some of our local trust-fund Marxists, who find his ritualistic Reagan-bashing congenial and his personality—well, just deliciously authentic. So when he spoke in our town a while back and these folks asked if I was going to hear him, I allowed that personally I wouldn’t cross the street to hear the paranoid ravings of some down-home redistributionist.

So I didn’t go. But now a recent issue of Southern Changes, the magazine of the Southern Regional Council, makes me wish I had. It contains an article—obviously once a speech—by Hightower. And, Lord, listen to the man. To be sure, you’ll hear an occasional Jacksonism, like: “Our programs will work if we base The Nation‘s growth not on the Rockefellers, but on the little fellers.” But when Hightower turns to policy, he calls for “developing our own enterprises” and “localizing our economy.” He comes on, in short, like the Nashville Agrarians, authors of I’ll Take My Stand.

He invites us to ponder the story of the Texas watermelon farmers who were losing 60 percent of their crop for lack of a market. While the Kroger supermarket chain was importing melons from Florida, Texas melons were rotting in the field. “What little they did sell was out of a pickup truck on the side of the road, getting a penny a pound for it.” A marketing co-op now means they sell Kroger half a million pounds of watermelon—at seven and a quarter cents a pound. Melon farmers’ income has more than doubled, and consumers, instead of paying $3.50 for Florida melons, “got that sweet Walker County melon for $1.98.”

Hightower has other examples of successful agricultural co-ops. Low-income Mexican-American farmers in the Rio Grande Valley, for instance, now sell squash and peppers directly to the Pathmark chain for four times as much as they used to get from wholesalers. This isn’t charity, or affirmative action: Pathmark sets the specifications for quality and still buys cheaper than it used to.

Hightower claims that something called the Mexico-Texas Exchange Commission has successfully organized various international trade projects and joint ventures, and that similar ties are being forged with Israel and Italy. “We’re finding markets around the world directly from our state.” He acknowledges that Texas has some things going for it, including “an awfully good-looking agriculture commissioner.” But he insists that other states can do it, too, individually or on a regional basis. “There’s no reason the South and individual states can’t form their own foreign relations. You don’t have to go through the State Department for this.”

From time out of mind. Southern agricultural reformers have called for diversification, and Hightower is a traditionalist in that respect at least. Why has his department been encouraging blueberry production? Because a small farmer “can make a living on forty acres of blueberries in our state,” that’s why. “In fact if you diversify your acreage and set aside maybe four acres for blueberries you’ll make enough on that four to subsidize the cow and wheat operation that you’re running on the other four hundred acres that you might have.” Have West Texas farmers with square miles of wheat been going broke? “Now they are producing sprouts on an area about the size of a kitchen table”—and making money.

The old diagnosis attributed the South’s economic ills to its semicolonial economy which produced raw materials, imported finished goods, and lost money on the exchange. Henry Grady used to tell about a Georgia funeral, pointing out where the casket was made, where the Bible was printed, where the shroud was woven, and so forth—and concluding that all Georgia provided was the body and the hole in the ground. Hightower argues that this is still too much the case when it comes to foodstuffs. Forget the Sunbelt: “We have grown the raw commodities and shipped them to Chicago and Philadelphia and Los Angeles where they chop it up, put it in a box, freeze it, and sell it back to us at a hundred times what we sold it to them.”

Just so—until recently Texas wheat farmers sold their wheat to mills in Kansas for a nickel a pound. “In Kansas they were making Texas wheat into plain old white flour in barrels and selling it back to hotels and bakers in Amarillo for twenty-eight cents a pound.” What could be done? Get Texans into the milling business, obviously. Now the first flour milled in the panhandle in a generation is produced in Dawn, Texas—”300,000 pounds of flour a day. That’ll make a pretty good biscuit.”

Just a drop in the bucket, you say? “We’re not talking about a science fair project; this is a real enterprise that will put $10 million a year into Dawn and in its first year of operation will create fourteen jobs right there. Now that doesn’t solve Texas’ unemployment problem but it takes care of it in Dawn pretty well.” You say this is an oldfashioned, Band-Aid approach to economic distress? Well, what’s wrong with that? “Instead of worrying about the global situation, let’s worry about where our people live. A little bit here and a little bit there will add up.”

Consider the crawfish industry. Gulf Coast rice farmers have begun to raise those little suckers because “all you do is put a little bad hay out there in that rice paddy and throw some crawfish in and come back later with some nets.” They sell them to Louisiana packing plants at 75 cents a pound. Good deal, right? But wait a minute: the packing plants have been selling deheaded, deveined frozen crawfish to Houston restaurants at $7.50 a pound, wholesale. Here’s Hightower: “Now maybe we’re not too bright in Texas, but we can dehead crawfish. We’re about to be in the crawfish processing business in Port Arthur.”

The man says so many good things. For instance: “You aren’t putting people in business to fail. You have to work on the market development so what they produce actually has a market, preferably one that is already established and signed for before you build a processing facility.”

He sums up his basic strategy: “If you have lemons, make lemonade.” And he waxes evangelical about extending this principle beyond agriculture. “We can have a decentralized economy that’s environmentally sound, that generates wealth at a local level, that has not only jobs but goodpaying jobs that are upwardly mobile, that allows a local, diversified, abundant management opportunity for little people to be involved. It doesn’t have to be owned by some conglomerate. We can do this ourselves and our people can be the managers and the owners.”

You don’t have to be a left-winger to like the sound of that. In fact, many left-wingers wouldn’t. This message plainly isn’t for doctrinaire socialists, or for the cryptosocialists who want Washington to rare back and impose a national industrial policy. But it sounds good to me. I can’t say whether Hightower’s program makes economic sense or not, but these are themes that can get people excited, and they appeal to wholesome impulses, native and fine. I’m not floating a Hightower-for-President trial balloon—Texas Commissioner of Agriculture sounds just about right—but I’m glad he’s talking.

If you’re suspicious (and you probably should be), you might note that Hightower isn’t entirely clear about the role of government in all this. He says only that the state should be a “catalyst,” one that “work[s] with local folks to create a pool of capital so they have the financing to do what they are wanting to do in an enterprise that makes economic sense.”

Now, if that means subsidizing marginal enterprises with government grants or below-market loans, to hell with it. We’ve already got an example of how that works, in the Farmers’ Home Administration. But if it means working with entrepreneurs to develop business plans, helping them through bureaucratic red tape, and putting them in touch with hardheaded and beady-eyed investors—well, then it seems to me that only rigorous libertarians or Wall Street lackeys could object.

“Wall Street lackeys.” Read enough of this stuff and you start talking that way, too. But, of course, so did the authors of I’ll Take My Stand.