Leadership Quote by George Smathers

A politician admitting disbelief in social equality is either a scandal or a strategy; in Smathers's era, it was often both. "I don't believe" foregrounds personal conviction, not policy detail, as if prejudice were simply a matter of taste. That rhetorical move launders ideology into temperament: you are invited to treat inequality as his honest worldview rather than a system with victims and beneficiaries.

The sharper blade is the tag-on clause: "and they know it". It turns a morally loaded stance into a badge of authenticity. Smathers isn't arguing he is right; he's signaling he is reliable. The implied audience is not the entire public but the voters and power brokers who could hear "social equality" as code for federal civil-rights pressure, desegregation, labor empowerment, and the postwar state's creeping demand that Southern hierarchies loosen. In mid-century Southern politics, plain talk about racial order was being forced into euphemism by national scrutiny. Smathers's line flips that constraint into advantage: the wink becomes the message.

Subtext: a promise to maintain the status quo, delivered as a test of solidarity. "They" draws a boundary between insiders and outsiders, between those who "understand" and those who would object. It's coalition maintenance through exclusion, a reminder that political identity can be built less on what you propose than on what you refuse to concede. The line works because it treats equality not as a democratic baseline but as a threat, and because it recasts resistance as candor in a culture that often mistakes bluntness for courage.