"There is always a dark underside to every age: a festering ill-smelling slum where man’s enemies and errors breed," she said in a speech given at Atlanta University. For American democracy, the greatest danger is "the demagogue: the man who deliberately betrays the people; the man who scares them, calling fire, when there is no fire; who tells the people they are free to break the law, free to trample other people’s rights, free to slough off their conscience and their reason and behave like mad men when they want to." That was the tragedy of the South Lillian Smith knew: the majority "gave [its] support, every time, to the cheap, foul-mouthed demagogue who appealed not to our reason and conscience but to our anxiety, who begged us to return with him to the past, a past that never actually existed." The rest, she said, "either [did] nothing or something totally irrelevant to the situation. And in a crisis that is a dangerous kind of behavior." Lillian Smith - Southern feminist writer