Being Southern in an Age of Radicalism - RECKONIN'
You are deplorable.
It is worse than that. If you are Southern or interested in the South you
are the most deplorable of all the deplorables. There is no place for you
among the enlightened and virtuous people of 21st Century America.
But perhaps there is a certain advantage to being an outsider. It can help
you see what 21st century America really is rather than what it assumes
itself to be.
We can’t understand Southern identity without a candid view of that other
thing, call it the North or mainstream America or the Age of Radicalism, for
which the South has been an economic colony and a cultural whipping boy
since well before the War for Southern Independence.
I was struck a few years ago by the statement of a leading Ivy League
intellectual. America was suffering, he said, from increasing violence
because of the spread of “the Southern gun culture.” This was the time of
Timothy McVeigh of New York, Michigan, and the U.S. Army; of the Unabomber
from Harvard and Berkeley; of the Columbine shooters (the only ones who used
guns). You see, all this violence is because something is seeping out of the
evil Southern culture to contaminate the good parts of America.
More recently, another Ivy League savant characterized the present truly
deplorable condition of once wealthy and productive Detroit as “an Alabama
ghetto.” We have now had three generations born and raised in Detroit, but
if there is something wrong, you see, it must be the fault of the South. To
invoke Alabama explains it all. In fact, studies have shown that the first
generation of African-Americans who migrated from the South to Detroit were
well-behaved even though they faced a lot of hostility. They had jobs and
founded churches and businesses. But what has happened since MUST BE the
fault of Southerners. That is the eternal default position.
Even more recently, I read the comments of a gentleman who says that in his
Northern parochial school, the nuns taught that Southerners used black
people for fire logs.
These commentators are ignorant. They are also diseased in mind and
character. They imagine something they call the South which does not exist.
To identify this as the source of evil in an otherwise pure and shining
American society is for them a sign of superior intelligence and virtue.
This defect is present, I fear, in millions of Americans, including some
Southerners. You have to wonder what would become of them if they did not
have this imaginary South to blame everything on and had to face their own
selves. It seems to me this attitude can only flourish because American
mainstream society is devoid of religion and any real culture, as well as of
self-knowledge. It has no self except in contrast that imaginary evil
“other” that is standing in the way of perfection.
This is the hostile environment in which the Southern tradition must
survive.
John C. Calhoun said that the South was the balance wheel of the Union.
Without the South America would go wild and fly apart. In this time when the
South has lost almost all power and influence, is not that exactly what has
happened? Is that not why we are in the “Age of Radicalism”?
Southerners are always being called upon to stop being themselves and
become more like other Americans. Curiously, however, to be a mainstream
American one must be intellectually and morally nimble enough to hit a
moving target. Mainstream America is always changing and about every second
or third generation it goes into a frantic revolutionary mode as it did in
the 1850-1870s , in the 1960s-70s, and as we are living though now. The
South has changed a lot but it simply can’t keep up. And what civilized
people would want keep up with the mainstream America that is sunk in
materialism, intellectual trivia, moral depravity, and that anti-culture
called diversity?
The South, of course, may be dealt with by tangible facts and figures,
historical and present-day. But there is an intangible element that is
perhaps the most important of all. Although intangible, this South is real,
not a product of the ravings of celebrated intellectuals. It may be this
promethean qualitativeness of “the South” that allows outsiders to deal with
us in ways that defy all reality.
This is what Mel Bradford was getting at when he defined the South “As a
vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who have
contributed to it.” The bond is not quantifiable It is a shared identity of
values and behavior, perhaps even of personality, and it has lasted a long
time and is much more venerable, humane, and constructive than that
artificial and dubious creation known at the U.S. government. It is not even
a matter of birth and raising. It is shared by all who contribute to it.
In 1981, with youthful presumptuousness that still astonishes me, I
attempted to define the South. I wrote:
“In my opinion the South has always been primarily a matter of values, a
peculiar repository of intangible qualities in a society particularly
preoccupied with the quantifiable.”
Count Hermann Keyserling was an Austrian (not German) nobleman well-known
in the 1920s for his insightful writings on his world travels. After a long
visit to the United States, he praised the material success of the United
States (this was written in 1929 just before the Great Depression). But he
added this:
“When the American nation finds itself culturally, the hegemony will
inevitably pass over to the South. There alone can there be a question of
enduring culture. The region below the Potomac possesses the type that was
truly responsible for America’s greatness in the past. This is the type of
the Southern gentleman, with the corresponding type of woman. For these are
the only types of complete souls that the United States has yet produced.”
The only “complete souls” to be found among culturally and spiritually
shallow Americans are Southerners. Think about it. Bradford and Keyserling’s
remarks relate to the “social bond individualism” described by Richard
Weaver. Lee’s men spontaneously forced him out of the line of fire against
orders because it was the right thing to do for the common enterprise they
were carrying out for their society. We may observe also, I think, a
complete soul in the Southern grandmother who in civilizing young people
warned against bad behavior not because it would be punished or was a bar to
success but because “we don’t do that sort of thing.” It may be that the
Southern dominance of American literature and music is an example of how
complete souls can find expression even in such a debased American society
as we now endure.
This form of individualism can often include a good deal of cussedness.
Like Faulkner’s farmer who could not fathom that the government wanted to
pay him NOT to grow cotton. Or the Confederate soldier described by Shelby
Foote, who survived Pickett’s Charge and backed very slowly and defiantly
down the hill taunting the Yankees.
In the late 19th century Americans reached a workable compromise in the
understanding of the great revolutionary bloodshed of the War for Southern
Independence. Southerners were glad that the Union had been preserved and
wanted to fully participate in the flourishing America that followed.
Northerners agreed that there was good and bad on both sides and that
Southern motives were honorable and Southern heroes were American heroes.
There was another side to this peace treaty, however: everything good about
the South became American. In the mainstream understanding of American
history, the great Southerners who created and nourished the United States
were “Americans,” that is, they were honorary Yankees. Only bad people like
Calhoun, slavery defenders and traitors, were considered “Southern.” So
Washington and Jefferson were put on Mount Rushmore along with Lincoln and
Teddy Roosevelt to suggest some sort of American, that is Yankee, tradition.
In fact Washington and Jefferson would have despised Lincoln and Roosevelt
as betrayers of the Founding. Now that we are expunging heroes, let’s blast
Washington and Jefferson off of Mount Rushmore and replace them with Chester
Arthur and Warren Harding.
It seems now that the lie is not working so well. It has come home that
Washington and Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern slaveholders, so
there is a rising demand that they be expunged along with Confederates.
Since Southern plantation owners were Presidents for 50 out of the first 72
years of the United States, as were most other significant leaders, American
history must go. New Orleans can no longer celebrate its greatest hero, a
slaveholder. If we are to put under the ban all slaveholders then we have
wiped away all of the earliest and best part of American history. That, of
course, is exactly what is intended.
But it has also wiped away the lies that have passed for mainstream
American history. Washington and Jefferson and Andy Jackson are once more
Southern and no longer honorary Yankees. And we can claim entirely for
ourselves Lee and Forrest, who are not just Southern icons but world
renowned military leaders, among the greatest ever produced by America.
Today is General’s Forrest’s birthday, by the way.
I find jihadist campaign against America liberating. As Southerners we no
longer have to be good sports and play by the rules that “those people” as
General Lee politely called them, have thrown out. We can once more embrace
our own Southern history, which is the real American history.
As Dr. Livingston and Dr. McClanahan have shown, from the beginning the
South was America and America was the South. With good will, the South gave
all to build the United States. Southerners all along thought of the Union
as an agreement in good faith for mutual benefit of all the States. They
served it in a spirit of patriotism and honor. From the very first day the
ruling elements of the North considered the Union as a way to make
themselves some easy money. They still do. And secondarily as a tool to
force their way of thinking on everybody else. Our loyalty to the United
States has never been reciprocated and our desire to be good Americans has
been treated with contempt. That is the reality of enlightened and virtuous
21st century America that we can see from the perspective of the Southern
tradition.
The Revolutionary War was won in the South by Southerners, although New
England historians lied so industriously that most people see the winning of
independence through a New England lens. In both the colonial and antebellum
eras, the South was the productive part of the American economy, its
products in great demand internationally. And it was the most prosperous as
well. The North could not produce anything that Europe could not make for
itself, thus the tariff that forced all American consumers to guarantee
profits to Northern industrialists and a national debt that did the same for
bankers.
Remember, in 1860 Lincoln was rejected by 60% of the American people. But
he and his party got control of the federal machinery and waged a brutal war
of conquest against the Southern people that no one previously could have
imagined possible.
This war destroyed 60 per cent of the property and one fourth of the men of
the South. War was very deliberately made on civilians, including African
Americans. Historians have looked recently into the matter are discovering
that the Southern civilian death toll, white and black, was much greater
than has previously been estimated.
In carrying out this war of conquest nothing was ever done by the Union
with a primary motive of benefit to the African Americans. In war and
Reconstruction they were simply tools of the winning side. The war was not
to preserve the Union. It was to replace the Union with a centralized
machine. Lincoln did not save Government of by and for the people. He
established a permanent regime of state capitalism.
This means that the real power is in the hands of big business and big
banks who use the government to protect and increase their own private
profit and wealth. It had nothing to do with slavery or the welfare of
African Americans.
This is the reality of 21st century America that we live under. If you
don’t think so, remember the bailout a few years back in the derivatives
crisis. The banks had gambled and lost. But they were Too Big to Fail.
Neither party could think of any solution except for the taxpayers to bail
the criminals out to the tune of billions of dollars. And this was regarded
as an exercise of great statesmanship. If there had been any Southern
Jeffersonian Democracy left the crisis would never have happened nor would
the atrocity of the bailout.
There has been a campaign to whitewash Reconstruction. But verbal
gymnastics and cherry-picked facts cannot forever disguise the fact that
that Reconstruction was actually a regime of oppression by military
dictatorship and of looting of an already impoverished region that postponed
its recovery. In the end it left nothing but poverty for Southerners white
and black.
The period following Reconstruction has been euphemistically described as
“the New South.” I recommend two recent books --- Philip Leigh’s SOUTHERN
RECONSTRUCTION and PUNISHED BY POVERTY by Ronald and Donald Kennedy. They
show that Reconstruction has never ended. We remain a colony of the ruling
class of mainstream America to be impoverished for their benefit and
hectored for our sins. You will be surprised to learn to what extent federal
policy after Reconstruction was designed to keep Southerners, black and
white, as impoverished colonials. Some 20 million Southerners, black and
white, left for the North and West in the first half of the 20th century to
escape their poverty---a world-class diaspora. But being good sports and
constructive and desiring to be good Americans, Southerners have almost
ceased to notice their second-class citizenship. And the South is still the
only part of American that remembers the Jeffersonian philosophy of
government, as Dr. Walters has pointed out.
The sufferings of Southerners in the war and Reconstruction do not even
register on the national consciousness. How easy it is to endure other
peoples’ troubles. Several people have recently attacked General Lee for
being bitter after the war. How can one be bitter about his land and people
being destroyed now that he has been shown the superior virtue of the other
side. This is the same mentality that encourages Americans to wreak
destructive havoc on other countries. Why don’t they love us when we send
drones half way around the world to blow up their wedding parties? After
all, we mean well and only want to bring them good things.
Faulkner, the greatest American writer of the 20th century, wrote from the
Southern tradition. There is the young farmer so poor he had to listen to
the radio outside a neighbor’s window. But the day after Pearl Harbor he
hitchhiked to Memphis to enlist. He did not need any abstractions about
saving the world for democracy. To defend your people was the right thing to
do. That is social bond individualism. Thoreau would have said don’t bother
him. Emerson would have demanded that he be the one to decide for everybody
else what the war was about.
Or the old lady and two boys in Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust who go to
extreme lengths to save a black man falsely accused of murder. Not because
they are dedicated to some abstraction about equality but because it is the
right thing to do as members of society. And Faulkner’s The Reivers, as
Bradford pointed out, begins with the words “Grandfather said…” followed by
an uproarious account of what happens with Grandfather’s instructions on the
conduct of a gentleman are disregarded. Imagine Hemingway’s or Fitzgerald’s
solipsist characters listening to what Grandfather said.
In Go Down, Moses, the character Ike McCaslin has been taken to be a hero
because he repudiates his family heritage tainted with slavery. But Ike is
no hero, he is a barren man, driven by an overly fastidious and abstract
idea of the good. He is a Southern Thoreau. The real hero is the worldly
Cass Edmonds, who accepts his tarnished heritage and does his best to carry
out his responsibilities to his people, black and white. When in The
Unvanquished Bayard Sartoris faces down his father’s killer unarmed in order
to stop a cycle of violence, he is a conspicuous example of social bond
individualism.
Cleanth Brooks, the greatest student of Faulkner, as pointed out that the
central character of all of Faulkner’s work is not an individual but the
community—the town of Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. This is true of
all the great Southern writers and sets them off from what elsewhere passes
for American literature. The world portrayed in Southern literature has
historical scope and social context, compared to what passes for American
literature.
Faulkner at the time of his death was preparing a book to be called ”The
American Dream—What Happened to It?.” He had written some parts of it and it
is a pure expression of the Southern and Jeffersonian tradition, more so
than he probably realized. In a speech a year after the Nobel speech,
Faulkner said that the noble American principle of a right to life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness had become nothing more than an excuse for
materialistic ease. The early Americans did not mean just the chance to
chase happiness. By happiness they meant “not just pleasure, idleness, but
peace, dignity, independence and self-respect,” things that had to be worked
for and earned. “We knew it once, had it once … only something happened to
us.” We no longer “believed in liberty and freedom and independence as the
old fathers in the old strong, dangerous times had meant it.”
Nobody these days even knows what you are talking about when, like
Keyserling, you mention “souls.” That is evidence that the United States has
never found itself culturally. I would say that it never will, because
American culture is now irredeemable. The Southern soul is still here but we
have to admit that it is embattled and weakened and I rejoice to see that it
survives in some young people.
Our topic this summer is “Being Southern in an Age of Radicalism.” I can
think of no better way to conclude these reflections than this passage from
Abbeville Scholar, Dr. Robert Peters:
The South is a garden. It has been worn out by the War, Reconstruction,
the Period of Desolation, the Depression and the worst ravages of
all---Modernity; yet, a worn-out garden, its contours perceived by keen
eyes, the fruitfulness of its past stored in memory, can be over time, a
time which will last no longer than those of us who initially set our minds
to the task, restored, to once again produce, for the time appointed unto
it, the fruits which nurture the human spirit and which foreshadow the
Garden of which there will be no end.
This is the text of a speech originally presented at the Abbeville
Institute Summer conference in 2017.
******************************
Author
Clyde Wilson is a distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the
University of South Carolina He is the author or editor of over thirty books
and published over 600 articles, essays and reviews
Dr. Wilson is also is co-publisher of Shotwell Publishing
<http://www.shotwellpublishing
Southern books.
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