THE
SOUTHERN TRADITION
Richard
M. Weaver
New
Individualist Review, Vol. III, No. 3
(1964), 7—17.
Many years ago the historian
Francis Parkman wrote a passage in one of his narratives which impresses me as
full of wisdom and prophecy. After a brilliant characterization of the colonies
as they existed on the eve of the Revolution, he said, “The essential
antagonism of Virginia and New England was afterwards to become, and to remain,
an element of the first influence in American history. Each might have learned
much from the other, but neither did so till, at last, the strife of their
contending principles shook the continent.” If we take Virginia as
representing the South and New England as representing the North, as I think we
may fairly do, we can say that this situation continues in some degree down to
the present. Each section had much to learn from the other: neither was willing
to learn anything and that failure produced 100 years ago the greatest tragedy
in American history. Today it appears in political friction, social resentment,
and misunderstanding of motives despite encouraging signs of growing amity.
This amity will clearly depend upon an appreciation, which Parkman
found so sadly lacking, of what each has to offer. You certainly never get
anywhere in mutual understanding among
peoples or nations by assuming in advance that the other fellow has nothing
whatever to offer. We would never think of assuming that in the case of the
English or the French or the Chinese, or even the American Indians. But I only
report what I have observed if I say that there appears a tendency on the part
of a good many Americans to assume that the American South has nothing to
offer—nothing worth anybody’s considering. That is a proposition in itself,
and it needs to be examined in the light of evidence.
My principal
theme, therefore, will be those things the South believes it has contributed to
this great, rich, and diversified nation and which it feels have some right to
survive and to exert their proportionate influence upon our life.
Before I can do
this, however, I shall have to say something about what the South is—what
makes it a determinate thing, a political, cultural, and social entity, which by
the settlement of 1865 is going to be part of the union indefinitely.
It is virtually
a truism in American political thinking that the South has been a kind of nation
within a nation. You have no doubt learned that “nation” is a hard thing to
define in any ultimate sense. But taking the term in the practical, working
sense usually employed, we can say that there are a number of evidences of
Southern nationalism. The political unity of the section often referred to by
the phrase “the solid South” is a fact of considerable notoriety. Its
ideological unity, or its community of belief about certain ideas, certain
institutions, and certain figures of history is only a little behind the
political unity. And the unity of its culture, expressed in its way of life, its
speech, its cookery, and its manners, has maintained itself surprisingly in the
face of a variety of conditions on the inside and considerable pressure from the
outside. I am inclined to think that Southern culture shows a degree of
centripetalism, or orientation toward a center, which is characteristic of all
high cultures.
In dealing with the factors which have produced this unity of thought and
feeling in the South, it seems best to take them in the order of their
historical emergence.
The first step
toward understanding the peculiarities of the Southern mind and temper is to
recognize that the South, as compared with the North, has a European
culture—not European in the mature or highly developed sense, but more
European than that which grew up north of the Potomac and Ohio rivers, in
several respects, even more European than that of New England.
The South never
showed the same interest in seceding from European culture that the North
and West showed. It played an important and valiant part in the Revolution, but
this was a political separation. After the Revolution it settled down quite
comfortably with its institutions, modelled on eighteenth-century England. A few
stirrings of change, I believe, there were in Virginia, but not enough to alter
the patterns of a land-owning aristocracy. While Emerson in New England was
declaiming, “We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” the
South was contentedly reading Sir Walter Scott, not, as Russell Kirk has
shrewdly pointed out in his The Conservative Mind, just because it liked
romance but because in Sir Walter Scott it found the social ideals of Edmund
Burke. And Burke is one of the great prophets of conservative society. The
European complexion of Southern culture showed itself also in other ways. It
showed itself in the preservation of a class society—one might more truly say
in the creation of a class society—for very few who settled in the South had
any real distinction of family. It appeared in the form of considerable
ceremonial in dress and manners. It was manifested in the code duello, with
all its melancholy consequences. It appeared in the tendency of Southern
families who could afford it to send their sons to Europe for their
education—even Edgar Allan Poe received some of his schooling in England. And
it appeared in a consequential way in their habit of getting their silver, their
china, their fine furniture and the other things that ornamented Southern
mansions from Europe in exchange for their tobacco, cotton and indigo.
Whether the
South was right or wrong in preserving so
much of the European pattern is obviously a question of vast implications
which we cannot go into here. But I think it can be set down as one fact in the
growing breach between South and North. The South retained an outlook which was
characteristically European while the North was developing in a direction away
from this—was becoming more American, you might say.
There
are evidences of this surviving into the present. A few decades ago when
Southern Rhodes scholars first began going to England, some of them were heard
to remark that the society they found over there was much like the society they
had left behind. England hardly seemed to them a foreign country. This led to
attempts by some of them to reassert the close identity of Southern and Western
European culture, to which I expect to refer again later.
The second
great factor in the molding of Southern unity and self-consciousness was the
Civil War. Southerners are sometimes accused of knowing too much about the Civil
War, of be of talking too much
about it, ing unwilling to forget it. But
there are several reasons why this rent looms very large in the Southerner’s
memory, and why he has little reluctance in referring to this war, although it
was a contest in which he was defeated.
To begin with, Southerners, or the great majority of them, always have believed that their part in this war was an honorable one. Far from regarding themselves as rebels, they felt that they were loyal to the original government, that is to say, they believed that they were fighting to defend the government as it was laid down at Philadelphia in 1787 and as recognized by various state ordinances of ratification. This was a government of restricted power, commissioned to do certain things which the states could not do for themselves, but strictly defined as to its authority.
The theory of states’ rights was a kind of political distributism
which opposed the idea of a powerful centralized government. The Southern theory
then as now favored the maximum amount of self-determination by the states and
it included, as a kind of final guarantee that states’ rights would be
respected, the principle of state sovereignty, with its implied right of
secession.
In the Southern
view, it was the North that was rebelling against this idea which had been
accepted by the members of the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Or to put it
in another way, the North was staging a revolution, the purpose of
which was to do away with this older concept of the American government. The
South refused to go along with the revolution, invoked the legal safeguards
which it believed to exist, and then prepared to defend itself by force. You may
recall that the late historian Charles A. Beard found enough substance in this
to call the Civil War “the Second American Revolution” in his Rise of
American Civilization. Thus in this second American Revolution the
Northerners were in the role of patriots, the Southerners in the role of
English, if we keep our analogy with the Revolutionary War.
In all great
crises of history where you have a legal principle challenged by a moral right,
you find people flocking to both standards. The one side says it believes in the
duty of upholding the law. The other side says it believes in the imperative
necessity of change, even at the expense of revolution. Though the Civil War may
not look quite so simple to us now, this is the way many people saw it. A number
of years ago, Gerald Johnson wrote an ingenious little book on Southern
secession, in which he referred to it as the struggle between the law and the
prophets. The South had the law and the North had the prophets, in the form of
the abolitionists and also of the advocators, both heard and unheard, of a
strong central government, unimpeded by theories of states’ rights.
The legal
aspects of an issue which has been so long decided can now have only academic
interest. But if any of you wish to see a statement of the South’s legal
position on state sovereignty and secession, the best source is a little book
by a man named Bledsoe—A. T. Bledsoe—Is Davis a Traitor? Bledsoe was
a Kentuckian, and he brought to the task of writing this defense an interesting
set of qualifications. He was a lawyer, a professor of mathematics, and for ten
years he had been a colleague of Lincoln at the bar of Springfield. Also—and
probably this is pertinent to mention, since we are talking here about a
metaphysical debate—he had written a book-length refutation of Jonathan
Edwards’ Freedom of the Will. I do not know whether this is true or
not, but it has been said that the appearance of Is Davis a Traitor? in
1866 was one of the things that made the North decide not to bring Davis to
trial. At any rate, the failure to bring Davis to trial was naturally taken by
the South as a sign that the North’s legal case was too weak to be risked in
court.
These
are the chief things causing Southerners to feel that, whatever the claims of
moral right and wrong, they had the law on their side.
Now we come to
the fact of the Civil War itself. It was impossible that a struggle as long and
bitter as this should not leave deep scars. Americans, particularly those of the
present generation, are prone to forget the magnitude of this civil conflict.
The United States lost more men from battle wounds and disease in the Civil War
than in any other war of its history, including the Second World War. The battle
front stretched from Pennsylvania to New Mexico, and included also the seven seas. A good many of the
wars of history have been decided by two or three major battles. In our Civil
War at least eighteen battles must be accounted major by reason of the number
and resources involved. The minor battles run into scores, and the total number
of engagements—somebody once counted them up—is, as I recall, something
more than 2200. Of this eighteen major battles you might call five or six
“critical” in a sense that, with a more decisive result, they might have
ended the war right there or have turned it in favor of the side which
eventually lost. I would include in my list of critical battles Shiloh, the
Seven Days, Sharpsburg, Gettysburg, and Chickamauga. So you can see it was
really a knock-down drag-out fight.
There is a
further fact to be noticed in discussing the effect of this war. Nearly the
whole of it was fought on Southern soil. With the exception of the Gettysburg
campaign, and John Hunt Morgan’s raids into Indiana and Ohio, and the small
but famous St. Albans raid in Vermont—a group of Confederates in disguise came
down from Canada, shot up the little town of St. Albans in Vermont, took the
bank deposits and got back across the border—the North was physically
untouched. There is a great difference between reading about a war your boys are
fighting 500 miles away, and having the war in your midst, with homes being
burned, farms being stripped, and your institutions being pulled to pieces.
I’ll bet any Japanese or German today will testify to this. The war was much
more a reality to the people of the South than to those of the North, and it has
remained such down to the present.
A natural
question to come up at this point is, why should anybody care to remember or
write histories about a war which left his country a hollow shell? In order to
explain this, I shall have to tell you something else from the Southern credo,
something that goes along with this faith in the legal case. It has been a prime
factor in preserving Southern morale and in maintaining that united front of
the South which I am afraid has been such a vexation to the rest of the country.
And the only way I can really tell this is by an anecdote, even though I have to
explain the anecdote.
The story goes
that a ragged Confederate soldier was trudging his way home from Appomattox. As
he was passing through some town, somebody called out to him by way of taunting:
“What’ll you do if the Yankees get after you?” And his answer was, “They
aren’t going to bother me. If they do, I’ll just whip ‘em again.” The
point of the anecdote, which may need to be explained, is that the answer was at
least half serious. It was a settled article of belief with the Southern
soldiers—echoed in numberless Confederate reunions—that although they had
lost the war, they had won the fighting— that individually they had proved
themselves the equal, if not the superior of their adversary, and that the
contest had finally been decided by numbers. There is no point in going into the
merits of the argument here. But it is easy to see how, right or wrong, it had a
great effect in preserving Southern pride, and even in maintaining a spirit of
defiance which to this day characterizes a good bit of Southern policy.
It also helps
to explain why the South has written so voluminously about the war, and why in
libraries today, for example, you can find a biography of practically every
Confederate general of any eminence whatever, and sometimes three or four. A
quick check of the card files in Harper library reveals ten full-length
biographies of William Tecumseh Sherman, but fourteen of Stonewall Jackson, plus
biographies of Stoneman, Pleasanton, Grierson, Bedford, Forrest, Stuart, and a
definitive biography of Lee by D. S. Freeman; but no definitive biography of
Grant. The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the
victory and the South the glory. If you consult the literature of the subject
very extensively you find a certain amount of truth in that.
Evidently there
was enough substance in the legend to nourish the martial tradition of the
South, and to support institutions like VMI, the Citadel and the A & M
College of Texas, which do not have counterparts in other sections of the
country.
This brings the
story down to Reconstruction, which somebody has described as “a chamber of
horrors into which no good American would care to look.” If that is an exaggeration,
it still seems fair to say that this was the most dismal period of our
history—a bitter, thirty-year sectional feud in which one side was trying to
impose its will on the other, and the other was resisting that imposition with
every device of policy, stratagem and chicanery that could be found. We must
realize that no people willingly accepts the idea of being reconstructed in the
image of another. That is, in fact, the ultimate in humiliation, the suggestion
that you must give up your mind, your inherited beliefs and your way of life in
favor of that of your invaders. There
was a critical period when, if things had been managed a little worse, the South
might have turned into a Poland or an Ireland, which is to say a hopelessly
alienated and embittered province, willing to carry on a struggle for decades or
even centuries to achieve a final self-determination. That was largely
forestalled by the wisdom of a few Northern leaders. The work of Lincoln toward
reconciliation is well known, but that of Grant, at Appomattox and also later,
I think has never been sufficiently appreciated. And the act of Lee in calling
for reunion once the verdict of battle had been given was of course of very
great influence.
It was an
immeasurable calamity that Lincoln was not allowed to live and carry out his
words in the lofty and magnanimous spirit which his speeches reflect. He was
himself a product of the two sections, a Kentuckian by birth, an Illinois-ian by
adoption. He understood what had gone into the making of both. As it was,
things were done which produced only rancor and made it difficult for either
side to believe in the good faith of the other. It is unfortunate but it is true
that the Negro was forced to pay a large part of the bill for the follies of
Reconstruction.
By all
civilized standards the period was dreadful enough. George Fort Milton has
called his history covering those years The Age of Hate. Claude Bowers
has called this The Tragic Era. If you desire a detailed account of what
the South experienced in these years probably the best source to go to is Why
the Solid South: Reconstruction and Its Results (ed. Hilary Herbert) by a
group of Southern leaders, including a number of governors of states. This is,
of course, a Southern view, but it tells you from the inside something about the
financial, political, and social chaos that prevailed in those years.
Unquestionably
Reconstruction did something to deepen the self-consciousness of the Southern
people, to make them feel less American rather than more so. They became the
first Americans ever to be subject to invasion, conquest, and military
dictation. In estimating the Southern mind it is most important to realize that
no other section of America has been through this kind of experience. In fact it
is not supposed to be part of the American story. The American presents
himself to the world as ever progressing, ever victorious, and irresistible.
The American of the South cannot do this. He has tasted what no good American is
supposed ever to have tasted, namely the cup of defeat. Of course, that experience
is known to practically all the peoples of Europe and of Asia. This circumstance
has the effect of making the mentality of the Southerner again a foreign
mentality—or a mentality which he shares in respect to this experience with
most of the peoples of the world but does not share with the victorious American
of the North and West. He is an outsider in his own country. I have often felt
that the cynicism and Old-World pessimism which the rest of the country
sometimes complains of in the South stems chiefly from this cause. The
Southerner is like a person who has lost his innocence in the midst of persons
who have not. William A. Percy, going from a plantation on the Mississippi
Delta to the Harvard Law School, found that Northern boys were “mentally more
disciplined” but “morally more innocent” than Southern boys. His presence
is somehow anomalous; he didn’t belong.
It is sometimes
said, with reference to these facts, that the South is the only section of the
nation which knows the meaning of tragedy. I am inclined to accept that
observation as true and to feel that important things can be deduced from it.
Perhaps there is nothing in the world as truly educative as tragedy. Tragedy is
a kind of ultimate. When you have known it, you’ve known the worst, and
probably also you have had a glimpse of the mystery of things. And if this is
so, we may infer that there is nothing which educates or matures a man or a
people in the way that the experience of tragedy does. Its lessons, though
usually indescribable, are poignant and long remembered. A year or so ago I had
the temerity to suggest in an article that although the South might not be the
best educated section in the United States, it is the most educated—meaning
that it has an education in tragedy with which other educations are not to be
compared, if you are talking about realities. In this sense, a one-gallus farmer
from Georgia, sitting on a rail fence with a straw in his mouth and commenting
shrewdly on the ways of God and man—a figure I adopt from John Crowe
Ransom—is more educated than say a salesman in Detroit, who has never seen any
reason to believe that progress is not self-moving, necessary and eternal. It
would seem the very perverseness of human nature for one to be proud of this
kind of education. But I do believe it is a factor in the peculiar pride of the
Southerner. He has been through it; he knows; the others are still living in
their fool’s paradise of thinking they can never be defeated. All in all, it
has proved difficult to sell the South on the idea that it is ignorant.
In a speech
made around the turn of the century, Charles Aycock of North Carolina met the
charge of ignorance in a way that is characteristic in its defiance. Speaking on
“The Genius of North Carolina Interpreted,” he said,
Illiterate we have been, but ignorant never. Books we have not known, but men we have learned, and God we have sought to find out.
[North
Carolina has] nowhere within her borders a man known out of his township
ignorant enough to join with the fool in saying “There is no God.”
You will note
here the distinction made between literacy and knowledge—a distinction which
seems to be coming back into vogue. You will observe also the preference of
knowledge of men over knowledge of books—this is where our Southern
politicians get their wiliness. And you will note finally the strong emphasis
upon religiosity.
(It has also
been claimed that this tragic awareness perhaps together with the religiosity is
responsible for the great literary productiveness of the South today. That is
a most interesting thesis to examine, but it is a subject for a different
lecture.)
For a preliminary, this has been rather long, but I
have felt it essential to present the South as a concrete historical reality.
One of the things that has prevented a better understanding between North and
South, in my firm belief, is that
to the North the South has never seemed quite real. It has seemed like something
out of fiction, or out of that department of fiction called romance. So many of
its features are violent, picturesque, extravagant. With its survivals of the
medieval synthesis, its manners that recall bygone eras, its stark social
cleavages, its lost cause, its duels, its mountain flask, its romantic and
sentimental songs, it appears more like a realm of fable than a geographical
quarter of these United States. Expressed in the refrain of a popular song,
“Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” the thought seems to be that the
South is a kind of never never land from which the nation draws most of its
romance and sentiment, but to which, for this very reason, you do not assign the
same weight in the equation as you do to the other sections. Well the sentiment
and the romance are there, in considerable measure, but there is a substratum of
reality too. People are born and die in the same way as elsewhere: if you prick
them, they bleed. The vast majority of them have to work for a living and in a
hot climate too. The South also votes in national elections. For this reason,
especially, it is important that the nation should see it as a reality and not a
fiction, understand it better, both with respect to its likenesses and its
differences. (And I certainly would assent to the proposition that the South
ought to understand the nation better.) In the foregoing I have tried to present
to you something of the peculiar history and formation of the South. In the
time remaining I shall try to explain some of the peculiar—in the sense of
being fairly distinct in this country—attributes of mind and outlook. It is
scarcely necessary to add that these have many connections with that history.
I shall begin by saying something about the
attitude toward nature. This is a matter so basic to one’s outlook or
philosophy of life that we often tend to overlook it. Yet if we do overlook it,
we find there are many things coming later which we cannot straighten out.
Here the
attitudes of Southerners and Northerners, taken in their most representative
form, differ in an important respect. The Southerner tends to look upon nature
as something which is given and something which is finally inscrutable. This
is equivalent to saying that he looks upon it as the creation of a Creator.
There follows from this attitude an important deduction, which is that man has a
duty of veneration toward nature and the natural. Nature is not something to
be fought, conquered and changed according to any human whims. To some extent,
of course, it has to be used. But what man should seek in regard to nature is
not a complete dominion but a modus
vivendi —that is, a manner of living together, a coming to terms
with something that was here before our time and will be here after it. The
important corollary of this doctrine, it seems to me, is that man is not the
lord of creation, with an omnipotent will, but a part of creation, with
limitations, who ought to observe a decent humility in the face of the
inscrutable.
The Northern
attitude, if I interpret it correctly, goes much further toward making man the
center of significance and the master of nature. Nature is frequently spoken of
as something to be overcome. And man’s well-being is often equated with how
extensively he is able to change nature. Nature is sometimes thought of as an
impediment to be got out of the way. This attitude has increasingly
characterized the thinking of the Western world since the Enlightenment, and
here again, some people will say that
the South is behind the times, or even that it here is an element of the
superstitious in the regard for nature in its originally given form. But
however you account for the attitude, you will have to agree that it can have an
important bearing upon one’s theory of life and conduct. And nowhere is its
influence more decisive than in the corollary attitude one takes toward
‘‘Progress.”
One of the most
widely received generalizations in this country is that the South is the
“unprogressive section.” If it is understood in the terms in which it is
made, the charge is true. What is not generally understood, however, is that
this failure to keep up with the march of progress is not wholly a matter of
comparative poverty, comparative illiteracy, and a hot climate which discourages
activity. Some of it is due to a philosophical opposition to Progress as it has
been spelled out by industrial civilization. It is an opposition which stems
from a different conception of man’s proper role in life.
This is the
kind of thing one would expect to find in those out-of-the-way countries in
Europe called “unspoiled,” but it is not the kind of thing one would expect
to find in America. Therefore I feel I should tell you a little more about it.
Back about 1930, at a time when this nation was passing through an extraordinary
sequence of boom, bust, and fizzle, there appeared a collection of essays
bearing the title I’ll Take My Stand. The nature of this title,
together with certain things contained, caused many people to view this as a
reappearance of the old rebel yell. There were, however, certain differences.
For one thing, the yell was this time issuing from academic halls, most of the
contributors being affiliated in one way or another with Vanderbilt University.
For another, the book did not concentrate upon past grievances, as I am afraid
most Southern polemic has done, but rather upon present concerns. Its chief
question was, where is industrialism going anyhow, and what are its gifts, once
you look them in the mouth? This book has since become famous as “The Agrarian
Manifesto.” As far as content goes, I think it can fairly be styled a critique
of progress, as that word is used in the vocabulary of modern publicity and
boosting.
Although the
indictment was made with many historical and social applications, the center of
it was philosophical; and the chief criticism was that progress propels man into
an infinite development. Because it can never define its end, it is activity for
the sake of activity, and it is making things so that you will be able to make
more things. And regardless of how much of it you have, you are never any nearer
your goal because there is no goal. It never sits down to contemplate, and ask,
what is the good life? but rather assumes that material acquisition answers
all questions. Language something like this was employed by John Crowe Ransom,
one of the most eloquent of the spokesmen, in his chapter, “Reconstructed
but Unregenerate.”
“Progress
never defines its ultimate objective but thrusts its victims at once into an
infinite series,” Mr. Ransom said. And he continued, “Our vast industrial
machine, with its laboratory center of experimentation, and its far-flung
organs of mass production, is like a Prussianized state which is organized
strictly for war and can never consent to peace.” “Industrialism,” he
declared, “is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning, but no
intelligence; it needs to be strongly governed, or it will destroy the economy
of the household. Only a community of tough conservative habit can master it.”
The South, Mr. Ransom felt, was such a community, and he went on to praise it
for its stability, its love of established things, its veneration of the
past—for all of those qualities which are generally thought to make up
Southern backwardness. Mr. Stark Young, the well-known novelist and theatrical
critic, defended the ideal of aristocratic indulgence and aristocratic
leadership. “We can put one thing in our pipes and smoke it,” he wrote,
“there will never again be distinction in the South until—somewhat contrary
to the doctrine of popular and profitable democracy—it is generally clear
that no man worth anything is possessed by the people, or sees the world under a
smear of the people’s wills and beliefs.” There are many other pungent
passages which might be quoted, but these should be enough to show that it was a
militant book. As you can see, its bias was anti-industrial, anti-scientific,
anti-popular. It defended the values of a culture rooted in the soil. Just
what the effect was, however, is hard to estimate. But no one conversant with
Southern history and culture will deny that it expressed some feelings which
survive pretty strongly into the present and which may be found anywhere from
the mansions of the nouveau riche in Atlanta to the mountain cabins of East Tennessee and Kentucky.
Another cardinal point, touched on here and there
in the volume, is the Southerner’s attachment to locality. The Southerner is
a local person—to a
degree unknown in other sections of the United States. You might say that he has
lived by the principle that it is good for a man to have a local habitation and
a name; it is still better when the two are coupled together. In olden days a
good many Southerners tried to identify their names and their homes: thus we
read in history of John Taylor of Caroline; of Charles Carroll of Carrollton; of
Robert Carter of Nomini Hall; of the Careys of Careysbroke; of the Lees of
Westmoreland County. With the near liquidation of the old land-owning
aristocracy this kind of thing became too feudal and fancy to keep up.
Nevertheless, something of it remains in a widespread way still; the
Southerner always thinks of himself as being from somewhere, as belonging to
some spot of earth. If he is of the lucky few, it may be to an estate or a
plantation; if not that, to a county; and if not to a county at least to a
state. He is a Virginian, or he is a Georgian in a sense that I have never
encountered in the Middle West—though the Indiana Hoosiers may offer a fair
approximation. Very often the mention of a name in an introduction will elicit
the remark, “That is a Virginia name” or “That’s a South Carolina
name,” whereupon there will occur an extensive genealogical discussion. Often
this attachment to a locale will be accompanied by a minute geographical and
historical knowledge of the region, a loving awareness of details, of the
peculiar physiognomy of the place. Andrew Nelson Lytle once complained in an
article that in the world since 1914, nobody has known who he was or
where he was from. The South has certainly felt the pressure toward rootlessness
and anonymity—which are sometimes named as among the chief causes of modern
psychic disorders—but I believe it has resisted the pressure better than most
parts of the United States and Europe. It still looks among a man’s
credentials for where he is from, and not all places, even in the South, are
equal. Before a Virginian, a North Carolinian is supposed to stand cap in hand.
And faced with the hauteur of an old family of Charleston, South Carolina, even
a Virginian may shuffle his feet and look uneasy.
The pride of
local attachment is a fact which has two sides; it is a vice and a virtue. It
may lead to conceit, complacency, and ignorance of the world outside. It
frequently does lead to an exaggerated estimate of the qualities and
potentialities of the particular region or province. The nation as a whole is
acquainted with it in the case of Texans, who have developed this Southern
attribute in an extreme degree. I was teaching out in Texas about the time we
were ending the Second World War. Ajocular remark that was passed around with
relish was: “I know we are going to win the war now. Texas is on our side.”
It was a fair gibe at Texan conceit.
But on the
other side, provincialism is a positive force, which we ought to think about a
long while before we sacrifice too much to political abstractionism. In the last
analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in
your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been
made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a
place, a time, and a Zeitgeist. Quite a number of spokesmen have pleaded
with the South not to give up her provincialism. Henry Watterson, a
long-time editor of the Louisville Courier Journal, told an audience of
Kentuckians, “The provincial spirit, which is dismissed from polite
society in a half-sneering, half-condemnatory way is really one of the forces of
human achievement. As a man loses his provincialism he loses, in part, his
originality and, in this way, so much of his power as proceeds from his
originality.” He spoke caustically of “a miserable cosmopolitan frivolity
stealing over the strong simple realism of by-gone times.” He summed up by
asking, “What is life to me if 1 gain the whole world and lose my province?”
Thirty years
later Stark Young, writing in the agrarian manifesto to which I referred
earlier, pursued the same theme. “Provincialism that is a mere ramification of
some insistent egotism is only less nauseous than the same egotism in its purity
. . . without any province to harp
on. But provincialism proper is a fine trait. It is akin to a man’s interest
in his own center, which is the most deeply rooted consideration that he has,
the source of his direction, health and soul. People who give up their own land
too readily need careful weighing, exactly as do those who are so with their convictions.”
What often looks like the Southerners’ unreasoning loyalty to the South as a
place has in this way been given some reasoned defense. Even Solomon said that
the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth. One gives up the part for the
whole only to discover that without parts there is no whole. But I have said
enough about the cultural ideal of regionalism. If you would be interested in
a book which brings these thoughts together in a systematic treatment, see
Donald Davidson’s The Attack on Leviathan.
Despite what I
have said about this love for the particular, which is another name for love of
the concrete, the Southern mind is not by habit analytical. In fact the Southern
mind has little capacity for analysis and I think one could almost say that it
is opposed on principle to analysis. There seems to exist a feeling that you do
not get at the truth of a thing—or that you do not get at a truth worth
having—by breaking the thing in pieces. This explains undoubtedly why the
South has always done so poorly in business and technology, which demand
analytical methods. The Southern mind is, on the other hand, synthetic and
mythopoeic—it seeks out wholes, representations, symbols. Especially is it
mythopoeic, or given to the creation of myths and stories. The
American tall tale was a creation of the Southern frontier. And one cannot go
into a mountain community in Eastern Kentucky or to a plantation in say,
Alabama, and open his ear to the talk of the people without having borne in upon
him an amazing wealth and variety of stories—dramatic, intense, sometimes grotesque.
As a mine of material for the creative writer there is nothing to compare with
it anywhere else in America. I have heard people ask where William Faulkner gets
that stuff that goes into his novels—whether he dreams it in nightmares, and
so on. No one who had spent any time in Mississippi with his ears open would
have to ask that question. He would know to what extent incidents and stories of
this kind enter into the imaginative life of Mississippians. This mythopoeic or
poetic—in the Aristotelian sense—faculty is surely behind the present
flowering of the Southern novel and short story. It has already given us an
interesting body of fiction, and it may one day give us a great literature. The
South is not so much sleeping as dreaming, and dreams sometimes beget creations!
Finally
something must be said about the South’s famous conservatism—famous or
infamous, depending upon your point of view. It is certainly a significant fact,
but it has not gone wholly uncriticized at home. Walter Hines Page, growing up
as a young man in North Carolina, spoke bitterly of what he called “an
unyielding stability of opinion.” Having failed in his effort to do anything
with it, he declared that “the only successful rebellion was an immediate
departure.” He then fled North, to become editor of The Atlantic Monthly and
eventually our ambassador to Britain during the Wilson Administration. Ellen
Glasgow satirized it in her urbane novels of Virginia life. Thomas Wolfe took a
few hefty swings at it in his description of old Catawba. And there have been
others who have complained of a stifling uniformity of thought on many subjects.
With some of
these specific protests I would gladly agree, yet there is perhaps another light
in which we can see this “unyielding
stability of opinion.” Stability has its uses, as every considerate man knows,
and it is not too far-fetched to think of the South as the fly-wheel of the
American nation. A fly-wheel is defined by the science of mechanics as a large
wheel, revolving at a uniform rate, the function of which is to stabilize the
speed of the machine, slowing it down if it begins to go too fast and speeding
it up if it begins to go too slow. This function it performs through the
physical force of inertia. There are certain ways in which the South has acted
as a fly-wheel in our society. It has slowed down social change when that
started moving rapidly. And, though this will surprise many people, it has
speeded up some changes when change was going slowly. Without judging the
political wisdom of these matters, I merely point out that without Southern
order, the New Deal probably would have foundered. Without Southern votes, the
Conscription act would not have been renewed in 1941. Generally speaking the
South has always been the free trade section. It is not very romantic or very
flattering to be given credit only for inertia. But conservatism is not always
a matter ofjust being behind. Sometimes conservatives are in the lead. I could
give you more examples of that if I had time. It requires little gathering up of
thread to show that a mind produced by this heritage is diametrically opposed to
communism. With its individualism, its belief in personality, its dislike of
centralized government, and its religiosity, the South sees in the communist
philosophy a combination of all it detests. If that issue comes to a showdown,
which I hope does not happen, there will never be any doubt as to where the
South stands.
I suspect that a good many of you entertain
thoughts of changing the South, of making it just like the rest of the country,
of seeing it “wake up.” It seems to me that the South has been just on the
verge of “waking up” ever since I have been reading things about it. My
advice is to be modest in your hopes. The South is one of those entities to
which one can apply the French saying, “the more it changes the more it remains
the same.” Even where you think you are making some headway, you may be only
heading into quicksand. It waits until you are far enough in and then sucks you
under. It is well to remember that the South is very proud of its past, hard as
it has been; it does not want to be made over in anybody else’s image, and it
has had a century of experience in fighting changes urged on it from the
outside. I agree with WJ. Cash that the Southern mind is one of the most
intransigent on earth; that is, one of the hardest minds to change. Ridiculing
its beliefs has no more effect, as far as I have been able to observe, than
ridiculing a person’s religious beliefs— and the Southerner’s beliefs have
been a kind of secular religion with him: that only serves to convince him
further that he is right and that you are damned.