On Being America’s Red-Headed Stepchild
Are you puzzled and irritated by the viciousness and falsity of most of what is being published these days about the South and Southern history? The beginning of all wisdom on this subject is to know that in American public discourse and so-called scholarship there is usually no effort to understand the South, like any other human phenomenon, as it is. Rather the South is raw material in a morality play about American, that is, about Northern righteousness.
The South is the red-headed stepchild in the American family. Or as Thomas Landess has put it, the South is a swarthy villain who threatens to carry off the fair maiden America unless he is suppressed by the strong and noble blond hero of the North. I can predict with absolute certainty that the upcoming observance of the 150th anniversary of the "Civil War" will be produced in terms of this melodrama. It will be the official and pervasive theme of the celebration, with which every educational institution and media outlet will be saturated.
My favourite example of this type of mind was a statement a few years ago by an Ivy League intellectual. America, he said, is threatened by increasing violence because of the spread of the “Southern gun culture.” This was written at the time of Timothy McVeigh from New York and the U.S. Army, the Unabomber from Harvard and Berkeley, and the Columbine shooters—none of whom were Southern or, except for the latter, used guns.
You see the assumption guiding this great thinker. If there is evil in America it must be because it is oozing out from Dixie, known to all good people as the source of bad things in an otherwise pure and righteous country. The distorted thinking, the hatred, and the projection of aggressive emotions onto other people is evident. Unfortunately, much of the history of the South is being written today by people who accept without question the unexamined and self-flattering assumptions of this person.
Another story to get at my point. A few years ago, when the controversy of the Confederate flag on the South Carolina capitol was raging, I read that the students at the University of Washington State, out on the Pacific, were rioting over the flag. I daresay that a Southerner can go for months without even thinking about Washington State (though I did enjoy the trip with my children to see the whales in Puget Sound). A Southerner would never be so presumptuous and unneighbourly as to attempt to dictate to the people of Washington State, but they feel it is their right to discern our faults and correct them. We are talking about two different national characters here. I strongly suspect that those folks up in Vermont who talk about independence for themselves would not hesitate to trample out our grapes once more if they got the chance.
The young son of a family I know, museum-quality specimens of Midwestern liberals, recentl;y wrote to the President about the oil situation. Mr. President, he said, you should do away with cars and make everyone ride horses. However much a Southerner might prefer horses to gas-guzzlers, it would never occur to one of us that the first thing to do was to demand that the government undertake universal enforcement of our preference. This is normal behaviour for a Yankee and is even considered a mark of superior virtue and intelligence.
I could cite a thousand examples of how all this strange mentality vents itself among historians who at the present time have distorted not only Southern, but American and African-American history to the point of pervasive falsification.
In the 1830's a publisher called Jonathan Elliot collected and brought out a work called The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution. At that time very little documentation about the formation of the Constitution was available. A well-known American historian once told me that the publication of "Elliot’s Debates" was part of a devious conspiracy by John C. Calhoun. Elliot was not a Southerner and his work was good scholarship that made available some authentic documents about vital mattters that ought to have been welcomed by anyone. But since the thrust of the documents supported the Southern view of the Constitution, their publication was obviously evilly motivated. This is the explanation that fit his unconscious bad-South scenario of American history.
Another example: Historians have been at great pains to explain why South Carolina was so exercised about the tariff that it defied the federal government by Nullification. Why were they so hot an bothered about this unimportant matter? They must have really been crazed with fear of their slaves, or they were lashing out because of their anxiety over soil exhaustion and population loss. Historians can’t accept what they plainly said: that they were tired of being ripped off by federal legislation that picked their pockets to benefit some rich people at the North, that they could prove that this was the real economic effect of the tariff, and that they thought the Union should be of mutual benefit to all rather than a burden to some and benefit to others. But since we know that Southerners, unlike Northerners, are always up to no good and we can’t believe anything they say, historians have to look for the hidden cause.
A common trick of the falsifiers is to neglect to ask the question—compared to what? For instance, it is commonplace to assert, without any real evidence, that the antebellum South was dominated by a few of the wealthiest slaveholders who lorded it over the rest of the population. Granted that rich people have more sayso in any society than poor people, we ought to ask the question: did the wealthy in the Old South have more power than the wealthy in the North or Europe? Or less power? Or the same amount? It is never even felt necessary to ask the questioin. We announce that we have found something in the South that we don’t like; ergo, we are free to assert that this bad thing particularly characterizes the South.
The current fad is to treat everything good that Southerners say about the Confederacy as part of a "Lost Cause Myth" that Southerners made up after the fact to rationalize their failure and their evilly motivated attempt to destroy the "greatest government on earth." Robert E. Lee was not really a great general, Confederate soldiers were not really brave and out-numbered, the people really did not support the Confederacy, a distinct Southern culture was merely a pretense to defend slavery, etc., etc., etc. In the face of vast contradictory evidence, it is simply declared that everything Southerners said about themselves was a lie they made up and told after the fact. A catalog I picked up just a few days ago reported new books: The Myth of Jefferson Davis and The Myth of Bedford Forrest. You see, Southerners always make up flattering stories about themselves while Northerners just tell the true facts.
Southerners are intrinsically evil and Northerners intrinsically good. The South is not to be understood for itself, as it is and was, as something with its own life and identity. It exists only as the bad side of America. Casting us in the villain's role is not in the least affected by the facts—that the South is now the only part of the country where a majority of black people say they feel at home, and that racial tension and hatred is more prevalent today in the big liberal states than in the South. It leads the Southerner to suspect that all the furor about imposed equality in the last half century is motivated by something less seemly than the pure thirst for justice.
It is a strange and not comfortable feeling to be the object of hatred of great numbers of people you have never met and to whom you have never done any harm. On the upside, it does give one some objective distance from the myth of unique American virtue, a false belief far more pervasive and destructive than admiration of the Lost Cause.
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Does anyone know why "that" is frequently typed instead of "than," as I did in my previous post? I'm curious because I see this mistake made so oten.
There I go again - often.
Dr. Wilson writes:
We're headed for a division between the American nation and the American citizenry. Conservative stances on abortion, prayer in schools, euthanasia, marriage, gambling, usury, and related topics (e.g. "soft" drugs) are all destined to lose politically - and so politically aren't as important (though should without question be defended culturally). Political alliances to push these issues won't achieve lasting results on these issues (though they might achieve other goals).
Admittedly many of the conservatives I've met outside the South have been Catholics, but they're often of a slightly different ethnicity (which bears more than genes) than America's roughly northwest European origin. And I'm wary of how their Church will guide them on matters of immigration and related topics.
Before the war there was a Know Nothing alliance. I don't travel much outside the South, but WASPs are the core of America. Those who've gone astray it seems ought to be won over. They're our kin after all.
Culturally we can practice conservative values ourselves, and the future for America is to develop a sense of nationalism with an attached culture for this remnant nation. Only if America develops a consciousness could it have a political future, which I don't believe needs to equate somehow with violence or ethnic cleansing as is often warned - somehow only whites are dangerous according to the mass media which has us bound with chains like Ogmios.
I appreciate being allowed to post this, and if I'm ignorant somewhere my defence is that unlike these think tank folks like at AEI, I've got to work - a blind man who fears everyone else is blind.
The Know-Nothings were almost non-existent in the South. Most of them went into the Black Republican Abolition Union Lincoln Party. That is exactly my point. The Deep North WASPS are and always have been the bitterest haters of Southerners. I have met many "ethnics" (usually Catholic) who were sympathetic to the South but very seldom a Yankee WASP who was. The Catholic and Jewish South-haters are merely imitating the old Yankees---that is a rite of assimilation to respectable "Americanism." The rise of the Republican party in the South (after the initial stages of conservative reaction against the Democrats) has been nothing less than the de-Southernisation of Dixie. Southerners can never count on anything from those old Yankees except use as cannon fodder. An alliance of Yankee and Southern WASPS would not be a conservative force. It would be simply the Republican Party--conservative Southern voters supporting Yankee profit and power.
Quite right; I remember an ad in Chronicles some years ago, of a book offering to explain that slaves were actually quite happy under Southern slavery. I hear the Bible belt also has some of the highest rates of divorce and illegitimacy. I don't see how these bad reports of the South ever get started.
Dr. Wilson,
I appreciate the reply. I know what you say about the GOP to be true, and I hope you're mistaken about Yankees today. At least as the US Balkanises it seems they'd finally find common cause. It seems strange for them to hate us or disregard our well-being now except for [ironically] perceived bigotry on our part.
Jack,
did the illegitimacy report separate whites and blacks (the latter has become especially bad since the Civil Rights movement)? Statistics are easy to manipulate by removing pertinent variables like this.
Are blacks finally happy today in the US - how about in Haiti or Rhodesia where they've won freedom from white rule? Where are blacks better off than in America and Europe?
Jack,
have you read David Copperfield? Free workers in a capitalist society aren't necessarily happy. The employer still needs to care for his employees when labour pressures don't force him to pay them justly. An employer-employee relationship can be similar to a slave owner-slave relationship, especially in America's recent past.
Too much luxury might be corrupting, I recall Machiavelli pointing this out and suspect he's right, but that applies for the rich as well as the poor.
Dr. Wilson,
I love how the Brit Arthur Kemp included "neo-Confederates" as a cancer of America, in the way of his "modern democratic white nationalism" (just where are these blacks going to go, or where are we whites going to go?)... I'm wary of white nationalism too, for obvious reasons. I might be a tad racially oriented, but I'm not merely "white". And I don't have anything against white "ethnic" Catholics, though I do see them as somewhat different. The South didn't receive until recent as many of the new immigrants as did other regions.
The South is not an abstraction, but a living value. Our existence insults the yankee conceit.
I'm reading Morality of Everyday Life for the second time. It is an aid in developing a comprehension and critique of Multiculturalism.
Current revelation is that Multiculturalism's rigorism demands an impossibility from White liberals who insist that others live up to their anti-racist abstractions.
Powerful Whites in the media will all agree that we need to atone for the sin of segregation, but which of them is willing to be the first to make that moral position into a moral act by stepping down and giving their job to a more deserving person of color?
Donald Livingston's critiques of what Lincoln didn't do are applicable here. Lincoln didn't include blacks in American polity, therefore he doesn't deserve the moral symbolism.
" remember an ad in Chronicles some years ago ...I hear the Bible belt also has some of the highest rates of divorce and illegitimacy."
Well whatever I hear about the Bible Belt I attempt to understand, and whatever I hear about Yankeedom, I try and ignore. The South probably still has some distant memory of marriage as it was in the beginning. Sure,perhaps they are damned fools for attempting it amidst the current dominating decadence, but at least they haven't entirely abandoned the idea of human procreation in all its delightful and various forms among men and women. Comparative happiness is always a dangerous enterprise, but if I were a slave, I would prefer to work for men like General Lee or Jackson in the 19th century than the Abbal Rizeigat in the 20th century.
"just where are these blacks going to go, or where are we whites going to go?"
The whites will run to the suburbs as they dwindle in numbers and influence both in the U.S. and in the South.
As usual I am late to this party but this whole controversy about the South has me baffled. You can't honor a great general like R.E. Lee but the evil monster and warmonger Napoleon, a child of the atheistic and masonic Revolution, is glorified in the history books. How about the crimes of the Soviets, Nazi's, Reds in the 20th century or the ruthless suppression and genocide of the Spanish and their descendants in Latin America to this day? All is forgiven now......only the South is hated 150 years later. As Dr. Wilson comments, compare the life of the slave in the South in 1848 with the lot of millions of Irish who perished in Ireland during the Famine because of British indifference and hatred or the millions of others who were conscripted into the Union army as cannon fodder or worked in the NYC and NE sweatshops dying young after a life of impoverishment and overwork. Any educated person with a brain would understand what is going on in the media and politics but unfortunately the ideologues and haters have captured the culture and the minds of the people.
I belatedly reread Dr. Wilson's #25 and find it very instructive. I wonder if he has expanded on it anywhere. It strikes me as being underlaid by either a tragic or stoical view of life. These are not the same. A tragic view would be that slavery is, in certain circumstances, inevitable but unfortunate. A stoical view would be that life has many different kinds of bondage, of which slavery is just one, and not necessarily the worst kind. The stoical stance would be that slavery is inevitable (under certain conditions) but neither fortunate nor unfortunate--just a fact of life, no more tragic than death, in the final analysis. I have the impression that Dr. Wilson leans toward this stoical view, which unfortunately has been squashed by the tragic view, and is therefore hardly understood at all. Somebody ought to take up the challenge of explicating it. (Not me--I'm concentrating on the subject of global warming from now on.)
Bernie,
Personally, I think Southerners should move to whiter areas, such as the Appalachians. But the blacks aren't going anywhere. Northern rule has created problems because historically Yankees didn't live around blacks and so didn't understand them. To the Yankee, race doesn't exist.
Rhodesia used to have a saying: it takes 2 weeks for a tourist to become a racist. That doesn't signify hatred though, note, but merely the acknowledgment of racial differences, which are profound and significant and must be understood for the two to get along.
My issue with Kemp is he's writing on things he's done no research about - we're no more important to him apparently than are Afghans to US and British generals.
Kemp was probably just rushed. He's supposed to be a serious BNP activist, and people make mistakes.
Almost no one wishes to restore slavery, slavery in the US was comparatively mild, the South is not defined exclusively by the institution, even the glorified NS Germany utilised nonGermans, and Southern identity is widespread and relatively strong with a number of distinctions.
When Southerners wave their flag, they're not rallying around an "ideology of slavery" as Kemp seems to believe. Ideology has nothing to do with it. My ancestors came here in 1690. I have friends and family here, and I like my part of the South. I know blacks and whites, and I wish for both to be happy and healthy... and to be free to establish separate institutions as per pre-Civil Rights Movement, as two distinct nations ought to be free to do.
No nation is perfect, not even England. We can't turn back the hands of time and undo the importation of blacks into the South. They're here now just as the Anglo-Saxons are now in England.
Bernie,
Magicians, not all of them the hated Protestants of oversimplified faerie tale, are to blame for the coming chaos of the South.
Men who blindly read their Bibles without looking up at common sense application to the real world; and who read newspapers of foreign lands, filled with a foreign race and culture, without bothering to step foot amongst the ignorant barbarians; and who read of wisdom and discovered apparent truth who then went on enlightened Crusade to free us...
These men, when the rest of us were distracted or apathetic, have shattered the South. We of the South are ultimately to blame for allowing this, and at some point we're going to take back our own destiny from these dangerous dreamers. Before that we'll need a 12 step program to free ourselves from hard drinking, television, sports, and general laziness and avoidance of all things political (Republican v. Democrat is not politics). Outside of such a 12 step program, we're incapable of ruling our own lives let alone these black dependents of ours (who should maintain full economic freedom albeit with diminished expectations if the two races are to live in harmony).
Race though is just not an ideology - the ideology is by those who dream of a world where race doesn't matter and where human lives make no sense. The dangerous modern ideology is those who dream of genetic manipulation and thus dismiss race. Race is ancient, and we find belonging and guidance in it - it does not mandate purity.
Frank,
You write words of wisdom on race. Your remark that "Northern rule has created problems because historically Yankees didn’t live around blacks and so didn’t understand them. To the Yankee, race doesn’t exist." explains huge chunks of our present dilemma.
I don't have time to engage your themes properly right now, but I can tell you this: I'm a northern white living in an all black neighborhood - truly the last of the Mohegans - and the depth of misunderstanding of blacks that I see in the whites who live in the all or mostly white nabes is astounding. They just don't get it - that no matter how "normal" appearing, no matter how seemingly law-abiding a black is, he's going to harbor that residual degree of sympathy for criminality and vice, and for a whole range of anti-white values and opinions, that just can't be trusted, or that needs to be treated with healthy suspicion until trust is earned.
Frank,
I do not mean to put words in your mouth about the differences between the races. The above is my take. I'd be very interested in hearing the words of thoughtful Southerners on this.
One sure way to validate all that is said here is to look at the response of what are ordinarily intelligent, objective people when they are confronted by irrefutable, proven, incontrovertible facts ARISING FROM THEIR OWN SOURCES. When one can prove that [1] the War of Secession was NOT the noble effort to preserve the Union or end slavery or [2] that Lincoln was not St. Abraham or [3] that the North waged a war so barbaric that Europe stood aghast, one is lucky if the response is not profane and insulting! But even if it a polite rejection of the facts presented, it is STILL an utter unwillingness to look at any part of the issue that is not part of the "orthodox version". I have NEVER heard any supporter of the Union say to me, "Let me look at that book or site or source and get back to you on this." NEVER! It is merely, "Well, I don't trust this author" or, in the case of a few choice quotes from Herr Sherman, "Well, that only proved that the North was WILLING to wage 'hard war'." So was Hitler, but I don't think that anyone is willing to laud him for that.
No, the response of supposedly intelligent, informed people clearly validate everything Dr. Wilson has said - and more! I'm afraid there is no hope in reaching "common ground" in 2011 anymore than there was in 1861.
Mr. Jacobi,
I had a high school history teacher from up north (a trust fundie) who descended down to teach us of how racist we were. He'd studied the South so thoroughly that he explained to a country girl (whose folks were farmers) how cotton grew on trees.
Your living among blacks, I'm sure you know all about them. The only folks today who'd still be oblivious are those in the all-white areas where all they hear are stories not real life experiences. Those and the fundies who've... never really been in the real world. When you read the Bible, how the world is only so old and we're all of Adam and Eve, you get to thinking race must not exist - you have to actually see it to understand. And the media doesn't help.
That said, the church-going blacks can be decent people - blacks today are somewhat the victims of the media... They can't stay married, employed, sober, etc., and they're told to blame all on whites (they're being used). Blacks didn't used to be quite so bad, though then if you go to Haiti or Africa, you hear about what's described as the "African abyss", unspeakable horrors. They are... different, but the South cleaned them up when it was in power.
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The most notable quality of blacks that you might not be aware of is their laziness. They are multitudes more sexually active than we are - when they complain of "racism" at universities it's often regarding how white girls won't sleep with them.
My folks, especially my grandfather, have done a lot for blacks and are well liked locally by blacks. However, no matter how much whites try to help blacks, whites are still blamed for this alleged white racism. In modern times the truth is plastic, molded by whomever controls the mass media... The blacks who know you will like you, but there remains this belief in unnamed whites holding them down.
Basically, we don't control the media and blacks are easy to trick by these hustlers and propagandists, though I don't think it's proper to mention who dominates it.
Regarding violence, I strongly suspect blacks have done and continue to do more violence to themselves than the Klan or anyone else ever did (I mean in reality not in the fiction that's been created for us...)
I'd move from where you are. Even I live in a white neighborhood. When blacks move in, whites move out. There are a few class exceptions, but you don't want to be living among most blacks, nor Mexicans for that matter - not that I have a great deal of experience with them, but I've seen and heard more to know to be wary of them.
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Though too I don't think blacks are the only group to fear. Any person who lacks a race or fuzzy belonging in a fuzzy race is to be viewed with caution. These people are apt to be selfish and vain, and there are increasingly more of them today. The solution is I think for them to decide where they belong and build on that. It's not a matter of purity or supremacy: people just need to belong somewhere, and the more I read the more I see this as a very ancient value, the modern being for us to abandon our ancestors and God.
The trust fundie incidentally was especially kind to me. At one point he was my coach, though I knew more about the sport than he did, haha. I regret not showing him more respect when in school - he was just a product of his schooling too, though I didn't know any better myself.
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What helped me a great deal was actually reading old Southern authors and using that to grasp where I come from. So far as whom my childhood friends and ancestors are, I come from a very Southern background. But my grandfather chuckles sometimes that I sound at times like a Yankee (though outsiders comment on how I sound both black and Southern, so I dunno).
My point: the South is changing. Reconstruction is working. I had to read of where I came from. Only then did I begin to look around.
I always liked the flag..., but the flag's just a symbol.
The South is very modern, and we don't read where we've come from. Anti-intellectual Southerness seems to be praised by some, but I find it awful. Schools and media raise children increasingly more than parents do, so the lacking books we're ceasing to be a people even without the massive white immigration entering in.
We're being reconstructed because we don't know whom we are. We mayn't fairly blame all on Yankees. They too are lost, and if we had a spirit left we'd help them - but we don't even know how to help ourselves. Just as the blacks deserve some of the blame for their actions, we too deserve some blame for ours.
Frank,
"They are... different, ..."
In between those three little dots I suspect there is a wealth of experience and knowledge, both personal and handed down in the Southern tradition of family stories. I hope you and other Southerners will continue to fill in the blanks. I have become convinced over the years, and my fairly recent exposure to Southern thinkers and historians such as Sam Francis and Clyde Wilson has only deepened my conviction, that no matter how well versed in the ways of blacks a Northerner might become, there remains a repository of old wisdom on this matter that is known only to Southerners.
In fact, I would like to see Chronicles devote an issue to the old racial stereo-types, examining family stories, folk tales, songs, minstrel shows, legends, both for the pleasure of it and to mine them for the grains of truth usually present in such artifacts. We (who are not professional scholars) have only heard the left's view of these things, and that can only mean that our heads are full of lies and distortions.
A follow-up could be about famous and infamous incidents such as race riots, lynchings, certain crimes and their trials, etc.
Back to you, Frank - I liked your bold, and I believe true assertion "but the South cleaned them [blacks] up when it was in power." This ties in with what Dr. Wilson has said about blacks before they moved north. Finally, I'm glad (though also sad) to learn that you back up my perception that blacks, even those who "like you", continue in their "belief in unnamed whites holding them down." Sometimes, around here, one begins to have trouble separating the paranoia from the legitimate fear.