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New South, Old Problems

The South from the 1880s through the early 1920s must have presented quite the scene. It is a South of conflict and contradiction, ignorance and tradition, nostalgia and progress. It is the South that Mencken called "benighted" and many others called "new" (although both terms are misleading).

Our readings on this period were from Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 by C. Vann Woodward and The Promise of the New South by Edward L. Ayers. Woodward addressed the period in fairly general terms, covering the dull stuff (politics, industry, the economy) more than the Ayers selection. The chapters I have from Ayers cover the three areas of (to my mind) greatest interest about the South: race, faith, and literature.

Woodward's piece confused me when I first started reading because it seemed to be saying that the South left its past entirely behind after Reconstruction. He focused on the march of progress, the focus on creating a New South, building up industry, etc. The South he described seemed like a polar opposite of the South I've been studying. Then, about a dozen pages in, I started finding statements like the following:

"One of the most significant inventions of the New South was the 'Old South.'"

"Only then, when the movement was taken into custody by Southern Womanhood, did the cult of the Lost Cause assume a religious character."

By now I was on much more familiar ground. It is familiar, of course, because I've discussed it before. The Old South as we often think of it is entirely a creation of the post-Civil War generation, North as much as South. The Yankee became every bit as infatuated with the plantation myth of Southern history as the Southerners themselves. But, at the same time, this nostalgia and backward-thinking co-existed peacefully with the spirit of progress and industry. Some of the most prominent spokesmen of the New South, in fact, claimed that the spirit of the new age was no different from that of the old. Woodward notes one man stating in 1895 that the "New South" was "simply a revival of the South as it existed thirty-five years ago." In some ways, he may have been right, but I don't think they were the ways he meant.

I recall that it was noted in our discussion of this period that we found "pretty much what we'd expect" from the reading. This was probably in reference to race relations in the Jim Crow South. Ayes invests a great deal of attention in the racial tensions involved in train travel (which, according to Wilson, still has repercussions in train travel today).

One of the largest prevailing issues, it seems, (and one that white people had little control over) was whether the South was better off with or without black people. Many wished they would go somewhere . . . anywhere: Mexico, Africa, the North. Planters and others who employed black laborers, on the other hand, were far from comfortable with the idea of a mass exodus.

Meanwhile, race relations continued to smolder, ready to blaze up at any moment around a number of flashpoints, particularly miscegenation. Nothing could provoke a lynching faster than the hint of a black "insult" to a white woman. And yet, whites ironically blamed blacks for almost all of the problems of the South: violence, alcoholism, poverty, etc. Multiple generations of white women grew up in terror of black men, while for their part, the black men knew how little it might take to place them in a position to be tortured and killed. It was, as Ayers says, "a poisonous atmosphere."

However, in direct contrast to heightened violence and racism, the South remained by far the most devoutly religious region in the United States. Before the Civil War, whites and blacks often worshipped together, and there is at least one account of a black slave who served as the well-loved minister for every white planter in the area. The era after the Civil War and Reconstruction, of course, saw the two races going their separate ways in worship as in everything else.

During this time (catching the spirit of Victorian England at the tail-end of it) Southerners began to out-Puritan even the Puritans, restricting such lascivious practices as dancing and playing cards. Sharing strict religious observance, the chief difference between turn-of-the-century Southerners and New England Puritans of the past was the intolerance for open, intellectual discourse of the former group. The Southern strain of religion incorporated legalistic adherence to specific doctrines, practices, and behaviors with strong emotionalism fervor.

This bizarre blend of religious fanaticism and racist violence seeped its way into the "literature" of the period as well. Literature, in this case, is a term loosely applied, for Southern writers during this time produced virtually nothing of lasting literary value. Joel Chandler Harris produced his Uncle Remus Stories, which spawned an entire genre of dialectic literature, and Ellen Glasgow began to lay the foundation for the decades ahead.

Aside from these two, however, the literature was characterized by writers such as Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, Jr. The former churned out dozens of "historical" novels between 1884 and 1914, most set in the Old South and all consisting of (as Oscar Wilde might say) "more than usually revolting sentimentality." The latter produced equally romanticized visions of "history," but laced them with an even more pronounced flavor of white supremacy.

Interestingly, these novels of dubious literary value were what established the national vogue of Southern literature which would last almost unfalteringly for nearly a century, and might even be said to continue through the present day. After the brief popularity enjoyed by Western literature in the 1870s had begun to fade, Southern literature quickly stepped in to satisfy the public's appetite for regional flavor. Novelists, far more than any historians, were responsible for the rise of the Dunning school of Reconstruction history in the public mind.

The South between Reconstruction and the Great Depression was the South of all our stereotypes and defamatory assessments, but it did not simply come into existence unprovoked. It was the product of a natural reaction by its people to twenty years of extraordinarily tumultuous events, and should be judged on that basis alone. Southern history up to this point had been characterized by an incredible imbalance: in race relations, in how the rest of the country saw it, in haw it saw itself.

Suddenly, historical forces shifted in another direction, but failed to produce balance, essentially leaving the people of the South to their own devices as far as attempting to reconstruct some sort of balance they could live with (but one which could not be allowed to take the form it had in the past). They cannot be entirely blamed if they failed to produce a reasonable system out of the chaos of their past.

Posted by Jared at April 29, 2006 03:15 PM | TrackBack