Looking Back to Glory

Looking Back to Glory

A Brief Presentation to the Abbeville Institute

Hopswee Plantation,  21 January 2017

When Don Livingston told me that participants in this seminar were supposed to celebrate some aspect of the Southern tradition, my mind—a lint-trap for useless facts that occlude my consciousness like floaters on the surface of the eye—churned up from its turgid depths a song popular the year I was born, though it was written much earlier.

It’s a way way down where the cane grows tall

Down where they say "you all"

Walk on in with that southern drawl

'Cause that's what I like about the south

“That’s What I Like About the South” was a hit for Jack Benny’s bandleader, Wonga Phil Harris.  Phil Harris made a career as a professional Southerner though Clyde Wilson likes to point out he was born in Linton, Indiana.  Harris actually did grow up in the South, since his parents—circus-performers (who else would name their son “Wonga”?) moved the family Nashville.

The song’s lyrics were written by Andy Razaf, whose full name was Andriamanantena Paul Razafinkarefo.  Razaf’s father was the nephew of Queen Razavalona, the last ruler of the kingdom of  Imerina on Madagascar.  Razaf’s mother was the daughter of the African-American consul to Imerina.  He was an accomplished lyricist who also wrote “Honeysuckle Rose,” “Ain’t Misbehavin’” and——“Hats off to Garvey,” presumably a tribute to Marcus Garvey, leader of the Pan-African movement.  (I wonder what Phil Harris and his Southern fans would make of Marcus Garvey.)  What did Andy Razaf, who grew up in New York City, know of the South?  Only the minstrel show clichés of American commercial culture.  It is mostly all that anyone, including Southerners, knows today.

The South is a complex regional mix of dialects, sects, and cultures.  Even in our imagination the South exists in several versions that do not so much conflict as interweave an intricate counterpoint.  One of those persistent imaginative traditions—the cornpone and molasses version—derive from a sentimental Southern patriotism, exemplified by popular songs that were hardly ever written by Southerners. One of the most popular, ”Are you from Dixie?,” was written by Jack Yellen, a Polish Jewish immigrant, who also wrote “Alabama Jubilee.” These are only two in a long and undistinguished line of maudlin anthems to the South, going back to Stephen Foster and to “Dixie” itself.

I am not at all suggesting we jettison this, the tackiest part of the Southern heritage:  Southerners embraced these songs—there are great recordings by Bob Wills, Jerry Reed, and Grandpa Jones—and in embracing the tawdry lyrics, Southerners gave them a reality their composers could never have imagined.  Southern sentimental pop can serve as a good illustration of Jack Kirby’s thesis in Media-Made Dixie, that much of what people think of as Southern is the invention of northern purveyors of mass commercial culture.   There is some irony, however.  Northern media moguls create, for example, The Dukes of Hazard; Southerners embrace the cartoon version of their culture; then Hollywood and New York denounce the whole thing as a neo-confederate plot and forbid the sale of “General Lee” replicas and impoverish poor Ben “Cooter” Jones.  Poor Cooter, a Democratic Party congressman from Georgia, turned into a Southern nationalist, when his pocketbook was hit by the ban on Confederate memorabilia, including replicas of the “General Lee.”

There is authentic Southern music of a high order—Bill Monroe and the Carter Family, John Jacob Niles, John Hurt, and Mose Allison.  Perhaps it is time to quit letting Garth Brooks or Lee Greenwood (from Los Angeles) or Elvis (who belongs to the Brill Building and Vegas more than he does to Tennessee) define Southern culture.  At least, let us not let the music of nostalgia on the cheap get in the way of acknowledging the reality of Southern culture, which includes a hardboiled realism  exemplified both in the literature and the politics of the South.

I started with a famous song about the South written by a New Yorker.  A more authentic—and in this case a very local—voice can be heard in Look Back to Glory, a long-forgotten novel by the Charleston naturalist and writer, Herbert Ravenel Sass.  Although films were made of his novels, Sass is so little known today that he is subject to the ultimate ignominy:  He has no Wikipedia article.  The story, set a year or two before secession, tells of the misadventures of a young man who returns from long sojourn in Europe.  Early on in the book, he and his brother have one of those conversations about the South.  The topic is, inevitably, secession, and the utopian dream of equality that had the world in its grip.  John C. Calhoun, says the Europeanized brother, drew inspiration from the ancient Greeks, who developed a form of democracy “that recognized the fact of human inequality, the fact that there will always be an inferior class to be taken care of or made use of by others.”

The young man pauses, and then bursts out; “Confound it…. They call us romantics here in the South, when we’re actually the realists…. That’s the greatest thing South Carolina has done—and it’s South Carolina that did it.  South Carolina pointed out to America the only kind of democracy that can succeed. Thats why South Carolina is going to be destroyed. Because the truth we’ve pointed out is unpalatable, because it’s contrary to the world’s dream, to America’s dream.”

Southerners could not afford to indulge the French dream of human equality, because—like the people in civilizations that have nurtured our own culture—ancient Greece, Rome, Israel and Medieval Europe—Southerners owned slaves.

This is no time, no place to discuss the evils of slavery.  Though I find it odd that in the hundreds of thousands of pages devoted to Southern slavery, very few seem to say anything about why slavery was or is evil.  Instead, historians are content to talk about the abuses—which undoubtedly there were or complain about the unfairness.  They ignore the obvious fact that formal slavery shares these vices with other forms of labor-exploitation, such as peonage, serfdom, commercial and industrial capitalism.  “The rich get rich and the poor have children.”   Or at least that is how it used to be.  A more accurate lyric today would read:  “The rich get richer than they have ever been, and the poor have abortions.”

The peculiar vice of slavery is usually held to be the forced submission of one man’s will to another’s, though this is hardly unique.  Back in the 1970’ Johnny Paycheck thought he was free to tell his boss, in the words of David Allan Coe, “You can take this job and shove it,”  but poor Johnny found, after he was convicted of shooting a man, that there are some state jobs you cannot escape from in less than seven years.  More to the point is the position of the soldier, whether volunteer or conscript, who must follow orders even in peril of his life.

The ancient Stoics grappled with this question and offered the solution that he who obeys orders grudgingly is a slave, but the man or woman who accepts his condition in life and does his duty, is free.  But let us not mince words.  Nobody wants to be a slave, and there is no cringing graduate student or servile assistant professor who does not dream of the day when tenure and promotion will give him the illusion of freedom.  Because freedom is for most of us an illusion.  You cannot be politically free unless you are in the position to tell your boss what he can do with his job, and you cannot be any kind of free so long as you are a slave to a culture of consumerism and hedonism.  These days, Americans all agree in condemning a form of slavery that was, perhaps, less oppressive than their own.

The South did not enjoy the luxury of hypocrisy.  Slavery was not abstract; it was not a moral and spiritual condition inflicted by television, pop culture, and an appetite for soul-destroying junk made in China.  They were surrounded by living manifestations of the institution of slavery.  If they once entertained the deceitful fantasies of liberty, equality, and fraternity, they were undone.