Laying The Ghosts of Southern Nationalism

I take my text from Henry Timrod, “Ethnogenesis,” written during the First Southern Congress in Montgomery in 1861.

At last, we are
A nation among nations; and the world
Shall soon behold in many a distant port
Another flag unfurled!
Now, come what may, whose favor need we court?
And, under God, whose thunder need we fear?

Was Timrod right or wrong?  In his prophecy, we of the future looking back would bless the establishment of the Southern nation:

But let our fears -- if fears we have -- be still,
And turn us to the future! Could we climb
Some mighty Alp, and view the coming time,
The rapturous sight would fill
Our eyes with happy tears!
Not only for the glories which the years
Shall bring us; not for lands from sea to sea,
And wealth, and power, and peace, though these shall be

It is true, that The South failed to make good its claim to independence, but the South has survived as a distinctive culture.  What sort of a culture was it—or, to be more accurate, is it?  If we can believe Van Woodward and other authorities on the New South, a semi-feudal patriarchal aristocratic society, which had been shattered by war and Reconstruction, was displaced by a society dominated by small farmers, craftsmen, and businessmen who signed onto the American project of creating a New American.  For Henry Grady, that new American already existed by the beginning of the 20th century, and he was a compound of the best qualities of the Southern Cavalier and the Yankee Puritan.  Grady found this ideal in one man, Abraham Lincoln.

Grady was himself a gaudy orator in the Lincolnian tradition, proclaiming high-sounding platitudes punctuated by homespun stories.  I hope I am not doing him an injustice by sifting out the subtleties of his arguments and reducing them to a simple proposition.  It was time for the South to turn its back on the traditions Mark Twain had ridiculed as “feudal” and embrace the ideals of democratic capitalism that had enabled the North to win the war.  It was time, in other words, for Southerners to join the American project. 

Grady was hardly a lone voice calling for a transformation of the national character.  The most influential apostle of the New American Man, John Dewey was only nine years younger than Grady, but his vision was a good deal bolder.  While Grady had study classics at the University of Georgia, Dewey repudiated the classical tradition as an aristocratic straight-jacket.  Americans, he argued, needed a new education and culture that were democratic and egalitarian.  Dewey’s dream, as radical as Stalin’s dream of the New Soviet man, is the nightmare we have been living through for three generations.

But Grady and Dewey did share a vision of a new national civilization that would fuse the elements of distinctive regional cultures and remold them in the crucible of democracy and progress.  Their visions were prophetic only in the sense that they were self-fulfilling.  As Americans, North and South, became more attached to material things, more dependent upon mass produced automobiles, housing units, clothing, food product, propaganda, and entertainment, the les they resembled their decidedly undemocratic predecessors who maintained respect for family integrity, distinctions of quality, and cultural tradition.  In only three generations, this massification of the American mind haas produced generations who cannot tell survey-takers in what century the War Between the State occurred, name the second President of the United States, or recite five continuous lines of English verse.  The human mind is not by nature the blank slate John Locke proposed, but modern culture has done its best to reduce its level of knowledge and understanding to virtually nothing,  

Far more insightful than the visions of Dewey and Grady were the propositions put on the table by the Southern Agrarians in I’ll Take My Stand and Who Owns America? and in later attempts to revive them, especially the volume edited by Clyde Wilson, Why the South Will Survive.  Clyde, with his customary brilliance and courage, put the question of survival as clearly as anyone has ever stated it.  It is a volume that must be read by anyone who values the Southern tradition

Everyone who hopes for a Southern survival has to face a dilemma:  Which path should be taken first, cultural renewal or political resurgence?   While neither excludes the other, which should be given priority?  In my experience, most Southern patriots might privilege the political path.  

There have been several attempts to form a Southern national part or political coalition.  Even before the Secessions of a group of fire-eaters, disgusted by anti-Southern tariffs met in Macon in 1850.  Egged on by  Robert William Barnwell Rhett, who had long advocated a policy of either nullification or secession, they formed the Southern National Party.  

Dixiecrats in 1948 who united behind Strom Thurmond to oppose both the slick Liberal Republican Thomas E. Dewey and the turncoat Southerner Harry Truman.  Dewey hardly differed from FDR on policies—and it was he who made a deal with Charles “Lucky” Luciano to restore the mafia to power in Sicily.  Truman, although a beloved political saint today, was the moral monster who had dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilians.  His mother was an unreconstructed Confederate, and she or her mother is supposed to have asked Harry, when he was elected to the US Senate, to look for the family silver the Yankees had stolen.  

The primary issue was the Civil Rights legislation backed by both Dewey and Truman, but the Dixiecrats were well aware of the deeper implications.  In their platform they declared

We call upon all Democrats and upon all other loyal Americans who are opposed to totalitarianism at home and abroad to unite with us in ignominiously defeating Harry S. Truman, Thomas E. Dewey and every other candidate for public office who would establish a Police Nation in the United States of America.

Thurmond and most of the leaders were well aware they could not win the Presidency, but they wanted to punish Truman and reconsolidate the Solid South.  Though they carried four states—Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina—they failed to stop Truman, but they certainly made progress toward Southern unity.

In 1970 the recently formed Southern Party held a rally in Mississippi.  The hostile New York Times [Jan 4 1970] quotes from a brochure distributed at the event: “The Federal Government is acting toward the South in a fashion similar to that of Russia toward its victims,” while Prof. William Scarborough called for “unified massive resistance” to what he described as ‘fascist orders.’

There were, in fact multiple efforts to restore the Solid South.  George Wallace certainly began as a populist Southern nationalist, but he came to realize that his call for limited government and the rights of communities also appealed to people all over the country.

  In 1994 the Southern League (later known as the League of the South) was formed by a group dominated by historians and a few others of different professions, including one who was described in the Wall Street Journal as a failed poet and classicist, as if anyone at that leftist newspaper knew anything about either poetry or classics.  Clyde Wilson proposed the name Southern League as a tip of the hat to the Lega Nord, whose activities I had been covering.  At the time and in future meetings, I stressed the importance of the Italian model, which existed, even before it won a single local election, as a social movement that revived Lombard culture and emphasized the more serious moral traditions of Northern Italy.

Some of us warned against any premature move to establish a Southern Party until we had some solid backing of conservative Southern politicians and a wider reputation.  Besides, what good would it do to have an independent South if it were ruled by the men who dominated Southern politics at that time: President Willam Jefferson Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and the Carpetbagging Republican Newt Gingrich.  Predictably, the leaders of the new Southern Party quickly fell to feuding.  Superficially the fights were over theoretical platform issues, such as the race quesion—as Donnie Kennedy has pointed out—but the most destructive energy was provided by personal ambition, vanity, and personal rivalries.

Patriotism and Nationalism

Before we can decide where to stand on the issue of Southern nationalism, there are several questions we have to consider:  First, what do we mean by saying the South is a nation?  Second, what is nationalism—as opposed to mere love of country or patriotism.  Third, if Clyde Wilson is right, as he surely is, that the South will survive, what are the best means to insure its survival in the days of FOX and CNN, Instagram and TikTok, Elon Musk and the Kardashian sisters?

The word nation comes from Latin natio, which refers to the common birth or descent of a people.  In the beginning the social connection consists only of ties of blood and marriage, and the nation is like an extended family that has grown into a Scottish clan and from there into a union of clans.  But even Highland clans included septs, some of which actually came to head the clan, as Flemings once were the leaders of Clan Murray.  

In other words, kinship by blood and marriage is supplemented by the fictional kinship of adoption, blood brotherhood, and what our ancestors called god sib—that is, the relation of godparents and godchildren.  

When successful nations like Rome or England swell into Empire, even fictional ties of blood are too limiting, and nationality begins to be defined by common language and common religion, shared literary and artistic traditions, and more broadly what we call “a way of life.”  Although the South has always been too large to be limited to one dialect or one set of cultural traditions, most Southerners of earlier generations took for granted a recognizable connection between the various dialects, and a set of norms that emphasized extended families, courtesy toward women, and defense of honor.  Defenders of personal and family honor engaged in a variety of practices from exchanges of insults in the press, dueling for honor in South Carolina to shootouts in the streets of El Paso.  

The Southern people were not uniform. There were predominantly English aristocrats in the Tidewater, Anglo-Celtic borderers, and even Cajuns and Germans, but these groups in becoming Southern shared a common  culture, common religion, and an identifiable set of ethical values.  Did this common identity constitute a nation?  Perhaps.  Southerners certainly learned to love the Southern people as much as Irish patriots loved their nation.

At the most basic level, our love of country is an irrational attachment to place and people. It does not matter if neither our place nor our people are particularly lovable.  We may pretend they are better than other places and peoples, but it is not necessary, any more than we have to pretend that our children are better looking, more intelligent, more honest than other people’s children.  The fact that they are ours is enough.

The Romans called this sentiment amor patriae, love of the fatherland, and in the Balkans it is sometimes known as rodoljublje, love of the stock—the word rod, like nation, comes from a verb meaning to be born/bear children.

Clever men are never satisfied with a merely irrational love, and must turn it into a lofty principle.  A clue that this process is going on is generally found in the suffix “-ism” and sometimes -ology.  People who grow up in a village or well-defined neighborhood have a strong sense of community, but when this is turned into a philosophical abstraction, it becomes “Communism”—and even our soundest instincts when ideologized can be made a virulent moral disease.  

When the love of nation becomes a matter of supreme importance, codified and philosophized, it can evolve into the ideology known as nationalism.  Many political intellectuals have tried to distinguish the two, but most of their efforts have been wasted ink.  Nationalism of this type is neither Christian nor conservative: It originated in the anti-christian anti-traditional French Revolution.

Nationalism springs up when an authentic identity becomes threatened by rivals or oppressors.  Irish Catholics had many reasons for loving Ireland and resenting the English and Scottish conquest and occupation, but, as one Irish rebel famously put it in a song, 

Come all ye young rebels and list while I sing

For love of one's country is a terrible thing

It banishes fear like the speed of a flame

And it makes you a part of the patriot's game 

There is nothing to censure in Dominic Behan’s passion for his country and his desire for its reunification, but, as his brother, the playwright Brendan Behan makes clear in his memoirs, the Irish patriotism that inspired boys to defend their country and join the IRA also drove them into acts of terrorism against peace-loving English civilians.  If patriotism springs from love of our people and their traditions, nationalism derives from resentment, from hatred of the other, not just occasionally or often but always and essentially.  For a portrait of what racial ideology can do to othewise good people, I recommend Madison Jones’ fine novel, A Cry of Absence.

In general usage, patriotism signifies a person’s willingness to take risks and make sacrifices for the sake of his country and his fellow citizens.  Lord Acton, the great classical liberal, sought to elevate patriotism to a higher ethical plane.  He argued that while this devotion may spring from what Acton calls an instinctive “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life,” the patriot does not merely feel loyal to a spot of ground; he is willing to defend it with his life, even if he feels no particular hostility toward the enemy who wishes to take it from him.  

Patriotism, as Acton understood, can transcend the blood-and-soil passions of primitive man and become an ethical force: "Our connection with the race is merely natural or physical, whilst our duties to the political nation are ethical…. " Patriotism..is an extension of the family affections, as the tribe is an extension of the family. But in its real political character, patriotism consists in the development of "the instinct of self-preservation into a moral duty which may involve self-sacrifice."

Acton was perhaps not the best person to understand love of country.  On his mother’s side, he was descended from the aristocratic Dalbergs of Bavaria, while his father was the son of a naval adventurer who went to the Kingdom of Naples and eventually commanded their armed forces and served as Prime Minister.  As a classical liberal, Acton had to seek for a lofty principle as the basis of patriotism, but in fact, it is precisely the process of turning patriotic instincts into a lofty ethical principle that patriotism begins to become dangerous as an objective that transcends other equally important objectives.

I once asked the philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, if he ever planned to move from his critical approach to the the different strands of the Liberal Tradition and go forward to articulate a more positive philosophy.  Typical was his response that he had done that in a lecture (which I had read) entitled “Is Patriotism a Virtue?”   Asking a rhetorical question is as far as any respectable philosopher is willing to go in defense of the pre-modern moral beliefs that undergirded all the civilizations to which we are heirs.  

Such caution seems admirable, if we contrast it with the plunge into unreason so often taken by enthusiastic patriots.  How small a step is it from the ethical virtue of patriotism to the more comprehensive ideology of nationalism.  This step was first taken by French Jacobins in the Revolution. Jacobin nationalists, in attempting to build an abstract and artificially unified French nation, they made war on all other, deeper loyalties: They destroyed the Church, waged a war of genocide against Catholics in the Vendée, destroyed the monuments of the early Frankish kings, and did their best to obliterate the regional civilizations of Provence and Brittany that were responsible for the vitality of French culture.  

The predictable results of nationalism, in France, Britain, and the United States (to name only three examples),is a mass culture in which the only “national identity” is the creation of commercial entertainment and state propaganda.   Love of country is not entirely rational and it can distort the patriot’s perception of reality.  Everyone remembers the scene of the Wilkeses’ barbecue:

"Of course we'll fight--"  "Yankee thieves--"  "We could lick them in a month--"  "Why, one Southerner can lick twenty Yankees—" "Teach them a lesson they won't soon forget--"  "Peaceably?  They won't let us go in peace--"  "They want war; we'll make them sick of war." 

Captain Butler attempts to pour the cold water of reason on the patriotic flames:  

"Has any one of you gentlemen ever thought that there's not a cannon factory south of the Mason-Dixon Line?  Or how few iron foundries there are in the South?  Or woolen mills or cotton factories or tanneries?  

"Have you thought that we would not have a single warship and that the Yankee fleet could bottle up our harbors in a week, so that we could not sell our cotton abroad? But--of course--you gentlemen have thought of these things.

Nationalists are even more prone to suicidal blindness.  Albanian nationalist have a map of Europe in which they control Kosovo, Macedonia, northern Greece, Montenegro, much of Serbia, and even parts of Sicily.  When I ridiculed it in print, they took it off their websites, but it was not long before they put it back.  Nationalism, if it succeeds,  inevitably turns into imperialism

  Here is a conundrum.  Some nations, in pursuit of nationalist greatness, create Empires but at the expense of their own people, traditions, and culture; Others may be conquered and divided, as the Poles were for so long, and yet preserve their core identity.  Years ago Hans Hermann Hoppe wrote an article pointing out that the German nation, when divided into several kingdoms and dozens of principalities produced people like Bach, Handel, Haydn Mozart; Herder and Goethe snd Schiller.  Once unified, we got conductors instead of composers, and literature professors instead of poets.

Some peoples have survived for centuries fragmented and ruled by aliens.  Others have established unity and independence but have been culturally absorbed by more creative peoples.  

This was to some extent true even of the greatest imperial nation that has ever existed—the Romans.  As one of the two greatest Roman poets famously put it, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. (Captive Greece took the savage victor captive and brought the arts to rustic Latium.)

Nationality is one of many forms of social bonding; kinship is another; and so is religion.  It is well-known that religions flourish better when they are persecuted and oppressed than when they are triumphant.  I would not say that the same is true of nations, though history is full of examples of.  Let’s look at a few.

Like the South, the Medieval Serbian kingdom was defeated by the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389.  For over four centuries, most Serbs were oppressed by the Ottomans and a few were under Austro-Hungarian rule.  They were reduced to illiteracy, poverty, and banditry, but through the Orthodox Church and the epic poems they recited about the deeds of their ancestors, there was hardly a generation when some were not ready to rise up.   Their vigorous religion and culture, however, began to be eroded under the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, when the richer families started sending their sons to France to be educated.

Germany and the United States became unified only in the 19th century.  The parallel case of Italy is even more interesting.  In the 19th century, when Italians began their struggle for independence and unity, Prince Metternich derided them, saying Italy was only a geographical expression.  To a large extent he was right.  The Italian peninsula was ruled in the South by the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily, in the center by the Church, in much of the North by Austria-Hungary and here and there pockets of little dukedoms and the tiny kingdom of Sardinia/Piedmont.  In fact, there never had been an Italy, yet writers like Dante and Petrarch had flourished, opera created, a great cuisine developed.  Despite regional differences of language and culture, educated Italians felt a kinship and this sentiment generated the Italian rallying cry, Fuori i barbari—out with the barbarians, that is, the French, Spanish, and German invaders.  (Many Italians feel the same way about the hordes of foreigners descending from cruise ships upon Venice where they buy t-shirt made in China.) 

The Risorgimento (the armed movement for unity and independence) culminated about the time of our own war.  In both cases the more industrial and less Christian North subjugated and exploited the Christian agrarian South. The result has been the slow death of Italian civilization, crushed by nationalist, fascist, and now leftist propaganda and bureaucracy.

Probably the most famous case of national survival is that of the Jews.  The quarrelsome twelve tribes that entered the Holy managed to quit fighting each other long enough to form a loosely organized confederation until the 10 northern tribes broke away to form Israel, while the south became Judea.  After Israel was subjugated by the Assyrians and Judea by the Babylonians, their religious, political, and economic leaders were deported to Babylonia.  

Restored by the Persians, they lived as subjects of the Persian Empire until Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire, when they became subject alternatively to the Macedonian Ptolemy in Egypt and the Macedonian rulers of Syria.  The brief-lived Hasmonean kingdom soon became prey to internecine squabbles, and the Romans installed a puppet regime of the Herods, whose internecine battles were aggravated by various uprisings that resulted in first Vespasian’s conquest and then Hadrian’s expulsion of the Jews from Judaea.  

Now, in all these struggles, some Jewish leaders had turned to Egypt for protection against the Babylonians and later the Macedonians just as they now turn to Uncle Sam. These big-power alliances were condemned uniformly by the great prophets who declared that Jews were a nation only insofar as they kept the laws and customs given to them by their God.  In their periods of exile, they found strength in returning to their religion, and miracle of miracles, after not speaking Hebrew as a home language for two millennia, one Russian rabbi, Eliezer Ben-Jehuda, moved to Ottoman-controlled Jerusalem  and began the revival of the language.  

So, language, religion, culture and not political power or unity or independence.  The nationalist and socialist state of Israel, while preserving Hebrew, is doing its best to destroy the traditions that preserved the Jews as a people.  Take a look at the Israeli kids captured by Hamas—they could be American teens at a rock and roll rave.  In a cultural sense, certainly, Israel is the fifty first state.

Greeks

While it is often said that the Jews are the only ancient people to have survived into the modern world, this cliché is misleading on two levels.  First, as my old friend Rabbi Jacob Neusner has argued in a series of books, the Jews have reinvented their identity time after time during periods of crisis. 

On the other hand, the Greeks two have a similar tradition with at least as much continuity.  Unlike the Jews, the Greeks never had a unified kingdom, but from the time of Bronze Age Mycenae and the Trojan War down to the Roman conquest they were almost always a patchwork of kingdoms, city-states, and confederations.  

This was in fact their great strength, since such cities as Athens, Sparta, Argos, and Corinth, Miletus, Phocaea, and Mytilene, Syracuse and Agrigento, each created vital local cultures that were important parts of what a Southern poet called “the glory that was Greece.  (This is a subject we shall be exploring in our annual Summer Seminar in Rockford in July.)

Divided politically and by dialect, often at war with each other, the Greek cities and regions nonetheless developed an understanding of the Hellenic identity.  Despite local religious traditions, they acknowledged the great gods portrayed by Homer; divided by dialects as different from each other as the languages of Edinburgh, London, Boston, and Charleston were 100 years ago, they read their literature in three principal literary dialects, which all literate people knew. They agreed upon a list of seven sages from different places whose wisdom they revered and attended the great Panhellenic games, with athletic, musical, and literary contests.  Even after they were conquered by the Romans, Greek culture continued to produce important writers and art, and when Latin culture went into decline, Greek culture retained a good deal of its vigor.

Byzantine Empire

When the Western Empire died out in the late fifth century, the Eastern Empire revived, gave up Latin, and returned to Greek.  This so-called Byzantine Empire lasted another 1000 years.  The people were of diverse backgrounds:  Middle Eastern Semites, Armenians, Italians, Isaurians, and they continued to called themselves Romans (Romaioi), though they were unified in the Greek language, Greek culture taught in schools, and the religion of Greek orthodoxy.  

Even after the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the Greeks did their best to hold onto their language, religion, and culture, until they threw off the Turkish yoke in the 19th century.  Like the Jews, the Greeks reshaped their identity many times, and Arnold Toynbee in his last book showed how Greeks of Homer’s day (and later times)  looked back to the heroes of the Trojan War, while Byzantine Greeks looked back to classical and Hellenistic times, and in the past two hundred years, many Greeks have longed to reestablish the Byzantine Empire.  This remarkable people, even in the twentieth century, has produced wonderful poets like George Seferis and novelists like Nikos Katzanzakis. The finest Greek writer of modern times, C.P. Cavafy, lived in Egypt and England but had little use for a Greek nation ruled by petty German princes.

Contrast the Greeks with the Irish who lost their language and culture under British rule, and, when they regained the freedom of Southern Ireland and tried to reestablish their language and culture, they have managed to become slaves to the European Union and American mass culture.   In the 1840s the rebels in Young Ireland sang this anthem”

When boyhood's fire was in my blood

I read of ancient freemen

For Greece and Rome who bravely stood

Three hundred men and three men

And there I prayed I yet might see

Our fetters rent in twain

And Ireland, long a province be

A nation once again.

Some years ago I was having drinks with an Irish Christian professor who remarked that the old anthem had to be rewritten as “A province once again.”  Deeply in debt to the European and corrupted by America mass culture, Ireland is now Anwhere in the New World Order.

 What can we learn from this brief, though tedious summary of national experiences.  First, that national survival does not require independence or unity.  In the case of the Jews, whenever they have achieved independence they have quickly set about distancing themselves from their religion and culture.

Second, that among the keys to survival are:  the preservation of a common language, the maintenance of a common religion, and in the Greek case especially, the persistence of literary, education, and cultural traditions.  Typically, these traditions are in the hands of dedicated and educated leaders who cherish them.

Let’s try to measure the South’s survival chances in the terms of success I have so far outlined.  The South has never had its own language.  There are, or rather were, distinctive Southern dialects, and much has been made of the continuity of certain English speech patterns in Southern English.  But Serbs and Croats and Bosnian Muslims all speak dialects of the same language, and a Bosnian Serb Christian speaks a dialect closer to Croatian in most respects than it is to the language of Belgrade.  The Croatian nationalist government tried to make a big deal out of a dozen common words that are different—much as the English used to say “lorry” and “Lift” instead of truck and elevator, but even they are now speaking more and more like Americans.  

There was a time, back in the 1960s, when many radio announcers and TV weathermen in the South spoke with a mild accent.  As a college student, I used to have drinks in the Francis Marion hotel in Charleston with a few of them, and they were frequently ridiculed by the northern-born part owner of the newspapers.  Now, if such poor benighted souls still existed, they could go to any number of schools and learn to talk Ohioan or Californian.  

It is a little like the Francophone schools in Québec where the Québecois learn to speak better French, but they, unlike Southerners, are trying to recover their language and not adopt the language of their oppressor.  But in giving up their religion and adopting the religion of government welfare, they have doomed themselves to extinction, as I have explained to PQ.

Religion?  Nationalists of varying degrees have tried to argue for a uniformity in Southern religion.  Cleanth Brooks used to say that the South was naturally Anglican but the Church had not sent out enough ministers to the frontier.  Certainly, Southern Protestants, despite their sectarian differences, agreed in taking a conservative approach to the Scriptures, and insisted on applying Christian teachings to the everyday moral life in their communities.  They also excelled in traditional learning.  One small example:  Basil Gildersleeve’s father was a Presbyterian minister in Charleston, and he so carefully taught his son that when Basil went to Princeton, he already had learned more Greek than they could teach.

Unfortunately, the learning of Southern pastors is a thing of the past.  What is the distinctive religion of the South these days?  The Mega-Church and charismatic churches where they cut the fool for Jesus. Let me just throw out a few names:  Joel Osteen, Jentezen Franklin here in Georgia, Paula White-Cain.  If anyone here thinks these Elmer Gantry imitators represent the Old Time religion, I’ve got a warehouse full of Kamala Harris in 2028 bumper stickers to unload.  

Southern Evangelicals by and large do not differ in their morals from secular America, and their divorce rates are, if you can believe the statisticians, even higher.  We have come a long way from James Henry Thornwell and Robert Lewis Dabney and, I should say, a long way even from Jerry Falwell, who was kind enough and Southern enough to send a donation to the Southern Partisan.

The South was known, down till the 1960s, for its adherence to the classical tradition.  Southern leaders such as Thomas Jefferson, John C. Calhoun, Hugh Swinton Legare, Jefferson Davis—and even Senator Bobby Byrd of West Virginia—were known for their fondness for classical writers, and by WWII the only schools that were actively preserving the study of Latin were either Catholic or Southern.  Unfortunately, this is no longer true.  Apart from the Christian schools, particularly Presbyterian and Catholic, and home-schooling groups, the classical tradition is so dead in the South that some of its defenders are themselves without any serious knowledge of Greek or Latin.

One bright spot until quite recently was Southern literature.  From Mark Twain to Walker Percy, Southern writers have been among the preeminent poets and novelists in America, and many northern writers have been profoundly influenced by the example they have set.  My good friend in Wisconsin, Anthony Bukoski, learned to express his love for his native region by studying in Louisiana and reading Faulkner, and it is no accident that his work was praised, early on by George Garret.

Southern literature, down to at least 1970, was not the exclusive province of English teachers and eggheads. In college, I had many fratboy friends majoring in pre-med or partying, and we had frequent conversations about The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, Absalom Absalom, Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus, and even the poets John Gould Fletcher, Sydney Lanier, and Conrad Aiken.

 Unfortunately—there is that unfortunate word again—few college educated Southerners under 60 years old have read any serious book not assigned in school, and for entertainment they turn to trash like the late Tom Clancy’s never ending stream of toxic waste or more recently Jack Reacher novels.  Country Music is now represented by Beyonce and southern country pop stars just as bad. Southerners, as much as Northerners,  applaud the same vicious movies and television shows, and enjoy their trips to the Satantic anti-paradise of Disneyworld.

The deterioration of Southern civilization is not one of those things that simply happens, like hurricanes or plagues.  It is due in large part to the disloyalty of Southern people.  Part of this disloyalty is quite natural.   It seems a law of human nature that the loyalty of a defeated people rarely lasts more than three generations, in other words less than 100 years, roughly 75-90.  The rule in the Scriptures for a conquest or usurpation to be legitimate is about the same time.  In the less than 70 years between the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie 1745 and 1814 the publication of Scott’s Waverley, the Scots had become British subjects. 

So in the case of the South, one would expect the flame of Southern patriotism to have been burning very low by 1930, 65 years after the end of the War.  In fact the 1930s witnessed a revival of Southern loyalty.  I’ll take my Stand (1930), Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom Absalom (1936), Stark Young’s So Red the Rose (1934), Gone With the Wind (1938).It is interesting how little any of these works conforms to the expectations of Henry Grady.  Southern literature from the 1870s to the 1970s was mostly concerned with either the pre-war South or with the survival of Southern culture in an alien USof A.   If you are looking for a New South literature, you will find it in Erskine Caldwell’s degraded vision in Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre or Willie Morris’s despicable North Toward Home.

What did happen in other areas of Southern life was the rampant capitalist development that turned Southern cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Charlotte into industrial nightmares that are the real fulfillment of Grady’s dream of a New South.  With the benefit of hindsight, we can appreciate the dilemma faced by Southerners growing up after the War.  Grady’s response was an early example of what is called the Patty Hearst syndrome—when kidnap victims come to identify with their captors.  I contrast this with attitude of the heroic Christian poet, Charles Péguy.  On the eve of the German invasion in WW I, Peguy advised Frenchmen not to imitate the massive mobilization undertaken by Germany.  What good would it do for France to win the war if by winning it, they ceased to be French.

In a poem celebrating the bicentennial of 1976, a poet described of a stream of trucks headed north up highway 27,

           …from the South, Atlanta, Birmingham--

           their factories the brooding sentinels 

           of Yankee occupation…..

There is a popular, though misleading story that some Agrarians wanted to name their manifesto Tracts Against Communism.  Actually a better title would have been Tracts Against Capitalism.  Socialist experiments in the USA were just getting underway, and our first great adventure in expropriation on the grand scale was the TVA authorized in 1933, while the forces of Capitalism, after destroying the civilization of the Northeast had conquered and exploited the South before attracting Southern businessmen to join in the fun.

An after-dinner speech is no place or time for a discourse on political or economic theory, some day American conservatives are going to have to learn to distinguish Free markets, which are part of the natural order, from capitalism, which is an ideology like every other  “ism.”  It is the theory that those who own and control the means of production constitute the actual ruling class, independent of kings and aristocrats, churches and ministers, families and kinfolks.  

Marxists accepted the basic premise and offered an alternative:  the people, through their representatives, should own and control the means of production.  The result of Marxist theory we know, but the destruction wrought by capitalism in the south is less recognized, though Andrew Lytle once told me that if he and his colleagues had understood what havoc and ruin would be caused by the automobile, they would have gone to Detroit and blown up the factories. 

It is Big Government working with Big Capital that sent so many industries in the South to Mexico and China. 

Is there a way back from a Southern culture dominated by the NFL, Nashville commercial music, and multi-national banking and industrial interests?  If there is, it is not the path of Southern nationalism, which will simply ape Lincolnian nationalism and hasten the demise of the South as a distinctive culture.   

Southerners, like the subjugated people I have talked about, will survive when they set out to:  Recover a Southern English that does not succumb to pop culture slang; rebuild Southern classical education through private schools and home schools; turn our backs on the popular culture that degrades our children and ourselves and read Southern writers of the past and present and the British and ancient  writers who inspired them, turn off the radio and TV.  As you all know, this has all been said before and said better by Mr Andrew in a famous essay:

Do what we did after the war and the Reconstruction: return to our looms, our handcrafts, our reproducing stock. Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall. Forsake the movies for the play-parties and the square dances.

This can and has been misunderstood as a sort of nostalgic aestheticism but Lytle put it in a context of rejecting, “the articles the industrialists offer for sale.”  

Elsewhere (in A Wake for the Living) he broadened the context of his critique and condemned the false communities of housing developments and suburbs in which consumers take refuge: “The ordered slums of suburbia are made for the confusion of the spirit.”  This confusion of the spirit cannot be remedied by any merely political change, whether it is revolution or reaction, secession or unification.

No Southern nation-state, no state government, no political movement can even begin the moral revolution Lytle and the Agrarians proposed.  It all starts with people, not random individuals living in high rise apartments or suburban developments, but married couples, families with children, kinfolks and neighbors.  In other words, it is not up to a big-haired dictator on a horse or some Southern nationalist with a  grand scheme for reforming world government.  It is up to us.