Joel Chandler Harris
Continuing with posts on the Southern Agrarians who contributed to the 1930 book, I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition by "Twelve Southerners," as I described in my last post, several of them founded a publishing outlet in the American Review edited by Seward Collins, who saw the journal as a home for "Radicals of the Right," who he also called "Revolutionary Conservatives," including overt admiration of Italian Fascism.
In the first edition of this dubious journal (April 1933), John Donald Wade contributed a biographical sketch of Atlanta journalist Joel Chandler Harris (1845–1908), best known for his still-controversial Uncle Remus stories. Although Harris in his role as a writer for the Atlanta Constitution was a booster for the kind of progress and economic development Wade and his fellow Agrarians found so hateful, Wade appreciated some of Harris' perspective, including the impulses behind his Uncle Remus stories. After the overthrow of the democratic Reconstuction governments by force and violence circa 1875, "the beneficiaries of the New Order" (post-Reconstruction), Wade writes, formulated a thesis, i.e, a guiding ideology:
This thesis was a mixed one, and so, likely to fare far. It was that Southern men before 1860 were the finest men ever seen anywhere, but unfortunately quite wrong in all the conceptions except that of private virtue - which they really need not have worried about since that, somehow, could be trusted to look out for itself. That was its thesis. Its program was, while speaking reverently, always, of the past, to reputdiate that past as rapidly as ever one might - with one exception, that the nigger be kept to his place. That was a rock that ws to bottle many bays, but somehow the New Order planned to over-leap it. [my emphasis]I wonder if Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Wade with his own words in that passage. What Wade refers to there is that the wealthy white leaders of the South who had triumphed in the anti-Reconstruction "Redemption" process were ready to modernize and industrialize the South, rather than try to maintain what the Southern Agrarians saw as a kind of Golden Age of the antebellum South.
But he recognizes that "speaking reverently" of that sacred past of the antebellum South based on slavery was an important part of the ideology of the present for the Redeemers. And in his approving description of Harris' Uncle Remus stories, :
[Harris] could swear well that in his hear t he was not surly, for instance, about the Negros, and he knew hardly anybody else who was surly on that score. [Harris lived in Georgia!] It provoked him to observe the constant clamour in Northern newspapers about his and his friends' being governed wholly by impulses which they indeed rarely recognized. He believed that those imputations were founded in an evil passion that had in all conscience lived past its just day, but he thought the accusers sincere, if ignorant, in fact, of what motivated them.This kind of smarminess on the part of the defenders of white racism can be seen to this day, sad to say, as in Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour's ludicrous defense of the white-supremacist White Citizens Council earlier this year.
His Uncle Remus sketches, undertaken at first as part of his newspaper work, exhibited his actual attidue as he lived, surely the reverse of surliness. When it was apparent to him that they were being read everywhere and that he as their author had been elevated, despite his protests, to a forum as influential as almost any in America, he must have worked consciously to make those stories propagandist in nature. He must have realized after a few years that his propaganda, through Uncle Remus, had proved effective, and he could tell himself with all justice that mucyh sectional rancour had evaporated before that old man's wit.It's imporant to remember in this passage, that Wade is primarily (probably exclusively) talking about the white North and the white South. That is very clear when he writes, "To the South, he said this: Treat Negroes as you would like to be treated in their position ..." Wade uses "the South" there as synonymous with Southern whites.
These sketches had shown, by implications, the kindliness that had exited in the ancient South between master and slave - and that is what, in the North, had been most seriously in doubt. He had tackled that rancour, too, in his Constitution editorials and in the numerous non-dialect essays he had published in Northern magazines. Sweetness and light were his weapons, Matthew Arnold one of his chief smiths. To the South, he said this: Treat Negroes as you would like to be treated in their position and don't make yourself equally criminal with irresponsible Yankees by getting angry when they upbraid the Southern attitude about Negroes. To the North he said this: First ask youself if what you are angry about really happened - then ask yourself if you might not have acted similarly under similar conditions. To both he said: Remember that the other fellow is human only, and above all (oh, above all) that you are also; pit him for his error, help him to avoid it, do not abuse him. [my emphasis]
Various of Joel Chandler Harris' works are available online through Project Gutenberg, the University of Florida Digital Collections, and the University of Virginia.
Tags: confederate heritage month 2011, joel chandler harris, slavery, southern agrarians, us south
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