The American Review 2:1 (Nov 1933) featured two articles by Southern Agrarians. One was a sketch by Robert Penn Warren of the Southern poet Sidney Lanier (1842–1881. It's mostly free of Lost Cause/neo-Confederate dogma. He does make a vague dig: "His social judgements in themselves are interesting only in so far as they illustrate the peculiar and sometimes irresponsible confusion into which the Southern liberal lapsed."
But Donald Davidson's "Still Rebels, Still Yankees" takes up the sectional cause of the (white) South. He was disturbed by the implications of Yankees worrying about the state of civil rights of African-Americans in the South. He tells a story about an anonymous ditsy Yankee woman who visited Virginia at some time in the relatively recent past from 1933:
Mount Vernon was all right, she thought; there the legend was safely frozen. But beyond, on the road to Richmond, what had become of all the great mansions she had read about, the cotton fields with Negroes carolling, the old gentlemen in goatees and white vests, sipping mint juleps in the shade? They were not visible. There were only a few scattered shacks and tumbledown barns in miles of impenetrable wilderness that looked for all the world as it must have looked when John Smith first invaded it. If she could have encountered the legend, the lady would have been content. But not seeing it or knowing how to locate it, she was smitten with a housewifely desire to get at this ragged land with a good broom and whisk it into seemliness.
Such vague tales about feckless Yankees visiting the South and being clueless about it are still popular today among segregationists. But such disappointed tourists were relatively harmless. Others were considerably more annoying:
Other sojourners had been anxious to do a far more drastic tidying-up. The Harlan County visitors, the Scottsboro attorneys, the shock troops of Dayton and Gastonia asked no questions about the genius of the place. Wherever they went on their mission of social justice, they carried with them a legend of the future more dangerously abstract than the legend of the past, and sternly demanded that the local arrangements be made to correspond with it, at whatever cost. The only American they knew or cared about was an overgrown urban America, that was forever in process of becoming one laboratory experiment after another.
This "overgrown urban America" was apparently about fair trials for black defendants as well as industrialization.
Davidson invokes the Lost Cause version of Reconstruction. He writes of the post-Civil War meddling Yankees:
Since Burgoyne's expedition no invader had come upon them to ravage and destroy. They had freed the Negroes, replying "I can" to duty's "Thou must"; but they were fortunately exempt from the results of emancipation, for no Negroes lived among them to acquaint them with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt. ... In a land [New England] where everything was so right, it was hard to imagine a perverse land where so much could be wrong without disturbing either a people's composure or their happiness. [my emphasis]
There had been an extensive proslavery propaganda prior to the Civil War about the supposed moral fanaticism bred in "New England." The non-Southern part of the United States in 1933 consisted of 48 states, only a few of them in New England. But the Southern Agrarians were great respecters of Southern tradition. So Davidson reached back to the venerable tradition of trashing "New England" for its indulgent attitude toward the black citizens who lived "with the disorder of unashamed and happy dirt."
I wonder if
Wendell Berry would find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Davidson with his own words in that passage.
How might that silly Yankee woman have gotten some romantic idea about the South? Maybe from descriptions like this one from Davidson, set in some vague time not specified, apparently intended to reinforce some
Blut und Boden notion of the development of the virtuous Southern white character:
The Georgia landscape had a serene repose that lulled a man out of all need of conscience. [?!?] It was anything but swept and garnished. It could be mild or majestic or genial or savage, depending on what view you got of pines against red earth, or Negro cabins underneath their chinaberry trees, or sedge grass running into gullies and thence to impenetrable swamps, or deserted mansions lost in oak groves and magnolias. Rivers were muddy and at times unrestrained; they overflowed at embarrassing moments. In the pine barrens you might get an impression of desolation and melancholy; but things could grow lushly too, with the overpowering vegetable passion that harrowed the Puritan soul of Amy Lowell, when she visited the Magnolia Gardens at Charleston. But finally, it was a well-tilled country, where you were forever seeing the Negro and his mule against the far horizon, or the peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink.
Happy Negroes were pleasant enough for whites, at least as long as they were out working happily a safe distance away at their subsistence sharecropping with a mule pulling a plow. Though perhaps not not as attractive as other parts of the Georgia backdrop, like "peach orchards bursting into an intoxicating pink."
When white people got a little closer, though, things got more complicated. Speaking specifically of the post-Reconstruction era, Davidson writes:
And everywhere was the Negro, a cheerful grinning barnacle tucked away in all the tender spots of Southern life, not to be removed without pain, not to be cherished without tragedy. The [white] Georgian, when reproached for his intolerance, told himself that actually nobody outdid him in fond tolerance of the Negro. Lynchings, the work of hothead and roustabouts, were regrettable; but what did a few lynchings count in the balance against the continual forbearance and solicitude that the Georgian felt he exercise toward these amiable children of cannibals, whose skins by no conceivable act of Congress or educational programme could be changed from black to white. The presence of the Negro, which had its advantages in agriculture and domestic service, made the [white] Georgians' life both comfortable and ramshackle; it gave him devoted servants and social problems, cheap labour and hideous slums, an endless flow of folk-lore and anecdote, and eternal apprehension for the future. But in his own way, the [white] Georgian respected the Negro, as another irregularity, taking a human and personal form, that had somehow to be lived with. He distrusted all ready-made prescriptions for bringing about regularity. In Georgia, life went along horizontally: you never crossed a bridge until you came to it - and maybe not then. [my emphasis]
At the risk of repeating myself, would Wendell Berry find it a case of "racist by association" if we associate Davidson with his own words in that passage?
Tags:
confederate heritage month 2011,
donald davidson,
slavery,
southern agrarians,
us south,
white racism
