Jon Meacham: The South Just Ain't That Different Anymore
In a self-interview entitled "Questions They Never Asked Me," Walker Percy once unleashed the frustrations of years of sitting for interviews, particularly with journalists from outside his native South. "Of all the things I'm fed up with, I think I'm fed up most with hearing about the New South," Percy wrote. Why is that? he asked himself. "I would dearly love never to hear the New South mentioned again … If there is anything more boring than the questions asked about the South, it is the answers Southerners give. If I hear one more Northerner ask about good ol' boys and one more Southerner give an answer, I'm moving to Manaus, Brazil, to join the South Carolinians who emigrated after Appomattox and whose descendants now speak no English and have such names as Senhor Carlos Calhoun."
Though I have never weighed fleeing to Brazil, I am a Southerner who sympathizes with Percy's complaint. To its natives, the South can seem the center of the universe, an American Rome to the rest of the country's barbarous provinces. To non-Southerners, the region is, depending on one's mood, a romantic republic of columned porches or a redoubt of redneck reaction. Neither the South's self-referential view of itself nor the outsiders' competing caricatures is especially useful. The internal impression is vain and precious, the external ones overly simplified and incomplete.
At the heart of conversations about the culture and politics of the South is the question that has launched untold numbers of dissertations: Is the South really different, and if so, how? The usual answer—yes, it is, sort of—includes the proposition that Southerners have a special sense of history and of tragedy. Does Boston or Lake Forest strike anyone as a wild-and-woolly, here-today-gone-tomorrow, throw-custom-to-the-wind kind of place? Yes, the South is said to be the only region of the country to have lost a war, which presumably heightens one's sense of the fragility of life, though how we factor our performance in Vietnam into that chestnut mystifies me. Percy's "New South" watchers have long noted the influx of outsiders to major hubs such as northern Virginia (for government and tech), Charlotte (for banking) and Atlanta (for everything), but even most of the region's natives now have no firsthand experience of the defiance of the 1950s and '60s. Majorities of the populations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia were not born until the year Reagan first took office. They are a wholly new generation.
There is no question about the significance of the past in a place that has been so decisively and so brutally shaped by slavery and Jim Crow, but other regions were complicit in both evils. Racism is hardly an exclusively Southern phenomenon; it is a national one. The same is true of redemption. The South, then, while more overtly culturally conservative than many other states, is not another country. It does no good to look down on it or dismiss it. Such condescension may feel good in the short run, but it is as self-defeating as old-style Southern slurs about godless, greedy Yankees or pointy-headed liberals.
The American South, to borrow a phrase from the caricature cupboard, just ain't that different anymore. It was once, but the Civil War is the exception that proves the rule that the South tends not to contradict but to exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way, what much of the nation thinks and feels. Understanding America's politics, then, requires understanding the South's—which is one reason why declaring the 2008 presidential election over is to make the same mistake the hotheads at the barbecue in "Gone With the Wind" did when they thought they could whip the Union forces in short order.
I have been in the South for the past month, occasionally talking politics, and have heard much more about Iraq and the price of gasoline than I have about Obama's race or John McCain's age. Though this is necessarily anecdotal, my sense is that many whites who have been skeptical of Democrats since the civil-rights era are not going to make a reflexive choice in November but will—like many other Americans—carefully weigh Obama against McCain...
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Though I have never weighed fleeing to Brazil, I am a Southerner who sympathizes with Percy's complaint. To its natives, the South can seem the center of the universe, an American Rome to the rest of the country's barbarous provinces. To non-Southerners, the region is, depending on one's mood, a romantic republic of columned porches or a redoubt of redneck reaction. Neither the South's self-referential view of itself nor the outsiders' competing caricatures is especially useful. The internal impression is vain and precious, the external ones overly simplified and incomplete.
At the heart of conversations about the culture and politics of the South is the question that has launched untold numbers of dissertations: Is the South really different, and if so, how? The usual answer—yes, it is, sort of—includes the proposition that Southerners have a special sense of history and of tragedy. Does Boston or Lake Forest strike anyone as a wild-and-woolly, here-today-gone-tomorrow, throw-custom-to-the-wind kind of place? Yes, the South is said to be the only region of the country to have lost a war, which presumably heightens one's sense of the fragility of life, though how we factor our performance in Vietnam into that chestnut mystifies me. Percy's "New South" watchers have long noted the influx of outsiders to major hubs such as northern Virginia (for government and tech), Charlotte (for banking) and Atlanta (for everything), but even most of the region's natives now have no firsthand experience of the defiance of the 1950s and '60s. Majorities of the populations in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, the Carolinas, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia were not born until the year Reagan first took office. They are a wholly new generation.
There is no question about the significance of the past in a place that has been so decisively and so brutally shaped by slavery and Jim Crow, but other regions were complicit in both evils. Racism is hardly an exclusively Southern phenomenon; it is a national one. The same is true of redemption. The South, then, while more overtly culturally conservative than many other states, is not another country. It does no good to look down on it or dismiss it. Such condescension may feel good in the short run, but it is as self-defeating as old-style Southern slurs about godless, greedy Yankees or pointy-headed liberals.
The American South, to borrow a phrase from the caricature cupboard, just ain't that different anymore. It was once, but the Civil War is the exception that proves the rule that the South tends not to contradict but to exemplify, if sometimes in an exaggerated way, what much of the nation thinks and feels. Understanding America's politics, then, requires understanding the South's—which is one reason why declaring the 2008 presidential election over is to make the same mistake the hotheads at the barbecue in "Gone With the Wind" did when they thought they could whip the Union forces in short order.
I have been in the South for the past month, occasionally talking politics, and have heard much more about Iraq and the price of gasoline than I have about Obama's race or John McCain's age. Though this is necessarily anecdotal, my sense is that many whites who have been skeptical of Democrats since the civil-rights era are not going to make a reflexive choice in November but will—like many other Americans—carefully weigh Obama against McCain...